Month: July 2007

FCC fails at Open

The auction rules include much of what Google requested, including open devices and open applications. But open services and open networks are out, meaning third parties may not get access to the networks at fair wholesale rates. Will we see a tidal wave of innovation in the space? It’s too early to tell. The FCC hedged its bets to keep AT&T, Verizon and other incumbents happy. New players like Google may or may not participate.

weak

Roaming Scam

2 weeks of travel with sporadic AT&T; EDGE network usage off and on mixed with wifi when available… $3000. Doing some research, I learned this morning that AT&T; offers unlimited international data usage at $70 per month to its Blackberry customers.

who needs phones?

A-List Tech Bloggers

A lot of the popular technology bloggers aren’t just often behind the current trends on the Web, but actually don’t even know how to use the software when they do find out about it because they are too out of touch with how the Internet generation actually thinks.

clueless a-listers

Google Maps Microformats

Today we’re happy to announce that we are adding support for the hCard microformat to Google Maps results. Why should you care about some invisible changes to our HTML? By marking up our results with the hCard microformat, your browser can easily recognize the address and contact information in the page, and help you transfer it to an addressbook or phone more easily. Firefox users can install the Operator or Tails extension; IE or Safari users can use one of these bookmarklets.

yay for me, and for microformats in general

a Web browser could automatically send all encountered hCards, adrs and geos to a map called “Web History.” The user could then turn this map on to view all of the pieces of information they recently encountered online geographically.

Google Maps may not be the first to embrace microformats, but it is definitely one of the largest services and should significantly increase the public’s exposure to the usefulness of microformats.

There’s a lot more that they could do along these lines if they went with RDF and/or RDFa

With this seismic shift in the landscape of published microformats, I think we in the microformats community may have to shift our focus slightly. Instead of just being concerned with evangelising the publishing of microformats, it’s now incumbent upon

The Google Maps team’s new deployment of Microformat support is yet another brilliant development in their evolution of local search

Google Base API vs. Astoria

I should probably start out by pointing out that the title of this post is a lie. By definition, RESTful protocols can not be truly SQL-like because they depend on Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs aka URLs) for identifying resources. URIs on the Web are really just URLs and URLs are really just hierarchical paths to a particular resource similar to the paths on your local file system (e.g. /users/mark/bobapples, A:\Temp\car.jpeg). Fundamentally URIs identify a single resource or aset of resources. On the other hand, SQL is primarily about dealing with relational data which meansyou write queries that span multiple tables (i.e. resources). A syntax for addressing single resources (i.e. URLs/URIs) is fundamentally incompatible with a query language that operates over multiple resources. This was one ofthe primary reasons the W3C created XQuery even though we already had XPath.

someone is trying to sell a thick client model here. NEED TO MAINTAIN CLIENT REVENUES