TalkLocal

RSS Explained Via Video

 

Pud(Adbrite) Launches A New Product

It's an easy way to add interactivity (zoom, sharing, captions, etc.) to your pictures. You can also optionally add advertising to your pictures to make money.

Exciting and Scary Times

glumbert.com - Shift Happens

Web 3.0

Web 3.0 is a shift from pure algorithmic search to Social Search, where the web is a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange. It is about taking 1.0 and 2.0 and making something useful and productive where humans are the algorithm and the more diverse and large the participation, the better the experience will become.

Mozilla Launches Browser Social Network

Mozilla Labs announced a new browser based social networking idea called the Coop. Mozilla says the motivation behind the project is:

"that the most common social interaction on the web today is sending someone a link. It's done over IM, email, weblogs, RSS feeds from aggregator sites, bookmark sharing sites like del.icio.us, social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace, and even over the phone. The desire is the same: "hey, friend, go check out this neat thing and then let's talk about it!" The goal of The Coop is to ease this interaction, and merge it with similar tools provided by a large number of popular web services."

Will OpenID Take Off This Year?

OpenID is a decentralized sign-on system that can be used on Internet websites for signing on with a central username and password from another site that supports OpenID. It gains relevance especially in terms of social networking sites such as Myspace, FaceBook, Bebo, etc. One could be able to log on to FaceBook with their Myspace Logon info., a persons total online identity could be immediately transferred across to the new social networking site. With all the social flavors developing, its getting more difficult to remember all sign ons as well as tedious to fill out identities. What I see developing in social networking sites is some consolidation and more collaboration, we'll see. Check out the example in Video below:

What is the Semantic Web?

Wikipedia defines the Semantic Web as the following:

The semantic web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a form that can be understood, interpreted and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily.^[1] It derives from W3C director Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange.

At its core, the semantic web comprises a philosophy,^[2] a set of design principles,^[3] collaborative working groups, and a variety of enabling technologies. Some elements of the semantic web are expressed as prospective future possibilities that have yet to be implemented or realized.^[4] Other elements of the semantic web are expressed in formal specifications.^[5] Some of these include Resource Description Framework (RDF), a variety of data interchange formats (e.g RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, N-Triples), and notations such as RDF Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). All of which are intended to formally describe concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain.

Basically, I think users in a tagging,voting, user generated world will create awesome content that beats the content returned by a search algorithm like Google's. If one million people are building a website in real time on a specific topic, how good will that website be compared to what shows in Google's results right now. We the people are the creators of Web 3.0 and the best content on the planet, the only question that remains is if we will be smart enough to get paid for it.

Internet Backbone Carriers May Be in Trouble

From my buddy at AT&T:

It's official - the carriers are not making money operating Internet backbones.

Why should you care? Because defying the laws of economics is a bit like defying the law of gravity -- it appears to work for a while, but you're in for an unpleasant surprise at the end.
Here's the issue: The carriers currently running Internet backbones are subsidising that service from other offerings. Competitive pressures and new technologies, however, are driving the price of these offerings down -- at the same time that IPTV, Internet-based video on demand, and multimedia interactive games are driving Internet bandwidth requirements dramatically up. As a result, carriers will need to beef up their networks to handle the capacity.
And where's the financing for that investment coming from?
There are a couple of possible scenarios. Carriers could fund Internet-backbone investments from the pockets of their customers, but there are signs that gravy train is slowing to a stall. Enterprise users quite rightly object to paying top dollar for network services -- particularly in an environment where Internet services (for the present at least) are far cheaper and almost equally reliable. And consumers are already screaming about the "high" cost of broadband services.
Another option is for carriers to put in place a peering exchange -- similar to stock market trading exchanges -- that lets them pass traffic from one backbone to another at fair market rates. Currently, peering arrangements are one-off deals between individual carriers, and they typically don't differentiate between types of traffic. That's as if, instead of the New York Stock Exchange, you had two guys in a smoky back room making deals without distinguishing between blue chips and penny stocks.
The advantage of a peering exchange would be the ability to trade like for like, at the lowest possible rates -- and thus would make operating Internet backbones profitable. Of course, that would require carriers to be able to charge differentially for different traffic types, something the 'Net neutrality folks adamantly oppose. So what are the other options?
Carriers could bite the bullet and get out of the Internet backbone business altogether. (Frankly, I'm half-expecting this to happen.) The logical next step? Government take-over. There's a long history of private innovations becoming so valuable to society that the government steps in to ensure service continuity. One good example: The New York City subways started out as private services and were taken over by the government.
Personally, I think this is a really bad idea -- and not just because I tend towards the libertarian. Government-operated services tend to slow innovation dramatically, and there are the political implications of having governments (US or others) with a direct window onto the world's communications networks.
What are the other options? Some say that if the current crop of carriers can't operate Internet backbones cost effectively, a new bunch will arise that can. I don't buy it -- the laws of network economics will apply to the new guys, too.
So what happens? Hmm. Brace yourselves for a sharp impact with reality.