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!

The article makes a comparison to the sense of a child who looks out the window, sees snow falling, and knows to go put on a coat before going outside. Now, a knowledge system would be able to make this connection given this simple rule: “If snow is falling outside, then it is cold.” The snow bit flips on the cold bit. However, even after we give the machine all of these rules to work with, it still wouldn’t match the reasoning of a human who can extrapolate new rules from other related rules.

Consider if you had an erupting volcano nearby and so lava was falling. Even if you’d never seen lava before or heard of a volcano, you’d look at the lava, smell the sulfer in the air, watch the screaming villagers running away from it, and conclude that whatever this new stuff is, it must be bad news. So maybe wear two coats before going out.

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!

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!”

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.

How soon can we expect this to form its own trend? We’d love to see:

Bayes, the Last Spambender – The last of a noble line of sysadmins battles the Spam Lord and the plague of spam that threatens to blacken the world.

Hacknote – The one-on-one globe-shattering battle between good and evil as the world’s greatest white-hat and the world’s most powerful black-hat square off, each trying to steal the other’s identity.

Fullmetal Software-Analyst – Two brothers roam the world looking for the Philosopher’s ISO Whitepaper, all the while trying to recover their mother who was last seen disappearing into a closet full of Ethernet cables.

Code Bogus – An alternate history where Britain kept the inventions of computers and the web at CERN to itself, so the United States had to rely on it for technology, but then France trumped Britain with Mandriva Linux so British nobility have to move to America after all, where they build a giant robot whose code nobody, but nobody, can debug.

Oh, they’re coming to get me. I’d better hide.

Peter Brittain
Digital Advertising Agency

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

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

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.

Curious as to how important BitTorrent is to the Microsoft ecosystem, I checked some established BT trackers.

Pirate Bay has about 1000 hits for “Windows 7″, but some of those are themes and whatnot. Currently, a seed labeled “Microsoft.Windows.7.Beta.1.Build.7000.x86.DVD-GENUiNE.iMAGE” has 4,580 seeders.

ISOHunt has a broken search (“The following terms are too common and are not included in your search: 07″), (duh!), so you’ll have to figure out how to reformat that so you don’t end up with the 7zip program or something. When you search for “windows7″ with no space, you get some mild results (Windows 7 Pre-Beta Build 6801 x64, 29 seeds), but it also suggests “Did you mean: windows 7″ and when you click that link you go back to the same error page! (duuuuhhhh!)

Mininova also finds plenty of Windows 7 torrents, including “Windows 7 Beta 1 Build 7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULFRE_EN_DVD” with 5,624 seeders at this time.

So have at it! If Gizmodo doesn’t get busted, neither will you!

Peter Brittain

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.

Fair enough. Except that the world market for web work is competitive. In any business, you have competition in the form of price, and no matter how much you complain about it, if somebody’s out-pricing you, you lose some business. The other point to compete on is quality. We can all do that, too.

We can also examine our overhead; I’ve known a lot of web designers who swore they couldn’t stay in business doing what others charge, and then it turns out that they have the pro version of DreamWeaver for development, the full Adobe CS3 suite for graphics, all running on Vista on a machine that’s ten times as powerful as they need, and running five monitors so they can look cool in their $750 Aeron chair while they design. Oh, and they need the top-dollar graphics card to play World of Warcraft on while they “wait for inspiration”.

Just a hint: It’s called “code”. A text editor can do it. But anyway…

You have to wonder about how far the writing profession has come since Ellison’s prime, and what he would have to say about the blog world were he to behold it. There’s millions of blogs out there just sending out reams of work every day for free. OK, granted, it’s ad-supported. And then there’s Wikipedia: what a mind-boggling amount of work is out there now, for no charge! But they collect donations.

The thing is, the web of the 21st century is becoming a new business model where if it isn’t free, it’s so close to being free that it’s hard to tell. Now, could you imagine explaining open source software to Uncle Harlan?

Peter Brittain

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