Worth noting...The Bing team wants us to know they are hard at work but we need to keep an eye on our sites:
Back in December of 2008, we alerted you to the possibility that you might start seeing our new web crawler in your referrer logs. Given the recent excitement around the arrival of Bing, we wanted to take a moment to update you on the latest bot news.
As we said earlier, you will see the new Bing crawler user agent string listed as:
msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm).
Note that we didn’t change the bot’s name for Bing. You’ll also see the previous version of the bot as well —
msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
— which is still in use, as of today, as Bing’s primary user agent.
We are busy working on our improved crawler and plan to ramp up its workload as we move toward the goal of putting it into full production. As a result, webmasters may begin seeing an increased amount of traffic from the new bot on their sites.
We do not anticipate any problems related to our increasing emphasis on MSNBot 2, but the unexpected can’t always be avoided, no matter how hard you try! As such, we wanted to preemptively alert folks to the most effective way to report bot and crawling issues to Bing’s support team in case they arise. If you have any feedback for us on either the existing or the new MSNBot, or on any other matters pertaining to crawling your website, please post your comments and questions in our crawling/indexing forum. Our Webmaster Center forums moderator will follow-up with you ASAP. Please include in your forum post the identity of the user agent that is the source of your concern so we can help you that much faster. Thank you!
-- Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/webmaster/archive/2009/07/17/new-bot-work-continues-at-bing.aspx
Bing fan boy here ;-)
Check out this post by Ian:
Pictures of Bing Stickers in Use
I’ve started to receive some photos of how people are using the Bing stickers I sent out. I sent out about 30 to various people around the world and I still have some more pending requests – I’m running very low now despite getting a few more in. And of course I must actually get on and do some work sometime… :-)
Here are the first two, starting with Ian Blackburn’s car:
And Mark Wisecarver has kitted out his custom Harley in fantastic fashion. See his website at http://msftwise.com/bing/ for more of these, here are just a few:
I’ll post more pics from people as and when I get them.
http://blogs.msdn.com/ianm/archive/2009/07/15/pictures-of-bing-stickers-in-use.aspx
First of all...
When it's raining on our parade everyone tosses their arms up and complains.
Point is, Codeplex is a lot like a Sunny day and we're enjoying the Parade -> Microsoft+Community
You already use http://www.codeplex.com/ ...Right?
Have you noticed the RSS feeds have improved?
Pull them in with your favorite RSS reader and you now have a description with each new and newly released project on Codeplex. Nice.
And here's a great tip from Sara Ford:
How to subscribe to the list of CodePlex projects using a specific tag
Currently, we don’t have any UI that exposes these RSS feeds.
We’ve thought about creating a page that says “design your own RSS feed here.”
But until then, here’s the RSS feed to subscribe to a specific tag:
http://www.codeplex.com/rss.ashx?behavior=bytag&tagName=<tagname>
And another fun one is the most downloaded project RSS feed
http://www.codeplex.com/rss.ashx?behavior=topdownloaded
http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/archive/2009/07/01/how-to-subscribe-to-the-list-of-codeplex-projects-using-a-specific-tag-044.aspx
Thanks Sara! Awesome stuff.
All the best,
Mark Wisecarver
http://twitter.com/msftwise