The Emerging Web: Collaborations in Web Design using XML

“The developers at del.icio.us have announced that they were purchased by Yahoo!. From the post: ‘We’re proud to announce that del.icio.us has joined the Yahoo! family. Together we’ll continue to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet, with a big emphasis on the power of community. We’re excited to be working with the Yahoo! Search team - they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web. (We’re also excited to be joining our fraternal twin Flickr!)’” For background on this purchase, carre4 writes “Stuart Maxwell, Jeff Barr, and Yahoo! team’s Jeremy Zawodny recently did an interview explaining What’s so cool about del.icio.us, in which Jeremy gave a non-committal answer about Yahoo acquiring del.ico.us”

In this two-part series, Edd Dumbill examines the various ways forward for HTML that Web authors, browser developers, and standards bodies propose. This series covers the incremental approach embodied by the WHATWG specifications and the radical cleanup of XHTML proposed by the W3C. Additionally, the author gives an overview of the W3C’s new Rich Client Activity. Here in Part 1, Edd focuses primarily on two specifications being developed by WHATWG: Web Applications 1.0 (HTML5) and Web Forms 2.0.

Bloggers as Media Parasites

This is an interesting post to the Nettime list about the relationship of bloggers to mainstream media. Also take a look at this new MSNBC blog Baghdad Blogging which claims to tell the “untold story.” I would love to ask NBC, untold by whom???

Instructables is a website bought to you by the partners at www.squid-labs.com. We make a lot of stuff, for business, and for pleasure. We’ve been looking for a long time for a convenient system for documenting our how-to projects, and the things we make, but it simply didn’t exist. We decided we’d have to develop it ourself, and here it is, it will evolve as we grow to meet our own rigorous demands, and those of our users. Principal in our demands is convenience - it should take less time to document a project than it did to build it.

And check out SourceForge if you have not already for the software version…

PodCast Choas Be Gone
Two new search engines offer to do for podcasting what Technorati does for blogs by letting users search podcasts by keyword to single out audio that suits their interests.

An article in today’s NY Times on the value and reliability of Wikipedia.

With Office 2003, Microsoft created an xml vocabulary for representing office documents. (Try it out by select xml document in the Save as type drop down menu when saving a word document, then open the resulting file in a text editor such as textpad or dreamweaver.) Up until recently this vocabulary has been proprietary in nature. Apparently that is about to change as Microsoft is making the vocabulary available to all developers with little or no strings attached. This could lead to a separation between the format for saving office documents and the authoring environments used to create and modify them. Top open source lawyer blesses new terms on Microsoft’s XML file format describes some of the technical and legal issues involved.

Pew Reports
International Telecommunications Union
ICANN
Internet Governance
W3C

A Slashdot review of a new book on podcasting: “Podcasting appears to be one of the more interesting developments in current culture and technology. It is one of the earliest nonbusiness representations of the value and power of XML (Extensible Markup Language). XML is subtly and quietly being used to link digital documents together, and more significantly, databases, much like the Internet itself linked individual computers into a global network.”

According to an article in today’s N.Y. Times (Books for Lending, Data for Taking) university and community libraries are experimenting with some of the data driven, personalized web applications that we have discussed in this course. The article touches on some of the privacy issues that go hand-in-hand with such applications.