PUBLIC MARKS with search interest

The growing interest in both the SPDY protocol and Node.js created the need for a stable Node.js SPDY module when the first version was released last year.

The call to action simply isn’t sufficient to overcome people’s lack of interest in and inclination to click on an otherwise opaque code…especially now that there are the first stirrings of a general awareness that QR malware can be used to inject malicious exploit code into one’s device.

The "free market" is a bogus political phrase. I'm in favor of markets: real ones that self-regulate by preventing fraud (a central clearing/blinding counter-party, bid/offer/open-interest/size transparency) and abuse of power (market winners capture governments -- this has happened throughout history, it's a big problem right now, see the Global Financial Crisis).

We conducted interviews with sixteen members of teams that worked across global time zone differences. Despite time zone differences of about eight hours, collaborators still found time to synchronously meet. The interviews identified the diverse strategies teams used to find time windows to interact, which often included times outside of the normal workday and connecting from home to participate. Recent trends in increased work connectivity from home and blurred boundaries between work and home enabled more scheduling flexibility. While email use was understandably prevalent, there was also general interest in video, although obstacles remain for widespread usage. We propose several design implications for supporting this growing population of workers that need to span global time zone differences.

karl dubost said at 4:32 am on December 14th, 2010:

Matthew Gertner: “I’ll concede that I have more experience with W3C standards than with those of other organizations. ”

http://www.w3.org/Search/Mail/Public/search?keywords=Matthew+Gertner+

Matthew Gertner: “Someone at the W3C, the de facto master of all things web, decided that we needed a proper schema language for XML.”

Ah? It is usually not the way it is happening. Someone with experience of W3C knows that usually some companies being W3C members have interests in developing a market (because they need interop, because they need to sell products, because… etc.). These companies under the umbrella of W3C organize a Workshop where they gather position papers. After this Workshop, a report is written and published. If more interests, an activity proposal is drafted. This activity proposal is then sent to W3C Membership for reviews and comments. More comments, more modifications. Basically the goal is to establish if the Members have enough interests to commit resources for developing the work. WG charters are established along the same line.

XML at W3C has been pushed because companies had developed tools for handling it and thought that because invested a lot of efforts in the XML toolchain, let’s reuse pieces of it.

IMHO, the standards activities anywhere (including W3C) derail when Marketing dept/Product groups have too much impact on the specification itself. The standard is not anymore driven by the market needs, but the companies are creating the market. HTML5 starts to become known outside of the tech sphere and I think we will have surprises.

The top-down approach in a standard organization seems bit strange considering that the work is the result (usually) of a community of practice.

As for an individual or a small group is not “best” for creating technical specs, it is just easier and address the needs of this small group. So indeed it is easier to produce something which is consistent for this group, which goes faster to implement, to market, etc. That doesn’t mean the technology is better :) The bigger the committee the larger the number of issues. This is a truism. All communities are working like this.

Matthew Gertner: “I’d rather see companies get their tech out there and open it up afterward because it’s in their interest (which is usually is).”

Yes and it is what happens most of the time. That doesn’t mean it will necessary solve things. A good example has been SVG. Three “proprietary” specifications were published before the SVG work with people having things implemented in products. But the spec grew too big, with many people wanted to have their own feature, domain introduced in the specs. Standardizing means reducing diversity, and it’s sometimes take times. For SVG, Macromedia (which was bought far later by Adobe) was on the initial SVG WG… as lurkers and unfortunately not really active participants. This is another reality of standards organization.

There are many more issues. W3C (the organization) is doing a fair job at balancing the interests of everyone. There are frictions, nothing is perfect, but there has been always room for improvements. The process has always been flexible for welcoming new use cases.

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For the most part, the movement that started with OpenID and OAuth is largely over. All the cool kids got grownup jobs and have been mostly missing. Think of the people you used to hear from on a weekly basis, and then try to remember when was the last time they had something new or provocative to say.

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I also realized just how destructive choosing standards as a career path can be. The standards world is very demanding and will suck every free minute you have. Most people contribute very little, and at the end, a handful of people end up carrying all the load. The problem is, no one wants to foot the bill for those suckers. Only a handful of very large corporations (mostly telecommunication and hardware) support employees doing standards full time, and mostly to serve their self-interest.

I also learned from the blog that many transit systems were making data available to Google and software developers that could be used in the creation of a "Frequent Service Map." The Chicago Transit Authority makes such data available. Since I have some skills and tools that could produce such a map and since I also have the interest, I decided to give it a shot.

Another interesting fact is free software authors always tend to keep "their" free software with them when moving from one company to another one. Free software authors often use companies as a funding scheme for their free software interest. Obviously companies enjoyed that because they found a way to attract talented people to contribute directly/indirectly to the company interests.

Ian's arguments are entirely based on browser behavior, when it

suits him, and entirely based on speculation when it doesn't.

We have had several discussions on terminology and language

definition for which he has shown no interest in consistency.

We have argued about URI and URL algorithms for which his claim

of browser implementation has turned out to be utterly false.

We are still arguing about the definition of Content-Language

as a pragma in HTML5, even though that definition is technically

wrong, not implemented by the majority of browsers let alone

any of the thousand or so content management systems, actively

harmful to deployed content, disagrees with the normative

MIME and HTTP definitions, breaks the principle of orthogonality

that is core to Web architecture, and even manages to misuse

the term "pragma" for something that is very clearly metadata.

Euh... dtg ?

I would not recommend to start with OWL, but maybe it suits you :) The hardcore way.

There is a good book "Programming the Semantic Web, Build Flexible Applications with Graph Data" By Toby Segaran, Colin Evans, Jamie Taylor with a lot of python code into it.

You can also play with SKOS if you want to deal first with taxonomies http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/NOTE-skos-primer-20090818/ and understands some of the concepts of RDF.

There is the IRC #swig channel (Semantic Web Interest Group) on irc.freenode.net.

Posted at 11:52 a.m. on May 13, 2010

The TownGuide map generator (townguide.webhop.net) is a python program that will render a map to a PDF file and include a street index and an index of user selectable points of interest.