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The Melbourne Pillow Fight. It's on.

For better or for worse fellow Melbournites, get your pillow out and get ready to swing it at complete stangers.

 

Time: 2pm

 

Date: Saturday 25th of March

 

Location: Melbourne City Square, Corner of Swanston Street and Collins Street

 

Designated Pillow Fight area: Between Starbucks and Swanston Street

 

 

 

And don't forget the rules of Pillow Fight Club:

 

1. You do tell everyone about PillowFight Club.
2. You do tell everyone about PillowFight Club.
3. If someone whines or has no pillow, you cannot hit them.
4. Everyone joins in the fight.
5. The one fight starts at the designated time - No earlier.
6. No tar, no heavy things in pillows.
7. PillowFights will go on until they're done.
8. If this is your first night at PillowFight Club, you have to get feathered.

And don't hit anyone with a camera, as it looks like we have a few photographers showing up as well.

 

Have a great Pillow Fight everyone. See you there.

 

The Pillow Fighter

 Check out Phil holdens blog post about the Windows Live Linkup and the new MSN Spacse Friends beta...

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social networking trial

 

This week I’ve had the pleasure of hanging out in Sydney spending time with customers, partners, a bunch of cool bloggers as well as the folks from NineMSN who run our business down here.  As usual when I’m on the road its been a crazy busy week but have to say it’s not a bad place to be ~ and brings back some happy memories from when I used to live here. 

 

 

One of the reasons to be here this week has been that we were getting ready to deploy our first social networking trial, specifically within the Australian market.   This new functionality is an extension to the existing Spaces service and is exposed as a module that one can add within one’s Space.  Our approach to social networking is designed to enable a way for customers to communicate and connect in more meaningful way with their circle of friends and in particular their friends and their friends’ friends.    We are doing this by adding this feature to our existing network – be it Messenger, Spaces or Mail rather than build a unique social network.   That’s often a little different from other services and I’m interesting to see how things play out especially as My Spaces is doing pretty well in this market and just this week Yahoo launched their 360 service here.   All in all it’s getting interesting in this area.  

 

Well this feature just went live!  Although the feature is only available to customers in Australia I did manage to setup a new Space to start playing around with new feature.  I have copied some screen shots to this blog entry and also a link to my Australian Space  so folks that are interested can see some of the experence even if they aren't in Australia. 

 

 
One thing that we are very conscious of is that we need to put customers in control of their social network.  To add friends to their network customers need to invite them, either via an email address, a Messenger ID or their Space address and then the friends need to accept the invitation before they are included on the list.   Once added to the social network both the inviter and the invitee can decide what information they want to share and with whom by setting permissions in MSN Spaces.   One thing to note is that in author/edit mode you get to see all the friends that you have asked to be part of your network even if they are ‘pending’ yet if someone were to view your Space they only see the folks that have accepted your invitation.   

 

 See more at Phils Spaces site

 How cool is this....courtesy of Boing Boing

Boing Boing: Castle Wolfenstein PC mod

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My Place
Check out this place on VirtualEarth:

Late last week, both Cameron  and I got interviewed by Joshua Gliddon from The Bulletin for an article on podcasting. Well...the story is finally out in this weeks edition.

The article is interesting and pulls some good quotes from us, like...

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Running against the potential of podcasts – at least for the next year or two – is their techy nature and their crumby name. It’s a little too close to Apple’s iPod, and that makes it misleading.

“I guess we’re stuck with the name for a while,” says Stanic, a former advertising executive and self-described tech evangelist. “But what else are we going to call it? Disintermediated audio on demand?” He grins. “That doesn’t have much of a ring to it!”

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and

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So what’s the appeal? Why bother listening to some amateur rant, or to badly recorded, illegally uploaded music? “People want to be communicated to,” says Stanic. “They want to listen to things that interest them at a time that suits them. They want relevant information when and where they want it.”
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Of course, they also wanted to do a photo shoot...and since Cam was in the US at Demo, they decided it was just me and that they wanted to shoot it out on the street at my local shopping area, with my laptop...a set of studio headphones and a serious studio microphone. They figured that would look better than a photo of me at home with my $50 Altes Lansing headset with built in boom mic.

Its hard for people to grasp that podcasting is a whole new shift in the way audio content is produced...the great thing is that we can get a show out that is listened to by 1000's of people arond the world...and we don't need a studio facilitythat has cost us $100,000's of dollars...though that would be nice :)

If your interested inreading the article...here is the article on the ninemsn Bulletin site (minus the photo)...and here is a PDF (2MB) of the article as well.

Not a full list (and not in any particular order)...but just a few i could find with a small hunt around....well done guys...this is a great tool for the entry level blogger and with the direction you wil no doubt take it, it will be great once it is ready to leave beta....

Michael Connolly - Group Program Manager, MSN Spaces

Mike Torres - Lead Program Manager, MSN Spaces

Scott Isaacs - Software Architect for MSN Web Experience Team

Jay Fluegel - Lead Program Manager, MSN Spaces

Dare Obasanjo - Program Manager, MSN Web Platform

Maya Voskoboynikov - Program Manager, MSN Spaces

As you can tell by the fact you are obviously reading this...the MSN Spaces site is now available in English...so much easier to add a post then when i started this Space site the middle of last month....well done MSN guys...i 'll be playing around with this for a while, but like a few other people have siad, MSN Spaces won't be replacing my MoveableType blog anytime soon...

Hey everyone...just testing the Japanese MSN Spaces "blogging site" with an English post...well...i can't really post in Japanese...though i wish i could...

I wonder how long it will be before we have access to the MSN Spaces site in countries other than Japan??? Hopefully not to long, as this will no doubt cause a bit of a stir in the blogosphere and a few sleepless nights for Google's "Blogger".

Out of interest, here are some links to an English translation of my MSN Space site, SplaTT Space, as well as a link to a translation of the MSN Spaces home page via Babelfish.