To get things started and to get some eyes onto the leaderboards, we've put 3 leaderboards for each MSDN and TechNet on the blog sites and they are available here (which is also the View All Blog Posts pages):

• MSDN: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/default.aspx?PageIndex=1
• TechNet: http://blogs.technet.com/b/default.aspx?PageIndex=1

The leaderboards are as follows:

• Most Active Contributors: Count of Blog Posts + Blog Comments + Ratings on posts over the past 30 days.
• Most Active Commentators: Count of Comments in the past 30 days (with the expectation that more of the non-blog authors will appear on this list).
• Popular Post Contributors: Recognition Points earned in the past 5 days. Points are earned based on the quality and viewership of the posts and hence will shift regularly. 

Note: The leaderboards will update daily so keep a watch to see who are the movers and shakers!

Congratulations to our first set of leaderboard contributors:

If you have any feedback, comment below. We'd love to hear it!

The new recognition system is using a “two-economy” approach. One, Recognition Points which are only earned when someone else in the community validates the quality of your contribution (downloads, votes, marked as answer, page views) and two, Achievements which are earned by general participation in the different apps. We have more details on the economies here if you want more information…

We are going to share more specific details as time goes on, like exactly what earns recognition points, what earns achievements etc. For now though we are watching the recognition system to make sure things are running as expected, our algorithms are working as planned and the integrated platforms continue to perform well.

For today though I’d like to share a little about the integration into the blogs itself. Firstly, if you hover over the authors name above a post you’ll see more details about the user including their avatar, name, affiliations (MSFT or MVP etc.). You’ll also see their total recognition points as earned across the network and the achievements they earned participating in the community. For those people who write comments while signed in, you’ll be able to do the same thing. Hopefully this helps you as a reader to better understand those who are long-term quality contributors vs. those just new to the sites.

If you watch closely over the next few weeks you’ll probably see your favorite blog authors points continuing to rise. We are in the process of replaying all blog activity since 2002 and are somewhere in 2006 right now so we have a lot still to process. Once that replay is done, things will settle down and it’ll be more obvious when blog authors are contributing quality content that perhaps we should be paying attention too.

“What about me, I’m not a blog author?” – true, the option to earn recognition points is currently restricted on the blogs to Microsoft Employees who can author on a blog. But we’ve got a few other ways for our blog readers to earn some achievements. Those include commenting on a blog post and rating blog posts. We have a few achievements at different levels for these interactions.

Now, as the title of the blog post suggests, we have been working to bring recognition across the entire network. You’ll now find Forums, Galleries, Blogs and the TechNet Wiki are all reporting your activities to your profile. You can build your own recognition up by contributing and participating across these applications in various ways. We are also working on integrating the Library and Silverlight.Net sites into the system and hope to have those online in the next few months.

We’ll also be continuing to expand the recognition system to give you deeper stats on how you earn your points, in what technology space, when you earned them etc. We are also looking into the social graphs that are being created as people interact with one another, tracking your favorite topics and working out potentially what a personalization story might look like.

Lots more to come and I hope you’ll stay and be part of the journey!

For now, I wanted to drop a quick line to talk about the blog platform upgrade we did last week. We made the move from Telligent Community Server 5.5 to the 5.6 release. A point release, should be easy eh? :) HA!. If we were using the platform straight out of the box, no customizations, maybe. But when you've got a whole bunch of dependencies, integrations, customizations, features that people forget about, 10,000+ blogs and the end of a long, dark, cold and rainy winter, well it takes some work. So I gotta say a big thanks to the team here who work with me on the blogs. John, Justin, Claire, Cindy, Sakthi, Sukesh, Sankar, Pam; well you guys just rock. Thanks for putting in the hours getting this release in place. Big thanks to Roger, Brian, Rich and Kelly at Telligent for their on-going support for us as well!

The changes are generally geared toward our blog authors but in the end that also benefits you. Here are some of the changes:

• It's now much easier for our bloggers to incorporate content beyond text and images. Silverlight, JScript examples, TechNet and MSDN Videos and other rich media will work a lot better.
• We also had reports about folks getting stuck in infinite Live ID Login loops. We believe we have this fixed. If you see it, please use the site feedback link on the home page and let us know.
• Prior to this release we would serve RSS feeds either from the database or from the ASP.Net Cache. We now store the RSS in files that are updated within seconds of a blog post being published or changed. This means our Web Servers and DBs are far less taxed than before. RSS traffic represents about 20x our regular page view traffic so this is a huge improvement. As a specific example, while our DB is running about the same CPU levels at peak times, the actual requests per second we are handling has trippled. That's pretty impressive.
• RSS feeds for comments per blog post are available.

In about 6 weeks, the blogs will be releasing again. At that time we will integrate into the new recognition system I mentioned earlier. If a blog author posts an article it'll appear on their profile. If you comment that'll appear on your profile (assuming you log in). There will be other actions and ways to earn recognition points and achievements by being an active member of this community. More information about the new system is available here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/ff395928.aspx

Have a great weekend. I hear the sun might show itself around here! Oh and it's mother's day here in the USA (and Australia where my mum is) - so here's to your mum's! :)

Anyway, the team is busy working on upgrading the underlying platform to the next version of Telligent Community Server (5.6). There are some infrastructure changes that need to be completed as part of this upgrade so it's going to take until the end of March to get that done. The new platform will give us a few new features, some more stability / performance and a few more pieces of functionality for our blog authors. When we get closer to release, I'll outline those in more detail.

As we look forward, we are going to continue our integration with the MSDN and TechNet Networks going deeper with activity integration and the upcoming release of our new recognition system. The recognition system is currently being tested in the new MSDN Code Gallery and will make it's way over to blogs, the TechNet Wiki, and eventually merge with the Forums recognition system. More details about that in the coming months.

I also want to recognize all the feedback we've received over the past few months. We hear you loud and clear about getting locale filtering on blog feeds, so that's in the plans for FY12. As we do some more FY12 planning we'll let you know our plans so you can give us feedback.

Thanks,
Sean

Localization: Spanish, German, Japanese

We are very excited to introduce Spanish, German and Japanese UI localization on the Blogs.  This is a very important step as we increase the globalization of MSDN and TechNet.  Please note that not all UI is localized as our blog authors can customize the UI which the platform doesn’t auto-localize.  Language selection is currently accomplished very simply through your browser language settings.  There is not currently a method for toggling this in the UI.

Note: Localized UI will only appear for users who are signed into the blogs. The language preference is stored connected to the user account. We hope to bring localized UI to anonymous readers of the blog shortly.

Example of localized Japanese UI

Comment Anchors

We’ve dropped a new commenting control to our bloggers which includes being able to permalink directly to a comment. Look for the hash (#) tag next to your comment to get the link.

Terms of Use

MSDN, TechNet and Expression sites will be moving on December 8^th to a single Terms of Use, shared across those properties. The blogs have been updated to point to this new Terms of Use and you’ll see the new TOU content once live.

We’ll back back in 2011 with continued improvements to ensure you get all the Microsoft news right here on the MSDN and TechNet Blogs.

Thanks!
Sean

Anyway, updates to the blog platform are still taking place. Over the past few months we've been working pretty hard to update the performance of the MSDN and TechNet blogs. We'll see even more performance fixes continuing to be deployed over the coming months and we continue to push the scale of this platform.

I want to give a big shout-out to Telligent (http://www.telligent.com) who are the major force behind our blogging platform - many of their staff have worked many hours recently to ensure these blogs are up, stable and fully featured for our blog writers and blog readers.

Besides perf and bug fixes, we've been preparing some new features for y'all. First up is localization of the core UI elements. Initially we'll be rolling out German, Spanish and Japanese. We'll add more languages as time and priorities permits. We'll be tracking to see just how many people are actually viewing the site in localized UI modes as well. You'll get the localized UI if your browser is set to use one of the supported languages...

I'll post about other features as we get closer to deploying them. We are also working on what's to come in 2011 so hopefully we can share some of that in the new year (things like aggregated RSS for groups of blogs, filtering by language of blogs, RSS feed improvements, merging user profiles and membership with the rest of the MSDN/TechNet sites, activity tracking etc.). If you have feature requests, please use the site feedback link on the site home page and let us know!

Thanks!

I will be back real soon with posts about the blog platform, FY11 plans, upcoming features etc...

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Just wanting to raise awareness of this series of interviews with community developers and IT Pros...

Bytes by MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/bytes.aspx)

Listen or watch 18 influential community and Microsoft developers interviewed at Tech·Ed 2010 talk about mobile, the cloud, the client, and a variety of additional topics that they are passionate about.  Check back weekly for the next installment in the series or subscribe and take it on the go.

BYTES by TechNet  (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/bytesbytechnet.aspx)

IT Professional Evangelists Keith Combs, Chris Henley, Matt Hester and Harold Wong interviewed 19 influential IT Professionals from Community and Microsoft at TechEd NA 2010 about Windows 7, Windows Server, Windows Azure, SQL Azure, BPOS, SharePoint 2010, Office 2010, Exchange Server 2010 and SQL Server 2008 and a variety of additional topics that they are passionate about.

Listen or watch interviews and check back weekly for the new installment in the series or subscribe to the RSS feed and take it on the go.

Bytes by MSDN and TechNet:  Listen in on our latest series of interviews!

Listen in as Bytes by MSDN & TN interviews the brightest and the best amidst the developer and IT Pro community and Microsoft.  Each interview shares tidbits on the latest technologies and announcements, providing you resources to keep your skills cutting edge!  Check out our latest series!

Or, feel free to join:

• Join the Bytes by MSDN Facebook Fan page!
• Follow us on Twitter and Retweet!
• Subscribe to the RSS feed

Today, we are releasing the Web Camps Training Kit: July 2010 Edition - Download it here.

The kit includes all the content we presented around the world at the recent Web Camps events; presentations, demos, labs and more.  Inside the new kit you'll find content that covers the following technologies:

• ASP.NET MVC 2
• ASP.NET 4 Web Forms
• jQuery
• Entity Framework
• Visual Studio 2010
• Deployment

We've also included the agenda so if you want to run your own Web Camp with some of our content, you can do that. Let the team know if you are planning to run your own - we'll help get the word out (webcamps [at] microsoft.com).

As a bonus we've also included scenario based content which comes in the form of complimentary slides, demos, demo scripts and hands-on-labs.  These scenarios show you how to take your own web application from an idea and prototype all the way to getting more visitors and optimizing for performance using the Microsoft Web Platform and other technologies from Microsoft.

• Prototyping Your Web App
• Building Your Web App
• Enhancing Your Web App
• Getting More Visitors to your Web App
• Optimizing Your Web App for High Performance

We are going to be adding new scenarios as well as fresh content covering the latest on WebMatrix, ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework, jQuery and more as well as brand new Web Camps!  Stay tuned!  Again, we're open to hearing your feedback and requests - if there is anything you would like to see in the next version of the training kit, let us know (webcamps [at] microsoft.com).

With the Windows Phone Developer Tools in beta and Windows Phone 7 in technical preview, now is the time to build Windows Phone 7 apps in earnest, and we have refreshed our Design Resources for developers and designers to help you build beautiful apps.

The UI Design and Interaction Guide for Windows Phone 7 v2.0 has been updated for beta. With additional information and a new layout we hope you will find more readable, this guide provides detailed information about UI elements and controls, UI system behaviors, and the interaction model for the touch interface based on the design system codenamed “Metro”. Designers and developers should read this guide to learn about the dos and don’ts of UI implementations for their Windows Phone applications.

The Design Templates for Windows Phone 7 are a collection of 28 layered Photoshop template files and system fonts that can be used to create pixel-perfect application layouts, to help guide UI development, or to pitch an idea. These design templates showcase many controls that are a part of the Windows Phone Developer Tools Beta. They also include examples of controls that are a part of Windows Phone, but are not available as a part of the Windows Phone Developer Tools.

Let us know what you think. If you have suggestions or feedback about these design resources, please email us at wp7des@microsoft.com.