Julian's Blogtech

No matter how much freedom you have as a freelancer, if you’re suffering from a double whammy of recession and rejection, it’s tough going. Throw in the big holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s), and for some lonely freelancers, it’s a difficult time. What do you during times like this?

With unemployment at a 14-year high and 240,000 workers laid off in October alone, many Americans are scrambling to update their resumes and turning to job boards and networking sites. Some are panicking as they try to devise new ways to get in front of employers. But even in trying times like these, prospective employees shouldn't completely reinvent their job-seeking styles.

Scour the Web searching for some permutation of the keywords "web", "design", "workflow", "process", "aneurism" - OK, not so much the last one - and, you'll probably find a plethora of literature that delves into five-phase processes that usually start and end with phases "Concept" and "Launch" respectively. Not that there's anything wrong them; in fact, they're generally quite accurate and most of those phases do, in fact, occur.

When ASP.NET MVC hit like Preview 3 or 4, quite a few of us were saying "We should get together and build new blog software based on MVC, it would be so fun!".

 

Well as good ideas go sometimes this one passed by the wayside due to lack of time available. Fortunately this is not true, when the Channel9 team had the same idea. They've build a new blog engine called Oxite based ASP.NET MVC and their experience building sites like Ch9, Ch10, Ch8, Edge and especially MIX Online.

Microsoft Corp will soon launch a full range of online versions of its software products, including the Office suite, and expects the weak economy to accelerate growth of the nascent Web-based software market, a senior executive said on Monday.

Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft's business division, is leading the company's entry into the "software as a service" market, which offers programs that are hosted online instead of downloaded to computer hard drives.

Here are some reasons why you should be.

Those who find success using social media are the ones that truly believe in the medium. They're out there using it consistently, and they're constantly making new contacts. They know how to play the game. It's not just a marketing trend to them. It's a way of life. A successful life.

Sandy Carter, author of "The New Language of Marketing 2.0" talked with WebProNews about the different aspects of using social media in marketing.

Should businesses be more involved in social media or less involved?

Ori Amiga, principal group program manager of Live Mesh, made some modifications to his 12-year-old Porsche that don't exactly qualify for an episode of Pimp my Ride, but for the geek in us, they're pretty cool. He has incorporated Live Mesh into his car and started referring to it as the "MeshMobile."

While it was not a new development by any means, the most notable thread in this week's news was the reporting, in several instances, of notable security breaches at very well known and widely used websites by malware distributors.

Most of the discussion surrounding Web 2.0 applications revolves around the way it revolutionized end users' interaction with applications and with other users. An area that is sometimes left out of the discussion is the impact Web 2.0 had on the developers who are actually building these applications.

Creating Web 2.0 applications involves a variety of technologies and standards from UI technologies such as AJAX and DHTML to back-end technologies such as SOA and other mash-up technologies

Microsoft’s Massive announced today that it has won multi-year contracts to provide in-game advertising to Activision Blizzard. In doing so, it has landed the big kahuna of the video game business.

In separate deals, Massive will provide ads to both Activision’s line of games and the Blizzard Entertainment division. Massive’s deal with Activision will cover 18 games, including Guitar Hero: World Tour, James Bond: Quantum of Solace, Transformers Revenge of the Fallen and Tony Hawk. Massive

On December 1, Microsoft announced that the Windows Live Wave 3 beta was closing down, and that the company would begin moving its Windows Live users to the final version of its web services. A Microsoft employee confirmed that as of Tuesday night, all the users have been moved over to the Wave 3 version. All services sport the new Wave 3 header and interface and allow you to customize your theme (including dynamic ones) across them all.

Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled a free plug-in for Firefox to translate Open XML documents, an update to its document translator, and a toolkit for Java developers that was built under the umbrella of its Document Interoperability Initiative.

The group released the OpenXML Document Viewer as an open source project on its Codeplex Web site. The viewer translates documents in the Open XML format, which became an ISO standard in April after much contentious debate , to HTML so they can be viewed on a browser. The viewer, which is still in the preview stage, eliminates the need for a user to install Microsoft Office or any other productivity tool set.

Linux users are getting closer to full Microsoft Silverlight functionality to view rich media applications on the Web. The Novell-sponsored Moonlight project today released its first beta of its Linux implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight media framework.

The beta release is considered to be feature complete and is the predecessor to a generally available Moonlight 1.0 release currently targeted for January of 2009.

The Moonlight 1.0 release is intended to provide give Linux users feature parity with Microsoft's Silverlight 1.0. The project is designed to help Linux users access more content and Microsoft to deliver content to non-Windows users.

Microsoft Corp. today released a new wave of Windows Live services that adds more social-networking qualities to its set of online services.

The company unveiled last month a plan to add Facebook-like qualities to its set of online services, which include e-mail, calendaring, instant-messaging, photo-storage and sharing and collaboration services, among others. At the time, the company said the new services would be available to users before the end of the year.

Many large online retailers suffered from traffic overloads as the online holiday shopping season kicked off with sales and promotions on Cyber Monday, according to a company that measures Web performance. Cyber Monday follows Black Friday, which is traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year for brick-and-mortar stores. The online counterpart is not generally the busiest day for online shopping but it does represent an official start to holiday shopping on the Internet, as thousands of retailers promote discounts, free shipping, and other perks to generate Web traffic.

More Internet InsightsWhite PapersThe Case for Universal Search Web Reputation Filters Battle the Latest Web Malware Threats Videos

Michael Chin, senior VP of marketing, KickApps, discusses the vendor's hosted social media platform, which lets Web publishes add social networking functionality--online communities, user-generated content, programmable video players, widgets for conHowever, Monday's traffic seemed

Saving money with a cloud computing strategy is not enough; innovating and building new capabilities will take enterprises to the next level.

Enterprises have to do more than move to the cloud in order to shave their costs in these tight economic times.

They also have to know how to develop applications rapidly, and know how to cope with the speed of change, said Jon Pyke, chief strategy officer at Cordys, which provides software for business process innovation.

RSS is one of those technologies that are extremely simple yet extremely powerful. Currently, RSS is the de facto standard for blog syndication, and it is used widely in both personal and corporate settings; for example, in blogs. And because a large percentage of these blogs run on WordPress, we’ll cover in this post some (hopefully) relatively unknown but useful RSS-related tricks and hacks that will help you use RSS in a more effective way — and without unnecessary and chunky WordPress plug-ins.

One of the persistent fears regarding Internet content is that the nature of web popularity will create a "rich get richer" situation, in which a limited number of sites wind up attracting the vast majority of web traffic and links. This position of dominance would then attract inbound links to create a "Googlearchy," in which their popularity starts a self-reinforcing cycle. Initial studies have suggested that there isn't a Googlearchy—a "long tail" of less-popular sites appears in search results—but a draft of a new study indicates the same may not hold true on social sharing sites like Digg and YouTube.

When I was growing up, if you heard the term “movie rental,” Blockbuster immediately sprung in your head. That’s not the case anymore. Thanks to Netflix, video on demand from the cable companies and an increasing number of options to rent films over the Internet, Blockbuster is increasingly being pushed out of a discussion it once dominated. But it’s trying to battle back, and now it has a new partner: Microsoft.