Yes, I know, I nuked the server and took down the site for a day. Sorry bout that.

Hey all,

Just got back from China (and I’m still up, which makes this about hour 23… ), and found out that the Frank Talk about MSN Search Video Andy Edmonds and I made for Robert Scoble on Channel 9 is now up! You can download the video or watch it (I recommend the download myself).

Good stuff, check it out!

Today, we did the Forbidden City / Great Wall trip. The Forbidden City is amazing, and the Chinese are rennovating it in preparation for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing . They’ve done the west half it looks like, and are working on the east half and will then do the north. I’ll see if I can’t upload some pictures to tell the difference, but when it’s done, it’s going to be fantastic.

I’ll talk more about this later, but first, let me tell you about the Ju Yong Pass.

Back in May, my pal Nick and I went up to the top of the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall. I thought it was steep. It was. However, en route to the Ju Yong Pass, our guide laughed at me, at which point everyone else did too.

Then we saw the climb. And it is a climb.

The wall near the Ju Yong Pass is actually a large oval around the pass (which contains a decent sized river). We climbed up one section of the oval to the top, and then down again. You could also climb down the other size and make a loop. The high point we went to was the high point for the region, and somewhere between 1500 and 2000 feet up we estimate. It’s a hike. The nice thing is that there are very few merchants hawking things, as it’s not a high tourist area (and I thought Mutianyu wasn’t bad). But the climb is physically challenging. I’m not in great shape, and while I did heave my butt up there, I was puffing. But once at the top — woot! It’s always a great feeling to make the climb.

Until you see the guy in a sport jacket chain-smoking and holding his girlfriend wearing a miniskirt and 3-inch heels hop on up.

Yeah, OK, some people are in better shape than others. Maybe I do need to join that 20/20 program

We headed down, and met our hosts at a local market for some shopping, then went to the Duck King restaurant (I’ll need to track down the Chinese later) for Peking Duck. I’m normally not a fan of duck, as I find it too fatty, but the stuff there was amazing. Quite good. Although they also had this lobster-meat that was more like spaghetti or ramen that was amazing!

Afterwards, we went to Bodhi at 17 Gong Ti Bei Lu, where we had nice foot massages. This was a treat… you get a room (we had a 5-person room) where they do the massages, and everyone is chatty. It’s a nice social event. I had a lovely massage by #30… they go by number vs name as apparently it’s easier to keep track of, especially for foreigners (Bodhi is near the embassies, so they get a lot of foreigners). Apparently, you need to make a reservation as they’re very busy — +86 (10) 6417-9595. Ask for #30, she’s great, and she’ll get an extra 10 RMB. Apparently, for a random person to give a massage, the commission is only 20 RMB, but if you’re asked for, it’s 30.

We headed home, and everyone except me headed out back to Seattle. I’m here until Tuesday, and today, time to go exploring a bit on my own. Woot!

[update: sorry for the half-post, looks like it somehow got eaten. Here’s the full deal:]

Some of our colleagues took us to the Bai Jia Da Zhai Man (白家大宅门), located at 海淀区苏州街29号乐家花园内 海淀桥南300米 路西. I don’t know where that is either, but I’m sure if you’re in Beijing somebody there can give you directions. The room we were in had two large tables, separated by a large area the size of another table. This is used for some Peking Opera bits to entertain the guests. The table I sat at started with a round of beer. The other table started with moutai.

Moutai is a lovely Chinese liquor, normally consumed via a shot (although normally just half-ounce). It comes in a couple different varieties, including one that’s 106 proof.

We had that one.

Well, we at the beer table had just finished a toast, when the folks at the moutai table, having just done about six shots themselves, started toasting us. OK, moutai all around. Not to be outdone, I went over to their table and had another round with them. Then people started moving between the two tables to have a round with each other.

In the 80s they coined a term for this. MAD.

I’m sure they had lovely food there… I remember a sea cucumber and this dish called monkey brains that was really just a big mushroom. And this fried chicken thing that was kinda close to General Tso’s Chicken without the sweet and sour sauce.

Oof.

You’d think that after a dinner like that we’d be done, right? Nope! Off to Baby Face, it was! Baby Face is a new disco in Shanghai and Beijing. Chinese apparently aren’t into bars, which are just sitting around and drinking. They prefer to do something while drinking, so discos with dancing and karaoke are good, as are restaurants with lots of food. So discos are where things are happening.

We got a private room that seated about 20, and started up the karaoke machine. Those of us able to stand started to sing, and had a great time. Some of our crew took the opportunity to rest for a bit, recovering from the ethyl alcohol deluge. It turns out I can sing pretty well. At least, that’s what I believe. And everyone there. But then again, we may not have had all our senses with us.

We finally stumbled home about 1 AM and sacked out. Meetings for the next day were moved to 11, as we knew we weren’t getting up early.

Except for one… he was flying out that day. So approximately 4 hours later, he got up, checked out, and headed out for a 16-hour 2-leg flight back to Seattle. That’s gotta hurt…

Sunday, a bunch of us in Shanghai went to the final Formula 1 race of
the year at the Shanghai Circuit. It’s the second year of the race in
Shanghai, and it’s a nice track for approximately 200,000 close friends.
Even though Ferrari had a bad year, there was plenty of red for the fans.

This was my first race of any kind (F1, IndyCar, NASCAR, etc.), and I
picked a good one. The driver championship had been decided the previous
race (the #1 Renault driver), and today was the manufacturer (team)
championship, between Renault and Maclaren / Mercedes. The race was
good, although it was decided early — one of the Maclarens pulled out
about half-way through, so that decided the championship there.

Something I hadn’t considered… even though it’s early October,
Shanghai is a hair further south than San Diego / Tijuana. So it was
sunny and warm with no shade.. bake bake bake! And to think I
intentionally took out the sunscreen from my toilet bag because I didn’t
think I’d need it in October… oops.

Here’s some fun while away. The question: What one feature would you add
to MSN Search? Sky’s the limit… imagine infinite money, infinite devs
and testers, etc. etc. It could be a big verticle, such as book search
(search within a book), a UI change (ditch MSN and just do search), or
something that’s a bit fanciful (do recipe search, and have the smell of
the dish with each result). Whatever you want, just name it.

Disclaimer: I’m not saying we’ll do any of these, and by saying
something you’re not going to get hired / patent rights / royalties /
etc. There’s no prizes / awards, this is just done for fun. We might
already be implementing what you suggest, or we might do it because of
your suggesting. Google, Yahoo, and other engines may do the same. So if
you have some killer idea that you think is worth some bucks, don’t tell
us! Go find a VC and do it yourself!

OK gang, have at it!

Well, this afternoon I hopped onto Northwest #7 to Tokyo en route to
Shanghai for just under two weeks of fun in the sun! Or good Chinese
food, at any rate. Seriously, it’s off to talk to the extremely poorly
named MSN CDC… China Development Center in Shanghai, followed by a
quick hop up to Beijing to get some face time with our pals at Microsoft
Research Asia. The first leg to Tokyo isn’t bad, but hard to sleep…
you leave at 2:30 PST, and even though they turn off the lights at 6:15
PST, you’re not even close to being ready to take a snooze. For
Shanghai, you get in about 8:45 PM (the next day from when you leave…
love that date line), so it’s just a matter of staying up until 10 or 11
and then crashing quickly.

Here’s an interesting factoid about flying out of SeaTac airport. About
half the time, you’re going to be sitting next to another Microsoft
employee that you don’t know. Or at least that seems to be the case for
me. Last time flying to Tokyo, the guy next to me was a business
development guy in the music group going over to see some clients, and
today I’m next to someone working on MSN who is based in Tokyo. It turns
out it’s pretty easy to spot Microsofties on the plane… look for the
standard issue Toshiba M200 tablet or the AudioVox 5600 Smartphone.
They’re always out, and it just yells Microsoft. At any rate, it’s just
one more cool thing about this company… you just find new colleagues
all over the place.

Disclaimer: just because I used to work for Real and now work for Microsoft doesn’t mean I actually know anything. In this case, I don’t, so I’m just offering speculation. It’s educated, but likely wrong.

As seen pretty much everywhere, Microsoft has agreed to settle with RealNetworks over Real’s anti-trust suit. Some interesting tidbits:

• $460 million cash money. So Real’s balance sheet goes from $263MM ($363M - $100MM debt) to $743MM… that’s almost triple!
• $301 million in cash and services. As near as I can tell, this means Microsoft advertises and includes Real stuff (which means Rhapsody) and gets a bounty for every subscriber Microsoft sends to Real. Presumably, there’s a minimum number of new subscribers per epoch, otherwise Microsoft coughs up more cash for that epoch.

Here’s another fun bit from the AP article:

Among other agreements, Microsoft’s MSN online unit will feature RealNetworks’ Rhapsody music subscription service on its MSN Music download site. It also will provide links in its MSN Search results that let people listen to songs through Rhapsody.

RealNetworks also will take steps to support Microsoft’s MSN Search, and the companies agreed to jointly promote use of Windows Media technologies with Rhapsody To Go, a music subscription services for portable devices.

Right now, say you do a search for Miles Davis on MSN. You’ll get an Instant Answer blurb about him. Presumably, this means you’ll see Rhapsody stuff there soon. It also means on Rhapsody, you’ll likely see some gateways to MSN Search.

Analysis, speculation, and wild guesses time:

• This is great for all the Real employees that stuck it out. If you’re an old-timer, Real did a stock option buy-back where the strike price was $7.22. Now, all those options for all those employees are above water! Granted, like $0.50 above water, and they could sink fast, but it’s better than hovering between $5 and $6 as it has for the past five years.
• This is the lottery for all the hired guns Real brought on in the past five years. Real has hired a bunch of folks lately, including some well paid execs and almost-execs, who are now liquid. Life isn’t fair, and timing is everything.
• RIP RealPlayer. OK, this is just a guess on my part, but at the end of the day, I think the Real format is dead, and Real is slowly but surely going to have to admit that. Nobody cares about formats, they just care about their music. Promoting Windows Media for portable Rhapsody To Go is the first step. That Cingular deal Real got may also turn positive for Microsoft (just a wild guess there).
• Real has no more excuses for failure. For a long time, Real has been griping that bad old Microsoft was the cause of its financial underperformance… I know a number of people, myself included, that would say at least part of the blame is on sub-par products. I won’t point out specifics, but I’ll just say that if you’re standing up against Microsoft, and the SlashDot crowd hates you, then you might be doing something wrong. With Microsoft no longer playing the Big Bad Wolf, Real is going to be forced to make good products… hopefully, this means some people will actually get back to writing specs and thinking about the end-to-end experience and what’s best for the customer, versus just hacking something out on a deadline.
• And the big one… Microsoft and Real have both realized that nobody gives a crap about either of them in the music space. The real business of streaming media is being able to sell streaming media. People aren’t going to buy players, and really they aren’t going to by servers or converters either. That’s commodity stuff nowadays. So you gotta sell music. The problem is, the only one selling music right now is Apple, because iPods are sexy, and everything else isn’t. So it’s time to join forces and hope that it isn’t too late to get into the game. Gonna be interesting for a few years I think!

Just a random point in space on the current round of Search Wars (III, by my counting… I was from 93 - 99, won largely by AltaVista, and II was the rise of Google over all).

The latest Media Metrix search market share numbers put the market share of search as 46.4% Google, 30.5% Yahoo, and 15.5% MSN. I’m counting AOL’s 9.9% share for Google, as Google powers AOL. The rest is Ask, InfoSpace (MetaCrawler, DogPile, and others), and others.

OK, these seems reasonable.

However, if I count the search referrers to my blog (most going to my Unlock AudioVox 5600 instructions post), then I get the following:


754 Google
93 MSN
54 Yahoo


In percentage terms: 83%, 10%, 5%.

I’m going to do some more digging… I’m in the top 3 results for all engines, so it can’t be a “Use MSN / Yahoo, fallback to Google” pattern. But really, are we saying that people looking for hard / esoteric stuff use Google THAT dominantly?

What really surprises me is the Yahoo number. I could believe (or make up) lots of reasons why the distribution for MSN is so low compared to Google… customer skew being what I’d guess (MSN has different customers than Google, and they tend not to be the type to go unlocking an AudioVox). But Yahoo being only 5% is just… well… weird. That’s really, really, really low…

Bloggers out there: if you have ‘em, I’d love to know what your referrer counts are! Here’s a quick one-line command if you’re on a linux / apache system (in /var/log):

zcat `/bin/ls -t access.log*gz | head` | cat access.log access.log.1 | egrep -v 'tide[0-9]*.microsoft.com' | awk '{print $11}' | egrep 'google|yahoo|msn\.com' | sed 's/.*\(google\|msn\.com\|yahoo\).*/\1/' | sort | uniq -c


[Update]

OK… so I thought that perhaps one reason for skewing is that perhaps Google rates my site overall very highly, MSN not so much, and Yahoo hates me. Or maybe Steph’s still mad about that dinner… Anyway, looking just at my unlock page, we have:


94 Google
2 MSN
0 Yahoo


Yow.. OK, so MSN has a 2% share there, but 0 for Yahoo? That’s just kinda bizarre… more later on what those Yahoo folks ARE looking for… although doesn’t seem to be much. Weird.

Just a quick update… for the astute, you’ll notice I’ve removed the links to the Rolling Duffel Project from my Unlock AudioVox page. They haven’t updated since mid-September, and so I’m assuming they’ve done what they could and have moved on.

However, I’d like to thank everyone who has donated to something for Katarina, especially those who chipped in to the Red Cross, Human Society, and Habitat for Humanity. If you haven’t, and you’re still feeling guilty, click on the links below and feel less guilty… just because FEMA botching things is yesterday’s news doesn’t mean people and pets have homes now.

I’d also like to talk a bit about the PETS act campaign that the Humane Society is helping to promote. You can see the latest congressional info on the Thomas site for HR 3858. So far, it’s got 40 co-sponsors from both parties.

This is good stuff, and I’m pretty sure a no-brainer like the above will sail through (who wants to go into the 2006 election as being anti-pet?). But it also got me thinking… what happens to pets when you have to evacuate in case of an emergency, be it a hurricane, wild fire, earthquake, or another Bush being elected to the White House? I can even remember most of the check-lists I went through in Boy Scouts (yes, I’m an Eagle) to make the emergency survival kits. 4 gallons of water per person per day (this was Utah, so we assumed desert). Non-perishable food for 3 days. Blankets, whistle, first-ait kid, etc etc.

What about an extra leash for each dog? Portable water bowl? And extra food / water for the dog?

How about space preparation? If you have to pack up the car, how much space will the dog take up? Or dogs? Cats?

And what do you need as far as first aid for your pet? Here’s one dog first aid kit, apparently given to the Cincinatti Police. The Humane Society also has a pretty reasonable pet disaster planning list.

For giggles, here’s FEMA’s Survival Kit Check-List. Again, here we assume no pets… no crate for the cat, and some extra kitty litter. No spare leashes for the dog. No extra tags for the dog either. Go team.

I suspect I’m like most of you, in that I barely have a first-aid kit, let alone a disaster kit to toss in the car as we head north / south / east to escape whatever. Hopefully I won’t procrastinate too much longer in putting something together… and I’d encourage you to do the same. Perhaps I’ll make it my New Year’s Resolution and knock off an easy one!

Anyway, here are the links to the Humane Society and Habitat for Humanity… please give what you can.