Google revives wiki web publishing - more user-friendly and less customizable
March 4, 2008
Google continues to expand its Apps, adding a team web publishing tool to the bulk. Google had acquired JotSpot wiki service back in October 2006, and now, after 16 months, launched it as a new Google App, naming it Google Sites.
Michael Arrington writes on techcrunch.com “Google Sites looks absolutely nothing like Jotspot, other than the fact that both are hosted wikis. All of the structured data templates launched by Jotspot in July 2006 have been stripped out.”
The new Google App added user-friendliness but took away from functionality, lacking an application program interface (API), and having limited backward scalability, writes Juan Carlos Peres on arnnet.com.au, summarizing the mixed feelings incumbent Jotspot users have voiced.
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Flow-based search architecture promises flawless
February 24, 2008
Bill Burnham, an early beta-tester of a, what he calls, flow-based search engine, predicts bright future for SkyGrid and even its ability to predict it; the future, that is.
Mr. Burnham writes on alwayson.goingon.com that when the flow, filter, analyze search architecture correlates to the “observed movements in things like … stock markets, company sales […] it should ultimately be able to theoretically predict, with reasonable accuracy, many of those changes. Yes, I said it: SkyGrid and its new search architecture may ultimately predict the future,” the author writes.
Mr. Burnham contrasts the “flow/filter/analyze” SkyGrid architecture to the “traditional” “crawl, index, query,” and the verdict to the latter sounds pessimistic. He calls SkyGrid “a radical new architecture” which ‘holds the potential to actually predict the pattern and influence of idea/meme propagation throughout the internet and from there into the financial markets and beyond.” To support his claims, the author breaks the flow-based architecture description in a series of logical steps that he had, as an early beta-tester, identified.
As to the danger of having the new, “revolutionary” search architecture getting beaten by the sharks of the business, Google, for instance, Mr. Burnham has the answer to that. “Moving from a traditional crawl/index/query architecture to a flow/filter/analyze one is a decidedly non-trivial undertaking, one that would require an entire re-architecture of their core services and thus one highly unlikely to be made.”
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Nuclear power flashes light at tunnel end
February 20, 2008
It seems that nuclear power is gaining ground on the energy market, or so the report of a “London-based World Energy Council” maintains. James Kanter, writes on a Business of Green blog, how Europe seems to be investing its hopes into the fission reactors.
“Nuclear energy technology, its proponents say, already works and can supply a huge base load of power to keep national grids supplied,” Mr. Kanter writes. “By contrast, renewable sources of power like wind and solar are intermittent and less able — at least for the moment — to deliver the quantity of electricity needed to drive modern, industrial nations.”
Yet, the author writes, “[t]he question of how developed economies will keep the lights on without burning more fossil fuels seems unlikely to go away anytime soon.”
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Full-fetched mobile networking might stand out as commodity
February 20, 2008
Christian Kreutz comes up with the natural question, “When is the collaborative mobile web coming?” on his crisscrossed.net blog.
“It is clear that the mobile will sooner or later bypass the personal computer by Internet usage,” he writes. But, “will it work? By this I mean that I can interact with all sorts of tools via my mobile phone — edit a wiki, build a mashup, writing a blog post, and finally network more effectively.”
Of course, Mr. Kreutz also sees other shortcomings of the mobile networking. “There are still many limitation to the phone: the screen, keyboard, connection. However this is just a matter of time, and recent devices already make a difference. I wonder why so little has been developed in order to interact and collaborate via the mobile phone in the social web.”
Social annotation comes handy in online research
February 20, 2008
The “proverbial” quest for “needle in the haystack” finds application in social bookmarking, Rebecca seems to imply on wildapricot.com.
Without leaving out the benefits of social bookmarking, Rebecca wonders whether “the usual social bookmarking services really are the best possible tool for organizing that flood of online information, [when it] comes to online research and collaboration?”
“Diigo.com takes social bookmarking to a new level of usefulness,” Rebecca writes. “It’s all about social annotation. Highlight text or leave a note, right on the web page itself.”
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TV ads might lose the cash cow status in a move to online
February 20, 2008
Webisodes and advertorials seem to be winning ground from traditional channels of advertising distribution – TV, VOD, and set-top box menu. Or so shows the study released by The Association of National Advertisers and Forrester Research, comments Jackson West on Newteevee.com.
“For producers looking for sponsors,” Mr. West writes “87 percent of advertisers believe branded entertainment — from sponsor shout-outs to product placement — will play a stronger role.”
The poll also shows a decrease in budgets for TV ads. “[T]he stat that really jumped out at me claims that over half of the marketers polled said that they’d cut television advertising budgets by 12 percent once DVR penetration had reached half of American homes.
“Where’s that money going to go?” the author wonders.
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Knowledge simplified to extreme: Adages and Ignorance 101
February 19, 2008
Michael H. Goldhaber, expands on his blog on the various degrees of nowadays ignorance, disguised as broader knowledge. “We might view expanding knowledge as a yeasty sort of bread — the faster it expands, the bigger the holes all through it,” Goldhaber writes. The web, and services like Wikipedia and Google allow people to “know less and less about more and more.”
Goldhaber argues that of course the web, and new technologies, impact the way knowledge is understood, yet one “would have to select on the basis of prior knowledge, and the incompleteness and holes in that knowledge are precisely why neither of these tools can be assumed to provide [one] with effective knowledge, or effective lack of ignorance.”
“Instead, the best [online repositories and the web] can do is little more than make us more aware of the very breadth and depth of our ignorance. As they enlarge every day, our ignorance only grows,” the author writes.
Another impact of ever developing technology that Goldhaber points out lies in the very nature of tech development. Technicians have little interests in “maintaining mundane stuff,” thus helping the depth of knowledge, when, instead of having Internet, for instance, running seamlessly, they could be working on development of new things “that potentially could be of interest or even value to millions.”
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Intangibles add value to free Internet data, making it sellable
February 3, 2008
On his The Technium blog, Kevin Kelly reflects on the paradox of free-data, money-generating economy. He filters down and illustrates eight things that can be sold and add value to the free, and endlessly replicated, data in “our networked economy.”
Kevin calls them “generative values. A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured.”
“Consider “trust.” Trust cannot be copied. You can’t purchase it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else is equal, you’ll always prefer to deal with someone you can trust. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy saturated world.”
Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, Findability – these are the generatives that Kevin identifies and explains in an illustrative and trustful manner.
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Monarchic speaker presides in oversimplified PowerPoint chair
January 29, 2008
PowerPoint presentations lead to disrespecting the audience, writes Edward Tufte in his recent Wired article. The author complains about the oversimplification of data and the imposing emergence of the speaker over its audience. “Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking: Respect your audience,” the author writes.
Although PowerPoint presentations make the life of the speaker easier, and have a ready-to-grasp appearance, they transform the once coherent finished sentences into “infomercials” and “pitchable sales.” “PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play - very loud, very slow, and very simple,” Tufte writes.
The Blogosphere seems to show solidarity with Tufte on this issue. Lennox pointes out in his Blurgl Blog entry the similarity between numerous but, alas, less quality desktop publishing and the abundance of PowerPoint bulleted presentations. “The problem here […] is that using PowerPoint is likely to continue to be the easiest and quickest route for most people. And they don’t really care about how well you remember it or even if you had a good time,” the blogger writes.
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Gutenberg galaxy lags behind the shapeless web world
January 28, 2008
“Billions of web sources” sounds abstract. “Billions of stars” sounds like a universe. John Naughton points out in his Observer article how the Gutenberg universe evolves into a much less-known and difficult to envision world of web. The web transformed the processes of thinking and knowledge-gathering in a rather more dramatic way then even the Gutenberg bible did, Naughton writes.
Alan Moore reacts to the Observer article on his Communities Dominate Brands blog, and raises new challenges to the understanding of the digital world. “The point is,” Moore writes, “that our once familiar analogue world, which we understood, no longer exists in our digital universe.”
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