Robin Good has interesting predictions
Robin Good has some interesting predictions and prognostications.
"If you stop looking for a second at the hundreds of interesting new tools and events happening online, what are the key trends you see? Where among the new emerging online media, should you be looking next when trying to understand where to invest your future energies and money?" (from New Media Predictions 2006: What Will The Web Future Bring?)
Worth reading.
Using AJAX to do word processing on the web
You may not have heard of this, but we are now starting to see quite decent word processing applications implemented directly in the browser, using a technique that has become known as "AJAX" - Asyncrhonous Javascript And XML. As usual there is debate about what AJAX really means, who invented it (Microsoft claims that they had it like 5 years ago - which everyone scoffs at.) Here's a good article about Ajax and how it's being used to build word processing applications that run directly in the browser:
"None of these methods, however, are as simple to set up as a standard Web browser, which can quickly access a file from anywhere in the world. That's the promise that AJAX brings to the party." (from AJAX: the way word processing will be)
One very impressive example cited in the article is Writely. It's (of course) free and easy to try. It really seems to work. Of course when it comes to word processing, features matter, but reliability matters a lot too. Last thing I want is to lose the 10 page term paper and not be able to retrieve it. Check it out.
Technorati Tags: ajax
They are all fake…
Check out these amusing images which I came across on the Advertising/Design
Goodness Blog.
Yes, they are all fake , but very cool!
Technorati Tags: advertising,
attention,
cool
Long tail UI Widget
This is kind of cool. I am playing around with the
Last.FM music service. Among the many things it
does, is that It 'watches' everything you play with iTunes to figure out your
music tastes. And then with that, Last.FM recommends
music that you might like. What caught my eye is the first use of the famous
'long tail' graph as a
User Interface element. You can drag the vertical bar right and left to affect
whether the recommended music is more in the popular or obscure range of
possibilities. Cute! Technorati Tags:
cool,
longtail
Web 2.0, I knew ye well. Here comes Web 2.5
Check out Liam Breck's new blog.
"Next, the religion of The Network Is The Computer has indoctrinated the congregation to ignore an obvious issue with connectivity: We depend on PCs only because electricity is ubiquitous and reliable. If the power is out, you've usually got acts of god in progress, and little divine inspiration for work." (from Web 2.5: Always-on-you Web 2.0 Tools)
Welcome, Liam! Technorati Tags: web2.0
[GEEK] Maybe Attention.xml and OPML shouldn’t always travel together
"Personally, I want the data the AttentionRecorder is collecting to be used, but I don't want to freight porting my feeds from one platform to another with those additional 10000+ rows of data." (from elliptical…")
While it may make sense to use OPML as a foundation for the format for Attention information, they are not one and the same and should not be inexorably bound. In the world of aggregators , the one of the original and core use of OPML was interoperability -- import and export of a user's set of subscriptions from one aggregator to the next. The potential voluminousness of attention information would harm OPMLs role as the universal interchange format between aggregators. Now the approach of using an app specific namespace for attention information is perfectly fine, as long as it is optional, and as long as aggregators can safely ignore it in cases when it doesn't matter. (I note that from a purely parochial development effort point of view, this is superior to a new format such as XOXO which aggregators generally aren't parsing nor generating.) Technorati Tags: OPML, attention, XOXO
Really cool rowing instrumentation
If there are any rowing fanatics out there, or competitive rowing coaches, take a look at this cool in- boat rowing instrumentation product.
"The RowMetrics system is innovative in-boat instrumentation bundled with software to provide a complete measurement system.The revolutionary force sensors installed between the foot stretchers and the rails capture the amount of force being exerted by each rower on a stroke by stroke basis. It measures the balance between the right and left feet for each rower. Also captured is the total boat's performance and the deceleration after catch. " (from ChampionMetrics web ite)
(Thanks, Aleksey) Technorati Tags:
[GEEK] Unified name space for aggregator extensions for OPML?
There's been a lot of discussion (follow these links for more links) of late about how to extend OPML , including what I wrote about some common aggregation related OPML attributes. From reading the discussions and thinking about it, I am thinking that a course correction might be better. Much of the discussion has been about an Attention namespace for OPML. I totally support this and will participate in that discussion. Yet there are clearly some information that many aggregators need to store with the OPML, which is not part of the core OPML standard, and also not really connected to Attention. Faced with this question an aggregator developer can do one of several things:
They can just create a product specific namespace (e.g. blogbridge: xxx)
Or they can just include regular non namespace attributes in their OPML (which will in turn cause either the validator or other aggregators to choke.)
What if instead we try to define a general set of a ggregator r elated e xtensions (are:xxx) to OPML? We could do an informal canvas and try to figure out a small set of really obvious attributes to put into this ARE name space. To start you thinking about this, here is a collection of attributes derived from what BlogBridge and FeedDemon each store in their OPML. I've identified two sets of attributes: The following have to do with bookkeeping and the operation of the aggregator:
are:autoPurgeMaxitems - number of items that should be stored locally
are:autoUpdateFrequency - how often this feed polled
are:numUnread - number of items currently unread
are:numFlagged - number of items currently flagged
are:numVisits - How often a user has visited this feed
are:firstPostDate - Date of the first post
And the following have to do with local user overrides of information that can also be specified in RSS.
are:userRating - user supplied rating of how 'good' this feed is
are:userTitle - user supplied override to the title or name of this feed
are:userCreator - user supplied override to the creator of this feed
are:userDescription - user supplied override to the description of this feed
I'm sure these are already too many. My top level question to those of us responsible for OPML import and export within Aggregators of all kinds, what do you think? Shall we try to do this? Is it a good idea? Or shall we all just create our little parochial namespaces with different words for the same thing? Technorati Tags: blogbridge, feeddemon, OPML
Very cool illusion
Try this out, it really worked for me, and is really strange and wonderful!
"This should be proof enough, we don't always see what we think we see." (from Very Cool Illusion, via del.icio.us)
Technorati Tags: cool