Category: World Wide Web

I don't know why have 192 feeds in my account. 90% of these feeds don't give me any useful information. If I don't touch it for a day, I get “RSS overloaded”!

Will be releasing my blogroll soon. Have a look at it.

Here are 101 reasons why you should use Mozilla rather than IE.

So should we wait till IE7 (Microsoft has that in news) for these and more things to come?

Found a good article on Semantic Web at Scientific American. A good introduction to Semantic Web I should say.

Another good and related article is Markup Languages and Ontologies.

I had written about Blog spamming some time back. I found many of my friends getting spammed through comments. Well, search leader Google has come up with a technique to prevent this.

Interesting read: Preventing comment spam from Google blog.

This is in connection with my previous blog entry. The reason why I use Yahoo tools is that all tools are available in one place. I can access my mail, address book, RSS feeds, notes, bookmarks, photos etc.

But when I saw Newsgator, it made me think again. Is it a good solution? True, many of these features are not used in a professional environment (you would probably be using some groupware like LotusNotes), but the point worth noting is that a single provider approach is usually not feasible.

But then it would mean, using multiple providers, each with a different user id, a different password. No wonder I have made a note, which reminds me which id's I have created online!

Now, how about a solution where you are able to make all these User_id and password entries in one place and then let the software take over? You get all the data in one place, although the data is coming from different providers. You are able to customize the front-end to suit your tastes.

Well, that is what an Integrated Work Environment is all about (according to me). You tell it what you want, where to get it from and how you want it to be displayed and it does it for you. Got the idea?

Does such a solution exist? I don't think so. Let me know if there is one.

Once upon a time during the beginning of this century man came up with a concept called blogs to convey his ideas and experiences. This concept survived for about 10 years. Now it is no more.
(This blog entry would never make it, for, in my opinion, 50 years from now, there would be nothing called blogs :))

I don't mean to say it would stop, but it would surely be replaced by something much better or there would never be a need for it and so would actually stop.

It does seem stale that you just write a set of words to query for a particular piece of information. For example, consider a query such as:

“Were there any video releases in the last one week that had XYZ(say an actor) as the lead role?”

Suppose we want to query this on normal search engines (what are abnormal search engines?!), we would probably write (disregarding useless advanced search options):

Search: “video release” XYZ -some-date-

Can we make it more specific? Probably we can, but the point is that there is no relationship between “video release” and XYZ whatsoever.

What could be a better query? How about using SQL-like queries to make our searches more specific?

It is possible and that is what semantic web, ontologies and a whole bag of technologies deal with. I am surely not going into the depths with these terminologies in this blog entry, but would like to hint on what modern searches could be like.

While modern English language interpretation would probably take a while to develop (we as SE's know the problem inherent in natural languages right?), it would surely be possible to develop a search engine which would be able to perform SQL-like queries.

For ex, it might be possible to put forth a query such as:

ALL(dom(video)) WHERE (video.leadrole=XYZ AND video.releasedate< -some-date- AND video.releaselocation=INDIA AND !video.actor=ABC) While whatever I have written above is directly off my mind (without any analysis whatsoever), it makes perfect sense right? It would mean: "Get me all the video releases which have XYZ as lead role and the release date is less than -some-date- and the release location is INDIA and it does not have ABC as an actor in it." The result? It might vary. While search engines might show a list of relevant sites as they do now, they could also take us directly to some particular relevant site as in "I am feeling lucky" of Google. (Then there would be more lucky people around 🙂 ) How's that? Amuzed? I surely am. And what's this going to use in the backend? XML of course. In fact there is an ontology language by name OWL, which is based on RDF, which is based on XML! And finally an update on the new search/RSS tools: A ticker from Yahoo – This ticker is able to present all the news feeds in box in your taskbar. So there is no need to view the RSS feeds in browsers. It is also able to show you the feeds present in your My-Yahoo page. Just let it tick…

I also hit upon another search engine called Mooter, which arranges the search results in clusters. Worth giving a try.

Eurekster – a group search engine, which learns from previously made queries.

And a last one in the list is, MyGoogleSearch, which is able to “guess” and extract keywords from a “similar” web-site. Not quite accurate, but worth giving a try.