Archive for the ‘The Webs’ Category

How to add semantics to content? embed it in the tools

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

Through reading an interesting post by Chris Dixon titled "To make smarter systems, it's all about the data", I came across another interesting link in one of the comments - the google research blog post on "The unreasonable effectiveness of data".

The post links to a PDF document written by three Google researchers, and covers a subject I've been experimenting with a lot lately - the semantic extraction of data.
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Chrome is out. Google has my vote

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

So Google Chrome was unleashed on the unsuspecting public yesterday with very little preceding hype. It enters a market that has thus far has had only two major players - Mozilla and Microsoft. Backed by marketing power that is unrivaled in the online world, it is strongly positioned to take both on (and especially Microsoft).

A web browser built on the webkit engine (same as Safari), Chrome offers a simple UI and extensive support for web technologies. Having used it for a couple of days now, it is striking to me how obvious it is that Google is a web company - in bold contrast to another software giant currently pushing for their next-gen browser.

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A web 2.0 business model can work, and work well

Saturday, August 23rd, 2008

The term web 2.0 has been frequently misused and misunderstood, however it is more than a buzz word - it defines a very real phenomenon in which user generated content can be the driving force behind an online site / service.

Some very well known and successful online entities can be considered as such - Wikipedia in which users contribute knowledge, Digg in which users help others find interesting articles by voting and facebook which is the current golden standard for social networking (in which user generated content - UGC - is a given).
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Comet is coming

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

In a recent article in which I wrote about the HTML 5 draft, I mentioned a server notifications API and hinted that it will standardize a technique known as Comet. So what is Comet anyway?

Comet is an event driven communication scheme with between a web-browser and a web-server. In the normal flow of an http request, a web server can not initiate communications with the client (the web browser) - it can only respond to requests. Comet declares a reversal of roles, in which the server can notify the client whenever new data is available. This technique is very useful in a constantly changing environment such as stock prices or online messaging (chat).
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The life expectancy of IE6

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

Internet Explorer 6 (abbr. IE6) is the biggest thorne in a web developer's behind at current times. This legacy browser, released almost 7 years ago, is known for its multitude of offenses on security and standards compliance and still has a sizeable user base to this day. Its market share makes it impossible for us developers to ignore it still, despite how much we would want to do just that.
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