The mixing of multiple data sets through the use of open API’s is my quick little definition of what a Mashup are. Referred to as “web application hybrid” it is a fun and interesting way to bring multiple sources of information to be displayed on the web. These combined sources can come from the afore mentioned API’s or through using JavaScript or other code base to create new ways to interact with and display data.

One of the other big initiatives on the web these days is the annotation of the planet earth. This is one of the phenomena that is really being pushed forward by the user generated content crowd. The mixing of information and GIS data in some very interesting ways. Using Flickr photos and Google maps to show where the images were shot. Adding relevant information to maps to improve our knowledge or ideas in relation to location. User generated reviews of restaurants, bars or shops tied to a mapping software. We are also beginning to see this information pushed to cell phones that are GIS enabled to allow us to receive virtual post its left by our social networks.  

This space is so active that things change on a regular basis a great site for more information is the site Programable Web. 

Here is one of the top Mashups listed on that site. It mixes Microsoft Virtual Earth + Twitter.

I really like this little gem as well called neighbroo

Description
Neighboroo lets you visually explore and search local trends across the nation including real estate, demographics, environmental factors and lifestyles. The website uses colorful heat maps and a simple approach to simplify location research.
APIs Google Maps + Trulia

Wikipedia defines social media as:

The online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other.

A few prominent examples of social media applications are Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), YouTube (video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), Digg (news sharing), and Flickr (photo sharing). These sites typically use technologies such as blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs to allow users to interact.

This is one of the more explosive and interesting components of the Web today. From the traditional information distribution mechanisms you can draw almost a direct line to the Citizens Journalism equivalent.

Print/Newspapers - Blogging

Radio - Podcasting

TV - Vlogs

But instead of air waves or news stands, the distribution methodology for this media is RSS. The collaboration no longer needs to happen in a board room or in a cubicle farm - it can happen anywhere you can get an Internet connection. As a result, the once exclusive club of journalists writing for a magazine etc. is now open and available to everyone. Like all things that are open, it can be a good thing and a bad thing.

The distinguishing factor we are developing is an online reputation. You are responsible for your reputation and voice and we are moving into a time when the bloggeratzi are separated from the serious bloggers/podcasters/vlogers etc. Where a trusted source of information is just that and the noise generated by the masses will either meet our social standards for quality or will be relegated to the equivalent of the grocery store check out line magazine rack. You will have your Edward R. Murrow quality media and your National Enquirer quality of the social media spaces. Make no mistake, the traditional media will be involved as well, adopting the new technology just like everyone else.

The collaborative nature of this medium is creating some amazing content and what are often referred to as a mash ups. This mixing of media from multiple sources and authors is generating some really amazing evolutions of archival media as well as new media created from producers all over the world. This 21st century cut-up technique would make Burroughs and the entire Beat Generation proud. Some of the more common mash ups involve Google Maps where multiple data sources are combined to create a new and interesting set of information.

[tags]social media, web2.0, audio, video, wiki, blog, social networking[/tags]

The evolution of the web blog into the video space in short. Sometimes referred to as video podcasting or vidcasting it is the distribution of video using a blog framework and RSS.

A very fast growing space on the web this is a giant part of the new video revolution on the web. A big reason for that growth is services like YouTube, Blip.tv and others that took the hosting cost and complications out of managing media. You will find that most of this video is short format usually less than ten minutes and on most services has a size cap.

Vlogs are often a video diary if you will, where intimate head shots are used to communicate with your audience. As video on the web has grown so have the types of shows that are being done. From shows like Ask a Ninja, The Show with ZeFrank or the phenomenon that was lonleygirl15 more produced and planed Vlog ’shows’ are being created.

 You can see this genera of video is showing signs of maturity with events like the Vloggies   an awards ceremony for the best Vlogs of the year, Robert Scoble has a nice list of the winners.  Alive in Baghdad, a big winner, is truly an eye opener and really brings home the concept of citizens journalism. We truly are the media.  

So what is a Vlog well IMHO it is video, plan and simply, it is how video is being subscribed to and distributed across this web 2.0 landscape. The better question might be on about how we are consuming video these days. Our patterns are changing and the advent of IPTV and things like three screen strategies are good examples of how our patterns are and will be changing. While talking with a good friend the other night he said and I will paraphrase here ” Just like we used to talk about movies or mainstream media, my partner and I now talk about what we saw on YouTube at dinner.”

Real Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0) is a web feed format constructed in XML that is used in a wide variety of tools and web platforms like blogs. The mode for consumption of an RSS feed is a subscription model. You choose what information that exist in a web site or application that you wish to subscribe to and it is delivered to an application that has an aggregator built in or is an aggregator itself. Usually in a blog scenario you have the option to subscribe to the content of a blog posts or the comments from those posts or both.

An aggregators is in it’s simplest terms a the reader of said XML file and displays the information in a human readable format. These days you have a wide variety of feed readers available to you. Some of the more poplar are:

• Firefox
• Google Reader
• Bloglines
• IE 7
• Attensa for Outlook
• NewsGator/Feed Demon
• Newzcrawler

I could go on and on with the list of RSS aggregators but these web based or client based aggregators bring in your RSS feeds and give you an interface to your subscribed information. The more powerful of these aggregators like the Attensa product and to some extent the Google Reader are very good in that they measure your attention information. That means they let you know what feeds you are most interested in and bring those to the top of your aggregator.

The Attensa product has an AttentionStream™ River of News feature that lays out your feeds based on a multitude of factors that they measure including frequency of viewing, tags, length of attention and many many more.  (note: in full disclosure I have done work for Attensa, but I approached them based off the fact that they had a solid product)

To me the more interesting movement in this space is that fact that these aggregators are integrating into common applications, an example of this is Thunderbird or the new Outlook 2007 where and RSS reader is baked into an e-mail client. The proliferation of RSS is really going to spread with the advent of the new Apple OS and the RSS integration into Windows Vista, IE 7 and Office 2007.

This integration will spread the usage of RSS in majors ways. What you will find is that people will start consuming RSS and not even realize it. It will be a part of the applications that are already commonly uses. As well RSS will be a part of dynamic web sites and services like Live.com Yahoo.com or Google personalized pages or services like Page Flakes. 

You will find that RSS is becoming a major distribution methodology for information and that the usage of this syndication will spread to all types of API’s and data sets on and offline.

Here is the definition from Wikipedia -

“A blog is a user generated Web site where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order. The term “blog” is derived from “Web log.” “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.”

I have been refering to this as the philosophy of conversation:

In the modern world we can not stick our head in the sand or play hear no, see no, speak no evil we must communicate.

One of the key factors in learning how to take advantage of this technology revolution is how to create a conversation. How to use comments and feed back to improve the flow of communication between you and your clients, customers, members, friends or family.

Creating a conversation with your customer or audience is one of the more valuable reasons for starting a blog. 

Some other values of blogging are:

• Develop platform framework for RSS distribution

• Create trust relationship with audience

• Improve search engine rankings

• Increased press coverage

• Lead generation

• Great support tool

• Centralized location for publishing other media podcasts,vlogs

• Improve product or service from feed back received

• Humanize your company or organization

• Develop marketing material from feedback and material generated

• Link love

• You can be seen as leader in your industry

This topic is as vast as the number of bloggers I love this image off the Technorati web site and this statement is oh so true. You will find more bad blogs than you have time to read. David Sifry’s blog does a State of the Blogosphere post every few months where he breaks down some very nice analytics from the traffic that flows through Technorati. As of November 6th 2006 they are about sixty million blogs they are tracking.

So how do you find a good blog?

Search services like Technorati and others are a good first step in finding one of those good blogs. 

Here are a few others -

• Ice Rocket
• Blogdigger
• Google Blog Search

Here is a great listing - Big List of Blog Search Engines.

Sites like Techmeme or Digg are good finding popular stories that are often writen by some of the more prominante or interesting bloggers. Another way to find a good blog is to look at the blogroll that is listed on a blog you read.

Right about now would be a good time for an aggregator - so I guess we will have to get into RSS and aggregators in the next post.

The Metaverse, a phrase coined by Neal Stephenson’s science fiction novel Snow Crash (1992) constitutes Stephenson’s vision of how a virtual reality-based Internet might evolve in the near future. [Source: Wikipedia]

We are moving towards a virtualized existence that has been touted for some time now. Initially the term virtual reality captured our imaginations with pioneers like Lanier and Rheingold. We watched as Lori Singer and Pierce Brosnan portrayed amazing Hollywood visions of what VR might be. The reality of VR was that the clunky gear and 14.4 modems could not even begin to match the futuristic visions Hollywood was putting out.

Fast forward ten years and a more realistic virtual existence has emerged with broadband and advances in computing making social interaction in virtual spaces much more realistic than the cartoonish virtual spaces of the past. We still live with many limitations in these virtual worlds but as the quad core processors and 100MB broadband become more and more real the limiting factors start to fall away and we move ever closer to Stevenson and Gibson’s versions of immersive 3D environments.

Here are a listing of some of the more popular platforms to interact in 3D spaces:

• Second Life
• Active Worlds
• Croquet project
• Dotsoul
• Entropia
• Universe
• OLIVE Platform
• There
• Virtual Object System
• Furcadia
• blaxxun
• IMVU

In a 3D space our “physical” manifestation is referred to as an avatar.

An avatar (abbreviations include AV, ava, avy and avvie) is an Internet user’s representation of himself or herself, whether in the form of a three-dimensional model used in computer games, a two-dimensional icon used on Internet forums and other communities, or a text construct found on early systems such as MUDs. The term “avatar” can also refer to the personality connected with the screen name, or handle, of an Internet user. [Source: Wikipedia]

Here is my avatar representation in Second Life (SL). Second Life is my personal leading contender in this space due to a number of factors but most important in my mind is that fact you are allowed to maintain your intellectual property. It also has its own economy and generates transactions of approximately $650,000 a day.

One of the items that really impressed me about the platform when I started really digging into it was the news release section of the Linden Labs site. When I first went to that section of the Linden web site I expected to see press coverage from gamer magazines and things like Wired. However what I found was coverage by MIT, BBC, Harvard Business Review, New York Times and Fortune. It amazed me how this platform was more than a game and how our sociological norms transcended into this virtual space. Something more connecting and “real” occurs, even though you communicate the same way you would in any chat program, but ‘actually’ being looked at seems to make it more “real.” A great twist is in the way an avatar slumps over with cartoon bubble stating AFK above someones head if the stop interacting with the keyboard. This actual physical representation in a virtual place that is getting more and more photo realistic is making the Metaverse much more than a toy or a game.

More on this in a future post on Virtual Companies.

[tags]Virtual, Metaverse, 3D Web, Web 3.0, Neal Stephenson, virtual reality-based Internet[/tags]

If you have read the About section of this blog then you know I was recently working on a project called the Encyclopedia of Earth (EoE).

On this project I had the opportunity to work directly with Larry Sanger, who along with Jimmy Wales started Wikipedia. This allowed me to delve deep into the Way of the Wiki. I had been familiar with wikis for quite some time, hell Ward Cunningham lives in my backyard, and the title of this post is a take off on his book with Bo Leuf entitled “The Wiki Way - Quick Collaboration on the Web” (2001, Addison Wesley). The Way of the Wiki is a path of collaboration, of working together to achieve a common end, whether this be an online encyclopedia project managed by everyone or vetted by experts, this spirit adds to the power of the Way. These ideals are at the heart of this new user generated evolution of the current state of the Web. To take and use the collective power of knowledge that exists and allow anyone or a selected group to collaborate on a project.

The power of wikis became evident to me early on when I saw that a collection of authors would have a version controlled repository of collaborative information. Having spent some time writing code the value of a content versioning system for more than code was very apparent. Most of the barriers to working with wikis have been broken down by now. You no longer need to know how to write wiki mark up.

Here is an example of Wiktext a.k.a. Wiki Markup

{{selfref|For Wikitext formatting in relation to Wikipedia itself, see [[Wikipedia:Glossary]] and [[Wikipedia:Cheatsheet]].}}
[[Image:Wikitext-wiki markup-wikipedia.png|thumb|400px|Wikitext as it is used in Wikipedia]]

”’Wikitext language”’ or ”’wiki markup”’ is a [[markup language]] that offers a [[lightweight markup language|simplified alternative]] to [[HTML]] and is used to write pages in [[wiki]] websites. ”’Wikitext”’ is text in this language.

Plenty of wiki projects now have WYSIWYG editors and many tools exist to import content like word documents directly into a wiki. You will also find many hosted wiki solutions on the market that try and make using wikis as easy as possible. You can pay for a hosted solution from companies like:

1. ViaWiki
2. Wetpaint
3. Social Text
4. BrainKeeper
5. Confluence

Or you could also use any of these to host your wiki for free.

1. PBWiki
2. StikiPad
3. JotSpot
4. WikiSpaces
5. Wikicities

The underlying engine for Wikipedia as well as the EoE project I worked on is MediaWiki.

What is MediaWiki?

“MediaWiki” is a wiki engine; that is, it is software which provides a Web site that contains user-editable pages. It is used primarily by the Wikimedia Foundation to power their open content projects, such as Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Commons.

This is a powerful and well-managed Open Source solution. Licensed under the GPL, this wiki engine will run on all POSIX systems and since you have access to the source code you can modify it to meet your needs. You can find a big listing of projects using MediaWiki over on the Wikiindex.

Wiki is becoming ingrained in our culture and you can see the power of media interacting with wikis from the Wikiality stunt pulled by Stephen Colbert on his popular TV show on Comedy Central. “If enough people believe something is true… it is - just like on Wikipedia.

Welcome to Wikiality, The Internet’s Tube Dedicated to Truthiness!

Together, we can create a reality that we all agree on.”

This humorous spin on the Way of the Wiki only goes to show how powerful that collective knowledge, accessible by all, can be.

[tags]Wiki, Collaboration, Wikipedia, Wikiality, The Way of the Wiki[/tags]

One of the biggest issues with Ajax is the concern over security.

• Hidden Calls

• Dynamic DOM Updates
• Untrusted Information Sources
• Data Serialization
• Cross-Site Request Forgery

These are some of the serious issues that any sites that wishes to use Ajax need to take into consideration. To understand these issues in more detail I found Ajax Security Basics to be a good starting point and for those of you how eat an breath code check out this report on the top 10 Ajax Security Holes and Driving Factors. For the non-coders among you just assure the developer who is doing the coding is aware of these issues and does not put a file called crossdomain.xml at the root of your Web server that looks like this snipit:

A big point to make is to assure you do not rely on client side validation. Always validate server side and assure the client is never making security decisions for your Ajax code. A craft hacker can monitor the traffic flow and if things like username or password are being passed from client side code they can scrap them out or can use an attack proxy to modify variables and send you unexpected results. Buffer overflow risks are slim but the ability to exploit SQL injection vulnerabilities or business logic flaws are things to be aware of. If you want to dig into these issues more deeply this article Testing for Security in the Age of Ajax Programming is a good article.

Additional resources for learning about Web application security and security analysis tools include the Web Application Security Consortium (WASC), the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), and the SANS (SysAdmin, Audit, Network, Security) Institute.
Another annoying aspect of Ajax is the broke back button. * note: this has nothing to do with gay cowboys * this is a navigation issue where in the browsers back button no longer functions as expected on your Web site after implementing Ajaxian styled navigation or site movement. This was much more of a problem before the proliferation of Ajax, but is still can be an issue for people unfamiliar with the problem. This also reflects a greater issue with unexpected results. If a user is not expecting an automatic update via an Ajaxian process, say a shopping cart update to a price or quantity, so a user may get click happy expecting a certain result and then end up with 15 items in a dynamically updated cart. IBM has a good article called AJAX Accessibility Overview that touches on these and other issues in relation to user expectation.

Just so I can present a positive spin here is an interesting article with Ajax security advantages entitled Securing Ajax.

To quote a News.com article entitled The security risk in Web 2.0:

“What’s new:

Security has been overlooked in the rush to adopt Web 2.0 features on sites, some experts say.

Bottom line:

While surfers can find some PC protection in security software, the burden is on developers to make sure they don’t leave any loopholes for attackers.”

True indeed and just as with any code you must QA your code thoroughly and it helps if you can think like a hacker. So go out and buy yourself a big black hat, lock yourself in the basement with some Red Bull and Jolt, and scheme up ways to “HACK the Planet” or at least your new Ajax code.

[tags]Ajax, Security, The Cult of Code, hack the planet, Ajax Security Basics, Web Application Security Consortium, WASC[/tags]

Well I guess I will start with A as in Ajax. This is a growing methodology for developing sites on the modern Web. Before we get into the guts of the matter let me share with you a usage scenario for Ajax.

A man calls up a Web design firm in a panic. “I have been trying and trying to update my Web site and make it fast and shiny using Ajax.” He franticly blurts out. “What seems to be the problem, sir?” The puzzled designer asks. “Well I keep hearing that everyone is using Ajax on their Web sites and that it makes them faster and more interesting. I tried this but it has only made my Web site unreadable.” “Well how are you implementing it, sir?” The curious designer asks. ” Well I keep scrubbing and scrubbing and all it seems to do is scratch up my Web site and make it unreadable.” ;)

Lesson#1 Do not use Ajax cleaner use Ajax code to enhance your Web site.

Ajax - Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a Web development technique for creating interactive Web applications. The intent is to make Web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire Web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the Web page’s interactivity, speed, and usability.

You see Ajax all over the Web these days and you will find some amazing and not so amazing implementations of this technique. Everything from interactive maps and the Gmail interface that Google uses to predict results in search forms. The interactive nature of components like drag and drop features as well as the fast response to quires can be really helpful.

You will find major players developing various Ajaxian Methodologies and creating a ton of tools

GWT - Google Web Toolkit

The ATF Project at Eclipse

Atlas from Microsoft

Sun - Java & Ajax

Adobe Spry *need an Adobe Labs account

Yahoo UI

Ajax has really evolved over the last year a has many more frameworks and tool kits to help you design with Ajax. However, it’s not all honey and sunshine and we will get into that in part 2 of What is Ajax?

[tags]Ajax, Code, JS, XML, Frameworks[/tags]

NBC is using Movable Type to to create the blogs for its new hit show Heroes. It is also using prototype and scriptaculous to perform Ajaxian functions on the Web site as well as plenty of RSS. It is also doing an online graphic novel that goes into more detail on the story drawing viewers to the Web site. The interesting part about the graphic novel is that it is used in the show; one of the main characters uses the comic book “9th Wonders” as a guide in the show. This component was also an interesting experiment in advertising. In the show one of the characters is speaking with a rental car agent who has one car left a blue Nissan Versa. The picture of the car is in the comic book and promoted on the Web site. A great marketing concept taking the idea of product placement and extending it across mediums.

Here is a good example of a major media outlet taking advantage of Web technologies to extend a traditional broadcast. It has one of the characters blogging as well as the creator Tim Kring, however the blogs are very light. On Hiro’s blog he writes “P.S. I don’t know what happened with the other blog entries. Must be a server glitch.” So perhaps technical difficulties are causing the lack of posts on the blogs.
“According to preliminary nationals from Nielsen, “Heroes” (6.9 rating/16 share in adults 18-49, 16.0 million viewers overall) delivered the strongest demo rating of the season for an NBC entertainment series, and the best number for any rookie skein on any net in the past two seasons.” Heroes in the Media. It will be interesting to see how these numbers are effected by the components of the internet that NBC and the fan of the show are putting together. Heroes has a fairly large and growing active fan base with multiple forums a wiki and teasers uploaded to YouTube. I would encourage NBC to take advantage of this user generated content.

 http://www.heroestv.com/

http://www.discussheroes.com/

http://herolounge.com/

http://www.heroes-forum.com/

http://www.heroesmedia.com/

The evolution and merger of the the Internet and television is a tricky experiment where we will have successes and many failures it is nice to see a major network experimenting with a bit of mixed media but I for one hope this is a huge success.

[tags]NBC, Movable Type, RSS, Ajax, Nielsen, Internet [/tags]

[tags]web 2.0, Internet, social media [/tags]

You may have heard the term web 2.0 before. Some consider it a buzz word while others see it as a definition of current iteration of the Internet’s evolution. The term is perhaps a bit underestimating the scope of the change in development methodologies when it comes to creating web sites today. The implication of 2.0 references the versioning of software that we are all used to at this point however to paraphrase Eric Rice “If it takes you 10 years to get to version 2.0 of your software you are so fired!”

I also think that this is more than a single low level version change, it is more exponential in it’s scope perhaps more web squared than 2.0. Regardless of the semantics behind the name this is a shift in how to develop, market, interact, work and experience the web. You need to know what all this means and how it effects you, your organization or your company. Thus I am developing a manual for the modern web what ever you want to call it. Through this blog and other writings I plan on helping you understand the changes that are going on today and tomorrow with the Internet.

Some of the topics this blog will cover include

• Ajax
• Blogging
• Folksonomy and Taxonomy
• Internet2
• Mapping and GIS
• Mash-ups
• Planet Lab
• Podcating
• RSS
• Social Networks
• The Metaverse
• Vlogging
• Wiki’s

I will cover the news around the industry to some extent, I will leave the heavy lifting on industry watching to Michael, Marshall and Nick as well as bring as much insider information into the industry that I can to light. I will of course have to abide by the NDA’s that I have signed and respect people when they say off the record. I hope you enjoy reading this blog and I want to thank Chris for letting me write here in the Nexus. Now go Google something else while I work on my next post. :)