//beconfused

Watch how much Web 2.0 has actually evolved. Long ago, there was only simple hyperlinks done with HTML. Today, web designers embrace CSS, AJAX, XML and more.

Web 2.0… The Machine is Using Us

“Web 2.0″ in just under 5 minutes.

I considered releasing it as an “eternal beta” in true Web 2.0 style, but decided to let it stand as is and start working on future projects. Many of my future videos will address the last 30 seconds of this video (the “rethink …” part).

The video was created by me (Michael Wesch), working alone from my house in St. George, Kansas. I used CamStudio for the screen captures and Sony Vegas for the panning/cropping/zooming animations. Someday I might make a video tutorial for those who are interested.

It’s just something that made me feel inspired.

I am always slow in adopting web applications because they’re such a pain to upload and upgrade. It’s not like your usual computer applications where you just click and it’ll install and upgrade; you’ve got to be careful not to overwrite your files when upgrading.

But when WordPress 2.1 is officially released, I upgraded it within an hour. There are some admin interface upgrades, it now has a more Ajaxy interface and seems to load faster than before.

What that makes me really happy is how easy uploading images actually gotten. I organized my images files in /images/2007/01/image.jpg manually in the past. I upload it with an FTP client (Filezilla) and link it manually. The builtin image uploading tool makes blogging so much more enjoyable for me.

The Users page is updated too, it is currently still a little buggy but I can live with it. I can add users easily. It’s very useful for a multiuser web site. The other feature that I really like is how links can now be assigned categories. Categories are not just for posts now.

Version 2.1 also introduce privacy options which would be helpful for people who don’t wish their friends find their blog. It tells the search engine not to index. I don’t really use that feature but it’s still worth a mention.

My only wish is that tags can be supported in WordPress together with categories. Most of my plugins still work in WordPress 2.1.

I don’t face any problems after the upgrade. But I did do my usual back ups before attempting to upgrade, you should too. Now, WordPress 2.1 is powering this blog nicely.

Blog Stats

There are currently 1,137 post and 4,194 comments, contained within 266 categories. Akismet has protected your site from 54,493 spam comments.

Still running well with more than a thousand posts in the database.

I never thought Live would do this to me. It didn’t support Firefox and Opera. Windows Live Shopping, at present, only supports Internet Explorer. So I can’t view with Opera.

_(Windows Live Shopping Beta logo.)_

You guys should go test it out with Internet Explorer. It was a pleasant experience for me and it’s really quite revolutionary way of shopping with AJAX technologies. Please try it out, I’m starting not to like Amazon.com already.

Visit Windows Live Shopping. I think Microsoft got it right with this one. Great work!

Check out an Ajax dictionary at Dictionary.hm.

I see how these Ajax things are getting more interesting already. It’s not the best Ajax implementation that I’ve seen, but Dictionary.hm does searches quite well generally.

My only complaint is that it seemed slow. A progress bar would be good. It would be even better if it can suggest the words that you are typing too.

_(Windows Live Academic Search logo.)_

Check out Microsoft’s contribution in journal searches. It’s pretty good so far really. I am quite surprise. It’s a beta right now and they only have 3 fields - Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Physics. Which is seriously not enough.

Give Windows Live Academic Search a try and you may be pleasently surprised that behind the horrible naming by the marketing department hides a pretty cool tool if you do need to research on science stuff. I tried, it works in Firefox, but it didn’t seem to work in Opera. I haven’t tried in Internet Explorer but being a Microsoft product, it should work there I think.

I just uploaded some pictures in my Flickr account. I haven’t uploaded a single picture since I last signed up back in October last year.

_(Screenshot of my profile in Flickr.)_

Flickr says I’m male and pretty much has nothing to say about me already. My profile page looks kinda silly so I probably be adding some more information about yourself.

I thought of adding after I played around with the Spell with Flickr tool this morning. So I just started populating my photos only today.

Does anyone here have Flickr accounts? Do add me through my profile page okay? I only have 2 friends and it looks pathetic.

Anyway, you can view the photos I take in the photo gallery.

My Flickr’s very Singaporean, most of the pictures I took are of buildings and roads so you can take a look if you’re interested.

_(Some random Flickr image I have in my album.)_

Well, here comes part 3 of the Windows Live Mail preview. You can check out part 1 and part 2 first before you read this.

Address filtering

(Filters email address as you type.)

This is one of the features I really like in Gmail, now it’s in Windows Live Mail too. That’s the way emailing should be like anyway. No one likes to open the address book to add addresses. Windows Live Mail does not implement them differently from Gmail. [Click here for a larger image.]

Sending mails in rich-text

The toolbar has been improved slightly. It looks quite similar to the existing one in Hotmail. I think it has a strange addition - to allow uses to add a search link to a particular text. Of course, Windows Live Mail tries to search in a particular search engine. It doesn’t change much, the existing one in Hotmail is already quite good already anyway.

By the way, I still don’t understand why their emoticon icon at the toolbar looks like a yellow french artist with a moustache.

Spel-chacking

(I tend to spell wrongly sometimes.)

One of the cooler features of Windows Live Mail is it’s spell checking feature. It checks as you spell, just like the way Microsoft Word does it’s checking. It is not as fast as the way Microsoft Word checks the spelling of course. I found the speed to be acceptable and I finally am confident of typing a formal email with Windows Live Mail. I always use a decent word processor to spell check my email before I send them to someone important.

Handling junk

(Emails in Junk are not displayed at all.)

Actually, I prefer to just call them spam. Microsoft calls it junk emails. Gmail just disallows images to be displayed and filters spam to put them in the spam folder. Windows Live Mail filters spam and put into the junk mail folder and went further to disallow message content in the junk folder to be displayed. I guess it is some kind of security feature to make sure no one even reads the contents of suspicious email. I think that move may be a little unnecessary though. [Click here for a larger image.]

Conclusion

Windows Live Mail is a significant improvement from the current Hotmail. There are some bugs which have yet to be fixed. One of which is that I can’t access my email from my company, which also means everyone in the army can’t access it I believe. While opening the page, Internet Explorer asks me to download a file named “attachmentpopup.aspx”. That doesn’t happen at my place.

At my workplace, I can only use Firefox to check my hotmail account. It has been “converted” to a Windows Live Mail beta account. Unfortunately, with Firefox, there are none of these cool features that you can play around with. It just hasn’t been implemented. In Firefox, Windows Live Mail is nothing more than the usual Hotmail with the Windows Live Mail look, it doesn’t have AJAX at the moment.

Note that what I wrote is just a glimpse of how Windows Live Mail is like as of Febuary 03, 2006. Microsoft may add and remove features. Sorry that I took so long to complete what was to be one post only. I wasn’t very free but I just want to show something (Windows Live Mail) I really like to you guys.

Read back

• Windows Live Mail Preview page 1 of 3
• Windows Live Mail Preview page 2 of 3
• Windows Live Mail Preview page 1 of 3 (you’re here)