Tuesday, April 29, 2003

It's Time to Shift Into Overdrive What happens when mass storage leaves microchips in the dust? J. Bradford DeLong explains in this commentary from Wired magazine. [Wired News] 1:39:54 PM

Monday, April 14, 2003

Palm Pulls the Plugs at Work Free at last: A case study in learning to love the unchained corporation of tomorrow. A look at Palm's bid to turn itself into a wireless workforce. By Brad Stone from Wired magazine. [Wired News] 1:10:21 PM     XML joins handcuffs, perp walks in corporate... XML joins handcuffs, perp walks in corporate accounting crackdown In the wake of accounting scandals that have resulted in imprisoned corporate executives and distraught investors, eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL), an offshoot of XML, promises to help make public companies more consistent in the way their financial data is transmitted, reported and presented to investors. If corporations actually committed their financial statements to a standard XML syntax it would be pretty simple to tailor an application to extract that information. Since we produced a medical information system this seems an ideal place to reapply that development effort. [IBM DeveloperWorks: XML News] 12:34:57 PM

Sunday, March 16, 2003

Social Software's Emerging Norms Clay Shirky: Social Software and the Politics of Groups. When the internet was strange and new, we concentrated on its strange new effects. Earlier generations of social software, from mailing lists to MUDs, were created when the network's population could be measured in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of millions, and the users were mostly young, male, and technologically savvy. In those days, we convinced ourselves that immersive 3D environments and changing our personalities as often as we changed socks would be the norm. That period, which ended with the rise of the Web in the early 1990s, was the last time the internet was a global village, and the software built for this environment typically made three assumptions about groups: they could be of any size; anyone should be able to join them; and the freedom of the individual is more important than the goals of the community. The network is now a global metropolis, vast and heterogeneous, and in this environment groups need protection from too-rapid growth and from being hijacked by anything from off-topic conversations to spam. The communities that thrive in this metropolitan environment violate most or all of the earlier assumptions. Instead of unlimited growth, membership, and freedom, many of the communities that have done well have bounded size or strong limits to growth, non-trivial barriers to joining or becoming a member in good standing, and enforceable community norms that constrain individual freedoms. Forums that lack any mechanism for ejecting or controlling hostile users, especially those convened around contentious topics, have often broken down under the weight of user hostile to the conversation [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] 7:01:43 PM

Tuesday, February 11, 2003

Feeling Chad's pain. In his column this week, Chad Dickerson fesses up to the dirty secret of XML content management. The blurb reads: "XML isn't a panacea, especially if the semantic integrity of data hasn't been maintained properly." No one intended for our XML data to grow unwieldy over the past few years, but it did. It takes a lot of hard work and attention to maintain the semantic integrity of the data represented in your XML, as your business morphs and changes and new people come along to touch and manipulate the data in different ways. It's particularly difficult when you're converting data created by people, ensconced in the daily ebb and flow of messy human life, into a machine-readable format intended for the ages ... [Jon's Radio] 2:38:01 PM

Monday, February 10, 2003

Macromedia: Cult, or Menace!? by John Dowdell; In our own work, we're shifting access to information and access to capability directly outwards, away from centralized power centers and outwards towards the decentralized population. [Macromedia - Designer Developer Center] 3:33:54 PM

Monday, January 20, 2003

Building Product Simulations with Macromedia Flash MX by Jonathan Kaye; re: Macromedia Flash. While there is a lot of talk today in the e-learning world about the need for more interactivity and simulation, few if any tell you exactly how to build them. Designing and programming device simulations of even moderate complexity can be quite challenging. However, with today's software development tools such as Macromedia Flash MX, designing and programming even complex, highly-realistic simulations is not as difficult as you might imagine - provided that you have a good methodology for managing the complexity of system development. [Macromedia - Designer Developer Center] 1:30:36 PM

Monday, January 13, 2003

The interactive intermediary. The scriptable DOM (Document Object Model) was always an intoxicating idea. Mobile scripts that lived in Web pages -- and could inspect and modify their hosts -- seemed rich with possibility. But when I saw the gymnastics those poor scripts had to perform in order to detect and adapt to browser versions, I recoiled in horror. There was no way I was going to use, or recommend, such a fragmented technology. Recently, though, my LibraryLookup project has reacquainted me with the world of JavaScript and the DOM. I was pleasantly surprised to find that scripts I wrote in Mozilla, under Mac OS X, worked identically under MSIE 6 on Windows. This is great news! It means that we're now in a position to reap the benefits of a class of software I'll call "interactive service intermediaries." [Full story at InfoWorld.com] ... [Jon's Radio] 12:26:26 PM     LibraryLookup Bookmarklet Keeps Going and Going and Going..... alf is off and running with more ideas for adaptations of Jon Udell's LibraryLookup bookmarklet. He proposed the following in an email message: "Set up an SFX server like this one: (http://demo.exlibrisgroup.com:9003/demo) so that we can use an SFX Lookup bookmarklet (http://www.pmbrowser.info/hublog/archives/000016.html) to find resources. (As an example, try it on an abstract page in HubMed: http://www.pmbrowser.info/pmdisplay.cgi?issn=07302312&;uids=12520538)   Sign up to WorldCat, so that we can find books by geographical location (see the link to the OCLC WorldCat service if you run the SFX Lookup bookmarklet on the abstract page above). WorldCat also provides the 'other formats for this book' service you asked for." Excellent! [The Shifted Librarian] 12:24:23 PM

© Copyright 2003 Peter Loats. Last update: 4/29/03; 1:41:00 PM.