It's not quite the end of January, but there's already alot of "new" in my new year.  There's a  new car, some new gadgets, and on the work front a new project and a new team.

As you may have heard, Charles Fitzgerald, left Microsoft to head to a startup. Charles was the GM that my old team, platform incubation, reported into. Charles set the mission for that team, and was the major stakeholder for Tafiti and several other internal facing projects that I worked on. Charles was a great GM, and while this is a loss for MS, I'm confident we haven't heard the last of him.

With Charles' departure, Scott and I will be moving to different roles in the company. I am happy to report that I am now officially part of Simon Guest's team.   

One of the few negatives about my last role in incubation was that it was inherently secretive, as parts of the work could be patented. As a result, after delivering my book on CardSpace I mostly dropped off the public scene, save for promoting Tafiti. With Simon's team having a key focus on talking about architecture with the broader community, this is something that will change, and you'll see me engaging more publicly on architecture related subjects. Simon's team has a big focus on Software+Services, which if you've read the blog for awhile know is something I've been looking at for some time in and outside of Microsoft. Expect to see me blogging more, podcasting/screencasting more, and writing the odd article or two. (No more books for awhile, though. Having written or co-written 3 books in 2 years, I've committed to my wife not to start another one until 2009)

I also mentioned there's a new project. I'll be carrying over a project with me from incubation to Simon's team as well. Nothing I can share at the moment, other than it will be public focused and it's going to be a key focus for me for a good portion of 2008.

While this project is big, there's another project I'll be working on that's even bigger.  This is a longer term project, estimated to last decades with a budget estimated to be in the seven figures. Oh, and it has nothing to do with software. My wife and I are expected our first child, a son, to literally arrive any day now. While there's alot of great 'new's in 2008 already, this will surely be the best.

Here's hoping your 2008 is going well, and I look forward to engaging with the community more broadly once again.  If there's anything you'd like to see me engage on - be it in blog, article, or podcast, let me know. As always, I can be reached at mmercuri@microsoft.com

Way back in May, I wrote a post on context and search (http://www.marcmercuri.com/PermaLink,guid,9d050e2c-e3dc-4b16-953a-4ea7c2d48702.aspx).  The post was prompted by something that was going on in the national media. Essentially, the US President's Press Secretary, Tony Snow, had come out and said that certain newspapers were being less than factual or selective in statistics they were reporting. In that post, I made a statement and a 'wouldn't it be cool' ask.

The statement was - set aside the politics for the context of discussion. The issue raised by Mr. Snow's statements questioned the level of trust associated with a particular periodical. Some people trust the Washington Post more than the New York times, that sort of thing.  The 'wouldn't it be cool' ask was about custom search.  Whether I'm searching on anything from presidential politics to the hottest new gadgets or the latest antics of Paris Hilton, I should be able to do that with a sense of context and trust.

At Microsoft, I attended a 'Search Mashup Day'. People across the company can get together, learn about search, throw out ideas, and for some of us, build out some mashups.  My 'wouldn't it be cool' ask was the intended basis of my work at Search Mashup day. Unfortunately, the search guys made it too damn easy, so I finished up pretty quickly (a good problem!)

The Live Search guys implemented this via something they call a search macro. You can create one in less than 10 minutes.

Step 1. go to http://search.live.com/macros

Step 2. Select Basic and click the Next Button

Step 3. Enter in the news / gossip sites you want to include in your custom search engine.

          Here's a sample list of some of the more popular news and gossip sites (remember, only copy in the web addresses from the first column):