More funding is being thrown at research to try to make computers have common sense. You’ve seen this story before, and you’ll see it again – just the players change. Related to this is the concept of the semantic web – the Holy Grail of Internet information retrieval where you will someday be able to type “Abbey Road” into a search engine and it will know that you mean the street, not the album or the studio. Or something like that!
Talk about reinforcing a cliche! As this post demonstrates, our biggest web businesses all got their beginnings in garages, basements, and bedrooms. With the exception of some offices.
Not pictured: Yahoo! was started in a trailer on the campus of Stanford University! Certainly, they deserve some more juice than some teenager who draws MySpace backgrounds, don’t they?
One notable mention is PopCap games. If we may be so bold as to speculate, PopCap basically owes its success to being the first link you find on Sun Microsystem’s Java.com site after you’ve successfully downloaded and installed Java. Now trace the
psychology: you just installed Java, got it set up, and now need to test it. Hey, there’s a handy site right here! So you go there and it’s games! What a fun reward after the hard work of installing Java. Hey, this site is fun, think I’ll bookmark this!
Man, I hate when I strain my brain! I overexert it, and then I have to hobble around all weekend with an Ace bandage on it. I have to remember to do ten minutes of brain-stretching before my workout.
What? Oh, don’t mind me. I was just wool-gathering after reading that blogging is like a gym for the brain. Which is all well and good, except that I should feel my brain getting stronger, and yet I ask it to pick up a heavy thought in the morning and it’s still snoring in bed, unable to handle anything harder than the cartoons on TV.
Of course, most of us wouldn’t bother with blogging, if it weren’t such good web marketing. The same site also tells us why every marketer and PR-pro should have a blog. That’s something I believe, too. I particularly agree with the statement, “Having a blog will teach you so much more about this space than you can possibly learn simply reading blogs.”
Because that’s actually the educational end. When you read the comments and see the feedback from other bloggers, you learn all kinds of new things, which is a work-out in itself. Also when you goof, commenters are not shy in any way about pointing that out. That’s a plus, too.
Just be careful not to do it too much, or you might end up like Dr. Gumby in the Monty Python sketches. “My brain huuuurts!”
Second to only O’Reilly Press and maybe IDG (who make the “For Dummies” books), No-Starch Press is at least the third most popular publisher of tech manuals. So we were particularly charmed to see this review of The Manga Guide to Databases.
Now, talk about understanding your geek audience! Outside of Japan, manga just about the exclusive domain of geeks – they collect them, read them, trade them with their LAN-party buddies. Along with anime, probably no other art form is as guaranteed to be noticed by the computer tech market. » Read more: Manga and Tech Manuals: They Go Great Together
You may have either opinion of TED, the Technology Entertainment Design conference in California, USA. You might see it as a gathering of forward-thinking visionaries mapping their collaborative plans for a better future, or you might see it as a bunch of rich twits getting together to stroke each other’s egos and whatever else they stroke. But you have to admit one thing: it’s pretty entertaining.
This year, Bill Gates, showing his usual social skills which are equivalent to a James Bond villain’s, actually brought a jar of mosquitoes with him and from the stage he released them into the audience. No, don’t ask me. The story’s at ValleyWag; ask them.
What set him off? Well, Sir Tim Berners-Lee also attended, and gave a talk about the importance of web standards. Perhaps, given the Redmond company’s stance on standards, Marvin the Microsoft Martian heard the speech and became VERY, VERY ANGRYYYYY!
Peter Brittain
Over at News.com.au, this article points out the five technologies expected to boom in 2009. And it gels well with what your common sense would suggest.
Number one and two on the list: a netbook and a smartphone. The days when you can build a web layout assuming that most people have a desktop PC are long gone; a growing percentage of today’s visitors are using smaller portable devices. Which means designing for the small screen sizes. As anybody in web design can tell you, this means liquid layouts and CSS, with smaller logos and graphics.
Number five on the list is also a mobile computer. These smaller devices are known as UMPCs, for Ultra-Mobile Personal-Computers, and they can serve content in “portrait” mode like a smartphone, or flip over and slide out a keyboard, becoming like a tiny notebook. Consumers have been absolutely thrilled with these designs, and most electronics companies either have one on the market or are rushing to launch one.
And one more note: get ready for Windows 7! Microsoft looks to be giving up on Vista, and is pushing Windows 7 as the next big thing. Many previews are out there already – And for web designers, this will mean having to test websites on the new system as early as possible.
Peter Brittain
Maybe Adobe could go in halves with them. Half the time when I ask somebody what they’re running, they say, “Pirated Photoshop I got off of BitTorrent”. Microsoft moans about software pirates stealing their product on one hand, then quietly condones it for the market share gain on the other.
So when I see Gizmodo telling us “How to Get, Install and Play With Windows 7, Pain Free”, and it actually tells you to go snarf a copy off of BitTorrent, I have to wonder if torrents are just going to become the official path to releases and updates. Mind you, this isn’t some Warez pirate site we’re talking about. Gizmodo is part of Gawker Media, probably the most mainstream corporate presence on the web after C|Net and Conde-Nast. » Read more: Microsoft Should Just Buy BitTorrent And Get It Over With
Did that headline get the attention of all you science fiction fans in the geek community? Go-o-od! Gotta get a hit somehow.
Anyway, so The Ellison has this fun little rant on YouTube, where he whinges in true Ellison style about how some agent called him expecting to do an interview for free on a DVD commentary. And he told them, as only Ellison can, to get stuffed. And a web designer posts this in support of the view that web designers are not assertive enough with their pricing policies, too. » Read more: What Would Harlan Ellison Think Of Blogging?
Oh, the nail-biting suspense! Which browser will come out on top? The intrigue! The drama! The… the routine.
We’ve actually been watching this fight between Microsoft and Mozilla since 1995, and in fact they’re actually descended from the same web browser. You heard me: Internet Explorer and Firefox. The same parent browser.
Meh, loosely speaking, anyway. The original, the one and only classic, is NCSA Mosaic. Another company, Spyglass, licensed the web browser code. To quote the Mosaic Wiki page:
“Spyglass licensed the technology and trademarks from NCSA for producing their own web browser but never used any of the NCSA Mosaic source code. Microsoft licensed Spyglass Mosaic in 1995 for US$2 million, modified it, and renamed it Internet Explorer.”
So that was at least the technology that went into Mosaic and also got sold to Microsoft. Meanwhile, Mosaic Communications begat Netscape Communications Corporation, producing Netscape Navigator. And lo, Netscape Navigator was eventually released as open source, under the codename of “Mozilla”. Does that name ring a bell? Yes, the same Mozilla corporation which produces Firefox.
The next time you’re in a heated debate with other web developers about which is the better browser or which one will win the desktop war, you can just wave your hand and go “What’s the difference? They’re both at least cousins to each other.” Then point them here.
Peter Brittain