29 January 2003

Technology of the Year: Publish/Subscribe. A new breed of middleware vendors brought pub/sub messaging down to the desktop. With Kenamea and KnowNow, you can subscribe a spreadsheet cell to a topic that's managed out in the cloud. An event published to that topic -- such as an inventory update -- automatically updates the spreadsheet. It's true that you could do this kind of thing a decade ago, using NetDDE (Network Dynamic Data Exchange) on your Windows for Workgroups LAN. But pub/sub at Internet scale is far more compelling. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] ... [Jon's Radio] 10:33:56 PM     Spot on Dave To Tom Matrullo who wonders what good RSS is if it just shovels the same old crap he reads in newspapers. Tom, t's better than that. Much. RSS creates a level playing field that's open to all. Amateurs and pros, young and old, rich and poor, the homeless, the uninsured and people with AIDS, you name it -- they all can slug it out for readers in the same venue. If you subscribe to Scripting News, today you've already heard about a new peer-to-peer network, you've learned a little math, and read an amusing Glenn Fleishman piece about skiing in Montana (if you clicked) and heard that Dubya is borrowing a few lies (oops lines) from Teddy Roosevelt. And it's not even 7AM. Sure the NY Times, BBC, News.Com, etc are all worth reading. But now you're getting more variety, and they're getting competition, which are good things, imho. [Scripting News] 9:02:54 PM     Right on Jon Jon Udell: A picture can be worth a thousand words. But a URL can be worth half a dozen pictures. [Matt Pope's Radio Weblog] 9:01:31 PM     EOMODELER IS THE REASON Those of us who have intense loyalty to WebObjects in spite of the awesome power of mainstream J2EE are loyal mostly because of EOModeler. We decided to go ahead and invest a few hundred bucks in Len Silverston's Reuseable Data Models today and within 30 mins we had them reverse-engineered into EOModeler and ready to autogenerate object-relational Enterprise Objects on demand. Probably saved us 150000 lines of code and months spent on iffy database/object design. Why doesn't Apple get people to reuse models? Silverston has the right idea .... 8:43:06 PM     MORE ON DYNAMIC EMAIL APPLICATIONS You see lots of HTML in emails but very rarely do you see HTML forms. Why not? Emails come at you every day right? Do forms break a social code in email, or a user interface rule? I'm surprised, given that email is the transcendent push application, that HTML email forms aren't completely pervasive. Don't organisations like salesforce.com worry sometimes that their users might never come back? The presentation tier in three-tier apps could be email. Database-business logic-email rather than database-business logic-browser ... One reason people don't do this too much is because the components are slightly tiresome to code. WebObjects makes it pretty easy however. In a similar vein, and speaking of push and forms, why doesn't the excellent Groove Project Manager push alerts out to people when tasks are due ... This is all just too bossy I guess ... applications that get in your face too much may just not be very popular. 8:33:38 PM     TIPPING POINT - ONE OF FORREST'S FAVOURITE THEMES TIPPING POINT CRIB SHEET: For those of us that only manage to read the first 100 pages of important books, Robert Paterson's weblog has a FANTASTIC overview of the Tipping Point.  [Michael Helfrich's Radio Weblog] 8:19:49 PM     Reputation Systems - interest in these issues in MMAPPS in which Mysterian is now involved Whuffie for hackers. Good SmartMobs story on Affero, a reputation system for hackers, and the ways in which it parallels Whuffie: One of the critical uncertainties about the future of smart mobs is whether or not workable, transportable, trustworthy reputation systems will evolve and spread. The potential for collective action in any population cannot be realized until the trust level rises above a threshold, and reputation can multiply the number of ways people trust each other. So far, eBay's and Slashdot's reputation system , or the more geeky trust metric used by Advogato have been the exemplars of reputation management systems. Affero is a new wrinkle, one that holds some promise. Specifically created to "facilitate funding for Free Software and Open Source projects and to facilitate more effective dialogue among groups", Affero works for Usenet or listservs or message boards." You register and get a URL you can put in your .sig or on a web page. People who like your posts or feel you have contributed your time and expertise to helping them with a technical problem can click on your URL and give you reputation points or contribute money (via credit card and soon via PayPal) to your chosen cause, or to the community's default cause, or all three. Organizations like the Free Software Foundation and Electronic Frontier Foundation are popular beneficiaries. Link Discuss (Thanks, Howard!) [Boing Boing Blog] 8:12:58 PM     This one's for Fusion http://www.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/09/20/hln.hot.buzz.blog/index.html http://www.weblogs.com/ 12:09:46 AM

© Copyright 2003 Neil Finlayson. Last update: 04/02/2003; 12:38:56.