New MSN Homepage Begins Full Roll-Out—With Customized Headlines, More Local

After a month-long delay, Microsoft’s overhaul of the MSN homepage is going live to the site’s 100 million users over the next two weeks. Perhaps the three most significant of the 30 updates Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) has made since announcing that a redesign was coming to MSN last November: Headlines on the page will now be customized based on user behavior, so, for instance, people who tend to be more interested in entertainment news will be more likely to see those type of stories. The page’s new local edition—which features local weather, traffic, news stories, and restaurant reviews in one place—will now also include local blog posts and Tweets overlaid on a map. And Microsoft’s Bing search engine is given even more prominence than in the initial plans; the search box at the top of the page includes the words ‘web search’—in bright orange. Microsoft had initially introduced the design to about 10 percent of MSN homepage users this fall, but the full roll-out, scheduled for late January, was delayed in part in order to avoid overlap with the Olympics and the Super Bowl. Click-through rates to content on the new page were also reportedly down. But MSN Executive Producer Scott Moore tells us that testing has shown single-digit increases in click-through rates to content on the page, as well as double-digit increases in click-through rates to the search box. As for ads, he wouldn’t provide data but said that advertisers were pleased because the new page gives their ads “more pop.” Indeed, the overhaul of the MSN homepage is visually much more radical than the recent redesigns at rivals AOL (NYSE: AOL) and Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO). The site’s design—which for years has featured an iconic blue background and long lists of links—has been replaced with an airy, news-style design. During our conversation, I asked Moore whether he was worried about a possible user backlash (and to judge from the comments left on our previous posts about the redesign there’s some very vocal opposition from long-time users). While Moore said it was “certainly possible,” he said that MSN had a “pretty good handle of what the audience feels about it” because it has been in testing for so many months. Take a look at the new page here. And here’s Microsoft’s announcement: MSN Homepage Launch Begins Today New MSN Homepage offers search, news, local and social networking – all in one place Today is an exciting milestone for MSN. We are beginning the launch of our new homepage to our customers in the US. The new MSN homepage offers search, news, local and social networking – all in one place. We encourage you to try the new homepage today and learn more about the many cool features. Since the preview of our new homepage began in November, we’ve been very busy gathering over 70,000 pieces of customer feedback and introducing over 30 updates in our quest to deliver the best homepage to stay in the know. Here are a few things we learned and new features we introduced to address customer feedback: Bing, Bing, and more Bing. We’ve seen double-digit increases in Bing search queries coming from the new homepage. People wanted even more Bing, so we: Increased the prominence of the Bing search box to make it easy for you to search from the MSN homepage. Added a new TrendWatch feature to highlight the day’s top movers on Twitter. Increased the prominence of Popular Searches, where our editorial team highlights the most interesting and topical searches of the day. Increased editorial programming of search-related content, including videos and images. And, we’re currently testing a Search History feature so you can more easily find information you typically search for. Local is a home-run. We knew people craved local information, but we’ve been surprised by how quickly our local offering has taken off. The MSN Local module on the homepage is driving over 50% more traffic to our new local offering, MSN Local Edition. This site already has over 9 million unique users every month, making it the #4 online newspaper in terms of unique users, and the leader for page views. MSN Local Edition, which uniquely covers the entire country across 42,000 zip codes, continues to innovate, introducing new features like: Hyper-local Tweets, which uses the power of Bing to highlight tweets from your location My Cities lets you personalize MSN Local and save up to 3 cities to follow – making it easy to keep up with your friends or family across the entire country. With partnerships with NBC Local Media and Hearst Television, MSN Local Edition now offers 3,000 news video clips a week across 36 local markets. You love images and news. The main module on the new homepage, which features a prominent image, receives over 50% more clicks than our original homepage. We’re continuing to offer more multi-media on the new homepage – including launching the availability of in-line HD video today. Now you can watch HD video in-line on the MSN homepage with minimal buffering. We also learned: The design of the new page was largely positively received, but we heard from some MSN loyalists that they missed our traditional blue background. So, we tested many different versions of our design – including an entirely blue background – and it turns out most people prefer the clean, white background we introduced with the preview – with a touch of blue highlighting the top of the page. The tabs on the new homepage allow us to highlight different categories of news and many different headlines with less clutter – we learned you love lots of news headlines to choose from, so we added more tabs and made the navigation easier so you can easily access the wealth of information on MSN. Social networking is handy to have on the homepage. Most of you appreciate the all-in-one offering of the new MSN homepage – including the ability to check your Hotmail, Messenger and favorite social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, right from your MSN homepage. We realized we could make social networking even easier, so now our social network module defaults to the social network tab you use most frequently (Facebook, for example). These are just a few of the many themes we learned and have been working on over the last few months. Because we want to ensure every customer has a great first experience, we’re taking our time to roll it out, but all of our 100 million customers in the US will have the new homepage within the next few weeks. Today marks an important milestone for us, but we’re going to keep working hard to hear your feedback and deliver more great experiences across MSN. Erik Jorgensen, Corporate Vice President, MSN Related New MSN Home Page Still Set To Launch 'Early This Year'—But Some 'Tweaks' Coming MSN Home-Page Overhaul Includes Big Push On Local

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How free will Ordnance Survey's maps be? Your last chance to decide

Government consultation on OS mapping closes today - and has attracted withering comments from its own advisory body (updated) From next month, you should be able to get digital forms of Ordnance Survey (OS) maps for free - free as in beer, and free as in speech - under a new initiative announced last November by the prime minister. And why's that important today? Because this is the closing date for the public consultation on which of those maps should be made available, and in what form. The consultation, and the options it presents, stirred up strong feelings among the people working in geographic information. And the outcome could have a dramatic effect on how you use maps in the future - digital ones and paper ones. Gordon Brown announced that OS "will open up its data relating to electoral and local authority boundaries, postcode areas and mid scale mapping information. The Government will consult on proposals to make data from Ordnance Survey freely available so it can be used for digital innovation and to support democratic accountability." OK, so what about the detail? That's the tougher part. The Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG), which is ostensibly in charge of OS, began a consultation in December, setting out three possible options: 1) leave OS as it is. 2) make all OS's maps and digital data available for free reuse on a Creative Commons-style licence 3) make only some of OS's digital maps - roughly from 1:25,000 (equivalent to Explorer) to 1:50,000 (Landranger) - available for free reuse on a Creative Commons-style licence. Option 2 is what the Free Our Data campaign has been pushing for since its inception in March 2006. The benefits are obvious: anyone who wants to build some sort of digital or even paper product can use the OS data - which you can rely on because it's the UK's national mapping agency, and so meant to get it right - and create new products and services that build on it. But there's a catch: where's the money to come from? If we were in the middle of a boom, it might be easy to argue that OS should just be funded directly from the public purse. The catch, though, is that it isn't: it operates as a "trading fund", a government-owned business which charges for the use of its data. Its revenues last year were around £117m, on which it was profitable and gave a few million pounds to the Treasury. A profitable government business? They're like hen's teeth, you might think. However the next catch is that half of its revenues came from the public sector - so actually this is the public sector charging itself and then saying how well it's done by remitting money to the Treasury. Except that the departments which pay for the OS data are centrally funded themselves. So not so clever. It's also emerged from the consultation that OS undercharges the public sector compared to the private sector (which hasn't pleased the private sector). But the tricky thing is this: if you just make all the OS data free, can you really persuade the Treasury to provide the necessary extra £50m or so of public money that's needed to fund its operation? (£50m because you save £50m in public sector fees, but lose about that amount in private sector fees, and it costs about £100m to run the OS.) By contrast it's much cheaper to go with option 3 - you only have to fund the "lost revenue" from the digital maps and the loss of revenues on paper maps as rivals start using the CC-licensed data to produce their own paper maps. That's probably going to be closer to £20m. Into this Gordian Knot scenario comes not just Gordon, but also Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who pushed it all through. But it's the detail that matters now. Which is where the consultation comes in. You can find various responses: we published the Free Our Data response on the Free Our Data blog, obviously; and an informal one from Tristram Cary of Getmapping, a private company specialising in aerial photography (and which got into a legal battle with OS that nearly killed the company). But by far the most interesting is the response from the Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information (APPSI) - the advisory body to the government that has the same role on information as the Council on the Misuse of Drugs does on, well, drugs. APPSI reckoned that Option 2 - making it all free - is actually the more sensible option because it's logically "cleaner". That's a radical proposal. As the UKAuthorITy.com site noted in a news story: "The panel, which advises on policy and adjudicates in disputes over public sector licensing, says that a "free data" regime for the OS would be "the most holistic, durable and clearest solution". However it recognises that this would be an irreversible step and agrees with the government's inclination for a phased transition from the current trading fund model. Less complex, restrictive and expensive licensing is crucial to the success of the government's open data initiative, it says. ""In particular, OS should not have any intellectual property rights in derived data."" That one alone is very important. At present, OS claims that if you create some new dataset while using an OS map, OS owns the copyright in that dataset. Yes, it does. This is the reason why you don't see much council data mapped out on Google Maps, even though there are plenty of people in councils who have the programming chops to do that. And it's also why you find some councils have been doing their mapping for public consumption on OpenStreetMap - which is free for use and doesn't have the same "derived data" rule. The reason for the OS "derived data" rule is essentially to prevent people from re-using OS maps in other forms. But it drives local government and the public sector - not to mention the private sector - absolutely barmy. If the consultation has one effect, it should be to remove the "derived data" rule from OS products released under "OS Free". Ideally, and suggested by a number of people, it should move to something like the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence - meaning you'd have to say you used OS data, but otherwise leaving you free to build on it. The final point about the APPSI consultation: "In unusually forthright terms, the panel, chaired by professor David Rhind, a past head of OS, points to what it calls "a fundamental contradiction" in government information policy. "The great bulk of government organisations are those that provide that information to citizens and businesses at marginal cost or for free. But a relatively small number of information providers fall into a second category: notably the trading funds of Ordnance Survey, the Meteorological Office and the Hydrographic Office, and also the Royal Mail. There has been no consistent philosophy behind the allocation of a body to a particular category, other than 'make some money wherever we can'." Lastly: it's interesting to compare the COI release (timed at 15.27 on 17 November, when the announcement was made) with the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) release, which has the same date but no time. The difference? The COI one doesn't include a quote from Sir Rob Margetts, OS's chairman - the clearest possible indication that OS didn't know what was coming. The question now is: will the consultation give people what they want? And have you got your response in? If you need to do it quickly, then you could use Harry Metcalfe's quick'n'easy page. But hurry... Update: the Local Government Association has a very robust response (PDF) to the consultation: "The consultation .. fails to recognize that substantial elements of core public sector geographic data are generated by bodies other than OS, and include local authorities (address and street data under a statutory requirement), Office for National Statistics (census geographies) and Defra (national park boundaries). To this extent, the OS database consists of surveyed, redigitised and collated data from these sources." In other words, why does OS get to dictate how data it didn't generate gets used? And: "there must be clarity across the public sector about what constitutes a public task: indeed, we prefer the term public good because the issue is what should the public sector provide as a public good and therefore what is available for free, where should the public sector recover costs etc. So, local government is increasingly being asked to provide non-personal data for free on the basis that tax payers have already paid for the collection and collation of the data, while the same authorities have to purchase OS to enable this offer." It's going to be very interesting to see how DCLG pulls together the threads. But the clear message from the public sector is: we don't like the way things are set up at the moment. Change is in the air. Free our data Internet Government data Charles Arthur guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

View original story : few+things Feed : Technology: Technology blog | guardian.co.uk

How to Blow Dry Trump International with a Helicopter

(Photos courtesy of Rob Hayashida of Golf Views) ARMCHAIR GOLF is in Rio Grande, Puerto Rico, for the Puerto Rico Open. I’VE SEEN A LOT of things on a golf course. Today I saw something new: a helicopter used as a giant blow dryer on a rain-deluged championship layout. Desperate measures were in order for the Trump International Golf Club at the 2010 Puerto Rico Open. The championship layout had taken on more than six inches of rain in the last 24 hours, and a tournament that was scheduled to start at 7 a.m. on Thursday was still delayed at noon on Friday. A grounds crew armed with squeegees and pumps and working through the night could only do so much. The loud whirr of the propellers signaled that the operation was underway. The helicopter started on the 1st hole, just as a golfer would. After flying a short distance along the fairway, it dropped down to just a few feet above the surface, hovering in place with its propellers rotating at high speed. Occasionally, men who dared to get close seemed to be directing the pilot as nearby palm trees swayed in the helicopter’s wake. It was a strange sight. No word on the model of the helicopter, which belongs to Jorge Diaz, owner of the property. (Is there a preferred fairway-drying model?) I expect it worked fine, an important piece of equipment during this very soggy week at the Puerto Rico Open. Players Emerge Professional golfers are a bit like reptiles. However, instead of sunning themselves on rocks after torrential rain, they emerge from their hotel rooms and the players’ dining room to sun themselves on the practice tee and putting green, working out the kinks after a long weather delay. First-round play will resume at 4:35 p.m. on Friday. –The Armchair Golfer Related: It’s Raining Cats, Dogs and Iguanas at the Puerto Rico Open Opening Media Conference and More Chi Chi Rodriguez Chi Chi Rodriguez: Puerto Rico’s Golf Ambassador

View original story : few+things Feed : ARMCHAIR GOLF BLOG

Recession Chic: Multitask & Save With These 10 Multipurpose Makeup Picks!

There are a few things in life I do not regret: 1) picking out all the Kit-Kats from the Halloween candy bowl instead of giving them to the trick-or-treaters, 2) telling my 10th grade English teacher that her gold lamé sports blazer looked like tin foil, and 3) stocking my makeup bag full of multipurpose products, like Nars' Multiple Luminizer stick for example. For anyone who doesn't have a compulsive cosmetics-buying problem like me, all-over color products not only help you save money with their multitasking abilities, but they're also a cinch to use (especially when they're finger-application-friendly or come in stick form), and conserve space in your purse! Get rid of your mini-collection of blush, lipsticks, and accompanying brushes and opt for a gel-based cheek and lipstain by Lorac. It's sheer enough to look natural even with the most rushed and haphazard of touch-ups and requires no additional tools other than a mirror (or not even that, if you've had lots of practice)! Or freshen up in record time (and ease) with Josie Maran's fingerpaints -- a space-saving palette of cream eyeshadow, blush, highlighter and lipcolor all in one, no brushes necessary! For more superhero-worthy products that will help save your wallet from mass makeup-buying peril, take a look at the slideshow!

View original story : few+things Feed : Stylehive Blog

ROI and social media; carts and horses

Asking about social media ROI? There are a few things you'll want to consider first. It's hard to measure the effectiveness of your outreach if you don't know what you're trying to measure in the first place.

View original story : few+things Feed : NLC BLOG

A Few of My Favorite Things (to eat) (in Portland)

Inspired by one of the first posts over at Portland Food Coma, here are some of my current favorite

View original story : few+things Feed : boda « WordPress.com Tag Feed

Small Microwave (Wicker Park) $20

Galanz Microwave. Clean and works great. No rotating tray, but heats things up just fine. Perfect for dorm or small apartment. Bought it for $50 a few months ago.

View original story : few+things Feed : craigslist | appliances in city of chicago

Canon EOS Rebel T1i 15.1 MP CMOS Digital SLR Camera with 3-Inch LCD and EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS Lens

The camera has a great grip and weight, nice battery duration, and make terrific pictures.. You get good colors and quality using the correct settings. Menu is not so easy to use (if u are not familiar with canon), but after few days, u get it! It's simply amazing to do HD videos with it. Great stuff for short movies. Only things to worry about this: not to cover the mic on the left, in the front face; and setting the focus - thats painful to get used. And unfortunately, its not possible to do 24fps videos or to change ISO or speed. Features New 15.1-megapixel CMOS sensor with DIGIC 4 Image Processor Includes Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS lens Full HD video capture at 1920 x 1080 resolution; HDMI output 3.0-inch Clear View LCD; Live View Function for stills (Quick, Live and Face Detection AF modes) and video Capture images and video to SD/SDHC memory cards (not included) Click to read more details | Customer Reviews

View original story : few+things Feed : Bestselling Canon Digital SLR at Digital Cameras 4 Less

Five Tips for Staying In Step with Your Kids during the School Year

By David Wolf, Attorney Published by Child Injury Lawyer Network During the summer months it seems pretty easy to keep in tune with your children. Sports activities, family vacations, and days at the pool help create a strong family bond. But once they leave for that first day of school in the fall, it can be much harder to continue the same level of involvement in their lives. But it is worth it. Many studies have shown that parental involvement helps your kids learn more effectively. Many schools and school groups, like the Parent Teacher Alliance (PTA), work hard to offer parents opportunities to become more involved in their children’s school experience. The following are five tips parents can use to keep involved with their child’s school and help improve their overall educational experience: 1. Ask lots of questions, and listen to the answers. Your child is discovering many new things every day at school. Put aside your grown-up worries for an hour or two and listen to what they have to say. 2.Keep in touch with the teacher. Knowing and keeping in touch with your child’s teacher is the most effective way to keep abreast of your child’s progress and to get a handle on any problems he or she might be having. 3. Join the PTA. The PTA is very involved with what happens at your child’s school. Talking to other parents and keeping abreast of what is going on help you be more involved. 4. Provide encouragement. Report cards only come out a few times a year, but every day is a new opportunity to encourage your child to do their best. 5. Don’t forget about after school activities. Sports teams, music and drama, the YMCA, Boys and Girls Club, and church activities all offer productive and enriching activities for kids after school lets out. Read more details about each of these tips at Good Parents Stay Involved.

View original story : few+things Feed : Child Injury Lawyer Blog

Manage your March Madness brackets with Yahoo! Tourney Pick ‘em

It’s just about that time of year again, when the sports-loving population checks out of work and tries, for a few Thursdays and Fridays, to follow the NCAA basketball tournament without their boss finding out. The boss knows, of course. But I’m sure that won’t stop most people from enjoying the five rounds of tournament action. For fans, the tourney centers on brackets, our blind predictions that are, for the most part, based on how each school fared while we were in college. Yahoo! has a bracket management application, and it’s available now for your BlackBerry The mobile application works in the same manner as the desktop interface, so there won’t be much to figure out. You can create brackets and even enter into Yahoo’s $10,000 bracket contest. The best bracket takes home a $10,000 prize, and if you pick a perfect ballot you win a million. Fat chance of that, though. You know you’re going to pick the wrong 7-10 upset. Once you make the picks, you can check out live scores — though since you’ll be watching from your computer at work you might not need that feature. You can also get new, analysis, and more from Yahoo’s writers. The selection show is on Sunday evening, and the tournament starts on Thursday. You can download the Tourney Pick ‘Em application by going to m.yahoo.com/tourneypickem from your BlackBerry handset, or you can go to http://mobile.yahoo.com/tourneypickem for more information. Hat tip BerryReview. This post originated at BBGeeks.com - home to all things Blackberry! Also a great source of info about AT&T BlackBerry. Manage your March Madness brackets with Yahoo! Tourney Pick ‘em This post originated at BBGeeks.com - home to all things Blackberry! Also a great source of info about AT&T BlackBerry. Manage your March Madness brackets with Yahoo! Tourney Pick ‘em

View original story : few+things Feed : BB Geeks