Hello.

The MSN Search API’s are up. Yay!I have not had much time to look at it just yet, but I have some links for you.Why MSN Search? http://msdn.microsoft.com/msn/msnsearch/whysearch/ MSN Search API Download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C271309B-02DE-42A7-B23E-E19F68667197&displaylang=enAs far as I can tell the search API is a SOA0P service [http://soap.search.msn.com/webservices.asmx?wsdl], so no direct calls from IE it seems, and it looks like I will have to create a proxy forwarding kit :) ala My yahoo ones.

I am starting to document things a little more at the moment. It is a slow process, I keep getting distracted by all the cool stuff I am missing that PDC. Most of my slowness it is revolving around MSN opening up there search to a public API. I don’t really know whether it is worth me doing anything with it, it is a soap API and doesn’t seem to offer anything that I can’t already pull from their RSS Searching and RSS results.

As well as MSN releasing their Search API’s, MSN’s own start.com has also released an API, which I think is built with the ATLAS framework that Microsoft are trying to get ready for the release of ASP.net v2.Why do I say ATLAS? because over on http://start.com/developer/default.htm, you will see a link to an ATLAS runtime overview http://start.com/developer/atlasruntime.aspx.All of this requires a bit more investigating :) It is really interesting because it appears that it is all about creating components called Gadgets that JavaScript RSS consumers….

Even after start.com has been updated and Robert Scoble said the Start.com team respond quickly to feedback They also posted Start.com/developer and are looking for feedback on all this stuff. They react fast and seem like they are adding new features every few days. I still haven’t had a reply [or any sign of implementation] to my UI improvement suggestion. I don’t think I am being silly, all I would like to hear is someone say, yeah it is good or yup kinlan you’r a fool :).

I saw an interesting article about Yahoo’s version of Google AdSense. over on Search Engine Roundtable, according to the article it allows you to target adverts directly againts a Yahoo Category. I think this would be really great if google had this in AdSense then I think the ads that I provide would be targeted better to my readers.JenSense was the first I have seen to jump on the news that YPN added ad category targeting.

Just testing because I like the way that I can use RSS Bandit to automatically post a comment about a blog on my blog. If that makes sense :)

Robert Scoble links to some more information about the MSN Search API’s. There is not an amazing amount of extra information in the linked article, however a figure is mentioned about how many queries that you can do with the API.I have broken down some of the figures so that you know what they are in comparison to other Free (Not mentioning Ebay) API’sGoogle: 1000 queuries to the Search API per day

In an earlier post I talked about promising to include an OPML list of the blogs I read in the page. Seriously, is this all that it does? I just don’t get what OPML is supposed to help me do or to how it helps anyone who reads my blog.Here is a list of all the people (“Web Celebs”) who like OPML and must know what to use it for; If anyone of them could tell me I would be very greatful.

I just noticed that when I went to any of the pages on my site that have been linked from my main blog, then the title wasn't appearing at the top of the page, only the page URL.Thanks to my AJAX Tagger for pointing this out :)

I have just discovered that to be listed in Technorati’s Blog Search you have to configure your claim and then add 20 keywords that relate to tags. These tags don’t even have to be on your blog.Why on earth is it done this way. They have a list of all the tags that a blog uses and all the journals that cross reference each other, so why can’t they use this information instead of stepping back 5 years in search technology.

Yes! Yes! Yes!MSN are launching API’s that enable developers to access their search results accoriding to the Search Engine Journal which quotes an article by the Search Engine Watch. Basically if you go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/msn/ you see a holder page which tells us to come back on Tuesday 13th of September.Expect me to investigate them and talk about them here and on http://tagger.kinlan.co.uk. I just hope they do something innovative like Yahoo’s related searches, Contextual searches and Term Extraction and not just provide access to their search results [which would still be cool though].

I have just done a little experiment with the existing application. I have in the past talked about Citations and problems finding previous articles that I have written so that I can cross reference what I have been talking about. I have added in some functionality that will search kinlan.co.uk, to find in articles that are related by keywords that have been selected by the tagger.All this is using the Yahoo API and it works pretty well.

This is the 8th installment of my Failures of my First Ajax Applicaiton and is titled “It didn’t generate much in the way of extra traffic”.There is not too much to say for this one really. I was hoping that it would generate a lot of needed interest in my web page so that potentially I might be able to earn some ad revenue, but after working on the project a little I have realised that revenue is not too important, just getting people to use it is more important.

This is the 9th an Final part of my Failures of my First AJAX application series. This is titled: “It accomodated the lowest common denominator in web browsers, therefore it was not as client (as in browser) as I wanted.”Hmm, looking at that I am trying to remember exactly what it meant.Ahh, now I remember. I am used to developing in Internet Explorer, so whilst coding and testing the App, I didn’t give much notice to Firefox.

This is the 5th post about the failures of my AJAX application and it is subtitled “It wasn’t visible to people other than myself what it actually achieved.”If you were to look at my application without me explaining what it did, you would not understand what it did and what it was supposed to achieve. I am a great beliver in intuitiveness and the ability to understand what an application\product is supposed to do with very little prompting from a user manual.

This is the 6th instalment of the failures of my first AJAX application and it is subtitled “It didn’t help anyone other than myself”.To be brutally honest, when I had this idea for the AJAXTagger I think I thought I would solve my problems with tagging my posts and also everyone else’s problems. The idea is a simple one: to provide the user with tags that Technorati can pick up without the user having to manually handcraft each tag; additionally each tag would be auto picked based on the context of the journal entry.

This is the 7th instalment of the failures of my first AJAX application and more commonly know was “It generated no feedback from anyone at all!”As in my previous post, when I was creating the application I had grand ideas about the people who might use this application. I had visions of thousands and thousands of people using it and having to ring up Yahoo to ask to have my 5000 daily query limit increased.

I am starting a new Blog alongside this blog that is completly dedicated to my AJAX Tagging HTML application.

I was listening to ShopTalk, a BBC Radio 4 Broadcast the other day and the topic of conversation was about Web logs and the Blogosphere. There was an interesting comment by one of the guest speakers [a woman whose name I can’t remember]. The comment roughly went like this: Bloggers in the US and the rest of Europe tend to link to other sites and other bloggers a lot more than UK bloggers.

When I first started investigating AJAX as a potential methodolgy for creating a really cool website, I thouhgt that it would solve all my problems, my bandwidth problems, my UI problems and that it would be really really really quick.But it didn’t.This entry is entitled “It didn’t work to quickly (but it did lead to success number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ….. :))”The very first iteration of the application included some Technorati Stats for each tag, so you knew whether it was worth creating or not and also related searches for each of the tags provided by the TermExtraction API.