Category: World Wide Web

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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.

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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/

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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.

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World Wide Web

Khoj is back

A long time since I posted on Khoj. So here goes:

* Morfik – Google's Web OS initiative.
* Live – Windows/Office over the web? (That too Microsoft doing it!!!?).
* Blummy – Bookmarklets in one place.
* Clipmarks – Annotation tool for the web.
* Rollyo – Customized searches.
* Blinkbits – News, blogs, articles on favorite subjects.
* Stumble Upon – Great Firefox extension.
* Furl – A good bookmarking tool.

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World Wide Web

Semantic Web -> Single data source -> The future of search -> Google base

It has just been 2 weeks since me and were discussing, “What will happen to search engines like Google, when the concept of Single data source comes in”.

The concept of single data source would mean that no data would exist in static pages. All the data would reside in some storage unit and the pages would be created (if at all required) at run time based on the users' interests.

The existing search engines work on static pages. How well would this work in Web 2.0? Suppose the only pages that existed in the Internet were dynamic pages, what can the search engines index?

Enter Google… Enter Google Base.

I should have thought of it before. As some “Google 1 hour video” says, Google will never give up. They think way ahead of others!

People are spreading rumors about Google base. Here is what Slashdot has to say. The comments are interesting as well.

Google stepped in and made an official announcement too.

People at Google are not fools! They know that once the world moves towards Semantic web and Web 2.0, the amount of static content is going to be drastically reduced. This would mean that search engines cannot boast of having indexed 8 million (or billion) pages and if they do that, it would be considered seriously out-fashioned. (Google has in fact stopped putting that number in their home page; why they did this is a different story altogether!)

It seems like Google says, “How can we solve this problem? Ask people to send data to us? Yeah, why not?! Why should we go around and ask people for data? Let us ask them to publish it here. We want all info. We have the capacity to store it all here. Make your data dynamic and we'll instantly show the world the data that you created.” (You publish, we subscribe! Inverse-RSSing hah?)

Smart!!!

Now the question comes, whether they are really moving towards the semantic web or not. I think they are. I did not get a chance to see Google base as yet; assuming that all the rumors are spreading true facts about Google Base, Google is using a “name=value” kinda structure in Google base, which is a basic pre-requisite for facts representation in Semantic web.

This could mean that Google would then say, “Just publish it wherever you want in a definite syntax, and we will take it from there”. The only difference between this way of indexing and the present way is that in the new method, Google is able to interpret the content in a much better way as the data is structured.

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World Wide Web

Problems with Podcasts

Podcasts are the new buzz thing in the WWW. While RSS provides a mechanism to subscribe to textual feeds, Podcasts help in subscribing to audio/video content. So, instead of those small orange bars, you will now see colorful iTunes images or Odeo images.

However there is an inherent problem with podcasts. They are not searchable. A typical podcast, for example, Slashdot Review contains many different news items. In this example, Slashdot review contains all the important stories published in Slashdot in that day.

In RSS, suppose I am not interested in reading a particular news item, I can just skip and read the next one. But in Podcasts, since all the news items are aggregated together into a single audio feed, we are not able to skip certain items.

However considering the fact that Podcasts are still in their infancy, we can expect a solution soon.

One such solution is to extend the RSS type to include 'skip points' in the audio file. By 'skip point' I mean a description of which news item starts at what offset. The Podcast descriptor would contain not just the location of the file, but also the contents of the audio file. This would also require a special podcast player, which is able to read and understand the podcast descriptor. Of course, this needs to be standardized so that podcasts from all providers adhere to a single standard. Another advantage of this is that the descriptors could be searched in a standard way and podcast directories are able to show news items and the exact location of those news items in podcast files.

However one problem with this technique is that, it is not easy to make listeners listen to advertisements. It would be easy to skip advertisements if the listener is not interested in it. A second problem is that the accuracy of the podcast descriptor is in the hands of the provider.

Any other solution?

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World Wide Web

Analysis-Paralysis and Information overload

I had this interesting thought today.

How many times has it happened to you that you come up with a brilliant idea and then after a lot of research you realize that someone else is working on it and are way-ahead?

But what I felt is that if this continues, then you will always be in a state of Analysis-paralysis. With the problem of Information overload, this problem is more intense. (Wanna know more about Anti-patterns?)

It is better therefore, to get into ACTION! This is probably the reason why RSS is a huge success, so is tagging. While there are groups which design standards, there are groups which actually jump into the playground and implement things. Someday the 2 groups converge.

And why did I have this thought? Well, tagging is evolving and you will soon hear about “Tag clusters”. While you might feel that this is normal, the clusters are responsible for giving a context to tags. Now this is where Semantic web concepts help.

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World Wide Web

Web 2.0 – is it the way to go?

Web 2.0 is going to change the way we use the WWW. The entry of social networking tools, blogging etc is just the beginning. There is a lot more to come.

RIA is just coming up. AJAX and AFLAX and similar other technologies are emerging.

We are seeing a total transformation in the way we work. More and more applications are moving on to the web. But the more sensible approach would be to move everything down to the desktop and then provide total interoperability between them.

Some years down the line, browsers will disappear and you will know what I meant. 🙂

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World Wide Web

2 days, 2 experiences

September 2, 2005:

As usual, after my office work, I improve my gyan in my fields of interest. I am trying out the newly discovered Clusty and hit upon something very interesting.

This site is called KurzweilAI.net. It is not something that I can describe, but here are some things it deals with:

* The Singularity.
* Living Forever.
* Will Machines Become Conscious?
* How to Build a Brain.
* Visions of the Future.
…

If you are not already excited, then you better not continue reading this blog. But if you are, then I suggest you start off with this:

Chapter 1: The Evolution of Mind in the Twenty-First Century.

I am tempted to tell you what is in there, but let me not, or else you will criticize me for curbing your interests after you read it.

September 3, 2005:

Early morning, I find myself attending a workshop in Le Meridian hotel, Sankey Road. This seminar is about:
Model Driven and Service Oriented Development using Eclipse, J2EE and Web Services.

The workshop was lead by Shridhar Iyengar, a distinguished engineer from IBM. It was one of the best workshops I had ever attended. It was jointly organized by Rotary Bangalore West, IBM and OMG.

Why I specially liked is that, this workshop dealt with upcoming trends in Software development. It talked about concepts like Modeling, Metadata, Service Oriented Development, Model Driven Architecture, Reverse Engineering, Reusable Assets etc.

I come to office today and find more interesting stuff:
Microsoft suing Google and Ballmer using offensive words against Google, making comments like Google will disappear within 5 years etc! (Is this more because of desperation?!)

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World Wide Web

Clusty – Not Just Yet Another Clustering Meta Search Engine

It has been a long time since I did any khoj on the Internet. So here is one good one:

Clusty is a meta search engine. As the name suggests, Clusty clusters the search results. The best part of Clusty is that it is integrated with Wikipedia. So, you can just search for words in this search engine, see what the related categories are. In fact, it is not even necessary to open the pages. The results (especially in Wikipedia) itself give you what you are searching for.

If that is not enough, you have customization features, preview etc. There is also a Firefox toolbar for Clusty.