This morning, we unveiled another enhancement to our advertising platform: a feed-driven approach to positioning ads on Web sites and blogs. The feed is the keystone to publisher content; by managing the feed and providing the FeedFlare service, the FeedBurner Ad Network sees context and structure normally unavailable or rendered ambiguous by simply screen-scraping the Web page.
We talk a lot about feed meta data around here, and it tends to result in a loss of dating opportunities, but it's this extra context that's available via the feed that provides the framework for new and better ad units. Ads that shift to the latest permalinks on a site, ads that only appear/disappear once a post has comments, serialized campaigns on a page that understand page/article sequence, etc. The first planned site campaigns powered via the feed will start running in a couple weeks, and we'll go from there. You can read more about this launch in our press release and in the news.
While we have been saying a lot about the ad network lately, we have been working hard on our full suite of free services, and we have a couple other updates to announce over the next week, including more integrated email management and added historical subscription metrics. We continue to not get to the bottom of the "things to build for publishers" list, and great suggestions keep on coming in, so we'll keep shovelling and you keep writing, recording, and filming.
对于我和我的同事来说,这两天“华闻大直播”的选题并没有让我们太伤脑筋,因为有一个大家都非常关注的话题,那就是齐齐哈尔假药案。之所以到了今天我才在博客上面和大家谈论这个话题,这是因为,到了现在,我才觉得对于这个事件的来龙去脉有了点眉目,有了眉目才能够让自己静下心来好好想一想。
昨天的节目主要是由我们的记者在这次案件所涉及的城市进行第一线的报道,我们没有在节目里面进行太多地分析,因为觉得,最需要让观众知道的,应该是尽量多的事实,让事实来说话。我的同事们的采访很困难,上海的同事到了南京和泰兴,有关的部门并不接受采访,只能够到那家化工厂听了一番诉苦,因为他们表示,没有生产过这样的原料。深圳的同事算是好运,到了广州中山大学第三附属医院,采访了病人家属和院方,这是因为大家都是这次假药案的受害者,都愿意站出来说话,希望能够讨个公道。北京的同事联系了卫生部,对方说,对于这件事情,没有发言权,也没有介入,向领导汇报,他们瞪大了眼睛:怎麽没有关系,医院不是卫生部管的吗?是啊,这点我当然明白,所以让同事追卫生部,但是人家不回应,我们也没有办法。只是真的不管他们的事吗?还好,今天卫生部出了一个紧急通知,要求所属的医疗机构停止使用有关的产品。至于国家药检局,不接受访问,但是他们昨天在网站上发布了详细地初步调查结果,也算是对公众有了交代。
昨天节目播出,接到了不少观众电话,还有死者家属的,因此决定今天继续,而且决定作分析性的报道。不过真的要做,还是有难度,相关的部门,相关的人不是找不到,就是封嘴不说,只好从外围入手。还好在齐齐哈尔的记者有点收获,知道这家厂检验设备很先进,检验人员很多还是在国外受过培训,为什麽原材料有问题查不出来,员工说,这就要问领导了。也有员工说,其实原材料有问题,厂方应该是知道的,为何还是使用了,还是要问领导。
上海的同事好不容易找到药厂愿意谈谈这次事件,不过被访者免惹麻烦,不愿意面对镜头。作为同行,他说,一个正规的药厂,是不可能出现这样的错误的,除非因为利益的驱使,因为现在药厂面对要公开竞标,价格很重要,于是只能从降低成本入手,不过,据他所知,再怎样的偷工减料,也不敢触碰安全这条底线,因为闹出人命,事情就大了,所以对于齐二药的这样的事情,他们都很震惊。
说到投标,这次病人出现问题的医院就一直在喊冤,因为他们的药品是透过政府集体招标采购的。齐二药的产品是唯一中标的。而既然药品有国家的批号,有合格证,医院当然毫不怀疑就用了。虽然议员应该对使用的药品进行抽查,但是他们说,这麽多的药,抽查不过来。也就是说,医院觉得,问题出来了药品监管部门的身上。
说到投标,这个机制是为了让医院采购到低成本的药品,目的应该是让患者最终受惠,不过结果不是这样,这次医院用底价钱采购到的药,卖给患者的价格比原来来价高的同样药品还好高。看来这个投标机制,成为医院开源节流的一个方法。
说到底,利益是这次事件背后最大的原因。便宜的原材料,齐二药的采购员或者收受了回扣,所以也没有去看资质证明,但购买了这些比原本使用的进口的原材料便宜了一半的货品,为工厂带来的是最终产成品的低价格。而正是这种低价格,让齐二药的产品在之后的招标过程中,屡屡中标。而中标的这种低价格的药品,也让医院有了更高的利润。
今天的节目请来了香港的一名专名打击假药机构的负责人,但是发现,拿香港的情况和内地的假药市场比较,实在是很难。因为香港政府要求所有的医院和诊所使用的药都是来自国外的大药厂,而这些药厂为了自己的声誉,是不会容忍出现假药的丑闻的,因为他们将会因此而断送一个企业的命运,有关的人员要承担严重的法律后果。不过看来对于制造假药的企业,他们并没有过这样的担心。
香港也有假药,那都是混杂在水货,也就是走私药里面。针对这些水货,香港海关和专业机构一直在打击,包括定期到市面上购买药品进行化验,而且对于市民进行教育,要求大家一定要根据药剂师的配方来购买制定的药品。内地也有监管机构,就是各地的药检部门,相信他们也在努力工作,只是很多时候,资源会决定工作的效率和成果。
有一点倒是内地可以借鉴的,那就是招标采购的问题。香港的公立医院的药品是由医管局统一采购,但是绝对不是价低者得这样的简单,而是对不同的药,有疗效,药厂的信誉等等严格的规定,务必让患者使用到疗效最好的药品。而内地价低者得的结果,正如我们采访的一些医生所说的,让一些原本疗效不错的名牌药从医院里面消失了,这对患者来说,并不是一件好事情。
其实,总结这次假药事件,很简单,再好的制度,如果人心不善的话,在完善,也会让人钻到空子,或者是放在一边,理也不理。我在想,这次事件,是不是反映出社会的浮躁心理,也反映出不少国人的素质让人担忧。忽然想起八荣八耻,当时很好奇地研读了一下,第一个感觉,这些不应该是每个人都应该知道的做人基本道理吗?现在想想,原来在现在的中国,真的需要再详细告诉大家。
五花八门
Take a peek at http://msnbc.msn.com and try searching for a few of the topics in the news like E3, gas prices or (my personal favorite) Britney Spears. To provide results we have taken advantage of both the news and web indexes. When something is current in the news you will find recent results in the top section of the first page. For topics that do not have any recent coverage on MSNBC we also provide results from our archive.
Implementation was pretty simple for our engineering team. We used the MSN Search API to retrieve a few different sets of data for each query we receive and then assemble them when rendering the results. We took advantage of some of the advanced query operators to scope the results right for news.
Each query uses a set of pre-defined operators to set the correct domain and allows us to filter the results a bit to return specific types of pages. Adding a few extra SearchTags to all of our pages allows us to do things such as return only stories and filter out category pages from the results. Also adding the path to a photo as a SearchTag enables us to add thumbnails to the results on the fly. If you have never heard of SearchTags you should definitely check out this post.
The end result of all of this is that it makes it much easier for us to add new features without having to totally change our whole application. For example will be able to easily add advanced search options in an upcoming release as all the functionality is already in place, we now just need the UI. We have just started down the path of making news search on MSNBC into a great experience and will continue to add features such as advanced search and photo search over the next couple of months.
We are reading every piece of feedback we receive so if you have any comments or feature suggestions just let us know:
http://feedback.search.msn.com/feedbacksearch.aspx?productkey=msnbcsearch&P1=dsatmsnbc&P2=msnsearchblog&P4=AE
-- Kelly Amsbry, Product Manager
On behalf of the MSNSBC.com News team