So the public beta for Office 2007 has begun. Here is a link to where you can pull the bits at: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/getthebeta.mspx. You have to fill out a form and “register” to perform the download. I downloaded the bits from my MSDN subscription yesterday and will attempt to install this weekend over the previous build I had. After being in the initial Beta I am pleased to say that I really like most of the changes they’ve made.
I was listening to an ArCast podcast with guest Simon Guest (not a pun) and near the end of the talk they brought up IM bots. IM bots are like the old IRC bots, which means they are just scripted IM clients. They understand certain phrases and questions and can provide information. An example of an IM bot is the Encarta Bot. You can check it out by adding encarta@conversagent.com to your MSN IM list.
I was hoping that the comment spam would disappear, or at least be blocked better by CS 2.0, but it appears that the people who have been targeting my site pretty much do a lot to avoid the SPAM rules that CS has built into it. They post a single comment about once an hour or so, it only contains a single link, and has no real keyword I can use to block them unless I want to keep people from using the word ‘hotel’.