June 5, 2007

MT 4 Beta

I downloaded and installed the MT 4 beta - which now has a version licensed under GPL.

The UI on the system is much more "application-like" - functionality that I used to navigate to are now appearing in dropdowns and many options are saved via XHR. Unfortunately there is nothing new in terms of providing more built-in metadata, but I expect this to change as RDFa and microformats evolve and proliferate.

The new widgets manager looks very interesting - I can't find docs on it yet but it looks like a better way to organize the sorts of public-facing content and functionality that usually appear in the right nav. So MT is now DRYer.

Congrats to the folks at SixApart!

May 17, 2006

AIM Pages

AIM Pages has the coolest web page builder I've ever used. Read/Write Web has a useful overview of the service.

If MySpace does not quickly follow suit with better design tools, I just might have to throw away all of the social equity I've earned in MySpace and migrate over to AIM.

What will improved page building tools do to the social hierarchy of profile design finesse?

June 24, 2005

direc.tor

Johnvey Hwang has created del.icio.us direc.tor, a rich-web interface to del.icio.us that is a great demonstration of client-side web service brokering using javascript. It works in IE and Firefox. Instead of taking the greasemonkey approach, Johnvey's service is launched via bookmarklet.

Other brokering services like the Google Maps hack are not entirely self-contained and require the broker host to proxy information between the main server and the client, thus doubling the amount of network traffic and degrading the overall performance. direc.tor eliminates the need for the broker host to proxy requests by instructing the client to directly communicate with the main server. This approach is very similar to the way Greasemonkey scripts are loaded, except that it is largely platform independent and does not require additional client-side extensions like Greasemonkey. However, the major pitfall to this approach is that users are required to manually create the bookmarklet. Source: del.icio.us direc.tor

Jonvey also posted a how-to on executing foreign-hosted code with bookmarklets in Creating A Client-Side Web Service Broker.

December 1, 2004

Memetic Markets

Media Mammon is a simulated stock market game in which the traded securities represent memes on the web.

At HSX we often talked about how cool a game just like this would be, but we never had time to do it. Mammon even allows traders to IPO new words and phrases that are not yet on the market (wisely adding a reasonable cost for doing so). Awesome.

By way of Andy Baio.

October 18, 2004

Google's Life Recorder

Danny has some interesting things to say about Google's life recorder (AKA Desktop Search) and other similar products.

I was blown away last week, having only expected to install searching. The recorder was a wonderful surprise. My interest in the semantic web began with investigating how organize and annotate my business research and fiction writing. Meaningful search and the web recorder changes how I do my research. Due to the rapid recall, local cross-referencing and commentary are much more feasible.

Desktop Search also says a lot about where computing is headed, with its unabashed browser interface to a local web server and simplicity. To millions of common internet consumers, the web will soon be much less "remote" than it has been.

The PC which I purchased last year for web development and games can now serve as my primary information platform. For this purpose, my PC is on the verge of displacing my OS X system.

August 18, 2004

TypeKey + Paypal = DropCash

DropCash is an excellent combination of web services. TypeKey users can organize fund-raising campaigns which accept PayPal payments. DropCash provides a convenient campaign url which displays a running tally and comments. Spotters: Anil Dash and Andy Baio.

May 5, 2004

Distributing the Load of the Semantic Web

Ben Hammersley has put together a cool egoboo tracker for authors, culling data from Amazon, Technoratti, AllConsuming, and others (by way of Cory Doctorow). It is an interesting way to re-combine information.

Unfortunately, the Auctorial Ego Tracker is somewhat slow due to the fact that it assembles the source data in real-time. But it got me thinking about the use of web resources. As real-time meaning aggregators gain in popularity, they will begin to put a much heavier load on web services as well as web servers simply hosting RDF and XML files. If open source applications and useage practices are not developed to distribute the load, the power (and necessity) of well-funded intermediary services such as Google will continue to grow.

It is not surprising that one leading discussion among bloggers concerns the inefficient and potentially overwhelming consumption of RSS feeds. William Grosso's Sunday Afternoon Thoughts on the Design of RSS Aggregators does a good job of explaining this problem and offering solutions.

Some recent approaches to addressing interaction limitations actually borrow ideas from the internet, usenet, and web build-out, including pDNS and RSS over BitTorrent. There is also an interesting discussion on www-rdf-interest about distributing RDF queries.

On a related note, I have recently been sketching out how a small web community might maintain some sort of RDF cache / router / query platform to buffer the interaction between its members and the greater semantic web.

May 2, 2004

Mozdex Announced

Byron Miller has posted an overview on Kuro5hin about the Mozdex search engine, a service that will provide open information about their page ranking strategy. The indexing process is performed by Nutch, while the search app runs on Tomcat and Lucene. He ends with this open question (for which there are many responses):

Do you think it is actually feasible to work on a process that stays ahead of the cheaters or do you believe it will be something doomed to fail just because its competing against the likes of Yahoo or Google? Source.

April 26, 2004

Annozilla Sidebar

I tested out Annozilla this evening. I could not get the sidebar going using the xul installer. Luckily, I saw the "Install Annozilla Sidebar" button in the viewing options on OS X and on Linux. This convenience was not mentioned in the installation doc.

Some very general notes:

While I have always had great hopes for web annotation, it is plagued by the classic chicken-egg problem. Getting the success feedback loop going involves building communities with web annotation. Applications will have to allow someone to easily locate and communicate with fellow annotators as they burrow through their favorite information piles.

I believe that certain communities are more suitable entry points for the annotation meme: bible study groups, classic literature students making use of the Gutenberg Project, the debate team / compulsive fact-hounds, and SEC filings consumers (that would include me).

April 23, 2004

Annozilla 0.5

Last week, Annozilla 0.5 beta was released. Annozilla is a set of Mozilla or Firebird extensions that are used to interact with Amaya servers. The installation looks somewhat difficult, so I'll post some notes about Annozilla over the weekend.

This is the the Annozilla project, designed to view and create annotations associated with a web page, as defined by the W3C Annotea project. The idea is to store annotations as RDF on a server, using XPointer (or at least XPointer-like constructs) to identify the region of the document being annotated. Source

April 20, 2004

Meaning in the Age of Google

Terrence Brooks provides some keen insights about Google in The nature of meaning in the age of Google. He positions Google as a "meaning aggregator":

Aggregating meaning is possible on the Internet because there are many easily accessible semantic objects to be harvested. Analysis of the aggregations can suggest patterns of high likelihood that permit applications to recommend, adapt, profile, forecast and so on.

An aggregation strategy permits Google to suggest the most likely Website to satisfy your query, Amazon.com to suggest a likely book for purchase, and governments to collect clues about terrorists. These are all examples of aggregating the meaning, taste, judgment, knowledge, etc., of a large universe of anonymous, independent agents to determine a common value.

In a similar fashion a stock market pools multiple buys and sells to find a price for an equity. Source

April 17, 2004

The Fuss About GMail

Tim O'Reilly has hit a home run in his commentary about the GMail fuss (and Google in general). He makes a great point at the end about being able to download your data, a beef I have with nearly every online service I use.

April 13, 2004

First Impressions of Creator

Yesterday I took the early access version of Sun Java Studio Creator for a test drive. This product has all of the trappings of a visual IDE, using JSF to assemble user interfaces for web apps in the same way that desktop apps are visually put together. Db data is connected to ui elements via JDBC RowSet. All it takes is a drag and drop from a representation of the database schema - much as it is done in Visual Basic and WebObjects.

April 5, 2004

BerkelyDB In Java

Sleepycat Software has released the beta version of their Berkeley DB, Java Edition.

Berkeley DB JE is a high performance, transactional storage engine written entirely in Java. Like the highly successful Berkeley DB product, Berkeley DB JE executes in the address space of the application, without the overhead of client/server communication. It stores data in the application's native format, so no runtime data translation is required. Source

The Secret Source of Google's Power

Rich Skentra has posted The Secret Source of Google's Power, a speculation / analysis of the hardware and software which drive GMail (by way of Slashdot).

March 31, 2004

Gmail

Google's Gmail. Get the full story from the NYT and ZDNet articles (by way of Anil Dash and BoingBoing).

Registrant:
Google Inc. (DOM-425410)
2400 E. Bayshore Pkwy Mountain View CA 94043 US
Domain Name: gmail.com Source

March 30, 2004

Corporate-Safe Wikiing

Meet Confluence, a wiki that any mid-level manager can feel safe using (by way of Blahsploitation).

Confluence, the professional J2EE wiki, is a knowledge management tool designed to make it easy for a team to share information with each other, and with the world. Source

March 29, 2004

Google Gets Personal

Google Labs has added personalized search (by way of unstruct.org). The personalization slider won't work with Safari, so check it out with Moz or IE.