Alex Barnett's blog : Web 2.0

Moving my blog

alexbarn — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 21:38:00 GMT

OK, so I moved my new Alex Barnett blog to here for a number of reasons, explained here at my, er, new blog.

Sir Tim: Calm Down 2.0

alexbarn — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 05:20:00 GMT

This is what The Register said Sir TBL said about Web 2.0:

"You should thank Tim Berners-Lee. Not just for giving us the web, but for articulating what's gone wrong in the lexicon and thinking of Silicon Valley. Hopefully, his standing in the web community will serve as a rallying cry for right-thinking individuals and true visionaries, and mean Web 2.0 is put in its proper context."

This is what Sir TBL actually said in the IBM podcast:

"LANINGHAM: You know, with Web 2.0, a common explanation out there is Web 1.0 was about connecting computers and making information available; and Web 2 is about connecting people and facilitating new kinds of collaboration. Is that how you see Web 2.0?

BERNERS-LEE: Totally not. Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.

And in fact, you know, this Web 2.0, quote, it means using the standards which have been produced by all these people working on Web 1.0. It means using the document object model, it means for HTML and SVG and so on, it's using HTTP, so it's building stuff using the Web standards, plus Java script of course.

So Web 2.0 for some people it means moving some of the thinking client side so making it more immediate, but the idea of the Web as interaction between people is really what the Web is. That was what it was designed to be as a collaborative space where people can interact.

Now, I really like the idea of people building things in hypertext, the sort of a common hypertext space to explain what the common understanding is and thus capturing all the ideas which led to a given position. I think that's really important. And I think that blogs and wikis are two things which are fun, I think they've taken off partly because they do a lot of the management of the navigation for you and allow you to add content yourself.

But I think there will be a whole lot more things like that to come, different sorts of ways in which people will be able to work together.

The semantic wikis are very interesting. These are wikis in which people can add data and then that data can then be surfaced and sliced and diced using all kinds of different semantic Web tools, so that's why it's exciting the way people, things are going, but I think there are lots of new things in that vein that we have yet to invent."

This is what Emily Turrettini over at Smart Mobs said The Register said that Sir TBL said:

"Berners-Lee has dismissed Web 2.0 as useless jargon nobody can explain and a set of technology that tries to achieve exactly the same thing as "Web 1.0." The Register reports"

This is what Voidstar said Smart Mobs said The Register said that Sir TBL said:

"pointing out that Web 2.0 is just Web 1.0 with pastel colours and a style sheet"

Did someone say 'echo chamber' or Chinese whispers?

Windows Live QnA service - public beta

alexbarn — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 19:43:00 GMT

Congrats to Betsy and the team: the Windows Live QnA service is now in public beta.

I've been on the private beta for a little while and turned to it for help for a couple of things when I got stuck. One example was asking for good seafood restaurants in Seattle. I tried out one of the recommendations and was not let down...it works!

Update: TechCrunch picks this up.

Tag, Tags, Tagging, Categorization, Classification and Laziness

alexbarn — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 05:37:00 GMT

Clearly a classic post on the topic of tagging, but I've not seen it before: A cognitive analysis of tagging (or how the lower cognitive cost of tagging makes it popular), by Rashmi Sinha:

"The rapid growth of tagging in the last year is testament to how easy and enjoyable people find the tagging process. The question is how to explain it at the cognitive level. In search for a cognitive explanation of tagging, I went back to my dusty cognitive psychology textbooks. This is what I learnt."

It's a good little read. Conclusion ('cause you're lazy):

"To conclude, the beauty of tagging is that it taps into an existing cognitive process without adding add much cognitive cost. At the cognitive level, people already make local, conceptual observations. Tagging decouples these conceptual observations from concerns about the overall categorical scheme. The challenge for tagging systems is to then do what the brain does - intelligent computation to make sense of these local observations, and an efficient, predictable way to ensure findability."

As it happens 1,272 people, lazily it appears, already tagged this since Sept 2005.

Found via my del.icio.us/inbox, where I subscribe to the tag 'tagging'.

Note: the 1,272 taggers who thus far tagged this post have collectively agreed that 'tagging' is the best category for this post, not 'tag', nor 'tags', nor 'classification'.

analysis article blog brain classification cognition cognitive del.icio.us design folksonomies folksonomy metadata psychology research science social socialsoftware tag tagging tags taxonomy toread usability web web2.0

Also note: The tag 'categories' or any variation thereof is entirely missing from the posts tagcloud, even though the article (post) uses the word 'categories' and its variations are used 40 times in its text.

Also, also note: The word 'tag' and its variations are used 30 times, including twice in the title.

For other posts of mine ~~categorized~~ tagged 'tagging' (by me), ~~tag~~ click here (note dest.url ;-)

Update (a few minutes later): Quick manual collaborative algorithmic, artificial, artifical intelligence results:

Taglocity 1.0 for Outlook

alexbarn — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 02:29:00 GMT

I blogged about a tagging tool for Outlook 2003, Taglocity, when it went to beta earlier this year.

Well, the team has released Taglocity 1.0! Congratulations to David and his team.

It's cool. Check out Mike Gunderloy's review of the beta and a Taglocity demo screencast.

Programming Language Trends and more

alexbarn — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 06:58:00 GMT

Tim O'Reilly's series of posts on book sales are giving up lots of interesting data and trends from the Nielsen Bookscan's top 3,000 Computer Books report (means: all publishers not just O'Reilly sales, but US sales only).

Yesterday's post was no different in terms of juicy data. This is the 3-year programming language market share trend (my bold):

"I wrote yesterday about the rise of Ruby and Javascript, driven by the move towards Web 2.0 applications. Also worthy of note in these graphs is the long, slow decline of Java and C/C++, and the continuing rise in market share of C#. You can see how Ruby's sharp ascent follows the introduction of Rails, and that PHP's fortunes reversed before book sales showed that web developers in search of rapid development languages moved over to RoR (and Microsoft's ASP.Net suite of technologies.)"

From 'ASP.NET on a Roll' (Q106 vs. Q105 comparison):

"With all of the buzz about Ruby on Rails and AJAX, not a lot of people have noticed that Microsoft is making another really good run at the web development space. Based on book sales data, it looks like ASP.Net 2.0 is on fire, with ASP-related book sales up 53% since the same period a year ago, versus PHP, down 3%, and JSP, down 25%."

Of course, this data isn't the whole truth (for one thing: it's US only) and there are many more market research data points (vendor sales numbers, independent research, etc) to refer to other than this, but books sales data provides a very good indictor of trends to watch out for.

Here's some more highlights worth, er, highlighting:

From State of the Computer Book Market, Q206, Part 2: Category Winners and Losers

C# book sales continues to gain on Java, with a 49% unit sales increase compared to Java's 10% decrease.
Microsoft's new release of SQL Server has continued to drive significant book sales, with that market up 86%.
ASP.Net is also on a roll, with book sales up 61%.
Books on SQL continue to show strong growth, showing the increased importance of databases in today's applications.

Given my role in the Data Programmability team, the Database roll up numbers of particular interest to me (as is the Ruby / ASP.NET / PHP data above):

"Looking at the Database rollup, we again see the strength of SQL Server, the decline of Oracle book sales, and that while MySQL is still a much larger category than Postgres, Postgres is showing some curious strength"

From State of the Computer Book Market, Part 2 covering Q106 vs. Q105 data:

"The SQL server book market is now more than twice the size of the Oracle book market, 50% larger than the MySQL book market, and growing faster than either of them. In fact, both the Oracle and MySQL book markets shrank versus the same period a year ago, with Oracle feeling more of the pain, off 9% to MySQL's negative 2%. DB2 is even worse off, with book sales down 14%."

For much more of this type of info, check out a list of Tim's posts tagged 'Hard_Numbers'

(Note to Tim: apologies for copying large chunks here - but it's all too good not to! ;-)

What is Web 2.0?

alexbarn — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 07:57:00 GMT

Assaf @ Supr.c.ilio.us has the answers.

If you like microformats and RSS you will love this.

alexbarn — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 02:04:00 GMT

If you like microformats and / or RSS you'll love it.

If you don't know about microformats and / or RSS you need to watch it.

Channel9 interviews Matt Augustine and Paresh Suthar about Live Clipboard and Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE).

Syndicated search engines broken - Part II

alexbarn — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 08:34:00 GMT

A few days ago I grumbled at the poor state of the search engines specializing in syndicated (RSS'd or Atomized) content.

Today, ~~Michael~~ Marshall Patrick is enthusiastically supporting a proposed standard by Bloglines that is trying to solve an apparent problem:

"“Everything you blog goes on your permanent record!” How many times have we heard that lately? From employment to family situations, many people have been frustrated to find out that things they intended to write for a personal audience is now discoverable by anyone in the world via search engines.

From the Bloglines proposal:

"As a result, we are proposing (and have implemented) an RSS and ATOM extension that allows publishers to indicate the distribution restrictions of a feed. Setting the access restriction to 'deny' will indicate the feed should not be re-distributed. In a nutshell, the proposal"

I respectfully disagree with ~~Michael's~~ Marshall's view here, and a user of these services, can not support the proposal, for three reasons:

1. Keeping stuff out of participating engines wouldn't ensure leakage. As one commenter on the quoted post has already pointed out (by '007') how do you avoid the repost scenario? If you really need to sneak stuff under the radar (to avoid getting fired???), use something other than public blogsite - you will be found. Another reason: why wouldn't some service providers show up that wouldn't adhere to the rules that ensure they catch the slime? (I could imagine 'Slimesearch'...). Private networks - ok = group IM, SSL'd, groups, etc (even company email considered leaky) - but just don't use inherently public networks for this kind of stuff.

2. A common issue with search results is spam. Spammers won't use the tag. I realize this isn't a stated goal of the proposal, but worth pointing out, I think.

3. IMHO, these guys (Bloglines, Technorati, etc) should be focussed on trying to solve the precisely reverse of the 'problem' they are trying to solve here with an access:restriction' tag - they should be trying to get more complete indexes, not the other way around.

Overall, this syndicated content search space is broken. The priorities seem wrong here - I don't see this step getting us any closer to getting better services when there are other much more fundamental issues that need solving.

Syndicated content search - still broken

alexbarn — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 08:34:00 GMT

For a few months now, Randy Charles Morin has been tracking and grading the performance of search engines specializing in syndicated (RSS'd or Atomized) content.

These search tools can be invaluable when you are trying to keep track of what customers, partners, influencers and press are saying about your product.

Now, having customers use your feedback systems is great and all very well, but you don't get the whole picture, no matter how convenient these might be to use. From a product development / design point of view, listening to what your customers are saying about your existing and planned products requires the effort to reach out and listen to them in the places where they are talking.

Increasingly, 'those places' are blogs. 35m+ of them depending on who's numbers you believe. Needles in haystacks, and all that...

This where these tools come in and why they can be so valuable.

From reading through Randy's research and from my own personal experience I can only conclude that there is still plenty of room for improvement required from these types of syndicated content search service providers. In fact, I'd say there is still even room for a new player (or players) to enter and dominate this space.

The engines Randy has been tracking are:

Blogdigger
Bloglines
Blogpulse
Google Blogsearch
Feedster
Pubsub
Icerocket
Technorati.

For the last few months I've been running the same query ("ado.net") on these engines. The frustrating thing is that one week Icerocket might do better than Google's Blogsearch. Then the next week Technorati seems best. And the next week Bloglines. Without any of these making significant (apparent) improvements overall. This space is broken.

It means that in order for me to track what I want to, I have to track a number of search results (which I subscribe to) in order to get the complete picture. Lots of de-dupping. And yet there seems to be no rhyme nor reason for all this variation in performance.

This isn't a short term phenomenon. I've tried them all myself (some for over two years +) in a number of contexts, and like Randy, I've found their results variable at best, but sadly they perform mostly poorly, most of the time.

So what is 'performance' is this space? Performance attributes I consider high priority (listed in order of priority) are:

Completeness / size of index
Time taken for items (from publishing) to be included within index (i.e. minutes, not days)
Consistency of service performance over time
Order results by content type (e.g. blogs, 'news', forums)
Order results by date and relevancy
Low spam pollution

You can judge for yourself - here are the following results for "ado.net":

Blogdigger - http://blogdigger.com/search?q=%22ado.net%22&sortby=date
Bloglines - http://www.bloglines.com/search?q=%22ado.net%22&ql=en&s=f&pop=l&news=m
Blogpulse - http://www.blogpulse.com/search?query=ado.net&offset=0&operator=&start_date=&end_date=&sort=&max_results=
Google Blogsearch - http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=%22ado.net%22&scoring=d
Feedster - http://www.feedster.com/search/%22ado.net%22
Icerocket.com - http://blogs.icerocket.com/search?q=%22ado.net%22
Technorati - http://www.technorati.com/search/%22ado.net%22

As you can see, most of the results are all over the shop. Track them for a few days and weeks and you'll see the pattern - broken, broken, broken.

Today, it seems Bloglines provided the best results - today. Tomorrow? Who knows...Please, someone win here.

I have invites for Windows Live QnA...

alexbarn — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 06:13:00 GMT

Well, lucky me and lucky you.

Betsy, Krista and co have been good enough to let me have some invites to give away for the Windows Live QnA Beta (hidden behind a beta door right now)

If you’ve not heard of this service, check out this summary by TechCrunch.

Now, I’ve only got a few, so first come first serve!

~~UPDATE - 7/22 - 12:37 PM PT - These are now gone!!~~

~~UPDATE - 7/22 - 11:08 PM PT~~ ~~- I have my mits on 10 more, so keep them coming...~~

UPDATE - 7/24 - 11:12 PM PT - These are now gone!!

Here’s what to do:

Head over to my contact form and send me a mail...

Send me:

First name
Surname
You email address (that is associated with Passport ideally, but not necessary)
~~a bottle of champagne for me a bottle of single malt for Betsy~~

You’ll then get an email from the team providing you with instructions.

First 10 emails with info I need get an invite. Hurry!!!!

~~I'll update this post once they are gone.~~ ~~UPDATE - 7/22 - 12:37 PM PT - These are now gone!!~~

UPDATE - 7/22 - 11:08 PM PT - I have my mits on 10 more, so keep them coming...

UPDATE - 7/24 - 11:12 PM PT - These are now gone!!

Let's REST!

alexbarn — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 03:11:00 GMT

A bunch of links to RESTful resources I've collated here and there - should be a good starting point to get a handle on some of the basics of REST, with links to example APIs / documentation as well as some posts ReprESenTative of the discussion in this space, plus some bonus randomly related stuff (rss). If you see some obvious holes here (and there are), let me know....

REST.

Representational State Transfer represents an architectural style for building distributed applications.

or

Really Extremely Simple Transfer. :-P

Intro to REST

Roy Fielding - Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures, Chapter 5
Ryan Tomayko - How I explained REST to my wife
Wikipedia - REST
~~Sam Ruby~~ Joe Gregorio: How to Create a REST Protocol

To REST or not to REST

REST and Web Services: The ZapThink Take ZapFlash

"In many ways, however, the debate about Web Services and REST is as pointless as arguing whether a hammer or a screwdriver is a better tool."

Paul Prescod: on REST - Second Generation of Web Services
Don Box: SOAP vs. REST
Dion Hinchliffe: Creating Open Services That Last (And Anyone Can Use)
Danny Ayers - Is REST too complicated?
Ryan Tomayko - The Highs and Lows of REST

REST APIs, examples, documentation and bits

Random, but related, RESTful thoughts:

John Udell - Amazon's pragmatic approach to metered infrastructure

"SQS is a Web-based queue to which you post messages and from which you read them back -- without worrying about pesky details such as scale, concurrency, reliability, or guaranteed delivery."

Tim O'Reilly - A Week in the Valley: GData

"The big point for me was that GData is just Atom/RSS for reading, Atom Publishing for writing, and A9 stored queries for searching."

Optimistic concurrency (versioning) (We're not talking about dating here....Google Data APIs Protocol)
sqlREST and 15 minutes Guide to sqlREST
Don Box: HTTP, XML, REST and $100 -
Popular REST tagged articles in Del.icio.us

Using the Flickr API with .NET

alexbarn — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 10:45:00 GMT

MSDN's Coding4Fun has a good intro article on playing with the Flickr API using Flickr.Net API library:

"the actual mechanics of communicating with Flickr are relatively simple. The hard part is coming up with the idea for a groovy new application."

For inspiration, have play with 'the best 10 Flickr mashups', (my favorites are Tagnautica and flickrGraph), or have a browse through ProgrammableWeb's comprehensive listing of Flickr mashups.

A crack in this fine social scene?

alexbarn — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 08:17:00 GMT

John Udell has raised a point triggered by the Share Your OPML (SYO) OPML experiment that I've not even come close to thinking about regarding the 'my data' meme.

"I presume there is no longer any argument about data export. If I contribute to blip or mefeedia or dabble, I'll expect to be able to easily get out what I put in -- or else I'll go somewhere that does ensure simple, high-fidelity export."

OK, got that...

"But I also want to extract and creatively reuse the amalgam of my contributions and other people's contributions, within and across these services. That's much trickier. The essential creative act performed by these services is, again, the creation of a community of contributors."

Yeah, yeah, got that too...but what's the point???

"How these services respect the creative rights of their contributors, while at the same time asserting their own creative rights, is a thorny question indeed."

Ah, yes. I hadn't thought about that. Or have I chosen not to? But the more I do, the more my brain slushes and mushes. Micro-drm? Nooo!

Update:

Shortly after posting this, I saw this post by Jason Calacanis (and this by Richard). I think my post title could just as well apply to this 'buy out' idea too.

PLOJ or POJ?

alexbarn — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 04:21:00 GMT

In the age of Ajax this and Ajax that, just remember - for some things, plain old Javascript (PLOJ) may be all you really need. Or is it POJ?