Markup As An API

Top 10 of Semantic Web 2008

ReadWriteWeb has published their Top 10 for 2008 of Semantic Web products. The list includes Yahoo SearchMonkey, Open Calais, Powerset,… Looking at the list, I’m not too impressed. Searchmonkey is cool, but all the others are rather gimmicky. They are all semantic web for semantic webs sake. When will we see integrated solutions, like SearchMonkey?

Mapanui

Have been plugging Mapanui a bit at Webjam8 (September), Ignite Spatial and Sydney Barcamp. Fun and interesting feedback.

Microsoft and microformats

Good to see another big player (finally) jumping on the microformats bandwagon, joining Yahoo! Microsoft introduces Oomph, a microformats toolkit, which includes an IE plugin and server-side javascript. Not sure about the name though. Additionally IE8 will support a feature called WebSlice, which is an hAtom based (MS propriatory) microformat. Additionally, John Allsopp has a great introductory article at Microformats: the Quiet Revolution, so if you still don’t know what microformats are, have a read.

Google X

Google turned 10 this week, from a simple university search project to a 20.000 employees strong company. Google also seem to have come full circle by introducing their own (open source) browser this week, Google Chrome:

Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier. Read about why we built a browser.

They introduced Chrome using a cartoon, which not only acts as a clever viral marketing tactic (accidently leaked, oRLY?), but it also explains why they released their own browser and how it tries to improve the internet experience for people, making complex information simple.

On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff - the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

Chrome is based on WebKit, the same HTML engine powering Apple’s Safari browser, and a new V8 JavaScript engine. While the last couple of years we’ve seen browsers adhere more and more to WebStandards (especially improved CSS support, finally in IE8), we might get confronted again with JavaScript incompatibilities (client-side storage, text-node serialization, timer delay,…) due to these new JavaScript engines being introduced. Although these JavaScript engines do support the ECMA language standards, they do a lot more under the hood to improve JavaScript performance. And you have to wonder, with a User-Agent string like Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13, is the User-Agent still useful? Google doesn’t make any money out of their search, nor with this browser, they make money with advertisements. So the question begs itself, will we see adverts in Chrome? Will it be limited to Google Search? Questions being answered on Matt Cutt’s blog, but you have to wonder, even if you are using an other search provider, they could still pick up anything you do in Chrome, what you’re searching for, what you click on, as if you were using their search. Not really, it is open source, and it is ‘easy’ to see what exactly it is doing. I’ve been using it at work this week, and I’m glad my stuff still works (contrary to the new IE8 beta 2, which I’ll need some more time investigating). I like most of its chrome’s aesthetics, its simplicity, but I really don’t like the baby blue though. The incognito mode looks a little bit nicer. I like the task manager and ‘stats for nerds’, and the WebKit based dev tools. Also try about:memory, about:stats, about:histograms, about:internets, and about:crash in the ‘Omnibar’. I’m also amazed at how Windows app development has stagnated so much since, well, ever. I mean, Chrome doesn’t look like a Windows app, same as Apple Safari doesn’t look like a Windows app, and I mean that in a good sense. Same reason I like AIR-based apps which don’t look like drab Windows apps. I wasn’t using Safari all that much on Windows, but I might use Chrome a bit more (even when the Mac version is released, so I can use it at home), though Firefox (and the upcoming 3.1) will still remain my main browser. And that always has been the main problem. Sometimes, for some people, just good is good enough. That’s why we’re still stuck with lots of IE6 visitors. But the might of Google may well change things, by paying hardware vendors (the HPs, Dells in the world) to have Chrome as the default browser on their hardware, same way they do to have their browser toolbar included. The Mac and Linux versions are in the works. The cartoon talks about extension, but currently they don’t offer any. Google Chrome is another option for people. It forces the other browser developers to take notice. Though it looks like we’re heading for another browser war this summer (hey, I’m down under), this one will take the web forward. Progression is good, and we really need a big leap now. Bring ‘em on, all at once. So, who is today’s startup Google, and where will they be in 10 years time? PS: Two weeks ago Microsoft released their IE8 beta 2 to the broader public, as well as Apple releasing Safari 4 beta for developers, and Firefox has a 3.1 version available too. Good times!

Mozilla Ubiquity 0.1

Aza Raskin of Mozilla introduces a new experimental (alpha 0.1) project, called Ubiquity, a power user’s CLI extension for Firefox. It integrates Google Maps/Translate/Gmail, Twitter, Digg, Wikipedia, TinyURL,… and allows the user to mashup content himself, through a command line. It’s very similar to PodiPodi, Catalog/Devo extension, but being developed backed by the Mozilla community.

Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility. Extend the browser functionality easily.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo. Three minutes into the video, a demo of Craigslist and mapping a number of rental unit addresses, and the note that this would take advantage of microformatted data, exactly like my own little project, Mapanui. You can extend Ubiquity by writing your own commands (and share them with the world), using JavaScript. Ubiquity also uses the fab jQuery library (obviously) for rapid JavaScript development (though not using $ but jQuery for compatibility). A nice push for microformats and an Open Web. Something to keep an eye on, and look forward to full Firefox 4 integretion.

Yahoo SearchMonkey Apps online

Yahoo earlier (in March) proclaimed to embrace the Semantic web:

LinkedIn is to mark up user profile pages with microformats. Yahoo search could then understand the content and relationships between pieces of content and present that data in an intelligent way in Yahoo search.

Last week then Yahoo introduced a number of changes to its default search experience to add more structured data to results using SearchMonkey widgets.

Yahoo SearchMonkey is a key part of Yahoo’s attempts to embrace the semantic web and open standards in general.

On Portable Social Networks

Ben Ward from Yahoo! Brickhouse writes about Portable Social Networks over at Digital Web Magazine. It talks about Identity, Personality and Profile, using Microformats like XFN and hCard.

Custom non-visible data in HTML 5

Short and sweet: HTML 5 offers custom data attributes on HTML elements, intended to store custom data, which can then be handled on-page by JavaScript, or off-page by other (web-)applications. John Resig discusses a number of useful benefits.

HealthMap and Pluribo

A couple of new, cool examples of SemWeb applications: Pluribo, a Firefox plugin which creates instant summaries of Amazon user reviews. Some Amazon products have 10-100’s of reviews. Pluribo gives a summary by analyzing all these reviews. Currently only available for Amazon, you could see more, potential interactions with other web applications, think StructuredBlogging, or a summery of 100’s of comments on a blog post. Ars Technica has a nice overview. HealthMap, a comprehensive mashup which ends up into a global disease alert map, on a country or province level. It filters disease news from Google News, the WHO and online discussion groups. Wired has more.

On why the BBC removed the hCalendar microformat

“Why the BBC removed microformat DateTime patterns from bbc.co.uk and what we are doing to bring them back.”