In case you are wondering what the MSN team (which I am part of) is working on, here is some info.

You may or may not know that we at Microsoft launched our new MSN Search Beta this week. There has been a lot of press coverage on it, of course. Many people still like Google, but the new MSN product looks reasonably compelling too. There is a cool blog from Microsofties which you can read for the latest info on the web search.

So what’s so great about the beta search?

• Reasonably fast.
• Inline answers from Encarta. What is the population of Peru?
• Do your algebra homework. x^2 + 2x + 1 = 0. What is x?
• I rank first on the ego search. Belshe
• Music Search w/ sample music. Madonna
• Image search better than Google. Dinosaur coloring

Whats not as good?

• Still can’t find decent Microsoft APIs. OpenMsgStore
• Every so often reports “temporarily unavailable”

Interesting article from the BBC about cell phones getting hacked with viruses.

The mobile phone market is a rapidly growing market. I read recently that by 2008, cell phones in the US will outnumber PC’s by 2:1. (Who knows if the figure is accurate, but the point is that there will be a heck of a lot of phones). Will phones become the hacker’s platform of choice?

I had to turn off comments on this blog today.

90% of the comments received are spam, and last night I received about 10 new spam comments.

Rather than trying to keep the blog clean manually, I just had to disable them all.

This is an area where Movable Type could have better software - the comment processing is really primitive. Don’t get me wrong, though, Movable Type is great!