John Martin's Blog : TechEd

Tales from the MSDN Bar and TechNet Lounge at TechEd Australia

John Martin — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 08:31:00 GMT

Some funny and interesting insights and photos coming out of TechEd Australia . See.. Chris Slemp's blog for comments on the keynote and attendee feedback on the MSDN and TechNet social strategy ... ...and the Microsoft Australia TechNet blog for how...(read more)

At TechEd Australia? Stop by and Meet Us!

John Martin — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 02:00:00 GMT

TechEd Australia is next week! And, our own Shanna Del Conte and Chris Slemp ... ...will be there to meet you, talk with you, show you how we are opening up the MSDN and TechNet sites to the technical community, and get your input. If you are at the event,...(read more)

PREVIEW: v 1.0 of Social Bookmarking on MSDN and TechNet

John Martin — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 16:45:00 GMT

Microsoft is opening up the MSDN, TechNet, and Expression sites to the community, so that technical professionals can better connect with each other, share knowledge, and succeed. Tagging - and especially social bookmarking - are essential ingredients for making this happen.

Back in May, just before TechEd North America, we released a preview version of our new social bookmarking app for MSDN, for TechNet, and for Expression. Since then, thousands of technical professionals from around the world have begun using it to save their web favorites online, share them with others, see what other technical pros are favoriting, and connect with others.

We also got a lot of great feedback on the app itself (thank you!) and I'm happy to say that in early September, we plan on releasing a full version of the app - v 1.0. Here are some new things to look for:

Subscribe to Tags or People: Find a tag you want to follow? Or a fellow bookmarker that bookmarks really good stuff? With the new app, it will be easy to get an RSS subscription for that tag or person (as in, click the orange button).
Browse & Find Users: Search or browse to find people by their display name (e.g., mine is "johmar") and other criteria.
Import Tools: Recognizing that a lot of people already have favorites saved in their browsers or in other social bookmarking sites, the new app will provide a tool for importing your favorites from Microsoft Internet Explorer and from Delicious.
Bookmarking Widget: If you have your own blog or other website, our new bookmarking widget will make it easy for people to bookmark your pages directly to their social bookmarks on MSDN, TechNet, or Expression. You'll get traffic from Microsoft when your bookmarked page is published in "social feeds" on our global sites.

Availability in 12 Languages: With the September release, the social bookmarking application will be available in Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Here is a screenshot of the v 1.0 home page for MSDN:

Questions? Comments? Feedback?

Let us know by commenting on this blog or in the Social Bookmarks Discussion Forum.

VIDEO: "No Need to Shout" - Ninjas and Pirates Just Might Be Able to Get Along After All...

John Martin — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 02:43:00 GMT

For your enjoyment - this video came out of TechEd 2008 North America.

Fun and funny way to learn about Microsoft online community offerings, including the latest from MSDN, TechNet, CodePlex, and Expression. Most of the comments I've seen on it are actually serious debates on Pirates and Ninjas!

For more fun and interesting things, see http://microsoftcommunities.com/

Video: No Need to Shout

Find out what Mark Russinovich, Keith Combs, and Bill Hilf are Bookmarking

John Martin — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:47:00 GMT

As we kick off the second week of TechEd 2008 North America, we have nearly 1,500 bookmarkers from around the world saving their internet favorites using our TechNet Social Bookmarks Preview.

One of the coolest things about social bookmarking is that you can easily see what others are bookmarking to discover valuable new content. Below are links to the bookmarks saved by some smart people at Microsoft:

Mark Russinovich, Technical Fellow
Bill Hilf, General Manager, Windows Server Marketing
Keith Combs, IT Evangelist

Want to try it out yourself? Visit http://technetbookmarks.com/ to get started. Here also is a good video from the TechEd TechTalk series about social bookmarking on MSDN and TechNet.

Thanks for a Great TechEd Developers 2008!

John Martin — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 23:18:00 GMT

Last week was a great week and I want to thank everyone who visited us in the MSDN Zone and/or attended Tshak's or Paul Johnson's sessions.

I also want to thank the more than 1,200 social bookmarkers from around the world that have started bookmarking using our new Social Bookmarks Preview. We have started to add feeds of social bookmarks to Dev Centers on MSDN and so far, we have them on the VB, VC#, and VSX centers. These feeds are tag-filtered, so if you'd like to contribute to one of those centers, simply use our social bookmarks preview to bookmark a URL (from anywhere on the web - not just Microsoft sites) and apply these tags:

Visual Basic: "visual basic" (use quotes to keep both words in the tag)
Visual C#: "csharp"
Visual Studio Extensibility: "vsx"

If you'd like to learn more about our social bookmarking feed service, see Taylor Parson's blog on it.

We also cut a great TechTalk video that sheds a little light on the technical side of Social Bookmarks on MSDN and TechNet:

Thanks again for your support!

How to Create Feeds from MSDN & TechNet Social Bookmarks

John Martin — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 22:53:00 GMT

Last week, we released a preview of MSDN and TechNet Social Bookmarks.

This week, we released The Ticker, a new Silverlight app that consumes a feed of new bookmarks from the sites and displays it in an interactive ticker-style UI.

So far, more than 1,000 people have started bookmarking with our preview - you can see their bookmarks on the social bookmarking sites (for MSDN and TechNet) or using the The Ticker.

Thank you to all the bookmarkers!

A lot of people at TechEd have asked about our API story and how they can access our social bookmarking data. We are commited to public APIs for all our social applications, and will publish a schedule for that soon. But in the meanwhile, Taylor Parsons, Lead PM for Social Bookmarking, has blogged some Unofficial Documentation for our Social Platform feed service.

If you are interested, pls check it out and let us know if you plan on using our feeds for your site or app.

Ask the Experts at the MSDN Zone - TechEd 2008

John Martin — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:07:00 GMT

If you are at TechEd today, come on by the MSDN Zone (right at the bottom of the South entrance) for our Ask The Experts event.

From 11:30-1:00PM US ET, experts from around Microsoft and the community will be available for questions, discussion, and just hanging out. I might even be able to go get some good snacks, too...

[snack update: doublestuff oreos, cool ranch doritos, nutter butter, peanuts, nilla wafers, smart food popcorn...and more)

Here's some of our Experts:

Taylor Parsons, Microsoft - MSDN Social Bookmarking REST interface
Brian Randall, MCW Technologies - MVP, VSTS
Matthew Roche, Integral Thought & Memory - MCT/MVP -SQL BI
Ted Neward, Neward & Associates - .NET, XML Services
Sara Ford, Microsoft - Codeplex expert and VS Tip of the Day Author
Beth Massi, Microsoft - VB Community Lead
Ken Rosen, Microsoft - MCT, MCITP, MCTS, MCSE, MCSA, MCDST (personally, I'm going to ask him what each of those means :-))
Trika Harms zum Spreckel, Microsoft Learning - MCP program manager
Noelle Mallory, Microsoft - MSDN Community Content Program Manager

Hope to see you...

TechEd Attendees Stunned by MSDN Innovations

John Martin — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 22:14:00 GMT

Orange County Convention Center - Orlando, Florida

Surpise and amazement quickly gave way to mental shock and fatigue for attendees of TechEd North America - Developer Week when they learned of recent innovations to MSDN, Microsoft's web site for developers. "I've been to a lot of trade shows before, and seen some pretty wild things, but I've never had people stagger away from my station and keel over after my demo" said Ricardo Arroyo, evangelist for MSDN.

(Above) The MSDN Zone became a Twilight Zone for many attendees of Microsoft's TechEd event.

Several attendees recovered in the "MSDN Zone" recalled a joy-like feeling immediately followed by confusion and a spinning sensation when faced suddenly with seeingly paradoxical concepts like a clean and efficient design for the MSDN home page, forums that are easy and fun to use, search that actually works, and a new application that allows the community to use MSDN to bookmark and share content from across the web.

Senior members of the MSDN team could not be reached for comment, but it was learned today that the group has ordered a large quantity of bean bags for their booth at the PDC2008 event coming up in October.

PREVIEW: Social Bookmarking on MSDN &TechNet

John Martin — Fri, 23 May 2008 20:38:00 GMT

Next week, we will release a preview version of Social Bookmarks for both MSDN and TechNet and showcase it at TechEd North America the following week.

While the preview will not have full functionality (it is also English-only), it will allow members of the community to...

Bookmark any URL on the web
Apply tags
Save bookmarks in the new My Bookmarks tool

All bookmarks, bookmarkers, and tags will also be enabled as links and can be “surfed” to discover new content and people.

Social bookmarks will also be integrated into the new Profile page and give every member of the community a great new way to increase their visibility, impact, and influence.

(See screenshots of the Social Bookmarks home page from a test build below; the bookmarks themselves are not real - created just for testing)

Let us know what you think of this with a comment or jump in to the new Social Bookmarks forum.