Here’s a recommendation for a book recommendation system: What Should I Read Next?

On your first glance at the tech.memeorandum home page, you won’t see anything all that special. You’ll see some links to blog items down the left-hand side labeled “Top Items”, and some smaller links to the right labeled “New Item Finder”. It looks like a hundred other blog aggregators being released nowadays…no big deal, right? […]

Continue Reading: Tech.Memeorandum’s Filtering Illustrates Web 2.0’s Most Important Skill

Pubsub linkcount is confusing. I have no idea what it means. One day bokardo gets 3 inlinks and its ranked 1,691 (in the top 4% of something). The next day it gets zero links and drops down to 91,755. The day after that its gets 6 inlinks and rises to 14,617. It would seem that the rank is based on the activity of other sites somehow. Is this just counting the number of links on a given day and ranking by that day only?

Does anybody know what this means?

By now you’ve heard why Ajax is great for web-based applications:

• It is standards-based
• It is degradeable with unsupporting browsers
• It is relatively easy to implement
• The benefits of a one-screen interface (no disruptions for page refreshes)

The Side Benefit of Ajax

But there’s another side benefit, that I think might be as influential as any of the above. When you build an Ajax application, you need to break down your server calls into smaller chunks. You’re no longer requesting complete web pages when you hit your server, you’re requesting information via a simplified API that you create (something as simple as a PHP script, perhaps).

This is yet another step toward microcontent, or pieces of data that live on their own and are called together to form applications screens or web pages. If you weren’t planning on accessing your content in this way before you decided to use Ajax techniques, you will definitely have to if you move that way.

This seems to be an overall trend, however. First we gain granular access to our own content for our own needs, and then we provide public access to others after we see how useful it is.

Doc Searls has a nice writeup of Blog Search engines, including the new Google Blog Search, IceRocket, PubSub, Technorati, Blogpulse, and A9.

He answers the question: What’s the difference between a Wide Web Search and a Live Web Search?

The difference? Syndication. I wonder how long that distinction will last.

If you’re a PHP programmer, check out Joe Stump’s article on Understanding MVP in PHP. Ever since I started doing things the MVC way, I’ve become much more productive…

(via Infodesign) In The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems Scott Golder and Bernardo Huberman of HP Labs examine folksonomies. From the abstract:

“Collaborative tagging describes the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content. Recently, collaborative tagging has grown in popularity on the web, on sites that allow users to tag bookmarks, photographs and other content. In this paper we analyze the structure of collaborative tagging systems as well as their dynamical aspects. Specifically, we discovered regularities in user activity, tag frequencies, kinds of tags used, bursts of popularity in bookmarking and a remarkable stability in the relative proportions of tags within a given url. We also present a dynamical model of collaborative tagging that predicts these stable patterns and relates them to imitation and shared knowledge.”

I now have veritable proof that Web 2.0 as a term is working to describe the changing web. How do I know? People told me so. Last night I led a talk for the Macromedia Boston Users Group called “Web 2.0 Interfaces, the Future of Design”. I used Keynote for the first time, and I […]

Continue Reading: Talking about Web 2.0 with Designers

This has the potential to be very popular: a project called Ajax pages has just been released, with the intent to allow people to embed Javascript code in HTML like we do with PHP, ASP, and JSP.

It’s not server-side, though, from what I can tell. It’s simply a way to manipulate things client-side in a familiar way.

Here’s an example:

<html>
<body>
<% var hello = "Hello World"; %>
<%=hello%>
</body>
</html>

Check out the tutorial to see how it works.

An interesting piece at Wired about a new browser called Flock.

The first question will probably be, unfortunately, this: How do you monetize a browser?

Instead, let’s ask this one: What does this do that I can’t do now?