Earlier I wrote about the GMail problems. But the latest issue is more than just problem, its a GMail disaster. As per TechCrunch, number of users started complaining that all of their GMail emails and contacts were auto deleted. They found lot of such complaints on Google groups including this:

Found my account clean..nothing in Inbox, contacts ,sent mail..How can all these information residing in different folders disappear? ..How to write to gmail help team to restore the account..is it possible?..Where to report this abuse?.Any help ..Welcome..Thanks in advance ps101

Even Google confirmed this via email to TechCrunch.

Hi there TechCrunch folks,

We saw your post today about Gmail and wanted to let you know what was going on.

Regretfully, a small number of our users — around 60 — lost some or all of their email received prior to December 18th. Once we found out about this issue, we worked day and night to confirm that only a few accounts were affected and to do whatever we could to restore as much of the users’ accounts as we could. We’ve also reached out to the people who were affected to apologize and to work with them to restore the email from any personal backup they might have.

We know how important Gmail is to our users - we use it ourselves for our corporate email. We have extensive safeguards in place to protect email stored with Gmail and we are confident that this is a small and isolated incident.

Thanks,
Courtney

Google’s official policy is that once emails are deleted, they are gone forever

I understand that once the email is deleted, its gone forever. But in case of disasters like this, can’t they restore the emails from last backup(except the mails since last backup)? Why they are asking the affected users to restore from the personal backup?(Unless they lost the backup too!. Its even worse!!) I knew lot of people who are using GMail as backup storage rather than as a email, even not how come we have a personal back up of the personal emails(of the size 2GB and counting)? After reading the email from Google representative, I suspect whether Google has any backup plans for GMail or not? -:)

What do you say? Don’t say that “Dude, its still in beta!”. I am (re)tired of “GMail Beta”.

Note: Are you using GMail? If yes, please have personal backup of your emails on a daily basis. Who knows one day you may receive a email from Google asking you to restore the emails from your personal backup. -:)

My company rolls its own version of Xerces for our products. We can add fixes or enhancements without fear of conlicts. Over the years, the list of things to do has decreased. Now it is just about down to removing HTML stuff, adding a SAX feature to ignore all entity references (editors need this) and customizing the horrible validation messages (humans need this.) One part of doing the in-house fork is running the program checkers on each Xerces release to gauge its quality.

Verdict? Pretty good.The best yet as far as automated software tests go: as a user of Xerces, it was a very encouraging result to me.

Announced today, Microsoft has apparently applied for the patent on “web feeds”. This is one of those announcements that make people roll their eyes up in their heads in puzzlement and disgust, in what I think in this case is perhaps justified anger. The issue in contention is basically that the Microsoft CDF format, which appeared very briefly in Internet Explorer largely in reaction to similar formats appearing in beta versions of Netscape. Both companies were attempting at that time to try to exploit the perception that the Internet would end up becoming the next TV (true, ironically, though by a very circuitous route that took a decade or more to make happen).

Most of the analysis I’ve seen on this would tend to push the idea that Microsoft is doing it to flush out patent trolls in preparation of the consumer rollout of Longhorn/Vista. It’s unlikely that they will succeed in actually gaining the patent - given the rather late date of the patent and the fact that there was in fact a fair amount of prior art even at that time mitigates against it, but I think there’s another facet here to the attempt that’s bothered me about XML-oriented patents for quite some time.

What, exactly, constitutes a desktop, and for that matter, what exactly constitutes an operating system? I beg a bit of an indulgence here in order to talk about a couple of cool apps and a couple of very disturbing developments, then would like to come back and reconsider these questions in light of this.

I am writing this particular post in a little Google applet called Google Notebook which is nothing exceptional (basically just a rich-text-edit control with a small piece of back end storage) that’s nonetheless quite exceptional in what it implies.

re: Patent Applications in the RSS space

>…We have always fully acknowledged the innovators and supporters of RSS, like Dave Winer, Nick Bradbury and many others…

I think you misspelled ‘innovators’ - let me help. Did you mean ‘inventors’?

You can get a spellchecker for Firefox here - https://spellbound.sourceforge.net/ as that’s a nasty habit to get into, and would be worthwhile correcting real soon…

Sunday, December 24, 2006 6:33 AM by TH

Huh. Interesting comment. COMPLETELY FALSE! But interesting, none-the-less.

Actually, that’s not true… “You can get a spellchecker for Firefox here - https://spellbound.sourceforge.net/ ” is true. The rest is false.

How so?

ongoing � JSON and XML

From: Aristotle Pagaltzis (Dec 21 2006, at 18:52)

Anders:

It’s a stretch to call the man who designed both RSS 2.0 and OPML an “XML partisan.”

I have no desire to get myself in any more trouble than I tend to get myself into, so I will leave my comments at a combination of the title and: Yeah, what Aristotle said. ;)

Rob Weir has done some interesting stats on XML parse time of real documents and the effect of increasing the elements and attribute names. The blog article is calledThe Celerity of Velocity. The result? Even though we expanded some NCNames to 32-times their original length, making a 5x increase in the average NCName length, it made no significant difference in parse time. There is no discernible slow down in parse time as the element and attribute names increase.

I don’t think he is claiming that this could happen forever or for all software, of course! Indeed, it might be the sign of crap software: if you went mad and allocated a 1K buffer for each name then copied the 1K of text startgin with each NCName you certainly would get constant parsing time regardless of name length.

Rob’s figures are of course difficult to accept. I would like them to be wrong. They seem to go against the kinds of stats that the Efficient XML proponents give. But a number is worth a thousand words.

Update: An interesting article linked to from “cognitively cognate” sets up stage with the following scenario,

Aniruddh Patel of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California, US, and colleagues wanted to know how people from different cultures group non-identical sounds. They recruited a group of 100 volunteers, half of whom were American and the other half Japanese. The volunteers listened to sequences of alternating long and short or loud and soft tones (audio clips in wav format).

The result? Please click-through to find out, though I will point out the fact that with all of what follows, opinions and results may vary. What I might perceive as one thing, someone else might perceive the “same thing” as something completely different.

Of course, I didn’t even touch on percent encoded UR{I|L}’s, but then again there are no doubt those people who simply do not care or do not agree or do not [something all together different], so for what it’s worth, there ya have it :)

Thanks for the comment/link, cognitively! :)

[Original Post]
NOTE: No red, blue, or any other pill colors will be mentioned from this point forward. In other words, this isn’t that kind of Matrix post. ;)
—

Last April, Mark Nottingham made a post to the web-http discussion list regarding Matrix URI’s…

It would be great if WADL and other Web description formats could
accommodate Matrix URIs;

https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/MatrixURIs.html

so that the parameters of the Matrix URI would be handled in a
fashion similar to the way query parameters are handled.

We’re starting to use them pretty extensively.

Until that point I had forgotten about Matrix URI’s, but as soon as I was reminded, I realized…

Why have we not been using Matrix URI’s all along???!!!

Matrix URIs - Ideas about Web Architecture

… Uhh, since when were they in competition with one another?

mikechampion’s weblog

As a 10 year XML veteran, and informal minister of propaganda for the “XML Team”, aren’t I supposed to leap to XML’s defense? I just can’t summon the energy.

And I can’t blame you, Mike! Why waste the energy of defending XML when theres nothing to defend!?

Quick show of hands from those who subscribe to a JSON Web Feed?

Okay, how about an XML Web Feed?

Okay, now lets try how many of you find that if you don’t want and/or need any of the extra stuff that working with the XML source provides, JSON is a really nice way to serialize XML data (e.g. a Web Feed), or any other source of data/data format for that matter, such that you can be more productive with less code inside of your web apps?

So tell me again… Where’s the comparison? Where’s the battle?

If anywhere, it must be in your mind (speaking to those who believe it’s one over the other, but “not both!”), cuz’ it does not exist! GET OVER IT!

From my own viewpoint, and in my own opinion** here is the list of what I believe to be the 10 most influential people or groups of people in the Information Technology sector in 2006. Please feel free to add/subtract/multiply/divide to/from this list in the comments section (or better yet, blog your list and provide a link in the comments section***).

The CSS1 recommendation was published on 17 December 1996, and the W3C has announced they’re celebrating CSS’s tenth anniversary by releasing a new version of the W3C online CSS validator, and by inviting developers to submit contributions to the CSS10 Gallery — “A selection of contributions celebrating 10 years of CSS”. Send your proposals to css10@w3.org. Bert Bos and Håkon Lie will look at all of the submissions, select the best ones (based on “originality, utility, and aesthetics”), and publish them at the CSS10 Gallery. More info at the CSS: Celebrating 10 Years with Style site.

Here is more of the fake coverage of the XML 2006 conference. Like Groundhog Day, we get to start from day one again and do it differently now that some more papers are up.

There are numerous misconceptions about the Semantic Web, largely caused by a misunderstanding of its aims and technologies. I’ve created this simple FAQ help dispel some of the myths.

Win Fabulous Prizes!*

Background

In my never-ending search to catalog all the web’s social networks, I have discovered a bunch of blogging sites based on the LiveJournal code. These include DeadJournal, GreatestJournal, and InsaneJournal.com to name a few. This is great for me because these sites all have built-in social networks, and all of that is produced in FOAF format.

I am current working on a project with some students to start using spidered FOAF data with a firefox extension to integrate some social network information into browsing. (We are writing a paper on this that I’ll link to just as soon as it’s finished). I’ve always maintained in my work that social networks aren’t really useful for much if we just sit there and play with them. They become powerful once we start using the data from them.

I’ve hinted at another potential use, combining social networks with tagging. But I really am interested in some other ideas. Thus, I introduce

The 2007 Unofficial FOAF Challenge

So there is a lot of social network data out there in FOAF format - easily machine readable and relatively easy to aggregate and merge. If a service were available that let you use it, what do you think would be a good way to integrate the social information into systems?

Please post your answers here. Best idea wins. Entries due by January 4, 2007. Winners will be announced January 5, 2007. Everything is totally at my sole discretion and whim.

Prizes! Well, prize singular. I hereby promise the winner their choice of a fabulous RDF, OWL, or Social Network mini button. Geek Flair.

Lisp Integration

Vista Smalltalk is descended from a Lisp interpreter that I started working on several years ago. I switched to Smalltalk syntax when the kernel was finally able to support messaging and dynamic object creation.

Now, I have begun re-integrating the Lisp reader and some built-in functions back into the Vst package. The lisp capabilities include basic functions such as “apply”, “mapcar”, “dolist”, “dotimes” and “eval” as well as macro expansion complete with “backquote”, “comma” and “at-comma” forms.

Messages are sent to objects using Xlisp syntax:

    * (send <object> <message> [...])
    * (send-super <message> [])

I think I can just leave it at that and not worry that anyone doesn’t both understand *AND* agree with the title!

THANK YOU PETER FISK!!! :D :D :D

I’ve just started going through the papers from XML 2006. I wish more people were putting their papers or slides up, so many are missing. Now that we have this new thing called the WWW, the readership for a paper is much more than just the conference participants; people like me on the other side of the world who weren’t there would love to read many papers. (I’d love to read the papers from Kitsis, Champion, Kay and Melton for example, who I all admire tremendously.) So here’s my fake realtime blog of the first day’s proceedings…

… don’t get (re)elected.

The Liberty Papers�Blog Archive � John McCain Wants To Regulate Blogs

What would happen if this law is passed and upheld in Court, of course, is easy to predict. Unfettered public discussion forums would, largely, become a thing of the past as most web site operators will not want to invest either the time or the resources into policing every conversation that takes place. Debate and discussion will be limited. All of which argues quite strongly that these regulations would violate the First Amendment.

Dear Current and/or Future Politicians,

Want to get (re)elected?

Don’t Fight The Internet!

Mark’s blog item is worth a read: he is working towards an ideal of time-independent validation. I take his essential point to be that different consumers have different constraints as showstoppers, and that it is inefficient, frustrating and wasteful for your input to barf on constraints that don’t effect you in particular. For example, if you are just storing a numeric field in a database now and then writing it out later, you don’t need to care whether it is in a particular range, just that it is a number at all.

I think there are four kinds of validation strategies, with a natural underwear analogy
* schema used for validating incoming data reflects the public interface (tighty whiteys)
* schema used for validating incoming data only reflects the capabilities of the consuming system (speedos)
* schema used for validating incoming data is a looser family schema that gives some kind of version independence (boxers)
* schema used to validating incoming data only validates traceable business requirements (G-string)

Err, OK lets forget the analogy…

I just heard of a good use of the XML Structured Document Complexity Metric to help negotiating a contract variation, for an XSLT stylesheet project.

Rusty has a quote from Wil Shipley today that Microsoft has nothing to gain by making life better for small programmers….they make all their money selling Windows and Office..

The subject of the quote is Windows APIs (and is a pretty broad claim for someone who admits to not really having looked at .NET or C#…hmmm) but without taking sides on any technical merits I suspect people will apply the same trope to (MS/ECMA) Office Open XML file formats. And I think they would be dead wrong there: MS needs to enable their army of system integrators to sell MS back-end systems and Windows-based solutions in the new XML-ified, document-exchanging world. So MS is positioning Office as a platform that can both compete with web-based applications and integrate with them.

Think about it: Can MS compete with Windows versus Linux as a platform? Not really: you cannot get any cheaper than free… And can MS compete with Java versus .NET as a platform? Compete maybe but not win: they are a two-man conga line…But what competes with Office as a platform? Open Office? Err, perfectly good as far as it goes (I use it!) but certainly it doesn’t actually go very far (I am going to upgrade to the new Open Office 2.1 today…maybe it will solve the current problems I have with unusable arrowed lines and jaggy PDF export.)

The thing about XML is that it reduces role of the API to being glue for connecting declarative pieces: queries, XML documents, XML transformations, XML configuration, XML GUI. Worrying about crappy APIs is so 90s. (I don’t really mean that, of course. OK I do mean it a bit.)

Google has released the GWT 1.3RC under the Apache 2.0 License. Here is the official announcement from the Google Web Toolkit Blog

The theme for XTech 2007 (15-18 May 2007 in Paris) is “The Ubiquitous Web”, and proposals for tutorials and presentations at the event are due by December 15 (this Friday).

The list of suggested topics covers a lot of territory: mobile browsing, microformats, geographical data and grassroots mapping, XBL, CSS3, SVG, Web frameworks, and much more.

To propose a presentation or tutorial, you just need to submit a short description (25 words or so) along with an abstract (250 words or so). If you want examples, see the archived schedule from this past year’s XTech.

If you search Google for…

• document
• net
• ruby
• python

…then, as a reader of O’Reilly weblogs, you’re probably going to see the kinds of results that you expected to find. But as the majority of people in the world aren’t web developers, are these results what most people would expect? If I asked someone in the street to tell me the most relevant thing they could about ‘ruby’ or ‘python’, it almost certainly wouldn’t be to do with the programming language.

From a quick glance at job vacancies on the Guardian website (one of the major newspapers in the UK), only about 1.8% of jobs have ‘development’ or ‘internet’ in them (limiting the search to just IT and Telecoms). So, in theory, the Google results would only be relevant for about 2% of the general population.

Which isn’t exactly the whole story, of course. Most people searching for ‘python’ on the web today are almost certainly searching for the programming language (i.e. the web population is different to the general ‘offline’ population). So is Google correct? Or is this a chicken and the egg situation, and - like the Nintendo Wii - the web will primarily be targeted at the hardcore until someone dares to design a system that targets the mainstream ‘non user’ over the tried and tested current user base? What other side effects could be caused by ‘web developers’ (or techies) being the people who put the most content on the web, and hence disproportionately telling Google what is ‘important’?

Mylar Technology Project

Mylar is a task-focused UI for Eclipse that reduces information overload and makes multi-tasking easy. It does this by making tasks a first class part of Eclipse, and integrating rich and offline editing for repositories such as Bugzilla, Trac, and JIRA. Once your tasks are integrated, Mylar monitors your work activity to identify information relevant to the task-at-hand, and uses this task context to focus the Eclipse UI on the interesting information, hide the uninteresting, and automatically find what’s related. This puts the information you need to get work done at your fingertips and improves productivity by reducing searching, scrolling, and navigation. By making task context explicit Mylar also facilitates multitasking, planning, reusing past efforts, and sharing expertise.

Will be interesting to discover just how well this works, though it sounds fantastic! And the notion of offline editing for Trac (don’t use the other two enough for this to be a benefit, but I use Trac *TONS*) has me practically giddy with excitement (Did I really just say/admit to that?!)

Last Friday I made mention to the fact that I had been heads down working on various projects, the first of which would launch between then and Monday.

Today is Monday…

Lawrence Lessig

So Code v2 is officially launched today. Some may remember Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, published in 1999. Code v2 is a revision to that book — not so much a new book, as a translation of (in Internet time) a very old book. Part of the update was done on a Wiki. The Wiki was governed by a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. So too is Code v2.

Thus, at https://codev2.cc, you can download the book. Soon, you can update it further (we’re still moving it into a new wiki). You can also learn a bit more about the history of the book, and aim of the revision. And finally, there are links to buy the book — more cheaply than you likely can print it yourself.

Most important, however, as we come to the $185,000 mark of the CC fundraiser: All royalties from Code v2 go to Creative Commons, in recognition of the work done by those who helped with the wiki version of Code v1.

So there are maybe five people who have lived on this planet in whom I can state have truly inspired me and the directions I have chosen in my life. Lawrence Lessig is one of those five people, and in fact, is at the very top of that list. To have been able to work on this project (and several more to come) with Professor Lessig (the site development; I had *NOTHING* to do with writing the book ;)) — well, as you can probably imagine, I’m pretty excited by it.

So here’s the deal,

- Like each of his previous titles, Code Version 2.0 is absolutely outstanding!
- You can download, mix, mash, share, and in other forms are free to use the text of this title as you feel is best, as long as you license any derivative works under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license (by-sa)
- You can also purchase the title, and in doing so support the efforts of Creative Commons.

It really can be *that easy* when you *SKIP* the intermediary ;)

This truly is a fantastic title. If you do nothing else today other than download and/or buy and then read this book, you will be a better, more informed human being because of it. And with that,

Please share, and enjoy!

I’ve slagged off before in this blog about standards ideas emanating from ODF and Microsoft camps: just to prove I can be positive, courtesy of Dennis Ding’s Open Standards Updates blog comes an Open Standards Definition that looks pretty sane!

Some people are startled to find that, amidst all the talk here of OASIS (now ISO) ODF versus ECMA Office Open XML, China has developed its own independent office document format, Uniform Office Format (UOF). I am not startled, but delighted, and here’s why.

Kurt made mention of Adobe MARS in a comment to my “DIRTY LITTLE* post from a couple days ago, and given the fact that Kurt is *MUCH* more qualified to provide proper commentary on this, I will leave it to him to do just that.

In the mean time, a couple of snippets from Eliot Kimber’s recent post to whet your appetite,

Dr. Macro’s XML Rants: Adobe MARS: Looks Interesting

MARS is an XML-based format that is intended as a functional replacement for PDF. It’s not really accurate to call it an XML version of PDF because it’s not a simple transliteration of PDF into tags (which could be done easily enough) but a ground-up exercise in designing and XML-based scheme for doing what PDF does.

…

MARS tries to use standards as much as it can and it seems to do so to a remarkable level of completeness. It uses SVG for representing each page, supports the usual standards for media objects (bitmaps, videos, etc.). Uses Zip for packaging, and so on.

…

Within Acrobat, the user experience off MARS is identical to that for PDF: all the behavior and functionality is the same. There is a MARS plug-in for Adobe 8 (reader or professional).

More > https://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Mars

And if that wasn’t enough, at the bottom of the above linked page, you will find…

The content on this wiki is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. Macromedia requires no attribution (details).

Adobe… YOU ROCK!!! :D

Update: Firstly, we’ve got ourselves a QOTD like none other!

len:

YouTube? Gimme a break. It is the ultimate expression of ADD for the unsophisticated web surfer.

YES!

Secondly, WHOA!!! << That's one helluva close-up! If you feel a sudden sense of fear overcome your entire being... You're not the only one! YIKES!!! ;)

Thirdly,

Mark Birbeck on XAML:

But then the last year or so has been quite a surprise for everyone, and one of the key messages is the groundswell of support for open standards and consistent browsers. In today’s climate it would take an incredible marketing effort to ’sell’ XAML as the ‘new language’ of the web, and you do wonder what exactly it would gain them anyway.

That is a VERY good point! And now that I think about it, I believe Mark is right on the money >> Regardless of whether or not XAML is the “superior” technology, attempting to sell it as a replacement for XHTML as opposed to an enhancement that provides a tool for creating cross-browser/platform web-based applications, is a bad idea. In other words, for the average web presence, XAML is EXTREME overkill, and the average web presence isn’t going to suddenly go away, replaced instead by weblications with super human powers. Text is text, and in a majority of cases, the simpler the presentation, the better.

Or to put it another way: If what I want to read requires that I first load an additional application that doesn’t already reside on my machine each time I visit the site >> Forget it… It’s not going to happen. No matter how slick the interface, each and every millisecond that is required to load a page means fewer and fewer people are going to stick around long enough for that same content to load, and in a world where >> CONTENT << is *KING*, or in other words, content is what generates the revenue in which keeps the web churning, regardless of how “cool” the eye candy is, if the result means lost revenue, then, once again…

Forget it… It’s *NOT* going to happen.

Of course, maybe MSFT already realizes this, and has no plans for making an attempt to replace what works with what they believe works better. So, again, as Mark points out in the same linked comment,

Of course, it might make it more attractive to support, too. Standards are a double-edged sword for the big guys like Microsoft, since they would all ideally like us to only use their proprietary formats, but they generally realise that this isn’t the way of the new internet. It’s interesting that we haven’t heard much about XAML in the recent period, which either means that MS are taking advantage of the ‘current obsession with Ajax’ to quietly get XAML ready, or they realise that the ‘current obsession with Ajax’ means that people actually like standards.

Again, VERY well said… Guess time will tell.

[Original Post]

DISCLAIMER: The title might be one of my most pathetic attempts at generating traffic to this blog I have *EVER* made. To my knowledge, there is *NO DIRTY LITTLE SECRET* that Microsoft wishes “NOBODY* knew. And if there is? Well this ain’t that secret!

With that disclaimer firmly in place…

Windows Presentation Foundation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere is a cross platform extension to WPF to provide a subset of WPF features, such as hardware accelerated video, vector graphics, and animations to platforms other than Windows Vista. Specifically, WPF/E will be provided as a plug-in for Windows XP, Windows 2000, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Linux, and mobile devices.

These extensions will allow the browsers and other applications to use WPF/E graphical capabilities. The browser extensions will be in the line of Macromedia Flash, a highly popular graphic plug-in available for most browsers. Internet Explorer will have native support for WPF in Windows Vista, and will support WPF/E in older versions.

WPF/E will work in concert with XAML and will be scriptable with Javascript, it will also contain a version of the Common Language Runtime so it can execute VB.Net and C# code.

WW:*

“Blah, blah, blah, yadda, yadda, yawn — We’ve heard it all before, Peterson, now quit your yappin’ and take your meds already!”

M.:

Bite me, WW:*, then take a look at this!

I’ve been heads down on several projects, one of which I will be writing about when it launches sometime between now and Monday, so my apologies for not posting this sooner. One of the items that I had tagged as “to blog” comes from the following announcement made several days ago.

If there is one attribute of Tim O’Reilly and O’Reilly Media that I admire more than any other, it is the simple fact that they truly do understand the importance of the community-based economy and the importance of being able to share with one another the things we most enjoy. Of course, what better way to show understanding than putting your money where your mouth is,

O’Reilly Foundation Donates to CC - Creative Commons

Creative Commons is pleased to announce that the O’Reilly Foundation has donated $10,000 towards CC’s $300,000 annual campaign goal. We are honored to be a receipient of such significant support. Tim O’Reilly is the founder of O’Reilly Media and a supporter of both open source and the free software movements, which this donation exemplifies.

NICE!

So who’s next? Microsoft, you have a couple bucks laying around, don’t ya? Apple? Sun? Joe from Topeka, Kansas? Jane from Ottawa, Ontario, CA? No matter who you are, how big your bank account happens to be, or how much you feel you directly benefit from the hard work and dedication of the good folks @ Creative Commons, I invite you all to follow the lead of Tim O’Reilly and the O’Reilly Foundation and donate to one of the most important projects brought forth in the 21st century: Creative Commons.

Already donated? Don’t let that stop you from donating again! The lines are now open. Here’s how to order…

(Thanks, Tim&Company!)

Sean McGrath, CTO, Propylon

Congrats to Jon Udell who is now working with Microsoft.
Jon lists a bunch of reasons for joining, one of which is:

“Jim Hugunin, who created both Jython and IronPython, is making my favorite open source scripting language, Python, a first-class citizen of the .NET platform.”

HOLY HANNAH!

So what will Jon’s role w/MSFT be? As he explains,

Q: What will your role be?

A: The details aren’t nailed down, but in broad terms I’ve proposed to Microsoft that I continue to function pretty much as I do now. That means blogging, podcasting, and screencasting on topics that I think are interesting and important; it means doing the kinds of lightweight and agile R&D that I’ve always done; and it means brokering connections among people, software, information, and ideas — again, as I’ve always done.

NICE! I can’t think of a better person on this planet to represent MSFT in this role; a Robert Scoble-like personality and capability, with the added bonus of actually being able to write code! (and write it well!!!)

So why commit such an evil and horrible sin by joining the “Eveel Empire”?

Jon continues,

XML has changed the Web dramatically over the last decade, though not at all as originally planned. XQuery, though, is gathering steam to drive a new round of potentially invigorating changes, even as Ajax heads down the JSON path.

Believe it or not, the Viberavetions Project is beginning to gear up with the release of several sub-projects with a primary focus of feeding the collaboration mechanism for musicians. More on that in the coming weeks.

In the mean time, Sylvain has pulled together a *FANTASTIC* overview of a report released by the good folks @ OpenBusiness.cc in regards to Creative Commons and copyright perception in the UK,

Sylvain Hellegouarch : Creative Commons and copyright perception in the UK

Interestingly what comes out of the survey showed that the main reason for those artists to use CC licenses was primarly practical but also a powerful tool to market their work by surfing the network of people claiming to use a CC license. As the report shows the use is not really for political or philisophical beliefs that the System is wrong and the CC movement could change it. However considering this movement has started only five years ago I would acknowledge that this could change in the next five years.

Ready to get things started?

KICK IT!

Here’s the final day of my stream-of-conciousness blog on the 2006 XML Conference in Boston.

About a year ago I wrote a blog post called Tagging Hall of Shame: Amazon. It pointed out that tagging books as “good” and “for dad” was not very helpful.

Well I am pretty impressed at this new step Amazon has taken. Amazon is running Amazon Mechanical Turk, a project in “artificial artificial intelligence.” Users (or “turkers”) perform small tasks for small pay. The tasks, called HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), pay from 1 cent for answering simple questions to several dollars for things like transcribing podcasts. Anyone can make a HIT and anyone can sign up to answer them.

I’ve found this to be a profitable thing to do while sitting in front of the TV. Today, I ran into a task put forward by Amazon. They pay $0.01 for a user to look at a tag and a book, say if the tag is relavent or not, and (if the turker likes) suggest other tags. When I saw this, nearly 1,000 items were available to be checked.

This is a great idea! I will very happily take $0.01 to say “gift” is a bad tag. It’s a quick easy way to get rid of those bad tags, develop new ones, and get them community checked for a relatively low cost. If this improves the search on Amazon because tags become effective, then I think the very small investment will really pay off. Kudos to Amazon for creating mTurk and for using it to do this.

CLARIFICATION: Some commenters have been arguing that personal tags are useful. I agree. I mean - Duh. However, I am writing exclusively about collaborative tagging. Amazon was originally put into my hall of shame for sharing personal tags with the idea of using them for collaborative tagging. A review of the tags that were available on Amazon before showed they were all very personal, and thus completely useless in the collaborative sense. Note also that I’m not saying that I even believe collaborative tagging will work in the ideal world, but it certainly won’t work if all I see are other people’s personal notes.

I’d love to hear your comments on the evolution of collaborative tagging (including if you think it will even work), or on mTurk.

Here’s the continuation of my stream-of-consciousness blog on the 2006 XML Conference in Boston. The conference is running
four concurrent tracks: Publishing, Enterprise, Web, and Hands-On. I’ll
be jumping around between different tracks and trying to give a quick
summary of each session.

[Update: Eric van der Vlist wrote about the panel described below]

XML 2006 started with a reminder of SGML 1996, where eleven brave people suggested a major simplification of SGML intended to make it usable on the Web, which became XML. I think they hoped to take over the Web specifically more than has actually happened, but it’s clearly made its way to the world. Jon Bosak, chair of that group, will be closing the conference with reflections on the past decade.

[Update: Bob DuCharme is also blogging here. And Robin Hastings. Some more stuff here by David Megginson. Simon did a summary, and here’s my second day. Found another more voluminous blogging at Palimpsest]

[Update2: A list of all the blogging links is here]
Here’s my stream-of-consciousness blog on the 2006 XML Conference in Boston. The conference is running
four concurrent tracks: Publishing, Enterprise, Web, and Hands-On. I’ll
be jumping around between different tracks and trying to give a quick
summary of each session.

They’re making a big deal of the 10 year anniversary of the SGML 1996
Conference when the original 27 pages first outlining of XML, developed
over 11 weeks by 11 people, who “left their corporate identities at the
door.”(Jon Bosak). Bosak, the original working group chair, is also doing the final session.

Amazon Web Services Developer Connection : Newsletter #20

What’s that tune? A Mash-up of 3 AWS Services…

Check out this .NET application built using C# and WinForms that uses three of our web services: Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon S3, and Amazon ECS. The application records audio from a user’s microphone, saves the audio to Amazon S3, creates a HIT in Amazon Mechanical Turk that asks for the worker to name the tune, then uses the HIT result to search for a related album on Amazon.com using Amazon ECS. Pick your favorite holiday tune, test drive the application, then re-use the code.

Access “What’s That Tune?”
Have a code sample you want to share? Submit it to the Resource Center by clicking on “Recommend your code” here.

The Semantic Web

Connecting people with data they might have interest in.

AmazonAWS

See: The Semantic Web.

Update:

The family analogy is an apt one: probably about 80% of my XPathing is pulling information from the current node’s children, and a comparable amount of time in my personal life is spent telling my son to get back into bed.

*GREAT* analogy from piers!

Update:

So give Goldfarb credit for his presentations of uhh.. 1991 with the input/transform/output diagrams on them…

Done. :)

[Original Post]

… and ends with…

How would you easily explain the concept of the Semantic Web to someone with basic technical knowledge? Re-factoring something I said in a blog a while ago, I’ve now edited it down to this:

• Web 1.0 was about connecting-up documents.
• Web 2.0 is about connecting-up people.
• The Semantic Web is about connecting-up data.

So, it’s a bit basic, but I think that gets the premise across. I’d be interested to hear any suggestions you have for other easy explanations. Similarly, the Semantic Web really needs a re-brand, doesn’t it? Maybe if it sounded cooler or less techy, people wouldn’t be so scared of it. What would you call it?

iWeb? Web 3000? Ultra-web? Ultra-Intra-Web? The Dark Web? (After all, it’s a bit like dark matter, and is intended to be the invisible glue that makes up the majority of the mass of the web). Maybe we should bring the word ‘cyber’ back into fashion, I kinda miss it… Cyberdata! No, on second thoughts… Anyone have any bright ideas!?