Zuneboards, one of the most popular Zune forum was recently listed on the sitepoint.com, an auction site for everything web related. Zuneboards was rapidly sold for $62k, $2k over the "buy it now" price. According to the Sitepoint listing, the...

Not enough space on your Zune 80? Don’t worry, for $150 you can now upgrade you Zune 80 to a Zune 120 by replacing the original HDD by a Toshiba MK1231GAL 1.8” 120Gb 5mm HDD. This Zune hack as been...

My deepest apologies, folks, but we've had to take down zune.net and the Marketplace temporarily for some emergency maintenance (this always happens right before a holiday weekend, huh?).

We're working our hardest to return things to normal. In the meantime, it is expected that you can browse, but can't sign in. I'll update this blog post when everything is back to normal.

--Jessica

When Adobe, Google and Yahoo announced earlier this week that content stored in its Flash file format would be more easily indexable by Google’s and Yahoo’s search engines, Microsoft was nowhere to be found.

I seemed to recall that the Redmondians and their backers, when comparing Silverlight to Flash, had touted before that Silverlight content was easily discoverable by search engines (and not just Live Search’s). Was I dreaming?

I asked Microsoft for verification and received the following statement from a company spokeswoman on July 2:

“Microsoft designed Silverlight from the beginning to be easily accessible by search engines.  Because it is simply a ZIP archive, a Silverlight application packaged in a XAP (the Silverlight application-package file extension) file is easily accessible to search engines without a special software development kit (SDK). And because XAML is W3C-compliant XML, any static textual XAML content can be easily parsed by search engines.  Furthermore, any metadata embedded in the ZIP file is easily indexed by search engines as well.  Silverlight applications also support “deep linking” as they easily consume the URL they were loaded from, and use information on the URL query string to rapidly load and display appropriate data.  Finally, the Silverlight DOM itself can be easily inspected to detect all text, links and images that are being visualized by the control.

“So does this mean that Silverlight offers customers superior search engine optimization (SEO)? Yes.  Not only was Silverlight architected to offer superior searchability, but Silverlight excels at enabling dynamic content published from content management systems to be easily indexed by search engines.  By publishing dynamic content to Silverlight via XAML and XHTML mirroring, users are able to dramatically reduce the time it takes to optimize content for search engines.”

Another question for which I don’t (yet) have an answer: Can Live Search index Flash content today and how well? (Stay tuned. Let’s see what Microsoft has to say about that one.)

Update: Ina Fried at News.com says Microsoft is not commenting on this question… at least for now.

Any SEO experts or content developers/publishers done any comparative analysis on how Flash content and Silverlight content stack up on the findability front? Do you think the new agreements forged with Google and Yahoo (but not Microsoft for Live Search) are going to give Adobe a leg up over Microsoft on this front? If so, why?

Meanwhile, on a related note, Microsoft has launched its Silverlight streaming ads pilot for which it began signing up testers earlier this spring. “This pilot program allows you to upload video content  to Silverlight Streaming and play it back with contextual ads  relevant to the playback experience, based on keywords you provide at video upload time, or configure later on in the video properties,” according to a July 2 posting on the Windows Live Dev blog. (Silverlight Streaming is Microsoft’s cloud storage service for Silverlight rich media content.)

After pulling its “Sandcastle” documentation compiler from its CodePlex repository site for failure to comply with Open Source Initiative terms and conditions, Microsoft is ready to try releasing “Sandcastle” again under one of its OSI-approved licenses.

Sam Ramji, head of Microsoft’s open source and Linux team, posted a blog entry updating readers on the Sandcastle matter. Ramji also noted that because of the Sandcastle incident, Microsoft had reviewed other projects on CodePlex and had found unspecified other cases where source was not shared as was required under the Microsoft Permissive License (MS-PL). In his July 2 blog post, Ramji noted that Microsoft has:

“found other cases where Microsoft-led projects had been licensed under the Ms-PL but hadn’t shared the source.  These have also been unpublished and will go through the same review process. “

Ramji said that Microsoft was set to repost Sandcastle to CodePlex immediately:

“I am very pleased to announce that the Microsoft SandCastle project team has reconfirmed its strong support for the Ms-PL  and is preparing to release all source code for the Sandcastle project immediately.  This was a non-trivial effort and I applaud them for it.  I think these actions demonstrate Microsoft’s desire to abide by the OSI’s Open Source Definition with regard to source code when releasing open source projects on CodePlex.”

Ramji ordered the Sandcastle project removed from CodePlex and issued a formal apology to the OSI in early June because of the team’s failure to release the actual source code.