HRG_TECH - The Power Of Internets

The Economist on Social Networks

officer — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:08:22 GMT

"Everywhere And Nowhere.
Social networking will become a ubiquitous feature of online life. That does not mean it is a business.

[...] The correct half is that a next big thing—web-mail then, social networking now—can indeed quickly become something that consumers expect from their favourite web portal. The non sequitur is to assume that the new service will be a revenue-generating business in its own right.

[...] The opening of social networks may now accelerate thanks to that older next big thing, web-mail. As a technology, mail has come to seem rather old-fashioned. But Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and other firms are now discovering that they may already have the ideal infrastructure for social networking in the form of the address books, in-boxes and calendars of their users. “E-mail in the wider sense is the most important social network,” says David Ascher, who manages Thunderbird.

via antonkovalyov

«Грязное бельишко» iPhone development

officer — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:34:38 GMT

Для всех романтически настроенных айфон-киллер-апп девелоперов (я тоже =):

iPhone developer rejection letter mass mailing
If you've applied for Apple's iPhone Developer program, check email for your rejection letter. The twitterati are reporting widespread disappointment and anger as thousands of iPhone developer hopefuls have received a "Thank you but no thank you" message in their inbox. [...]

[...] What we are talking about here is the $99 signup for the developer program, which includes a signing certificate to allow applications to run on physical iPhones and not just in the Aspen simulator. Just because you have downloaded the Xcode SDK components does not make you an iPhone dev Jedi -- if you haven't paid your $99, or you haven't been invited to pay it, you have no lightsaber.
More...

«Как украсть миллион на iPhone»
Специально привожу скриншот и далее цитирую оригинал: “The iPhone Developer Program will initially be available to a limited number of developers in the U.S. and will expand to other countries in the coming months” Что в переводе на русский язык означает: «Программа iPhone Developer первоначально доступна только ограниченному числу разработчиков на территории США и будет распространена на другие страны в ближайшие месяцы». Думаю, что верить сайту Apple можно, в отличие от Rip Dev это официальный источник информации. Отлично эту ситуацию описали вот по этой ссылке.

Фактически любой разработчик, находящийся за пределами США, получил отказ на участие в программе, его деньги не были приняты. Более того, множество разработчиков на территории США также получили отказ без объяснения причин.

Цитата на русском взята из продолжения.

+ БОНУС:
Успешная организация location-based services без участия оператора

Google же пошел на шаг дальше, и привязал "наблюдаемые" значения LAC и CellID определенного количества мобильных операторов к реальным географическим координатам, что позволяет им показывать текущее положение абонента на карте с точностью от 5 км до 100 м. Я подозреваю, что для сбора этих данных использовались бета-тестеры (или все пользователи) приложения Google Mobile Maps, обладающие телефонами, которые не только предоставляют информацию о LAC/CellID, но и имеют встроенный или подключенный по bluetooth GPS-приемник. По крайней мере, такая версия не только объясняет широту покрытия этой услуги в восточной Европе и в США, но и отвратительно качество ее работы в наших краях :)

Кстати, сравните список аппаратов, поддерживаемых Google Mobile Maps и список аппаратов, поддерживаемых Flexi-Spy - похоже, что используются одни и те хе хаки/недокументированные API.

Вобщем, видно, что "если нельзя, но очень хочется - то можно", причем - с достаточно неплохим качеством. Однако, хочу подчеркнуть, что информация о LAC и CellID - это исключение, которое только подчеркивает общее правило: большинство низкоуровневой служебной информации телефона недоступно из пользовательских приложений, и уж во всяком случае речь не идет о наличии какого-то универсального общедоступного API.

По-простому о том, как работает определение местонахождения телефона по GPRS.

YouTube API introduction

officer — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 17:38:57 GMT

Overview: http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/overview.html
Guide: http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/developers_guide_protocol.html

Google Sky

officer — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 17:30:22 GMT

http://www.google.com/sky/
http://earth.google.com/sky/skyedu.html

Жалко, что пока нельзя кликать на все звездочки и делать drill down...

Mark Zuckerberg vs Sarah Lacy @ SXSW

officer — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 19:44:20 GMT

There’s been no shortage of discussion over the last 24 hours on Sarah Lacey’s on stage interview with Mark Zuckerberg, most of it centered on Lacy’s interview style. Ultimately you can judge for yourself by watching the video above.

From TechCrunch

Guy Kawasaki on Steve Ballmer @ MIX'08

officer — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 09:30:29 GMT

Гай Кавасаки в его обычной мягкой и ненавязчивой манере пытается раскрутить Стива Балмера на интересные ответы. Смотрится все довольно весело - много шуток и тонких намеков. Ну и Стив - как всегда просто красавчик, не сдается под напором, а наоборот напирает сам. Жаль только Microsoft это уже не поможет...

100kbps | 300kbps | 750kbps

Silverlight stream: http://visitmix.com/blogs/News/Watch-Steve-Ballmer-and-Guy-Kawasaki-Live/
Стенограмма: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/06/microsoft-mix-keynote-two-live-from-las-vegas/

np4me

officer — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 10:59:59 GMT

via linl

http://www.adme.ru/research/2006/10/09/10350/

officer — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 07:36:20 GMT

Несколько устаревший текст, но актуальный для Москвы сегодня

Семья 2,0 живёт 43 часа в сутки: информационный мир изменил традиционный семейный уклад

С точки зрения обывателя технологии, прежде всего, позволяют поддерживать связь. При этом люди уже довольно сильно зависят от них — молодежь попросту не может себе представить жизни без вездесущей техники. Более половины опрошенных (55%) в возрасте 18—34 лет заявили, что не смогут поддерживать связь с родными и близкими без помощи телекоммуникационных технологий. Более трети опрошенных в возрасте 18—34 лет заявили, что их социальная активность «серьезно пострадала бы» в случае отсутствия технологий , а 36% признаются, что именно технологичные новинки помогли им преодолеть застенчивость и барьеры в общении.

...многозадачность, проявляющаяся во всех аспектах жизни современной семьи, ставит перед рекламой задачу повышения уровня вовлеченности аудитории. В данных условиях реклама должна способствовать улучшению жизни, делать ее полноценнее, а не повышать уровень информационного давления и рекламного шума.

JS Masters

officer — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 15:50:26 GMT

Самая дефицитная профессия в Кремниевой долине

Одна из проблем Кремниевой долины, с которой я, возможно, сталкиваюсь ввиду специфичности работы - это отсутствие людей, хорошо знающих JavaScript. Т.е. не "специалистов", получившим образование по записям в блогах типа "10 классных эффектов на jQuery" или "Делаем фото-галерею на YUI", а именно людей, способных писать быстрый и компактный код на JavaScript, понимающих closures, и не поднимающих скорость рендеринга страницы в 3 раза. Людей, которые хорошо бы знали именно язык, а не разнообразные надстройки и библиотеки (хотя последнее тоже не мешает).

Собственно, этому есть весьма хорошие обьяснения. JavaScript редко когда преподают в вузах, так как считают в принципе языком несерьезным, несмотря на присутствие в нем некоторых вещей, которых ни в каждом языке и найдешь. Даже опытные разработчики нередко считают JavaScript этаким языком для написания игрушечных вещей типа alert("Превед!"); В особо забитых случаях (и такие разработчики уж точно не проходят интервью) они считают JavaScript подмножеством Java, и итого любой Java-эксперт теоретически знает JavaScript.

В итоге людей с действительно хорошим багажом знаний в Долине можно перечислить по пальцам, и за ними гоняются все.

CopyPasted from http://alexmoskalyuk.livejournal.com/744410.html

Semantic Web for dummies

officer — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 12:02:31 GMT

По-русски:
Будущее тут: Веб 3.0
Семантическая Сеть на Хабрахабре
Есть смысл
http://semanticweb.narod.ru
http://semantictools.ru

In english:
Video: Intro to the Semantic Web
Semantic Web Wiki
Video: AI meets Web 2.0: Building The Web Of Tomorrow Today (Dr. Marty Tenenbaum on Semantic Web)
Video: Tim Berners Lee on the Semantic Web
Video: Semantic Web on Google Tech Talks

Security/Privacy ratio

officer — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 11:36:10 GMT

Britney Spears joins DataPortabilty

officer — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 07:33:26 GMT

ROFL :)

DiSo

officer — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 17:42:55 GMT

The Existential DiSo Interview from Chris Messina on Vimeo.

Enthusiastic! Must see.

Many Eyes

officer — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 14:52:55 GMT

I’ve been playing around with Many Eyes (if you are not familiar with it, it is an easy-to-use data visualization suite; you might call it the flickr of data sets and visualizations) steadily since early January <...> It certainly has great potential for educators and teaching, and is already seeing some use there.

I don’t work with a lot of numeric data and most of that is not something I can make public (a good decision on the part of Many Eyes is that all data sets– as well as the visualizations– are completely public and open for others to build visualizations on), though I have tested various sets to try out the wide array of visualization types. So I have focused primarily on the free text visualizations: tag clouds and word trees.

RSS tags

officer — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 14:29:01 GMT

К вопросу, а есть ли теги в RSS?

"На самом деле это немного не так, как еще 3 года назад писал в своем блоге Nial Kennedy - и в RSS и в ATOM есть тег <category>, служащий именно для передачи контентных тегов, и вопрос видится в другом ракурсе - а используют ли эти возможности, с одной стороны, генераторы потоков, а с другой - инструменты, которыми мы потоки модифицируем."

Brian Del Vecchio on requirements for a tag-aware rss reader

officer — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 14:24:50 GMT

Ставлю весь текст целиком, как я его выдрал из архива:
http://web.archive.org/web/20060127014559/http://hybernaut.com/bdv/tag-aware-rss-reader.html

===[ cut here ]===

Home » blogs » Brian Del Vecchio's blog

requirements for a tag-aware rss reader

Submitted by Brian Del Vecchio on February 7, 2005 - 2:23pm.

Tonight as I was reading weblogs from some of the leading hackers in the tagging communities (Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Technorati), I found this thread of blog entries discussing frustration with the current trend toward hybridised RSS feeds from personal weblogs:

Matt Haughey: stinky links
Dave Shea: Information Aversion
Tom Coates: On hybridised RSS feeds...

This thread really hit a nerve, as I recently sent mail to fellow del.icio.us hacker Chris Lott asking if he could provide separate feeds for his posts and linklog. He replied that TextPattern allows him to create a feed per category, but a feed from all the categories except the linklog was tricky.
I'm interested in all sorts of content from all sorts of sources, but I generally prefer to browse that river of content by category. So it would be nice to sort out Chris' linkblog and group it together with the others I read: waxy.org, metafilter, etc.
If only my RSS reader could recognize tags to unsplice some of these feeds: this entry is a photo, that one's a list of links, this is a recipe.
Then I started thinking: since Flickr and Del.icio.us and Technorati are encouraging everyone to tag their content, it follows that the tag-aware RSS reader will be the next step. I should be able to browse through the stream that my RSS reader has captured using the tags assigned to the individual entries. Straw, the RSS reader I use every day, allows me to categorize feeds, but currently does nothing with the metadata attached to the posts themselves.
I expect to see the leading commercial RSS readers come into tag awareness of some kind in their next release cycle. But I also expect that the first round of tagging integration will be much like Technorati's display of "aggregated" tag data from Del.icio.us and Flickr: if you click on or type a tag, you will see the most recent 15 items associated with that tag. With such limp displays of tagology, it's no wonder that so many people are saying "I don't get what's so cool about tagging".
One thing I don't like about Technorati Tags is that they're trafficking strictly in author tags (those selected by the content author). Del.icio.us, by comparison, deals entirely in reader tags. Flickr deals primarily in author tags, but allows you to tag some photos from other members. I'm not familiar enough with the Flickr mechanics to be sure, but my impression is that most of the tags in Flickr are author tags.
It seems to me that author tags aren't really all that useful by themselves, for reasons which have been discussed at length in more qualified circles. To summarize, though, Librarians and champions of the Semantic Web consider casual "folksonomic" tagging to be inferior to more structured taxonomy because inconsistent tagging decreases the semantic value. Also, semantic ambiguity leads to confusion, as the tag 'java' will be used by programmers, coffee lovers, and visitors to Indonesia to tag three completely different sets of items.

If you've read this far, you're probably familiar with this debate. If not, you can always read more about folksonomy via Del.icio.us.
These problems become magnified when the only tags available are author tags, since one man's trash is another man's treasure. Also, since it's unlikely that all weblog authors will somehow converge on a common taxonomy for their weblog postings, it's unreasonable to expect that their tags will be very useful to you, the reader.
In Del.icio.us, however, a well-tagged article will accumulate enough metadata from the community that some consensus appears:

44 folksonomy
43 metadata
23 folksonomies
22 tags
17 del.icio.us
15 taxonomy
13 flickr
10 web

There's also a distinction to be made between personal tags and the community's tags. As I have accumulated tags on nearly 2000 posts in Del.icio.us, I've been terribly inconsistent in my tagging, but I've still done a good enough job that I can search my own posts by tag and almost always find what I'm looking for. And when I don't find it, I can adjust the tags so that they're better. My tags spring from my own internal vocabulary, and don't always make sense to everyone else.
On the other hand, I use community tags to find things that I haven't seen before, either through the Del.icio.us inbox or by directly browsing a given tag.
The (currently disabled) nutr.icio.us posting interface to del.icio.us bridged those two types of tags elegantly by suggesting popular community tags for a given URL at personal tagging time. The result is a community consciousness that helps tagging consistency.
Yet another important and subtle component to tagging is the ability of the system to determine related tags. In Del.icio.us. while displaying items carrying one tag, the system will suggest other tags with a close statistical correlation. For example, while displaying the community [lotr] tag, the system will suggest the related tags [tolkien] and [lordoftherings]. Personally I believe this to be a strong counterargument to the main criticism the strict taxonomists have against folksonomic tagging. A good back end will be able to draw semantic associations, compensating for issues arising from imprecise tagging.

What this means for an RSS Reader

So if you're developing an RSS reader and you want to add tagging support, you're probably wondering, "what does all this nonsense mean to me?"
I believe that for an any application which wants to exploit tagging, the incorporation of reader tags is critically important. In addition to using the tags which may arrive conveniently attached to an item, I want the ability to add my own tags. I would want the ability to tag the items themselves,
Whenever possible, you should retrieve community tags for the item. In Del.icio.us you would use the item's Permalink as the key.
This is going to be tricky because often the items arriving via RSS are so new that they haven't been tagged by the community yet. So perhaps you'll need to make that query multiple times. But not too often, as one of the main challenges that services like Del.icio.us face is the bandwidth demands of automatic polling from RSS readers.
Of course as a user of your fine RSS reader, I will also want you to fully support personal tags, allowing me to conveniently tag items as I read them.
For personal tagging, I would want to add tags to items that I decide to hold on to for a while. I also want to tag the feeds, so that each item would inherit its source feed's tags. An even richer mapping system would be sweet, allowing me to map the author's categories into my own tag vocabulary.
Posting these back to Del.icio.us makes sense, but only for the posts that I want to keep permanently. It doesn't make sense to automatically post every item that floats in on an RSS feed to Del.icio.us. Nor would I want every webpage that I visit automatically posted. Plus, the infinite regress of posting to Del.icio.us for every linkblog entry that I read--that would get us both banned in a hurry.
And items without Permalinks? It doesn't make much sense at all to post those to Del.icio.us. If I chose to keep some of those items permanently on my workstation, I would expect you to store my tags along with them.
I was just looking at the source of [Straw], my daily RSS reader, and it doesn't look like I'll me adding these features to it. It's built in Python, and I just don't have the time to learn a new language. Not this month, anyway.
Of course, if you're a developer of an RSS reader and you'd like to discuss these issues further, just drop me an email and I'll be happy to talk with you more about it.

Tags: del.icio.us tagology folksonomy rss-reader syndication

» Brian Del Vecchio's blog | add new comment

www.kantianxia.com

Submitted by zheng (not verified) on March 28, 2005 - 8:54am.

www.kantianxia.com, it support user tagging entry.

» reply

Rojo

Submitted by Fernando (not verified) on June 14, 2005 - 2:33pm.

I'm in the same case as you. I use liferea and i miss the tags.
Have you tried Rojo? (www.rojo.com) You can use tagging. I don't use it because I prefer an off-line feed reader.

» reply

===[ cut here ]===

Google Maps - US Presidential Primary

officer — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 07:02:42 GMT

http://maps.google.com/maps/mpl?moduleurl=http://www.google.com/mapfiles/mapplets/elections/2008/primary/primaries.xml&utm_campaign=en&utm_source=en-ha-na-us-google-mp&utm_term=decision2008

“We’ve joined forces with Twitter and Twittervision to give you instant updates on Super Tuesday. You can watch Twitter texts from across the country and send in your own updates!”

CNN отдыхает...

Data Portability

officer — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 08:56:55 GMT

Data Portability gathers existing open standards into a blueprint for a social, open, remixable web where your online identity, media, contacts and content can follow you wherever you go.

This amazing video was lovingly hand-crafted by Michael Pick, from Smashcut Media, to outline and demonstrate what Data Portability is all about. If you've been under a rock and haven't heard of the Data Portability Workgroup, this ought to catch you up real quick. ;)
via http://www.particls.com/blog/

Dissolution of Social Networks (Audio)

officer — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 08:50:20 GMT

http://audiovideo.economist.com/?fr_story=e2cf9a7f7edb74406258605df2a9e5ffb488d384&rf=bm

Interview with Andreas Kluth (San Francisco correspondent for The Economist) talking about real and virtual campfires, and predicts the dissolution of standalone social networks as we know them.

Anyone interested in the next generation of internet technology really needs to listen to this podcast. Its clear, concise and really gets at the heart of many social graph issues and human behavior.

via http://www.particls.com/blog/

BaseCamp Sandbox

officer — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 01:28:09 GMT

Интересно будет только тем, кто пользуется BaseCamp

Basecamp Tips & Tricks
by Andrew Crow

We’ve been using Basecamp for quite a while now. In order to make it do what we want, it sometimes takes a little encouragement and some hacks.

Things like making use of the existing CSS code to stylize your messages, or using Ajax to dynamically hide and show images to embedding Google calendars and video. Sometimes these little enhancements help you communicate your ideas more effectively.

I’ve created a free Basecamp site that has examples and the code that we’ve collected. Feel free to use and tweak as needed. If you have any others, or better ways of doing something, leave a comment here or in the Basecamp Sandbox below.

http://basecampsandbox.projectpath.com/
login: guest
password: guest

i want "hrg 2.0"

officer — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 02:00:49 GMT

The PayPal mafia

via http://alexmoskalyuk.livejournal.com/718007.html

kids on the block

officer — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 13:36:48 GMT

http://explore.twitter.com/blocks/

In-your-face proto-types

officer — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 13:29:17 GMT

http://www.jvetrau.com/

Прекрасный блог о проектировании интерфейсов.
Особенно внятно расписан процесс прототипирования:

Tag: Итерационная разработка
Разбиение проекта на этапы исходя из контекста использования системы

Tag: Прототипы
Интерактивные прототипы. Действующия модель пользовательского интерфейса.

Tag: Wireframes
См. более ранние посты, в конце списка.

Ура!
thx yagr

Radar's Anatomy

officer — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 12:53:12 GMT

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/12/our_methodology.html

Thomas Lord posted an interesting question in a comment on one of my recent posts: "I have a question about how the "Radar" works.

Dale and Tim have great noses for the future, and were right in the thick of things with the commercialization of Unix, popular uptake of the Internet, Open Source, Peer-to-Peer, and Web 2.0. Their methodology is pretty simple: in hacks, research, and startups by alpha-geeks we can often catch early glimpses of what will later be mainstream products or trends. So when Dale saw Pei Wei working on an X11 viewer for this thing called the "World Wide Web", he thought "everyone can use this".

The O'Reilly Radar is an attempt to scale this beyond Tim and Dale.

via yagr

Best of Unread

officer — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 12:20:54 GMT

Rex has released his list of the Best Blogs of 2007 That You're (Maybe) Not Reading over at Fimoculous. Like last year, he's focused his best-of-blogs list on lesser-known sites instead of the biggies, a strategy I applaud.

via kottke.org