Hello. I am Paul Kinlan.

I heard back from the Start.com team at MSN regarding the feedback I sent earlier. I'll share more details tomorrow, along with a couple of other posts I've been working on. Thanks to Venkat and Hadi for their responses.

I'm really interested in ATLAS (AJAX), but I need to prioritize my time. I can't afford to get sidetracked by this project right now, especially since it's not .Net-based and my current work focuses on .Net.

The MSN Search API is now available. I haven't explored it fully yet, but here are some useful links: Why MSN Search?, the MSN Search API download, the SOAP service description, and the developer registration form (requires a .Net Passport). The API appears to be a SOAP service, so I'll likely need to create a proxy for direct calls. The download includes documentation and sample projects. You'll need an application ID, similar to Yahoo's. If you know how to use SOAP with JavaScript, please email me!

I'm trying to be more diligent about documentation, but PDC distractions and the new MSN Search API have me sidetracked. The API's SOAP format and seeming redundancy with existing RSS search options make me question its value. Maybe I'll integrate it into AJAXTagger v2 if I can avoid feature creep. Check out my blog for MSN Search and Start.com developer program resources.

I'm still waiting for a response from Start.com regarding my UI improvement suggestion. Even though Robert Scoble mentioned their quick response to feedback, I haven't heard anything about my suggestion to improve the functionality of the close ("x") button on content panes. I've sent an email and even blogged about it, but no luck so far. Hopefully, they'll address it soon!

Microsoft's Start.com has launched a new developer API, possibly using the ATLAS framework (precursor to ASP.NET AJAX). It seems to focus on creating JavaScript-based "Gadgets," similar to RSS consumers, that need to be hosted on a server. The API also requires enabling cross-domain data sources in Internet Explorer, a topic I've discussed previously.

Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) now offers ad category targeting, similar to Google AdSense. This feature allows publishers to specify categories for their ads, resulting in more relevant ads for their audience. I'm excited about the potential of this for my own site and hope Google implements a similar feature in AdSense. I'm even considering incorporating this into future versions of AjaxTagger.

Testing out w.Bloggar and RSS Bandit integration for automated blog post commenting. Excited about the potential!

This post compares the query limits of free search APIs from different providers. It highlights that MSN Search API reportedly allows up to 10,000 queries per day, but whether that limit is per API or in total is still unclear. The post also notes that Google's Search API allows 1,000 queries per day, Yahoo's APIs allow 5,000 queries per API per day, and Amazon's allows a generous 86,400 queries per day (calculated as 1 query per second). More investigation is needed to confirm the exact limit for MSN.

I'm still confused about OPML. I know it's for sharing blog subscriptions, but I don't see the practical benefit for me or my readers. Even after checking resources and looking for OPML enthusiasts like Robert Scoble and Dave Winer, I'm still lost. Technorati's Blog Finder wasn't much help either. Wikipedia had the best explanation, but I still need to figure out how to actually use OPML.