"web as platform" entries

Preparing for the realtime web

How the shift to realtime will affect the web (and why info overload is overblown).

The stream of updates and links that powers the realtime web is giving static websites a run for their money. In this Q&A, "Building the Realtime User Experience" author Ted Roden discusses the impact of the realtime web on developers and users.

Four short links: 30 Apr 2009

Four short links: 30 Apr 2009

Youth, Government, Tween Arduino Hackers, and Table Slurpage

  1. Ypulse Conference — conference on marketing to youth with technology, from the very savvy Anastasia Goodstein who runs the interesting Ypulse blog on youth culture that I’ve raved about before. Register with the code RADAR for a 10% discount (thanks, Anastasia!).
  2. Government in the Global Village — departing post by the NZ CIO (and Kiwi Foo Camper) Laurence Millar. The principles here are applicable to almost every nation. We need to recognise the network effects of opening up government data in a form that means others can access it. Economic value is created by businesses building innovative new services using government data. Public value is created by enabling a richer and deeper understanding and dialogue among interested individuals about what the data tells us about our lives.[…] The legal, policy, and moral position is clear – New Zealanders own the data, having paid for its collection through taxes. These “problems” will all be solved by the community, and our role as government is to give priority to this. These efforts are stuff that matters. See also Google adds search to public data.
  3. Children’s Arduino Workshop (Makezine) — video of three eleven-year old girls working on an Arduino project, and should be inspiration to anyone who has ever wanted to work on hardware projects with kids. Whoever did it succeeded in making it fun! (via followr on Twitter)
  4. With YQL Execute, The Internet Becomes Your Database — YQL is a query language for Yahoo! data sources, and now they’ve added a server-side Javascript way to import your own web page’s tables into YQL. YQL and Pipes are turning into very interesting pieces of infrastructure (e.g., Museum Pipes blog). (via Simon Willison and straup on delicious)
Four short links: 6 Apr 2009

Four short links: 6 Apr 2009

Baby nerds, evil URL shorteners, reasoned discussion, and the Government straps its Web 2.0 on:

  1. Books for Wee NerdsForget Pat the Bunny — your baby wants to Pat Schrodinger’s Kitty! Help baby search for subatomic particles and explore the universe. (via Tim’s tweets)
  2. On URL Shorteners — Joshua Schachter and Maciej Ceglowski on the downsides of URL shortening services like bit.ly et al.
  3. Mending The Bitter Absence of Reasoned Technical Discussion (Alex Payne) — We’ve come to accept that trying to have a reasonable discussion on the Internet is like insert any number of increasingly offensive metaphors here. Usenet, IRC, forums, blogs, and now media like Twitter have all been black-marked as houses unfit for reason to dwell within. And so we roll our eyes, sigh, and quietly accept the idiocy, the opportunism, and the utter disrespect for our peers and ourselves that is technical discussion on the Internet. This need not be the case. It is possible to have a reasoned technical discussion on the Internet. People do it every day, particularly in smaller online communities where social norms are easier to enforce. We can do it. (via SarahM
  4. GSA signs agreements with Web 2.0 providers — Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, and blip.tv get agreements that make it legal for federal agencies to use those tools. Followup to my earlier cite of roadblocks to Web 2.0 tools for government use. (via Fiona’s delicious links)
Four short links: 10 Feb 2009

Four short links: 10 Feb 2009

Happy Monday! Kid coding and web-powered political transparency form the artisanal wholewheat organic bread slices around a sandwich filling of meaty (or tofuy) web travel APIs and blogly angst:

  1. Art and Code — conference on programming environments for “artists, young people, and the rest of us”. Alice! Hackety Hack! Scratch! Processing! And more! March 7-9 at CMU. Want! (I’ve written before about my ongoing experiences teaching kids to program)
  2. TripIt API — clever, they’re building a single point where hotels, airlines, travel agents, mobile apps, etc. can access your integrated booking (use case: flight delayed, which hotel and mobile car rentals learn and react to by not assuming you’ve bailed on them) (disclaimer: OATV has invested in TripIt).
  3. Organically Grown Audiences (Danny O’Brien) — good point from Danny that I’ve been thinking about for a while: maintaining an audience is hard work, and the audience isn’t necessarily comprised of people you’d choose to hang out with. Perhaps the answer is to grow the audience slowly, but I’m not convinced. I’d say that unreciprocated intimacy from your audience is a sign that you’re doing things wrong, but it’s how fame works: the things people say to people in the public eye, on and off the web, are astonishingly presumptuous and familiar. Then again perhaps I should retreat back to the British Isles from which my frosty social distance comes and tend my tweed elbow patch farm until I die from bad teeth, bad beer, or a surfeit of Benny Hill.
  4. Promoting Open Government (Economist) — state and central governments are making expenditure public, in varyingly useful ways. Links to Missouri Accountability Portal and ReadTheStimulus.org (the former as well-designed, the latter as crowd-sourcing).

Web Meets World: Privacy and the Future of the Cloud

Yesterday I gave a talk to the Privacy Forum in Auckland, New Zealand, titled Web Meets World: Privacy and the Future of the Cloud. The talk was intended as a scene setter for a discussion with the audience, about 70 lawyers, technologists, consultants, and public policy wonks. They responded well to the challenge, and we talked about the nature of…

Major milestone for ProgrammableWeb & "The Web as Platform"

Last week marked an important milestone for the "Web as Platform" as the 1,000 API was added to the ProgrammableWeb registry. John Musser (see: Web2.0 Report) started tracking the first few web service API's back in 2005. How do these 1000 APIs break down by type? The following chart, derived from our database, shows the the top 15 sectors…