Dylan Greene dot com

This is why I like Scoble and his blog:

• He works for Microsoft.
• He openly admits Microsoft doesn't do everything right.
• He calls for change.

Here's a quote from today:

MicrosoftMonitor asks us to "pull back Longhorn evangelism" and "revamp our XP marketing and evangelism."

I have taken that to heart. Whenever I fly I interview customers who still are using Windows 2000 or 98. I want to know why they haven't upgraded. I'm talking about Longhorn far less now too.

So far the answer I'm getting is "we're stuck with what our company gives us." But, when pressed, most of these people couldn't name three new features in XP that don't exist in 2000 or 98.

I wish we'd come out with a new TV and magazine campaign that'd focus on "the joy of software." And point out specifically new features in our currently-shipping software.

It's interesting. My coworkers and I talk about our advertising a lot. I haven't found ANYONE who likes the latest Office ads. Admittedly my sample size is small, but let's show off our software! Search folders in the latest Outlook, for instance, are REALLY AWESOME yet we don't tell anyone about them.

Most people don't know what ClearType is either.

Joe and Michael are right to keep pressure on us to market our current products better.

This is also why I like blogs - we complain, they listen. It's fine and dandy to complain about Microsoft software to your office buddies and IT staff, but that isn't going to fix the problem. Posting your complaints online means somebody at Microsoft will see it, especially with people like Scoble quoting other people complaints. Even if somebody at Microsoft isn't reading your blog entires, there are others out there reading, and your complaints will be linked to and talked about on other blogs.

The end of it is that the more people that blog, the more likely good complaints will be seen by the people that can make the difference, and that means better software and less headaches for you, me, and everybody else who uses Microsoft software either by choice or requirement.

New feature: Categories.

The bottom of every blog entry has the category or categories. Click on the link to see all blog entries in that category.

When you click on a blog entry after the comments is the "Related Entries" section with the list of blog entries that have the same categories.

Let me know if this good or it needs some tweaks. I haven't updating the caching code so the category pages might seem to load a little slower than the rest and the blog entries might not show the categories yet, but the system should work fine.

As I alluded to in an earlier blog entry, I finally got a chance to meet Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble last Friday. Scoble is known outside Microsoft as the great welcome human voice that Microsoft has never really had. Scoble is downright honest in his blog, complaining about the same things we users complain about and writing about non-Microsoft things that Microsoft seems to often miss or ignore. Hopefully he has the power to make some important changes within Microsoft, or at least the clout and balls to get things moving.

I've talked with Scoble a few times on messenger and he's linked to my blog entries a bunch of time times. I've always considered it an honor when he links to something I've written, so it was especially cool to get to meet him in person.

Scoble blogged my visit days well before I got around to writing this.

Some of the many things Scoble and I talked about:

1. The perception of Microsoft as a trustworthy company, versus a company like Apple or AOL.
2. The expectation from users that software should be easier to use today than 10 years ago or even last year.
3. Microsoft's lack of using good products for helping with the PR problem.
4. My belief that Longhorn should take away user interface flexibility for programmers and instead focus on funneling developers into a paradigm where they can only create usable applications.

Some interesting things I picked up while at Microsoft:

• None of my friends there blog.
• None of them had heard of Scoble. (!)
• None of them use RSS readers or read blogs with any frequency.
• None of them seemed to understand the draw of blogging.

Their reason for not blogging:

• "It would be boring to read about what I do all day."
• "I don't want to get in trouble for posting company confidential information."
• "There's no reason to blog in the intranet."
• "My blog would be no different than reading my progress reports off SharePoint."
• "It would take too much time."
• "There's already too many blogs out there."
• "RSS sucks as a standard. It needs better metadata."
• "What I write won't be helpful to anybody outside my team."

Interesting. My friends are from groups such as Avalon, MSN, SharePoint, and Security, all of which I think would have really interesting blogs.

Small world:

• Scoble and I were in ClubIE and and ClubWin
• Scoble remembers visiting my Windows 95 site (The Windows 95 Starting Pages)
• From Scoble's blog entry about my visit:

Funny, after I dropped him off in the lobby of my building, someone I didn't know stopped me in the hallway and asked "is THAT Dylan Greene you were just talking to?" Heh.

So who was that? If you're reading, let me know. I'm curious.

Here's the photos of my visit with Scoble, and bunch more all over the Microsoft campus: Microsoft photos.

I got a funny email from Tristan Louistoday: He was typo Googling his name and found that I mentioned him in a blog entry about who reads my blog, but his name was spelled wrong.I fixed it, and it gave me an idea....

Today Google suggests the correct spelling of words you search for but happen to spell wrong.To takethis awesome featurea step further, Google should suggest popular typo variations as alternative searcheswhen you happen to spell the search terms correctly.

Example 1: Misspellings. Bloggers, press, and coworkers often spell my name wrong, leaving off the last e in Greene. If wasto Google for Dylan Greene, Googlewould suggest also searching for Dylan Green.

Example 2: Spacing. The company I work for is called webMethods, but it is often written as Web Methods. When searching for webMethods google would suggest "Web Methods" as an alternative.

Example 3: Ordering. Canon's latest digital SLR is officially called the Canon 300D in the US, but their previous model was called the D30, so people often mistype 300D as D300. A search for 300D would suggest D300 as an alternative.

Example 4: Wrong Word. I meant to search for wiring but instead typed wriring. Apparently wriring is a word too, so Google didn't suggest any alternatives. Even though wriring is a word it knows about, Google should suggest the far-more-popular word wiring as an alternative.

Thanks for the idea, Tristan! This make sense to anybody else?

Note:If you search Google today for "Typo Googling" there are no matches. I'm looking forward to searching again in a couple weeks or months to see if people use the term. Meanwhile, Typo Google your name and blog the results. Find anything interesting?

The .NET Banana is a blog that announces upcoming Microsoft-related user group meetings and other events in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, DC, Virginia, and West Virginia.

Tonight: Enterprise SQL Server Auditing and Security Best Practices in Tyson's Corner, VA.

I'm using SQL Server for the sites I run, including this one, so I'm looking forward to this presentation. The Northern Virginia SQL Server User Group (NoVaSQL.com) is putting this on.

In March: Introduction to Reporting Services. Cool, looking forward to that one too.

Update: I just got back from the SQL users group meeting. It was really good. Most of the general security-related information was review for me from personal experience and my internship on the IE 5 Security Team, but the presenter, Jeremy Kadlec of Edgewood Solutions, went into a lot of detail that was new to me and helped me better understand some of the finer points, such as the technical reasons why it is not advised to host IIS and SQL Server on the same machine. There was less than a dozen people there so we were all able to ask good questions, and I got all of my security-related questions out of the way.

I'm back from my business trip to the Seattle area. I never actually went into Seattle, but I've been there plenty of times before. Instead, I was primarily at the webMethods office in Bellevue, working on a very cool project that I, unfortunately, can't talk about yet.

I also had some interesting visits to the Microsoft campus to visit my college roommates and meet Microsoft blogger extraordinaire Robert Scoble for the first time. More on that later.

The weather was surprisingly nice, so on Saturday afternoon I drove around and took a ton of photos of the main Microsoft campus and two satellite campuses, RedWest and Millennium. Those photos will be up later this week or whenever I have time. I'm sure some of you are curious as to what it looks like there. My photos show the progression of architectural styles from the original Building 1 to an ultra-modern building still under construction.

I don't have work today but they do at Microsoft. So today I'm going to stop by to visit some friends and stop by the company store.

Out of my own curiosity, here are some past Microsoft-related things I've written:

• Fixing Windows Update Error 0x800A138F
  62361 page views, 198 comments
• Windows Update is like... going to the Dentist...
  2017 page views, 9 comments
• I've been Scoblized!
  315 page views, 0 comments
• How Microsoft could stop spyware and adware with Longhorn...
  2204 page views, 25 comments
• Fix for MSN Messenger 6.1 Sign On Problems
  3131 page views, 60 comments
• What Microsoft needs to do in 2004
  175 page views, 2 comments
• Office 2003 crashed and it was cool!
  987 page views, 3 comments
• Improving the XBOX: Local Player Profiles and Saved Game Uploading to Live
  288 page views, 2 comments
• What happened to the concept of the Killer App?
  115 page views, 0 comments
• Maybe Microsoft wants to confuse us
  798 page views, 7 comments

Interesting statistics, at least to me. I would have expected that the "What happened to the Killer App" and "What Microsoft needs to do in '04" entries would be as popular as the others. The popularity of the "Windows Update Fix" is because that page is the first or second match in Google and apparently many people have suffered through that problem.

Note: Page views are as of Feb 16, 2004. Bots, page scrapers, and RSS readers are not included.

Tomorrow morning... oops, nevermind... Start over... Six hours from now I fly from Washington, D.C. to Washington, T.S. - The State. I'm going for work, to integrate my current project with another team's project.

Since my work is closed on Monday for Presidents' Day, I'll be stopping by Microsoft to visit some friends and old co-workers. If you're one of those people, fire me an IM so we can all meet in one place for lunch or something. Otherwise I might just sneak into your office when you least expect it.

It seems fitting that I'll be in both Washingtons this Presidents' Day weekend.

Today I went downtown to deposit some checks, and there were people everywhere... Tourist Season has begun. It's still weird to me that a place I go on a whim to run an errand is the same place others select as their vacation destination. That's not to put down DC - I highly recommend it to everybody, politics and history interests are not required.

• More about Washington, D.C. [Encarta]
• More about Washington, The State [Encarta]
• The Myth and Lies behind Presidents' Day [Snopes.com]

I also just learned that Seattle's Best Coffee and Torrefazione Italia, two major non-Starbucks coffee stores/brands up in the Northwest (and quickly spreading elsewhere), happen to be owned by Starbucks. That would almost be like if Microsoft happened to own Apple and Sun, but they let the companies operate independently and didn't make a big fuss about it.

Well, Washington is the only state named after a president, so they probably throw some bitchin' Presidents' Day parties over there. I better get some sleep.

Among the "legal documents" that were suddenly conveniently found: George W. Bush's dental chart.

Looking at the chart doesn't tell me anything suspicious, but somebody who knows teeth a lot more than I do sent me this:

[The chart] looks real enough to me. He had his wisdom teeth out, has class I restorations (fillings) in teeth 5, 15, 21 and class II restorations in teeth 4, 20 and 30. He also had number 3 extracted, which nowadays is rare for a relatively wealthy person, but in his unfloridated generation it was probably more common. It looks like he has some sort of crowns of something (I'm not sure what the "line" filled in teeth are, but I'm guessing crowns). The one red flag that gets raised in my mind is that it wasn't a very thorough exam, because they didn't bother to check if he had any gingivitus, periodontal disease or calculus. He most likely had all three if he had to have a molar extracted.

In my opinion it would be pretty routine to check for gingivitus, etc. In fact, now that I am looking at this there is a big red flag in my mind. It says he had Bitewings done, and only bitewings... they are x-rays that show problems with the posterior teeth. It would be extremely easy for Bush (or someone in his place) to get a couple bitewings done anywhere, and send them to any dentist to fill out this form. The dentist could look at the x-rays to get all the info that is on the chart, without the patient even being there... hmmmm... conspiracy? maybe?

Very interesting.... On similar topic of possibly faked documents, this photo of John Kerry with Jane Fonda speaking at a Anti-War rally has been proved fake.

Forget blogging being this "hip new" technology that helps or hurts a presidental campaign, it could be Photoshop. If anything, just check urban legends reference Snopes.com before you foward that photo on...

And more good news related to TeacherReviews:

An attorney with a background in litigation and First Amendment laws has volunteered to help me free of charge. He said he knows of other attorneys who may be willing to help as well. He also pointed me to the following organizations:

• The American Civil Liberties Union (www.aclu.org)
  "A lot of First Amendment experience, but traditionally very friendly with teachers' unions/groups"
• The Institute for Justice (www.ij.org)
  "Very interested in educational issues"
• The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE - www.thefire.org)
  "Students' First Amendment rights group"
• The Individual Rights Foundation (www.cpsc.org/irf.html)
  "I know they have been involved with some libel/slander defense work recently"

Amazing web designer foO has volunteered to take responsibility for the new TeacherReviews look. He'll give the new redesigned site a clean, professional look, while adding his trademark foO-touches that make his sites stand out: forgetfoo, alphafilter, gotfoo, foobloger.

I got a bunch of PayPal donations - thank you! One person even sent me a donation having "never used (or even seen) the site" - because he hates lawsuits. I couldn't agree more.

The Tuesday evening Slashdot article caused a huge jump in traffic for my web site:

• Visits to the site: Average 4,500/day. Yesterday: 400,000.
• Unique visitors: Average 2,500/day. Yesterday: 28,000.
• Pages viewed: Average 15,000/day. Yesterday: 777,000.

People have posted over 600 comments on the Slashdot article, over 300 comments on my blog entries, and sent me another 100 emails. Wow - There's a lot for me to catch up on... Scoble, tell me again how you stay caught up? I'm flying to Seattle this weekend so maybe I can catch up on all of these comments on the plane ride... Thank you again for your support.

I was planning on going to sleep early tonight, but some nice coverage on the uber-popular Slashdot.org geek news site has punted me back into my usual work state.

I'm glad to see that the site is taking the beating, at least so far. It's all homemade code running on a single Win2k3 box and I haven't performance tested it with this much traffic before. I had to make one small change because my database coding skills are lacking: random photo captions and live visitor stats are both turned off at the moment. I'm sure you don't mind. The credit that the server isn't even breaking a sweat (2-10% load) goes to Tim Macrina of QuickMortgageLoan.com.

The posting about TeacherReviews has been on Slashdot for only two hours and there are already 400 comments.

Some things I would like to clear up:

• "Letting professors remove reviews is going to make the site worthless."
  The only reviews that will be removed are those that are considered slanderous. There are a few reviews that are just students venting their anger at getting a bad grade and they have nothing to do with the professor.
  
• "On Monday Ebay won a case which says that they do not need to remove information that is false or libelous. This means you can leave the reviews up."
  I am also trying to improve the site. The new features will make the site better for students too.
  
• "What is going to determine that a review is removed?"
  I am adding features similar to the Slashdot moderation and meta-moderation system. I'll have more information about it as I build it.
  
• "You're a wuss for taking the site down, even if it's just temporary."
  Actually, I'm smart for taking it down: I don't have a lawyer. The advice I'm seeing posted in the comments here and on Slashdot are great, but I can't print those out and show them to a Judge as my defense. The ACLU has helped the site in the past, but they typically won't step in until there is actually a case to defend. I could get a lawyer, but TeacherReviews makes me no money and I don't have any money to spend on a lawyer. There's also the fact that I have a full-time job which is totally unrelated to TeacherReviews. A court hearing would require too much time and travel for me to be able to balance both. Since I really enjoy my job and it pays the bills, I must stay focused with it and take TeacherReviews down for a short while - at least until I finish re-coding it and added some new features.

I'll be launching the new site as I finish the features. You'll probably see the first set of features go online this weekend. Please be patient. The two or three week wait will be worth it.

TeacherReviews.com is coming back, and it's going to be better than ever - for both students and professors.

The professor who threatened a lawsuit has decided to drop the case. This happened after we talked about the situation, the site as it is today, and the intent of the site, which has always been to help students, as opposed to insult professors. This professor is now helping the site by providing feedback to the new features from a professor's point of view, which is something I have not looked into before.

Here are some changes I've been working on:

1. Redesigned and rebuilt the entire site from scratch. Not one line of HTML, ASP, or stored procedure code is from the old site. There will be a fresh new look that will hopefully be easier for you to navigate, and the system will make it easier for me to plug new features into.
2. I've reorganized the database. For example, departments are now associated with classes instead of professors - since a professor might teach classes in different departments, but classes typically don't change departments. All 34,000 reviews are still there.
3. Reviews can be "Flagged for Removal." Anybody can flag a review, but only volunteers and I will have the ability to permanently delete them. When a review is flagged, you will see the grade and the flag, but not the content unless it is unflagged.
4. When a Flagged Review is removed, it is considered Banned from the system. If a user has too many Banned reviews, that user risks being banned from using TeacherReviews.
5. Professors who ask not to be reviewed will still have their names in the system and it will still accept new reviews for them in case they change their mind. Their reason for not wanting to be on the site will replace their reviews.

Helping out:

• Contact your editors: TeacherReviews can make a great story for your school or local paper. I've been interviewed twice this week from different papers. Who's next?
• Create Fliers: Schools always have players for posting flyers. Save those fliers because I'm also going to create a Flier Exchange to share your fliers with others.

Finally - once again, thank you everybody who wrote in. As of right now (~4am), my blog entry "What Happened to TeacherReviews?" has just under 200 comments. I've received over 100 emails, and I think I managed to reply to every single one of them. If you didn't get a reply it might have been eaten by my spam filter.

So... Save your TeacherReviews.com bookmarks. The new site is coming soon.

UPDATE (Feb 10, 2004): I had a PayPal donation link but I decided to remove it because I do not want to be soliciting donations from students. I have a full time job that pays my bills and I don't want students who have a hard enough time paying for college to be concerned about finding money to give me.

TeacherReviews.com is free site I run for students which lets students share opinions of professors with other students. I have been pressured to shut it down. I'm not sure if it will be down forever or just a short amount of time until some changes are made. Please read on to find out why and what I am going to do about it.

Yesterday and tonight I talked with a professor who was extremely upset with what written about him on TeacherReviews. He had several inappropriate reviews that made unfounded accusations and inappropriate untruthful remarks such as calling him "Bipolar Paranoid Schitzophrenic." These reviews should not have been on the site.

I immediately deleted this professor's reviews, as I always do those rare times that a professor complains. He still threatened to sue - and even threatened to get the involvement of the teacher's union American Federation of Teachers. A lawsuit is not something I have the time or money to be involved in, no matter how confident I am that the courts would side in the favor of free speech and the site.

This would be the first lawsuit against TeacherReviews, however TeacherReview, the precursor site to TeacherReviews had one lawsuit against in about four years ago. TeacherReview had a "no review is ever deleted" policy. The ACLU helped defend TeacherReview, and TeacherReview achieved a victory - the two professors involved settled just days before the San Francisco Superior Court hearing .

The purpose of Teacher Reviews has always been to help students find the best professors to take, however the quality and reliability of TeacherReviews has been diminished by the few users who have used the site to write insults, accusations, remarks that can be considered slanderous.

As I find about about these reviews, I always delete them. They no have merit, are not helpful to anyone, and are obviously the product of a bored student who just wants to harm the reputation of a professor. That is not the purpose of TeacherReviews.

There are over 36,000 reviews on the site - far too many for me to read and evaluate. Because of this, and the threat of lawsuit, I have elected to take down TeacherReviews.com for now - at least until I can make some needed changes to how the site works.

Here are some of the changes I hope to put in place:

• Instant review removal. As a rule, I have always removed reviews upon a professor's request. Today the system is manual and it is not obvious enough how it works. The new system will have a link for removing reviews next to every review. Anybody will be able to instantly remove inappropriate reviews. Some friends and I will evaluate these removed reviews.
• Easy professor removal. I believe professors should have the right to make their reviews be private. A professor will have the ability to hide all reviews from public view. Reviews posted will be emailed to that professor, but not shared with the rest of the world. The number of reviews and possibility other information will remain on the site.
• Hide Reviews from Google. One of the complaints I got from a the professor was that if you searched Google for his name, his reviews would show up pretty high in the list of found items. Normally this is a good thing, but if the reviews are inappropriate, then it is not approbate for the to be showing up in Google.
• Email notification of New Reviews. Professors should not have to regularly visit TeacherReviews to see if they have new reviews posted. This feature will give them the option of receiving email when new reviews are posted. Students will be able to use this feature as well. New reviews will also be available via RSS.
• Date-separated reviews. Today reviews that are two years old and older are listed along side of recent reviews. Since people change, I believe that these older reviews need to be identified as older reviews, and be put on a separate page.

These features I'm not sure about:

• Response from Professor. I don't know how I can verify that somebody is really the professor before I let them post a response on the web site.
• Non-Anonymous Reviews. This would remove me from lawsuits, but I don't know if students would be comfortable posting truthful reviews.

I have never made any money from TeacherReviews. All costs related to the site have come out of my own pocket. If there ever is a lawsuit, the costs to defend the site will also come out of my own pocket. Hopefully it will never come to that.

TeacherReviews has always been a part-time hobby for me. Because of the part-time nature it might take some time to add the new features I have proposed.

Thank you for your patience and understanding, and I appreciate any comments you have, especially about the situation and my proposed new features for the site.

- Dylan Greene

(Please leave comments here or email SaveTR@TeacherReviews.com )

UPDATES:
(Feb 10): This has made Slashdot!
(Feb 10): I've posted an update to the situation: "Exhausted and sick, but I have good news!"
(Feb 11) Followup to the update: "Welcome Slashdot Readers..."

Sam Ruby notes that there are a bunch of RSS feed validators. Note to Sam: The one at feeds.archive.org has disappeared. That's the one I used to rely on.

Ross Karchner is building a web-based front end to the multiple RSS feed validators.

I would just like to have one RSS feed that I can subscribe to that only has an entry when it sees a problem with one of my RSS code. Problems with my RSS code are rare, but I like to know when they occur.

The FCC has started an investigation because Janet Jackson's breast was exposed for a split second during the Super Bowl half-time show...

Lets get this out of the way first: I believe the whole exposure thing was done on purpose: it happened right as Justin sang "I'm going to have you naked by the end of this song" and MTV had been promoting the half time show as having "Shocking Moments." MTV and the two of them got tons of press for an otherwise non-noteworthy half time show, so the marketing scheme worked perfectly.

OK, but back to this whole FCC investigation... Where else is showing part of a woman's body considered so offensive that the government launches an investigation? I wonder if this gets more money and press than the WMD/Bush/CIA investigation.

So the mere sight of a bosom is considered too woefully disgusting and terrible to show on TV, yet these commercials are fine to show:

• Man is bit in the nuts by a dog in order to get his beer.
• Horse explosively farts on a woman for no reason. Drink beer.
• A dozen young kids are forced to suck on a bar of soap after seeing some new truck.

These shouldn't have made the air. Especially the soap one. Isn't that child abuse? Plus every time I see that truck I'm going to taste soap in my mouth. Yuck...

I have a conspiracy theory: Two different drug companies were advertising erection pills. I think they're worried that somebody might realize they don't need to buy those pills. Wait - there can be ads that talk about erections but they can't show a bare bosom?

TiVo has put out a press release that the breast incident was the most popular TiVo'd moment... ever. On the radio on the way home I heard the TiVo CEO say that practically every single TiVo owner watched it more than once.

I think it's time for the FCC to modernize. If something like this happened in Europe, would anybody care? I say they are trying to make an issue out of a bad marketing decision.

Update: I just noticed Dan Gillmor wrote pretty much the same thing but with less words. I guess that's why he gets paid to write and I don't.