During lunch at work one day this week we were talking about movies, one of our favorite topics. Both Jared and Christine suggested watching the new Val Kilmer movie: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. They said it was quirky, funny, clever, and just a great story. They highly recommended it. But I got to thinking. Why […]

Continue Reading: Which Movie to Watch? An Overview of Recommendation Systems

“At one point, Battelle paints a disturbing picture, sketching out a scenario in which the federal government could demand that Google provide personal information about its users in the name of national security.

If that were to happen, Google would have to notify all the affected parties, right? Not under the U.S. Patriot Act, which specifically forbids companies from making disclosures about government requests for information.

Didn’t know that? Don’t feel bad. Neither did Brin when Battelle asked him earlier this year about the potential perils of Google becoming a secret tool for the U.S. government.

Via A book that googles Google

Doc Searls in Talking Markets:

“The Powers that Were are no longer the only ones with the power to communicate, influence and change culture as well as prices. Look how the market for (actually the category of) photography has changed, thanks not only to what Nikon, Sony, Canon and Flickr have done, but to what any of us can do with tagging.”

Tom Coates writes up how to build bubble-up folksonomies. It’s an interesting piece, sure to become more useful over time, as systems migrate toward bottoms-up instead of top-down.

Are you thinking of building something like this?

I think that sums up the new browser, now in beta. Just look at some of the new and updated features:

Features

• SVG support
• Support for the <canvas> element
• CSS 3 Columns
• DOM inspector
• Javascript console
• Syntax highlighting on view source

Supported web standards

• Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML): HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0/1.1
• Cascade Style Sheets (CSS): CSS Level 1, CSS Level 2 and parts of CSS Level 3
• Document Object Model (DOM): DOM Level 1, DOM Level 2 and parts of DOM Level 3
• Mathematical Markup Language: MathML Version 2.0
• Extensible Markup Language (XML): XML 1.0, Namespaces in XML, Associating Style Sheets with XML Documents 1.0, Fragment Identifier for XML
• XSL Transformations (XSLT): XSLT 1.0
• XML Path Language (XPath): XPath 1.0
• Resource Description Framework (RDF): RDF
• Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP): SOAP 1.1
• ECMA-262, revision 3 (JavaScript 1.5): ECMA-262

See the Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Beta for Developers page for more info.

I’m happy to announce that Richard MacManus and I are writing a book about Web 2.0 for O’Reilly Media. As many of you know, I’ve swallowed the Web 2.0 bug here at Bokardo and Richard has what is probably the most popular Web 2.0 blog, as well as a Web 2.0 column on Digital Web […]

Continue Reading: Web 2.0 Book

Boy, I wish I had seen this when I wrote my recent piece on Writing Semantic Markup. Joe Reger, who calls what he does “data blogging”, has released a screencast of him uploading an XML schema file to his blogging software, which takes the schema file and creates a new log type out of it. […]

Continue Reading: A Glimpse of the Future: Joe Reger’s XML Schema Coolness

The next wave of applications will be web-based. Many will be online equivalents to what we have on the desktop. In recent months the push has been toward applications that mirror Microsoft Office: made up of a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation programs.

ThinkFree Office is in Beta, written with Java, and pretty darn robust.

You can try out the apps, too:

Write | Show | Calc

My new favorite blog is the Web 2.0 Explorer, written by Richard MacManus over at ZDNet. As many of you know, I’ve been writing with Richard about Web 2.0 Design over at Digital Web, and now he’s writing with the big boys. Congrats, Richard!

Web 2.0 Explorer Feed

Paul Boutin writes a nice, quick overview of Greasemonkey, a Firefox plugin that allows you to run your own, local javascript when viewing a web page: Monkeying With the Web.

Mark Pilgrim has written a book on the subject: Dive Into Greasemonkey.