As mentioned previously, I plan on "blogging" about, or possibly even from, the Toronto instance of Launch Tour 2005 this coming Tuesday. Unfortunately I've yet to hear if there is any sort of public connectivity at the venue (I sent an email to Mark Relph this morning, but alas - no reply. Maybe one just needs to blog about these things nowadays to get any respect - Mark, if you read this tell me if there's connectivity there. Thanks!), and I don't plan on using my exorbitant cell data rate for uploading pictures, so we'll see. It may not be posted until that evening. We'll see.

On another note, apparently the Canadian audience will be given "special editions" of the Standard Edition of SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 (what's special about them? Maybe some sort of license clause like "don't do anything commercial with it"). I'm not quite sure why this even matters, as presumably most of the audience will already have it via the MSDN library. Freebies at events are usually a bad thing as they draw people for all of the wrong reasons - I hated being at Comdex LV and trying to get real info, but instead you're fighting with throngs of geeks trying desperately to get a free $5-value t-shirt (coupled with exhibitors that built their entire presentation around giveaways. Yeah, I flew here so I could get a free pen and a tote bag emblazoned with some embarrassing logo).

Mark needs a better digital camera I think.

[Launch2005]

I do make use of the blog categories to try to limit the amount of out-of-band content general readers need to endure. For instance I'll often put .NET code tips only in the .NET section, and SQL code tips only in the SQL section. When they are very specific technology specific items, I don't propagate them to the home page either, so you'll only see them in those categories.

I mention this only because I know some readers interested in SQL or .NET specific stuff only subscribed to the root RSS feed, and unfortunately they'll miss some of the content that way. For them I'd recommend subscribing to both the root feed along with the category specific feeds.

One of the biggest plays currently happening in the "Web 2.0" evolution is PageRank whoring (because PageRank is worth big money) - everyone trying to get you to link to their domain somehow.

Maybe they're handing out "blog awards" and the celebratory icon requires some sort of link back attribution, or they want to add you to their aggregation, but demand that you place various links to them on your site that they'll automatically harvest (and continually validate) to "ensure" that you're legitimate. Some even require a link to a script (that'll do who knows what at some future point) on their site in the header of your blog.

Whatever the case, it's clear that many Web 2.0 strategies these days are based on PageRank as a short-term substitute for money, and clearly these sites are hoping that a PR9 will get them good VC funding.

Examples abound on the net, but this came to mind looking at the way Technorati requires that you decorate your posts to "tag" them in the Technorati world - instead of some general, cross-industry tagging mechanism (e.g. "put a list of tags in square brackets to the right of Tags in your post. e.g. Tags: [SQL Server][etc.]"), you have to add links to various Technorati tag URLs in your posts. 

Not only is Technorati building their entire value based upon external blogger provided content, but you also need to hand over some pagerank to them as well to be categorized properly (and to head off bloggers using rel=nofollow, they also demand that you use rel=tag. How covenient). Imagine if Google demanded that your page add links to every Google searchword that you want to be indexed by? Give me a break.

Technorati is trying to monopolize the blog world, and I'm really quite surprized how quickly so many rolled over for it. They seem to provide a nice service, but they shouldn't require quite the level of complicity by the blog community (unless they're making every contributing blogger an equity owner).

BTW: Could every blogger please link to this post? Thanks! I want to boast about how high my imaginary Technorati rating is so I can generate meaningless "what this blog is worth" numbers.

Irony = Technorati Profile

In that prior example I used a cursor technique that might be alien to some - rather than using a DECLARE CURSOR, I iterated through the records by id.

I came across this at one shop that I did some consulting. At first I approached it with skepticism - It seemed like an unnecessarily quirkly way of doing a cursor - but after several benchmarks I was sold. If the iterating id is indexed (which it often is), the performance advantage will vary between marginal to significant.

Quite a few times I've worked with groups that couldn't tell you what tables in their database were the largest, or what component (data, indexes, or even unused space) was using the most space. I've pulled around a very simple script for some time that has served me well.

I mentioned the Microsoft Live "gadget" competition derisively on Tuesday - where they're giving away a couple of xbox360s to the creators of the best gadgets, trying to entice some extremely cheap labour (split the marginal prize cost amongst the hundreds who'll probably take the challenge to win themselves a game system). Of course Microsoft is doing it to try to make their platform viable.

Firefox is getting into the game too: Develop the best extensions to go with Firefox 1.5, and you could win from a collection of prizes. It is sort of remarkable that the Mozilla Foundation prizes are so much richer than the Microsoft prizes - e.g. three absolutely top of the class gaming computer rigs as the grand prizes, versus I believe 4 xboxes, worth 1/5th the amount, from Microsoft (you would think Microsoft would at least pony up for a year of MSDN Universal or something for the winners). The Firefox competition also has impressive category winning bounties, including an iPod Nano and a $250 gift certificate.

Of course many enter these sorts of competitions not for the prizes, but rather for the prestige. For these people the prizes are almost an insult.

For the prospective competitors, in the Firefox case there is already a rich ecosystem of very impressive extensions, so you can go into that knowing that you're starting with a proven, rich platform. In Microsoft Live's case, there is a measly 8 existing gadgets, and they're a little weak. I'm always suspicious when organizations unleash that sort of platform on the world, because their lack of experience trying to use it in real world scenarios means that it is almost certain v1.0-borked - e.g. you can expect a complete rework and rewrite as people explore the edge cases, and discover all of the things that simply cannot be accomplished with the infrastructure they've developed. If you're a developer, you've probably been handed that sort of "framework" from a coworker, with grand promises of extraordinary extensibility, but in reality it's useless in the real world because they never actually used it for anything of consequence themselves.