This is where the Internet is heading, <a href=”tag-ttp://mypersonaltagmachine” rel=”tag” value=”this is what I wanna do” clickable=”no” priority=”high”>
Web 2.0 is just a stepping stone for the Semantic Web, allowing a smooth transition from the nascent HTML to machine readable data formats.
Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us
February 8th, 2007Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
January 18th, 2007I found this gem, while confronting myself on couple of topics.
Don’t read it like a prayer, nor like a morning chant; Read it like a war cry, or read it if you are ever confronted by fear or the lack of free thoughts confront your self.
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake.
– from Gitanjali, Offering of Songs, published in English in
1910, written by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore.
The rise of Ajax and the death of HTTP 404
January 3rd, 2007In classic web application models, the user-agent sits between the user and the the webserver — The user-agent does not apply any business logic other than rendering the pages. With the rise of Ajax, server-side logic is moving to client, so much so that the conventional 3-tier web model is being challenged in a way that the whole presentation layer and the controller is being touted to move to the browser.
So, what happens to the veritable 404 (and other related HTTP error codes and pages)? In classic web applications, if you have a “Page Not Found” situation, you as a user “see” the associated 404 page (e.g. http://www.google.com/non_existing_page.html). However, with Ajax, it’s the Ajax engine which is suppose to capture the 404. The user sees a “pretty message” while the Ajax engine (or the library running the engine) captures the 404. For example, in scriptaculous’ javascript library, on404 is the callback handler for HTTP 404s returned from the server.
Reproducing and annotating Jesse James Garrett’s diagram from the original Ajax article comparing classic and Ajax application model further crystallizes this thought that we need a redefined set of HTTP codes to support the Ajax application model.
Image modified without explicit permission of Adaptive Path. Are they cool?
Tags: Ajax, Web 2.0, scriptaculous
4 Traits of a successful Web2.0 Development Team
December 29th, 2006* Treat Programing languages like soda-water, adds new ingredient (as required) to flavor it up
* People who cannot focus on one thing, when they are alone and not writing code (both criteria inclusive)
* People who can produce at least half-a-dozen new ideas in a 60 minute conversation
* People who live on the edge, who can think ahead at least 2 years from today (but no more than 4-5 years, otherwise they are plain dreamers and not pragmatics)
Enterprise Tagging: How Sales & Marketing can exchange information
November 24th, 2006Tagging on the internet has allowed discovery of information from individual blog posts, to stories, to stock tickers, to photos, all of which has given rise to Folksonomy. Large corporations have Marketing departments spend millions of dollars in marketing material which never get shared with the sales department — event if they do, it’s after spending tonnes of money in building/buying some proprietary software to automate the process.
The reality is:
* Marketing is global, so are sales
* Marketing material is produced by different teams viz. marcom, product marketing, channel marketing, event people, etc. etc.
* Sales department sits in their own silo — esp. in large organization, Marketing material never reaches sales, even if it does, either it’s not timely or not in it’s entirety or maybe after spending thousands of dollars for a software to properly tag the proprietary meta-data
* Meta-data is a moving target — If a system is used for storing the attributes in an RDBMS — any change in meta-data either renders the content undiscoverable or leaves it with incorrect attributes.
Come tagging to the rescue, being flexible, tags can be defined on the go — however good idea to have some high-level tags; as in product names, business units, etc. The second level tags could be platforms, customer names, companies, etc. How the information can be exchanged? Marketing runs a blog with the single objective of exchanging information with sales (in this case say marketing collateral). Every post is tagged with the product the collateral belongs to, the second level tags being platform, industry vertical, target audience, etc. etc. Sales can receive this information by either subscribing to the feeds or by searching for the tags on the blogs. WordPress supports category level feeds.
Tags: Writable Intranet, Enterprise 2.0
Enterprise Tagging: How Sales & Marketing can exchange information
November 24th, 2006Tagging on the internet has allowed discovery of information from individual blog posts, to stories, to stock tickers, to photos, all of which has given rise to Folksonomy. Large corporations have Marketing departments spend millions of dollars in marketing material which never get shared with the sales department — event if they do, it’s after spending tonnes of money in building/buying some proprietary software to automate the process.
The reality is:
* Marketing is global, so are sales
* Marketing material is produced by different teams viz. marcom, product marketing, channel marketing, event people, etc. etc.
* Sales department sits in their own silo — esp. in large organization, Marketing material never reaches sales, even if it does, either it’s not timely or not in it’s entirety or maybe after spending thousands of dollars for a software to properly tag the proprietary meta-data
* Meta-data is a moving target — If a system is used for storing the attributes in an RDBMS — any change in meta-data either renders the content undiscoverable or leaves it with incorrect attributes.
Come tagging to the rescue, being flexible, tags can be defined on the go — however good idea to have some high-level tags; as in product names, business units, etc. The second level tags could be platforms, customer names, companies, etc. How the information can be exchanged? Marketing runs a blog with the single objective of exchanging information with sales (in this case say marketing collateral). Every post is tagged with the product the collateral belongs to, the second level tags being platform, industry vertical, target audience, etc. etc. Sales can receive this information by either subscribing to the feeds or by searching for the tags on the blogs. WordPress supports category level feeds.
Tags: Writable Intranet, Enterprise 2.0
Open Source Java: What it means to an average Java developer
November 14th, 2006Sun announced that Java is now Open Sourced. It’s business as usual to the rest of the 4m Java developers. All we (yeah!) care is when I write “java” on the command line, the new version of Java has all the required classes to complete that task.
What I fear from this open-sourcing is hundreds of forks doing their own thing and going the route of Unix and Linux. Choice is good, confusion is not — In the end, RedHat, SuSe, etc. are making money on the work done by 100s of open source developers. Although, proprietary forks are not possible due to GPL v2, what we can clearly see is that multiple options would lead to non-concentrated effort in VM optimization and future development. Will the Open Sourcing lead to incompatibilities? Only time will tell.
The biggest winner from this initiative would be availability of Java RPMs and packages for installation on Linux straight from vendors and community supported distros. Right now, it’s a pain installing Java on Debian.
Web Applications with Portable Data: The next generation of Web applications
November 7th, 2006Data portability is a big issue. None of us want to get locked down with a particular vendor. All the free web apps like GMail, JotSpot, Writely, et al come with a price — your data is in a proprietary data store. If you are not using pop3 and want to migrate from GMail to some other cool new email application, then there is no easy way out. The vendors rely on the lock-in of this data. For example, Google is offering E-mail services for SMB — what if you grow into a larger enterprise tomorrow and wanna have your own e-mail environment. There is no easy migration. Same goes for other next generation hosted applications like spreadsheets, wikis, office application. For a long time vendors rallied against Microsoft for proprietary formats — Talk about this one!
What’s the solution then? As Fred Wilson mentions:
I think anyone who provides a web app should give users options for where the data gets stored. The default option should always be to store the data on the web app provider’s servers. Most people will choose that option because they don’t care enough about this issue to do anything else.
I think we need a new breed of web applications which have pluggable storage. For example, all you get from a next generation GMail is a presentation and business logic layer. You get an ability to choose your data storage. It should work the way other desktop based applications work — You photo organizing software does not have data store attached to it, all it has a tonnes of logic and uses the file system. You can switch to another application and take care of the business.