Author: Gautham Pai

About me

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World Wide Web

Gmail forwarding and service interoperability – an interesting observation

Ever seen the Gmail forwarding feature? Gmail helps you in forwarding your mails from one account automatically to another account.

It just occured to me (and would occur to any hacker), what if I forward mails to some account and then from that account forward it back to this?

Guess what? Nothing happens! Gmail has taken care of that.

We had a similar problem when we were discussing about service interoperability in Ananyeah. I guess it is easier to take care of this in Gmail as it is only mail. What if there are other services?

Let me give you an example for other services. It is possible to subscribe to a blog and get the feed delivered in our reader. Let us call the first reader, Reader1. Now assume, Reader1 provides the option of creating an RSS out of it. If I subscribe to this RSS using another feed reader, Reader2 and then subscribe to their RSS using the Reader1, what is bound to happen? Time to check out and start experimenting. (And if you did not understand this concept, don't worry. You will hear about it soon.)

Categories
My Updates

Nokia 6030 – my new cell phone


I bought a new cell phone yesterday. It's a Nokia 6030.

Categories
Technology

Brain pattern

Your Brain's Pattern

You have a dreamy mind, full of fancy and fantasy.
You have the ability to stay forever entertained with your thoughts.
People may say you're hard to read, but that's because you're so internally focused.
But when you do share what you're thinking, people are impressed with your imagination.

Categories
My Updates

And now an analysis about my blog


You Are a Pundit Blogger!

Your blog is smart, insightful, and always a quality read.
Truly appreciated by many, surpassed by only a few.

Categories
Technology

And now copyrights are fighting with technical evolution

Pardon me for the title. I am not on either side of the balance. Let the law decide who is right and who is wrong. But this one really seems interesting.

This is a continuation of the blog Patents – A boon or a bane, that I wrote recently. And this time it is to do with Copyrights. Without delaying any further let me tell you what I am talking about.

I am talking about the Google Print lawsuit and all the hoopla around it. Google wants to digitize all the books in 3 major libraries of the world and many publishers don't want that to happen.

The ones on Google's side say it helps people in easily searching for collections. You can search for each and every word in each and every page of each and every book that the library has. Seems great for a techie, but the ones against Google say, “It is against the law. Google cannot copyright anything without the prior permission of the publishers. If Google can do it to books, it can then do it to movies, audio and whatever it wants!”

And there is another take of the whole story. What is Google trying to do? Is it trying to grab the data (may be personal) of each and every person? (That is what sounds like the – Aim of Google). How will you feel if someone owns all your data? Is Google a silent killer? (At present it does not seem like one and this seems like a merciless extension of the Google story).

Let's wait and watch.

Categories
World Wide Web

Key-Value Tagging

The act of tagging consists of labelling objects with keywords [Wikipedia].
Tagging, the way it works now, is attaching separate keywords with
objects. Although we might attach multiple keywords with the same
object, the words are independent of each other (Don't argue that the
words are related in the sense of tag clusters. Let me get to the
point).

In its present form, tagging no wonder has created a revolution. But
would it not be more useful if tagging were in the form of key-value
pairs as well. I should have an option of either tagging objects with
single words (as it works now), or with key-value pairs.

How would this help? I had written about Problems
with Podcasts sometime back. Now consider a model in which I
could not only have skip-points which mention where a particular topic
starts, but also what these topics are and my own comments on it.

If you compare a single podcast to a set of blog entries, 'key-value'
tagging could be compared to comments to a single blog entry. It would
look somewhat like this:

<skippoint>
 <time>0.24.29</time>
 <comment>This is where the speaker talks about Google's WebOS initiative.</comment>
</skippoint>

Although this can be done using XML so easily, an end user would not
like writing XML code. So a simple interface could be provided where
the user writes the time and the comment and this is clubbed with the
podcast and can be accessed anywhere on the web. Further, the user
could add any information, for example, the name of the speaker
(example, speaker=Gautham) or the location where the podcast was
created (example, location=Bangalore).

And just like tags, nothing is pre-defined. The user can add just about
any 'key-value' tags to any object. Again, as I keep mentioning, RDF
has solutions to these. But 'Keep It Stupidly Simple' is how the web
works. So be it. 🙂

I have been talking about Tag evolution here.

Categories
World Wide Web

Web 2.0 now… What next? Ananyeah?

Everyone is talking about Web 2.0. And almost everyone who sees it, seems to be a big fan of it.

Now let me tell you something that the GAGS have hidden from you all these days…

It is something that we wanted to base our 'company' on!

The idea is something that Web 2.0 is trying to achieve, but is not even close. In simple terms it is interoperability of end user services. Web 2.0 in its present form is just providing integration of services [See Live.com for example]. Live.com is talking about providing mail, messenger, gadgets and obviously an RSS feed aggregator. It is basically talking about integration.

Now put in some more spice and bring in the magic word “interoperability”. What we get is services talking to each other. For example, your mail service starts talking to your blog. Or your messenger starts talking to your feed aggregator. Now what do you get with such an interoperability? Well, it is limited only by our imagination!

The way this would work is by having rules defined to make services interact with each other. These rules would initially look very similar to the “Matches”->”Do this” found in Gmail. But that is just the beginning.

For a starter let me give you an example. You could define some rule, which says “When I am in office, I don't want my friends to see me online”. And lo, your messenger gets what you say! Or you could say, “Whatever offline messages my friends leave in my messenger should be immediately mailed to me”.

Web 3.0 is considered to be OS over the web and if you want more flexibility, you can even think of programming over the web. That is a different story all together!

And for Ananyeah, this is just the beginning. The vision of Ananyeah is something that will take quite some time to achieve.

Categories
World Wide Web

Tag evolution

Tagging has been one of my recent interest fields. The concept of attaching words with objects exposes a lot of possibilities, although it is quite simple and straightforward.

While there are people who say that tagging is not useful/time consuming [1] [2], I feel this is just the beginning in information/knowledge management. I feel there should be one solution that fits all. If you don't like tagging don't tag. If you want tagging use it. And if you want more than that, have more (this is yet to come, but there are people working on this).

There are many other tools/technologies being developed in the semantic world that help this cause, but their 'complexity' has resulted in lesser adoption. So the golden rule seems like 'If it is for the web, KISS'.

Tagging in its present form has a lot of cons and so it is evolving naturally. Here is my first snapshot of the latest developments in this field.

Tag clouds
– http://del.icio.us/tag/
– http://cloudalicio.us/tagcloud.php?url=http://www.livejournal.com/
I-Tags
– http://www.dvguru.com/2005/10/29/itags-a-new-idea-in-tagging-media/
Tag clusters
– Explanation of flickr clusters [1] [2]
– http://flickr.com/photos/tags/chip/clusters/
– http://flickr.com/photos/tags/lion/clusters/
Tag tagging
– http://atomiq.org/archives/2005/10/tagging_tags_to_make_synonyms.html
– http://tagtagger.com/
Tagwebs
– http://www.blumpy.org/tagwebs/
Tagcamp
– http://tagcamp.org/
About the concept of tagging
– http://blog.simpy.com/blojsom/blog/2005/08/11/Categories_vs_Keywords_vs_Labels_vs_Tags.html
– http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/HierarchyVersusFacetsVersusTags
– http://www.rashmisinha.com/archives/05_09/tagging-cognitive.html
– http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/beyond_cardsorting_freelisting_methods_to_explore_user_categorizations.php
Tools built using tags
– http://tagcentral.net/

Categories
Technology

Patents – a boon or a bane?

Recently someone claimed that XML is something that they have patented [News story]. A similar thing happened with JPEG patent [News story].

And then a survey was conducted by AAAS on A Descriptive Analysis of a Pilot Survey on the Effects of Patenting on Science. This survey has reported that 28% of the respondents have abandoned their research projects because of complex licensing negotiations. (How sad!)

There are 2 groups of people: one who support patents and ones who don't. The ones who support patents say that it is good and patents in fact are responsible for innovation to happen. The reasons they give are:
* Patents mean that you disclose something safely and the government grants you exclusive rights over your idea, which means that either another company will have to pay you for the use of your idea or they cannot use it.
* Patents result in people thinking in different ways than one, so that results in innovation.

Both seem to be good observations. But the ones who don't support patents say that, it is in fact hindering innovation. Patents are being misused, especially in the software world [A software patent debate in Wikipedia]. Many basic things, some very obvious things are patented and being misused. For example, extending software functionality has been patented in various forms (although extending something to provide extended/enhanced functionality seems obvious).

My personal take on the issue is that patents in their present form clearly hinder innovation. Keeping the business interests of companies in view, patent procedure should be modified so that misuse does not occur. Or else, there will be people who patent just about anything and everything that they can.

I had recently written about someone who had patented the method of swinging a swing.
While this is not just one of them, there is a very interesting blog entry here, which describes how a person patented a wheel to emphasize the flaws in the patenting system.

Let me end by telling you another shocker: 1/5 of All Human Genes Have Been Patented. So, you have in your body genes that are owned as patents by someone else! 🙂

Categories
World Wide Web

A general update of many things

This blog entry has no specific title. I wish to talk about a lot of things here:

First and foremost, I have updated my website – ? / // / // `/ ? / /-/. It now reflects a lot of things and is dynamically updated based on RSS feeds. Thanks to RSS-to-Javascript for a cool utility.

From now on, all the items that I search (which I used to normally include in Khoj) will be reflected in my homepage.

All my comments that I make in a hazaar other web-sites will also be dynamically updated in my web-page. (Thanks to this blog entry for the cool hack.)

Let me tell you what this hack is all about:
You might be commenting in a number of other websites and you might wonder how I can club all these together and bring them in one place. This hack helps you do this.

This hack reminds me of the UNIX tooling concept, where you are given small tools and it is up to your creativity to join them together and do wonderful things. Semantic web and Web 2.0 revolution has just started and this is just a taste of it! You will see more of service-combinations in the near future.