Google Notebook

I am happy to see the release today of Google Notebook. While the chief grumble appears to be that it doesn’t allow for tagging, I am okay with that (it will no doubt be added soon enough).

What Google Notebook does provide is a means to nab portions of web pages and add them to an online ‘notebook’. Notebooks can have folding sections in them and the text that is nabbed can be edited using a basic function online editor. The editor allow you to modify fonts, color and hyperlinks and a few other niceties. Sections of a notebook can be moved from one notebook to another by simply dragging and dropping. Snippets can also be rearranged within a notebook via drag and drop as well.

Google Notebook reminds me a lot of another application that I use on my Mac called StickyBrain. I use StickyBrain to grab text and graphics from various applications that I can then file away, organize and search for future reference. I find it very handy for when I want to just grab a snippet of something from a web page rather than bookmarking the entire page. Because StickyBrain is a Mac app, I also found myself wishing that I could do the same on the Windows based laptop I use for work. Until now, this really wasn’t possible. I could get part of the way there by using LookLater to have visibility to bookmarks between work and home systems (keep in mind, this was before del.icio.us provided private bookmarks) .

Google Notebook now lets me just nab the bits of pages that I want and share them StickyBrain-like between home and work. Frankly, I was relieved to find that the provided Firefox plugin works identically under both Windows and Mac OS X.

Now if only chronosnet would come out with a way to synch my Google Notebooks with StickyBrain this could be a very powerful solution (they already have an excellent Palm synch conduit and a .Mac synch so this is not new territory for them).

Currently, Google Notebook doesn’t appear to integrate much with the other Google offerings except for search. To me, the big opportunities her are integration with gmail and Google Maps. I would guess that other things like tags and the ability to subscribe to shared notebooks online will come in due time.

Overall, I like what I see with Google Notebook and am curious to see how it will evolve over time.

technorati tags: , , , ,

Share Your OPML

I am not sure why people are getting excited over share your OPML; this seems like yet another vanity/popularity service that will soon attract spammers and other bottom dwellers much like Google Page Rank did. It is definitely attracting the attention of those who see it as a marketing tool (sorry, I mentioned bottom dwellers already).

I can get excited about someone that truly implements a relevance system for my OPML or RSS reading habits. I define relevance as presenting me with things that I want to read based on what I read, not on someone else’s notion of popularity. I really, really don’t care what is popular, I do care about what is important to me — it’s that simple. And I can’t imagine that I am alone in that feeling. Sadly, only the dearly departed Searchfox has come the closest to implementing this.

technorati tags: , , , ,

Ajax and Accessability

sitepoint has an excellent posting on Ajax and Screenreaders: When Can It Work? With more and more sites resorting to Ajax-y interfaces (sometimes for questionable, buzzword compliance reasons), I have often wondered what the effect on the usability of these site is for those users who require screen readers to surf the web. In summary the author states:

Let’s face it, a great many AJAX applications (dare I say, “most”?) use this approach for its own sake, and don’t really benefit from it all — they could just as well use traditional POST and response.

I would even go a step further to call for a fundamental re-assessment of our priorities here. What we’re talking about is making dynamic client interfaces work effectively in screen readers, but maybe that was never the point. Isn’t the real point to make the applications themselves work effectively in screen readers?

Some may read this article and think, ‘meh, why should I care?’. I think that you should because a growing part of Internet users are (or are becoming) ‘senior citizens’ who may need a screen reader at some point. Why lock out a large part of your potential audience/market by succumbing to the need to chase the latest buzz? Besides, isn’t this the same sort of lesson in exclusivity that the ignorant ‘IE only’ sites are continuing to learn to this day?

technorati tags: , , , ,

Yahoo Tech: Plenty of Bloat But Misses The Boat

Yahoo just doesn’t get it. Yahoo Tech is yet another Yahoo offering composed of flash advertisement incrusted pages that will never be as useful as google, google news tech section or tech.memeorandum at providing you with news, products and more without the annoying, in your face (and completely unnecessary) advertising. Might be tolerable under heavy Greasemonkey-ing, but why not use the more useful, less annoying alternatives?

Nuff said.

technorati tags: , , , ,

SOAP Intentionally Obtuse

While reading through yet another article on SOAP vs REST, I came across a quote from Tim O’Reilly that confirms something that I always suspected about SOAP:

I think there are also some political aspects. Early in the web services discussion, I remember talking with Andres Layman, one of the SOAP architects at Microsoft. He let slip that it was actually a Microsoft objective to make the standard sufficiently complex that only the tools would read and write this stuff, and not humans. So that was a strategy tax that was imposed by the big companies on some of this technology, where they made it more complicated than it needed to be so they could sell tools. [Emphasis added]

Everything I have seen about SOAP has let me to this conclusion. The funny thing is that many corporations cling to SOAP as if they couldn’t possibly have web services without it (though many crafted and successfully implemented their own simple XML over HTTP services before the SOAP spec saw the light of day).

I think that Tim missed the boat with this comment as well:

It’s not necessarily just Machiavellian scheming. I think Microsoft really believes that you can create better user experiences with tools that give people so much more power.

Not quite. It took vendors like Borland (who has now left the compiler/IDE business) and others creating much more robust and productive environments in the 80s for MS to finally wake up to the need to have a viable IDE. In typical monopolistic fashion, MS latched on to the IDE as yet another means to vendor lock in. So, once it inserted itself into the IDE business, MS ‘strategy’ has always been creating the most obscure, convoluted means to implement code, libraries, frameworks, etc to tie developers to their toolset, plain and simple. If the languages and frameworks were able to stand on their own, there would be no lock-in to the MS tools. Incidentally, you will hear similar arguments around JavaServer Faces and Sun tools as well.

technorati tags: , , , ,

BBC Television Program Info Searchable in RDF

Apparently this site (open.bbc.co.uk) contains 75 years worth of information about every program that the BBC has aired over the years in a searchable format using semantic web technologies under the covers.

I wanted to try this out and write about it a bit, but apparently the site is not responding. Is this a server problem or a Ruby problem? Either way it probably has to due with enormous demand at the rollout of this new tool. I guess we will find out later…

technorati tags: , , , ,

IBM Web Ontology Manager

Over on Alphaworks, IBM has released a Web Ontology Manager:

IBM Web Ontology Manager is a lightweight, Web-based tool for managing ontologies expressed in Web Ontology Language (OWL). With this technology, users can browse, search, and submit ontologies to an ontology repository. Developers can discover new ontologies without having to develop the ontology themselves; reusability is thereby promoted and development time and effort is reduced. This technology includes a Web interface for easy uploading of ontologies in an .owl format by any user of the system. It also includes an interface for generating (using Jastor) Java APIs from uploaded ontology files.

technorati tags: , , , ,

Technorati is Broken

I have tried several times today to add this new blog URL to my technorati profile. The profile update appears to just be broken — it doesn’t give any error message; nor does it update my profile. If I try to add a new URL it adds two new blank sites instead.

I don’t suppose anyone is paying too much attention because it is Easter weekend.

Perhaps this will get fixed sometime in the coming week.

UPDATE: 20.APR.2006 — Appears to be working now; I was able to add this blog and have it update properly.

technorati tags: , , , ,

CL1P.net : The Internet Clipboard

I recently discovered a handy little tool at cl1p.net that lets you ‘store’ a chunk of text or a small (less than 2MB) file at a URL of your choosing and then retrieve it again using the same URL. As the site states, clip has some interesting use cases:

Getting around firewalls. With cl1p.net you can easily move data from one machine to another. All you need is a URL.

Enhance Instant Messages. Instant messaging clients do a poor job at sending large blocks of text. With cl1p.net you can create a cl1p and post the URL in an instant.

Improving productivity. Cl1p.net is the fastest way to post to the Internet. Why go to the trouble of logging into e-mail just to move data?

technorati tags: , , ,

RedHat Acquires JBoss

I was a little surprised at how little coverage there has been of the RedHat acquisition of JBoss — could it be acquisition fatigue or general disinterest. The latter is a little hard to believe considering that both parties have at some point been the darling (or bane) of the open source community/movement. With the general love/hate relationship with RedHat, I’m not sure that having the bombastic Marc Fleury on the roster is going to be much more than a liability.

This blog post over at zdnet was one of the better I saw on the merger.

technorati tags: , , ,

Now with Ajax

This week I saw an announcement on Ajaxian that several high powered engineers were leaving Sun Microsystems for JackBe. I recognized all of the names of the engineers from the influential Core J2EE Patterns book that they collectively co-authored.

Unfortunately, visiting the JackBe web site does not give a very good first impression, particularly the large-ish advert that might as well read “make your company fully buzzword compliant with our Ajax assessment!!”. This reminds me of around 8-10 years ago when every consulting company was offering a ‘Java assessment’ or ‘Java Jumpstart’ and how such things will give you a ‘technical/competitive advantage’ to anyone who would take the bait. Repeat the same for client-server, object-oriented programming, eCommerce, agile programming, INSERT_YOUR_FAVORITE_HERE.

This is not to say that Ajax does not have value (it does, when applied appropriately), but it is to say that anything can be oversold.

technorati tags: , , , ,

Give Me Back My Data

I’ve been thinking about all of the places that ‘allow’ customers to do the data entry tasks for them with little in the way of reward back to the customer. Think about it, you get to key in all the information for your airline reservation, but what do you get in return (ok, maybe a discount, but hear me out)? What I would like to see happen is that more online companies provide value added information in return.

For example, when I make an airline reservation, why can’t the airline shoot me an iCalendar with all of the departure/arrival information that I can drop into my calendar? If I order some merchandise from an online vendor like Apple that requires a signature on arrival, why not provide me (again) with an iCalendar that I can easily add to my calendar so I can make sure someone is available to sign for the delivery? You would think that the delivery companies (UPS/DHL/FedEx) would be all over this as it saves them the time/effort/fuel associated with re-delivery. For that matter, why not give me an Atom/RSS feed that allows me to easily track the package. Once the package is delivered, they can trash the feed URL. Actually, the same would be cool for the airline example as well.

This isn’t such a leap — many banks allow you to get your transaction information in a format (QIF) that you can easily import into Quicken; why not for the more mundane stuff as well?

But the thing that would really make this work, is to craft the value added data so that it would work with mobile devices. That way I don’t need to be tied to a feedreader or calendar that is on my desktop computer, I can be anywhere. This is obviously important for the air travel scenario. Perhaps part of the problem gets solved by having a feed reader that can send SMS messages based on certain feeds changing (like my flight schedule). You can sort of make that work now with Yahoo alerts, but a more integrated solution would be preferable.

One last thought: perhaps an interim method of bridging the data gap is to provide the scheduling information in a microformat like hCalendar and embed it in the confirmation/receipt screen (HTML) that is typically provided by a web site. It could then be mined out with PiggyBank or some other GRDDL-like scraper. Not perfect, but at least avoids the re-keying that is required now.

technorati tags: , , , ,

Rojo Relevance Not Very Relevant To Me

There has been a lot of discussion about some new features that have been added to Rojo, an online feed reader. One feature getting the most buzz is the ‘new’ relevance feature.

I don’t get it. For one, I have been a Rojo user since the shuttering of the excellent Searchfox, and I have had a ‘by relevance’ option for months. It was never clear exactly how ‘relevance’ was being determined, if at all. In response to a comment that I posted on techcrunch someone pointed me to this write up on readwriteweb that includes the following:

First, the purpose of “relevance” is to do for feed reading what smart search engines (like Google) do for search results — figure out what to put on the front page. Many readers are overwhelmed by the number of new stories coming from their feeds every day. So Rojo Relevance is about sorting those by “relevance” rather than date, to put the good stuff on top.

So basically, as Rojo defines it, relevance is absolutely useless to me and should more accurately be called ‘popularity’. I want it to be relevant to what I am interested in, not the beauty contest/what-everybody-else-is-reading dogpile. That represents value to me.

I’ll say it again: that was the beauty of Searchfox: it paid attention to what I read and ordered my river of news according to that, so that everytime I sat down to read, I was greeted with what I wanted to read first. Searchfox also was smart enough to mark a page of links as read as I advanced pages; this way, if I was interrupted in reading, I could simply hit refresh and get any new postings as well as the unread ones from my previous session. Apparently this is a very difficult concept for Rojo and others to understand and implement.

Can someone please implement a real relevance ranking in a feed reader and not another implementation of digg?

technorati tags: , , , ,

Your Blog Is Locked

I returned from my trip to San Jose this week to discover the fine folks (or bots) at Blogger had determined that my blog was a splog:

Your blog is locked

Blogger’s spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What’s a spam blog?) Since you’re an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.

You won’t be able to publish posts to your blog until one of our humans reviews it and verifies that it is not a spam blog. Please fill out the form below to get a review. We’ll take a look at your blog and unlock it in less than a business day.

If we don’t hear from you, though, we will remove your blog from Blog*Spot within 10 days.

Awesome. So how did it determine that my blog was a splog? Golly, it must be because it is linked to by, oh, about 6 external sites according to Technorati (clearly suspicious). Maybe it’s because I have links to my Flickr, last.fm and other personal information so that no one could possibly find me and report me for my ‘spam blogging’ activities.

Added irony: when I spell checked this posting with Blogger’s own spell checker, it suggested ‘blocker’ as the correct word for ‘Blogger’. It also suggests ‘degenerate’ for ‘Technorati’ as well.

I don’t suppose that I will ever actually get an explanation (or an apology). Time to consider looking for a new place to host this blog? Maybe.

technorati tags: , , , ,

Exploring the Flickr Tagspace

information aesthetics has a pointer to two fun tools for exploring the growing Flickr tagspace: tagnautica and flickr tag browser.

Both use a similar visualization paradigm with the ‘keyword’ in the middle and related tags in a formation around the keyword. You can explore the related tags (and thus change it to the current keyword) by clicking on the bubble of your choice.

Shameless plug: I am an avid Flickr user; a random sample of some of my photos can be seen in the right gutter of this blog or directly at Flickr.

technorati tags: , , ,

Websites in a Blink

I really enjoyed Malcom Gladwell’s book Blink and noticed that a recent article in Nature provides further evidence that all it takes is a ‘blink’ to decide if a web site is worthy of attention or not.

Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly jarring, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal. Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny.

technorati tags: , ,