This is a little confusing but HTML, CSS, web standards evangelist, Molley E. Holzschlag wrote on her blog today that she is Working on contract basis for Microsoft with Internet Exploer team. She also mentions that she will be working with the Expression Web (Microsoft’s new web design product replacing FrontPage) team. You may not know Molly, but she has been one of the leaders pushing web standards and suddenly going to work for Microsoft has the connotations of Dick Cheney announcing his new position as the head of Al-Quaeda’s intelligence forces in the US.

Yes, I know that having that kind of influence within Microsoft will take web standards deep into the marketplace, but quite often Microsoft has ignored web standards and invented their own IE standard that everyone has to play by. The other announcement in her blog post that strikes me as unusual is who she is pulling into the IE world with her. She says, “our group will be publishing educational material for designers and developers from such noted industry experts as Eric Meyer, Christopher Schmitt and Aaron Gustafson.”

This year CBS is using 42 High Definition Cameras at the Superbowl and over 500 staffers. Broadcasting and Cable reports “CBS will have 21 hard (or wired) cameras, three cabled handheld cameras, two wireless handheld cameras, one wireless Steadycam camera, one CableCam camera, two robotic goalpost cameras, two robotic coaches cameras two talent-booth cameras, one unmanned camera for inside beauty shots, one robotic camera atop a tower at CBS-owned WFOR Miami for outside shots, two clock cameras and a spare hard camera.” They will also deploy one slow motion “Phanton” camera shoots over 3000 frames per second allowing a player’s motion to be broken down in minute detail.

Many times I write about general techy subjects, but I realized that recently I have been a no-show, no-comment on Windows Vista. I guess this means I would just fall into the category of someone who has XP working pretty well for them and doesn’t want to deal with the bugs of a new product from Microsoft. Both my desktop and my laptop are vista capable and would run it fine according to the published specs, but right now I just don’t have a desire to let the operating system slow me down from everything else that I am doing.

I think one of the main reasons I am delaying is that I strongly believe that I should do a clean install of a new operating system and not just upgraded my current OS. And if I do a clean install that means I have install all of the other software and utilities that I use taking up at least a day, but maybe more to make everything work for me.

Don’t get me wrong, I will eventually upgrade to Vista. Probably sooner than later, but first I want my schedule to slow down a little and Microsoft to find a few of those opening month bugs.

I’ve been playing around with forms, databases and data driven websites for a little more than five years now. In the beginning, I used access databases and Dreamweaver UltraDev to write the vbscript and sql to interact with databases. Later, I graduated to Microsoft SQL and mySQL and even some PHP to write all sorts of data driven sites ranging from Content Management Systems for news stories, classified ads, blogs and even rental listings.

Now, there a lot of web tools out there to make creating data driven websites a lot easier (without even having to write much code). Here’s a few tools that I’ve found lately.

• Atlas – A free google maps mashup that allows you to upload your own database of map points and information and publish a map to your website.
• Zoho Creator – A free online database that creates the database, create the forms to feed the database information and then create a page to pull the information from the database. You should check out the rest of the Zoho tools (most of which are free).

Arkansas’s former governor, Mike Huckabee, announced yesterday morning on Meet the Press that he was running for the Republican nomination for president for the 2008 election. As I was watching him duck and weave Tim Russert’s question on my DVR late Sunday morning (about 10:45 a.m.), I started looking for his website announcing his intentions. Of course, he would have one up already, I thought, Hilary and Barak announced their candidacy on their website. So, I google Mike Huckabee thinking this should be easy (remembering that his campaign can’t control Google results).

• First link, Arkansas Governor’s website featuring Arkansas’ new democratic governor Mike Beebe.
• Second link, Wikipedia’s Mike Huckabee entry.
• Third link, a blog promoting Mike Huckabee’s candidacy telling everyone that he was right two years ago that Huckabee was going to run.
• Fourth link, MikeHuckabee.com: website trashing Huckabee and pointing all of the negative rumors that float about him.
• Fifth link, finally, Huckabee’s PAC Hope For America that has nothing on it. Unfortunately, It’s just a blank blue page. Apparently, taken down for the announcement. When I checked the list again on Monday morning this site is now his exploratory committee’s site and is also pointed at by his exploratory committee’s url ExploreHuckabee.com

If you’ve read this and you’re working for Huckabee, please don’t hesitate to shoot me an email (lbyrd@mediabyrd.com) for some free private pointers. I just can’t have a presidential candidate from my home state looking out of touch, online.

I am all about telling a good story and that’s what journalism is all about for me– using the right medium to convey your message to your audience. One essential to good journalism (and good storytelling) is editing. Behind every wonderful writer is a wonderful editor. The site editTeach is a wonderful resource I just found for editing including tips on improving content, language skills and editing resources.

American Journalism Review published a profile of Adrian Holovaty in their January/February issue. He’s responsible for the award winning mashup ChicagoCrime.org. The article recognizes him as a pioneer in the new field of programming journalist as he “collects data, synthesizes it and converts it to an understandable format to give readers a deeper understanding.”

Online media guru Rob Curley is sharing the details that went into the Naples Daily News Studio 55 Vodcast. He covers where the idea came from,how they implemented and why it worked. It’s the way newspapers should try convergence.

Microsoft is courting the professional photography market and is making a concerted effort to reach out to pro photographers. So far they launched the Professional photography with Windows XP website, held the Microsoft Pro Photo summit and released a couple of software tools to add to the Windows XP environment.

The first tool is the Microsoft RAW Image Viewer which lets Windows XP work with RAW images like JPEGs or GIFs. It shows previews of the files when you are in thumbnail view, allows you to double click on a RAW file to see a full-screen view or start a slideshow and allows RAW images to be printed with the built-in XP photo printing function that allows you to print contact sheets or whatever size photo you want.

The other tool that I’ve found useful is the Microsoft Photo Info Tool that allows you to view and edit the metadata stored in the photo file. Metadata is becoming more and more important with photos as web search engines like google scan the metadata and web applications like flickr post information from it.

This blog has moved, but you probably won’t really notice if you always went to lanniebyrd.com to read it. If you went to some other address or read the rss feed, then you probably did notice it moved.

I switched from having blogger ftp the blog to my host at mediabyrd.com/lanniebyrd with lanniebyrd.com as a forwarded domain to that address to using blogger’s new custom domain name service. It was very easy to set-up. I just had to point the www record in the DNS to blogger’s domain service and turn it on in the control panel.

I’ve had this blog with blogger almost six years (since February 2001) and many times I’ve thought about moving to some other hosting service or hosting in my domain with some other blogger cms, but I’ve just stuck with blogger because it is so easy to use. Now, blogger has made some major upgrades and integration with google and I’m glad I have stuck with them.

Update: I am also in the process of adding labels to the posts from this blog. It’s very interesting looking back at what I’ve posted about to see what I am really interested in.