greg hughes - dot net
Note that the contents of this site represent my own thoughts and opinions, not those of anyone else - like my employer - or even my dog for that matter. Besides, the dog would post things that make sense. I don't.
 Thursday, September 30, 2004
 Attending GnomeDex? Grab the PST file and update your Outlook calendar. I did, which means my Blackberry is up to date.
Sheez, that’s sooo lame. But it’s cool. :)
It's about what you'd expect. A group of people from all over the country - well the world, actually - are converging on South Lake Tahoe for a couple days of Geek Fest. What do they want to do? Watch the presidential debates and have WiFi so they can blog about it while it happens. Heheh... Freakin' hard-core blodgers...
I might even join in on the debate action, except that I actually try to stay away from political positions on this site. I lean a little to the right (politically, now stop that), but mostly hang in the middle somewhere. I know who I like for this election (and am glad I feel that I have someone/thing to vote for, rather than having to vote against someone).
On a personal note, I had the opportunity to meet someone here whom I have always held in high regard, ever since we first conversed on the Internet back in 1996. [Sidenote: In our big-small world, it seems people tend to judge others without having actually met them. That has always bothered me, it's a mistake to do that. Forgive the analogy, but fact is you can't tell a book by its cover, and you can tell even less about a book from a picture of it's cover on Amazon. Believing its possible to know someone on the Internet the same way you would know them if you met them face-to-face is short-sighted and plain wrong.] So, while I have always suspected as much, I have now had the opportunity to confirm that Chris is a good and likeable guy, and a hard worker. And Ponzi is very cool, too. Oh and BTW Chris, it was PowWow by Tribal Voice - anyone remember that one??
There are others I am looking forward to meeting, as well - people with whom I have had professional or blogging contact frequently, but whose analog voices I have never heard and whose non-virtual hands I have never had the opportunity to shake. Thats the best part of this event for me - making the virtual relationships real.
By the way... The BlueGo Networks via Proto Networks WiFi hot-spots here suck. If I have to pay through the nose for WiFi, it sure as hell better work, and this service is worse than bad. Argh. It worked last night for the most part, and today it connects for 5 seconds and then drops out, then comes back for a minute or two, then drops. What a freakin' tease! Highly non-recommended.
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
 I picked up a pair of SoundShield headphones from the Brookstone store in the PDX airport on my way out of town today, after a friend of mine showed me his and recommended (strongly) that I get some of my own. I was telling him how flying on jets causes me to get all tense and stressed by the time the flight is over, and he said it was the loud background noise, and that these headphones would make a world of difference.
He couldn't have been any more correct.
Not only do the headphones cancel out nearly all the background noise on the airplane, they also plug into my MP3 player or laptop (or the aircraft audio jack or whatever), and the sound reproduction is very good. The noise cancellation idea is amazing - I found myself asleep and arriving in Reno relaxed and without the muscle tension that normally ruins the plane flight for me.
Recommended - highly - for travelers.
Arrived in South Lake Tahoe this afternoon, and have already started meeting a lot of cool people, some of whom I have interacted with in the past, and a few new acquaintances as well.
Who I met today:
A bunch of great people. We talked geek stuff, politics, constitutional law, you name it (your typical tech conference fodder of course). I helped stuff bags for the attendees. Putting on a conference like this is a ton of work, something very few people actually understand, especially when you're a small company or organization running a show labor-of-love style. And that's what this is - there's no huge up-sell to come out of this, it's all about getting together, geeking out and learning from each other.
Quality is what this is all about, and the more I speak to people about it, the more excited I am to be here. I'd choose a conference like this, with a killer crew of really smart and talented people, over a thousand-attendee marketing fest any day, month or year.
USGS officials are holding a news conference right now, and have just announced an explosive event on Mt St Helens is possible, and the alert level has just been raised by the USGS for the mountain. The lava dome in the crater has apparently moved a measurable amount, and seismic activity has taken a noticible upturn.
They are now seeing quakes at the rate of 4 a minute. They are larger quakes, 2 to 2.5 in magnitude. Describing the seismic activity, they say it is definitely ramping up and plateauing in phases, not falling back down. Explosion and ash are the risks. This behavior is similar to what was observed on the mountain in 1986: Big increases in seismic energy over past 8 hours.
I'm at the airport flying out to Reno at 12:45, mobile posting from my handheld device. I hope it keeps its top on.
Update: USGS Advisories and information about the mountain activity available here.
Dexter-Southfield Schools via NB
SpaceShipOne, piloted by Michael Melvill, just completed the first of a series of two flights into space with an equivalent load of three people. One more flight within the next two weeks (sounds like they will try for Monday next week) would net them the coveted X-Prize. The goal behind the contest is to build a private, reusable space transport technology that can be licensed and used in business. The design for SpaceShipOne is pretty darn cool - it's wings fold back about 45 degrees to act as brakes for re-entry. Already people are signing up and buying tickets to fly into space, and one Las Vegas businessman is looking for someone who can build an orbital "hotel destination" for four. More and more amazing, every day. Wow.
The other day I mentioned about how I heard a rather popular blogger from Seattle on the radio, and essentially had a "wow what a 'big small world' this is" moment. The Internet has done that - effectively shrunk the world as we know it, while maintaining its true non-virtual size and mass. Yesterday a co-worker, Steve, saw me in the elevator along with another co-worker, Scott. He said that he had just been communicating with someone he knows who lives in Alaska, and was talking about something interesting, when the friend asked him if the Corillian he works at is the same Corillian that employs the guy who tore apart his MP3 player for the hard drive inside. Steve was surprised and had a good story to tell. I bet that kind of thing almost never happened 40 years ago. Again, it's "big small world" we live in. Today I'm leaving on a trip that will help turn the tables again and make my world just a little smaller again. Let's call it the "small big world" trip (it's subtle, take you time, heh). I'll be meeting people I've never had a chance to speak to face to face, and I am looking forward to it. There are people for whom I have great respect but have never met in person. I see this as a great opportunity. If you think about how much technology (specifically electronics and the Internet and everything you can do with them) has changed the world in the past 10 years, it's pretty darn incredible. It makes me wonder what the next really big thing will be. I guess we'll just have to hang on and see.
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
I've neglected myself three times over the past few years by not attending Gnomedex - which was both my mistake and my loss. This year I am going, and it's looking to me like this may be one of the best conferences I've ever attended from the total-geek-fest standpoint. I'm flying to Reno tomorrow and making the quick drive over to Lake Tahoe, where the conference is being held at Harrah's. Probably the thing that I am most looking forward to is meeting people that I have conversed with on the Internet (mostly through the blogosphere, as they say) face-to-face. There are a number of people for whom I have great professional respect that will be in attendance, and that alone will make this more than worth the while. Chris Pirillo's Lockergnome is the power being this conference. I am sure it will be fun, interesting and memorable. Below is some info ripped from the Gnomedex FAQ, and yes, I will blog from the conference when something stands out to me. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go do some laundry so I can pack clean clothes.
Q: Will there be Internet access? A: Is the sun a mass of incandescent gas?
Q: Who's Gnomedex 4: Geeks Gone Wild! for? A: Technology enthusiasts, professionals, and folks who just love hanging out with geeks. In past years, we've had fantastic presentations, vendors, and sponsors - and expect this year to be no different in that respect.
Q: Is this conference family-friendly? A: It's recommended that anybody below the age of 18 go to Disneyland instead.
Q: Can I bring a friend? A: Only if s/he likes to have fun, too.
Q: Why is yours better than other conventions? A: Because it is.
Q: Do people really read FAQs? A: No.
Q: How many people do you expect to be there this year? A: Including you? A lot. Close to 1,000, according to our estimates.
Q: Where's Gnomedex 4: Geeks Gone Wild! being held? A: Harrah's.
Q: Is this a place for me to make business contacts? A: Yes, and to make them life-long friends as well.
Q: Can I blog this event? A: If you don't, the gods will be angered and virgins will (most likely) be sacrificed.
Q: What is a blog? A: Nobody really seems to know.
Great software announcements today... Nick Bradbury has announced that FeedDemon 1.5 Beta 1 is available.
Why is this a big deal? There's a great new addition to the mix:
“Starting with version 1.5, FeedDemon users can create a Bloglines Channel Group from their Bloglines subscriptions. When viewing a Bloglines Channel Group, items you read in Bloglines won't show up in FeedDemon, and items you download in FeedDemon won't show up as unread in Bloglines. It's very easy to synchronize with your Bloglines subscriptions so that FeedDemon reflects feeds you add or remove from Bloglines.”
Looks like I may need to go back and try BlogLines again. This is what was missing for me - synchronized integration with my feed reader.
And just in time - Blackberry has announced (but not released) BES 4.0, which will (finally) get some much-needed changes in place!
For example (my filtered feature list of what really stood out):
- COMPLETE WIRELESS SYNCHRONIZATION - Yes!!!
- View pictures on the device
- Better graphical browser with Javascript and some CSS support
- More wireless calendar features (accept tentative, add comments, notification of conflicts)
- Global search (email, contacts, calendar, tasks, across the whole thing)
- Wireless management of Out of Office message, email filters, signatures, etc.
- Lots of back-end wireless security and management improvements
More detailed info is on the Blackberry web site - click the links below.
The latest release of the BlackBerry Enterprise Solution will feature:
Nice, nice nice! Time to go renew that TSupport subscription that's about to come due...
Blackberry customers running a BES can sign up for possible inclusion in a BES 4.0 preview if interested. Done.
A good introduction to using RSS on the Internet is available in both quick-video-tutorial format as well as a more detailed, yet easy-to-absorb text format at c|net.
If you are not familiar with RSS, and you work in the high-tech industry, I do hereby declare you to be old skool, out of touch, and truly negligent in your professional career path - and it won't be long before you're declared incompetent, so watch out. I mean, can you imagine what you would think of someone who did not know what email is? Trust me, it's a lot like that. I know there's a lot to learn, but don't get caught behind the eight-ball, people...
When you need a RSS feed to subscribe to, so you can learn without hurting yourself, just start with this one:
There - now if that doesn't motivate you, nothing will. Now go learn something fast!
By the way, a couple of interesting (to me, at least) things:
- NewsGator (if you're an everything-in-Outlook fan) and FeedDemon (my own personal choice in RSS readers) are both featured in the video (and the product reviews). Either one sells for about $29, and is money well-spent.
- Misplaced noun of the year: I wish the freakin' emphasis on "news" when talking about RSS would just go away - It's not a news reader people, it's a feed reader. News is just one type of content you can get in an RSS feed format.
(shamelessly plucked from Scoble and others)
Monday, September 27, 2004
 Addy Santo has updated BlogWave and released the first beta version. He released a pre-beta version back in July, and has since updated the software.
Say hello to BlogWave Beta 1 - Download and what's new info is available here.
What is it? what does it do? Answers to your questions ripped straight from Addy's web site:
Q. What is BlogWave?
A. BlogWave is an "RSS Generator": a tool which can pull information from a variety of sources and publish it as RSS. This process is very easy to configure and can be scheduled to run automatically. For example, using BlogWave you can create an RSS feed from Sharepoint announcements on your company's internal site. Or you can publish event logs as RSS. Or even merge multiple sources into one feed (aggregation) and/or publish a feed to multiple destinations (cross posting).
Q. What content sources does BlogWave support?
A. BlogWave currently supports the following sources
• RSS Feeds
• Google Searches (new)
• Event Logs
• WSS Lists and Document Libraries
• SPS Searches
• NNTP newsgroups
• Custom sources can be added through a pluggable architecture and a simple .Net programming interface.
Q. Which destinations can BlogWave post to?
A. BlogWave supports the following destinations:
• .Text based blogs
• FTP sites
• Local or Network URNs
• Any WebDAV compliant website (such as Sharepoint or WSS)
• Custom destinations can be added through a pluggable architecture and a simple .Net programming interface.
Ahhhh, now here's some cool news. FlexWiki is being released to shared source. From David Orenstein's blog: This evening FlexWiki took the next step in its life and has been made available at SourceForge.net under the Common Public License. With this step, the developer community will have the latest source (including all the WikiTalk features), better access, better tools, and a better legal environment. The FlexWiki developer community has kinda stalled out a bit over the past few months as I've worked to get FlexWiki to this point. Now we can really get going again!
FlexWiki is based on WikiWiki, and has a lot of nifty features.
Not to spark a war of words or anything, but for those who are interested in the "Windows will or will not scale" debate, here is some info definitely worth talking about.
I work at a company called Corillian Corporation (as the corporate IT team's manager). Microsoft just released a case study they did with Corillian, and it's worth taking note of. Scott Hanselman, our Chief Architect, posted these facts and figures on his blog earlier today, which illustrate the numbers quite well. They are, frankly, pretty darn amazing numbers:
- Currently, more than 19 million end users—or about 25 percent of U.S. online banking customers—use Corillian technology when they use their institution's online services for transactions such as checking balances, paying bills, and transferring funds between accounts. (Not bad for a Microsoft-based platform, eh? .NET works.)
- Voyager 3.1 was able to support 70,000 concurrent users across multiple lines of business.
- Voyager 3.1 was able to support a sustained throughput rate of more than 1,268 transactions per second — about 4.5 million successful transactions per hour—and a sustained session creation rate of more than 208 new sessions per second.
- Voyager 3.1 supported more than 129,000 concurrent sessions across the system at peak load. This includes both active sessions, in which a user is executing transactions, and inactive sessions.
- Voyager 3.1 supported a ramp-up from 0 to 70,000 users in only 15 minutes—without any adverse impact on performance—demonstrating that Voyager can sustain a large burst of users accessing information in a short time period without overwhelming the system.
- Voyager 3.1 surpassed its previous benchmark of 30,000 concurrent users by 133 percent, with only a 32-percent increase in overall hardware cost.
Another interesting note comes from some questions I asked of a Corillian employee involved in the testing. He told me that the bottleneck that stopped the test from going into higher numbers was not Windows, nor was it Voyager (our online banking application); It was the hardware (which is amazing hardware by the way). The test simply used up all the hardware resources available in the lab. In other words, both Voyager and Windows Server 2003 had more room to spare and would have kept scaling, had the hardware allowed. When you consider the test systems are some of the biggest and best in the industry, that's saying a lot. That just doesn't typically happen.
From the case study, this quote sums it all up:
Hugh Wade, one of the Microsoft engineers who spent time analyzing the Corillian code and recommending some changes to the company, notes that "Voyager was the best-performing non-Microsoft application" he had seen in the lab.
This is pretty amazing stuff, and it says TONS about Windows Server 2003, as well as Corillian Voyager - and the people who are involved in developing both products.
 Clearly visible from the front porch of my house, across the river over there in Washington, Mt. St. Helens is getting restless. Standing in the yard looking at the mountain in the hazy sky, it looked just like it does any other day, but apparently it's been grumbling more than it usually does under the surface - enough for the USGS to take official notice, anyhow.
Here is the seismic-activity recording from Wednesday evening last week (the seismograph readout shows a 12-hour block from noon to midnight UTC, which is 9pm to 5am PDT), which looks pretty normal:
And the following are the subsequent 12-hour periods, from September 23rd on through to this evening...
September 23 0000-1159 September 23 1200-2359
September 24 0000-1159 September 24 1200-2359 September 25 0000-1159
September 25 1200-2359
September 26 0000-1159
September 26 1200-2359
September 27 0000-1159 (partial)
All images come from the webicorders system at the Pacific Northwest Seismograph Network. On the webicorders page, scroll down and see the links under "SEP EHZ UW : St. Helens - Dome Station" for the latest data.
In addition, news reports are now saying that the USGS has issued a "notice of volcanic unrest" for the mountain: "Initially, hundreds of tiny earthquakes that began Thursday morning had slowly declined through Saturday. By Sunday, however, the swarm had changed to include more than 10 larger earthquakes of magnitude 2.0 to 2.8, the most in a 24-hour period since the last dome-building eruption in October 1986, Scott said."
The full Seattle P-I news story can be read here.
Saturday, September 25, 2004
The Business Journal Online reports on an Annenberg survey that finds people who watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart are more likely to know the issue positions and backgrounds of presidential candidates than people who do not watch late-night comedy.
"In recent years ... traditional journalists have been voicing increasing concern that if young people are receiving political information from late-night comedy shows like The Daily Show, they may not be adequately informed on the issues of the day. This data suggests that these fears may be unsubstantiated. We find no differences in campaign knowledge between young people who watch Leno and Letterman – programs with a lot of political humor in their opening monologues -- and those who do not watch late-night. But when looking at young people who watch The Daily Show, we find they score higher on campaign knowledge than young people who do not watch the show, even when education, following politics, party identification, gender, viewing network news, reading the newspaper, watching cable news and getting campaign information on-line are taken into account."
While this does not mean the Daily Show makes people more politically aware, it shows the sample audience is more aware of the pertinent issues and facts. So for me, the full results of the survey and Annenberg's review of the content of each night-time comedy show were very interesting to read, especially when you compare and contrast the actual content of different shows, such as The Tonight Show and Late Night.
This helps explain why, even for someone like me who does not necessarily agree with Jon Stewart's political positions or leanings, The Daily Show is a program I look forward to watching - I TiVo it every day. It's funny and in fact does address the issues in its own way. It's comedy, so you have to take all of it with a grain of salt, but if nothing else, it's one more place for intelligent people to process the vast amounts of information (both relevant and irrelevant) that makes up this never-ending election cycle.
Note: You can view the actual Annenberg Center news release, which contains the full survey questions, results and analysis here. [PDF]
The Annenberg Public Policy Center also operates FactCheck.org, I site I mentioned recently here, which does an excellent job of non-partisan review of the advertisements and other messages put out by the political campaigns, with the tag-line, "Holding Politicians Accountable."
Survey Excerpts:
"Polling conducted between July 15 and Sept. 19 among 19,013 adults showed that on a six-item political knowledge test people who did not watch any late-night comedy programs in the past week answered 2.62 items correctly, while viewers of Late Night with David Letterman on CBS answered 2.91, viewers of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno answered 2.95, and viewers of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart answered 3.59 items correctly. That meant there was a difference of 16 percentage points between Daily Show viewers and people who did not watch any late-night programming."
"Young people who watched The Daily Show scored 48% correct on the campaign knowledge test while young people who did not watch any late-night comedy scored 39% correct. Meanwhile, young people who watched four of more days of network news scored 40% correct, equally frequent cable news viewers 48% correct and newspaper readers 46% correct."
"Of the 83 political jokes made by Stewart, only 9 specifically targeted Bush. That was 11 percent of his political jokes. The same number targeted Kerry."
"The Daily Show segments are less likely than a Leno or Letterman joke to use a quick punch-line to make fun of a candidate ... Instead, Stewart’s lengthier segments employ irony to explore policy issues, news events, and even the media’s coverage of the campaign."
- Thanks to Betsy over at My Whim is Law for the pointer.
Friday, September 24, 2004
I swear to God, I just heard Robert Scoble schooling Michael Savage on his talk radio show about what blogs are and why people write web logs. So cool!
And here I am driving down the road at 70 ... Uh I mean 60 55 miles an hour blogging about it Blackberry-style, heh. Moblog yo!
Cool stuff, Robert. Amazing new world we live in - You read on someone's web site that they listen to talk radio. It's a web site I read in order to learn and stay up-to-date in my field. A couple days later, I'm driving home and I hear (what I think was) the author (Scoble) on talk radio, talking about blogging. Nice.
Tonight I had the privilege of watching two very smart people speak about a technology I barely grasp at the PADNUG meeting, with a few good laughs thrown in. The requisite pizza never showed up, but dinner afterwards was a fun time and I had a chance to talk to some people I otherwise would never get to meet. The speakers were Rory Blyth and Scott Hanselman. Scott is a friend and co-worker of mine, an accomplished technical presenter and regional MSDN director. He played code-monkey while Rory, a rather infamous blogger and all around good guy who recently started work at Microsoft as a MSDN Presenter**, demonstrated the beta of Visual Studio .NET 2005 (aka "Whidbey"), showing off many new capabilities in developing ASP.net application web sites with membership capabilities (almost all without writing any code). Thee guys are both crazy freakin' smart. Much smarter than I. I'm one of those guys who deals with lots of hardware and software, manages a group of fine employees, deals with a wide variety of people and their needs, and generally does his best to make sure things work. These two guys are in a higher league. They're amazing when it comes to coding and building things out of thin air. I wish I was half as smart. Rory and Scott presented things in a way that I - a simple IT jock - was able to follow and pretty much completely understand. That's the mark of a good presenter and teacher: When you can impart and transfer some portion of your knowledge and to someone truly outside your profession. By the time they were done, I had a good picture of what kinds of things Visual Studio 2005 will be able to do for the developer crowd. Understand that I am a guy who tends to get lost in developer presentations, so the fact that I actually followed along the whole time and was able to use words like "cool" and "ahhhh" with actual meaning and understanding proves these guys can teach as well as present. Rory will also be presenting in Portland (Hillsboro actually) at the local MSDN event scheduled to be held on Thursday November 18th at the "Movies on TV" theaters. The target audience for those presentation sessions is developers interested or working with Visual Studio and .NET technologies. If you're in a different city and want to attend an MSDN event, check the schedule of all upcoming events and locations here. ** Note that Rory's title is really something like "Pacific Northwest Microsoft Developer Community Champion," but "MSDN Presenter" is much easier to use in a sentence.
Thursday, September 23, 2004
If you are running a pirated or otherwise improperly-acquired copy of Windows and you think you'll be able to download updates and add-on's, you may find yourself out of luck in the future.
Security Pipeline reports that Microsoft has quietly debuted a mechanism that can block pirated copies of Windows from downloading fixes, patches, and software.
 According to Microsoft, 23 percent of Windows computers in the United States are running bogus versions of Windows. The new program installs an Active-X control (users can opt out, at least at this point) that examines a system accessing certain files on Microsoft's Download Center to see if the copy of Windows that is installed on the machine is legitimate. At this time a number of Windows Media files are flagged for the check, along with several others. Files that will prompt the user to validate his or her copy of Windows are marked in the file listings with a small gold arrow on a blue circle background (see above).
I was interested to find that my computer, the very one from which I am writing this weblog entry, a computer provided to me by my workplace and which I know for a fact runs a legitimate copy of Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, was initially denied access to the Windows Media Player 10 download because the test did not immediately verify it as a legitimate OS installation. Wow, I thought - that's just great.
However, once I correctly entered the product code from the friendly license sticker (the one with the teeny tiny print so small I almost could not read it) into the web interface provided for computers that could not be automagically verified, I was passed straight through to the download page. So in the end, it worked just fine:
No doubt Microsoft is legitimately interested in making sure its updates are getting into the hands of those who have purchased the products the company produces, while at the same time providing software thieves with a reason and incentive to pay for the operating system they use. It should not come as a surprise that Microsoft is doing this now, nor that they will likely expand this capability in the future. Ultimately, it takes people spending money on software to allow a company, regardless of how big that company may be, to continue to build new and better software products. No matter what your philisophical position with regard to Microsoft, the one core rule of business always applies: If you're not making money, you shouldn't be in business.
I know he didn't mean to (so I won't act all flattered or smug or anything), but Robert Scoble just sort of summed up the better part of my topic/category list for this-here-blog of mine, over on his blog...
I thought it would be interesting to compare his list of cool upcoming topics for the future to what's categorized or searchable right now on my site. So, I did just that and have added the links, below. Not a bad start, and it points out to me where I am falling shorter than I had realized in my content. Hey Robert, thanks for the copy. 
“For the next 18 months, where are the business opportunities going to lie? Tablet PC. Bigtime. Windows Media Center. Gonna be a big deal. SmartPhones. Wanna watch how fast the Motorola MPX220 sells when it's released in the next few months? Xbox Live. You only need to say one number and everyone knows exactly the Xbox thing I'm talking about: "2." Visual Studio 2005. Tons of stuff coming there. MSN has a whole raft of things up their sleeves. And we haven't even started talking about BizTalk, SharePoint, Exchange, SQL Server, 64-bit Windows, SBS, CRM, LiveMeeting, and OneNote, among other things.”
It also gives me a gut-check on my existing blog categories. Here they are, with the ones that apply to this posting checked:
I have been using Furl for the past few months to create an online quick-hit catalog of items that I want to keep track of on the 'net for a number of reasons, such as items to keep track of for work purposes, stuff I may want to show someone else, or things I might want to write about at a later time here in my weblog. Today Furl sent an email to its users telling them that LookSmart has acquired the company, and describing the plans. It looks pretty good, and I hope it will be, since I have come to appreciate the Furl application. From the email (my emphasis is added in bold): "We are joining LookSmart, a provider of Web search and research-quality articles search, in addition to other high-quality search products. ... "To show how serious that commitment is, we are officially allocating 5 gigabytes (GB) of storage for each individual member's public archive, enough space to store tens of thousands of archived items. "We are also now working on many new features, some of which you may have requested. These include a groups feature, and the ability to search across all public archives. "You might be wondering whether Furl will continue to be a free service, and the answer is: "Yes!" Furl will create revenue through the display of relevant, contextual advertising on search and content pages. This revenue source enables us to continue offering Furl free of charge. It also allows us to keep investing in the service. As Furl gets better and better, it attracts more members. They in turn attract new advertisers, creating a cycle of growth that benefits our members as well as our business."
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