I care about… – Page 11

Ben Brophy’s Linkwalla adds xFolk support

Ben Brophy‘s databaseless personal link aggregator, Linkwalla, has recently been upgraded to v0.9.7. Aside from Flickr and Ma.gnolia integration, the output is now marked up in the xFolk microformat.

Bush Force Quits Rumsfeld (finally!)

Brilliant.

Check it out on Tailrank. Track it as the story grows.

Gang warfare, Web 2.0 style

Summary: Adobe + Mozilla + Google are ganging up to take down Microsoft to become the definitive future web platform.

I’ve been reading with great interest and intrigue about Adobe’s substantial contribution to Firefox’s codebase in the form of open sourcing Flash Player 9’s virtual machine.

On the one hand, I’m tempted to go and congratulate Adobe for their good will and desire to support “sustaining innovations“.

On the other, more cynical, hand, I know enough to read between the lines and see this for what it really is: business as usual, with the good grace of open source being used as a context for making this appear “nicer” than it really is.

But don’t get me wrong — this is a good thing for the web, for web denizens, for web developers, open source and for innovation. So that’s not what I’d like to point out here.

Instead, I’d like to offer a theory that this is a calculated move by at least Adobe (if not Mozilla and Google collectively) to go at Microsoft’s jugular just when it’s starting to regain its some of momentum as the dominant web platform after releasing IE7. (Note that my intimations are purely conjectural and not based on known fact. Whether intentional or not, this announcement spells out an alternative future, and it’s worth teasing out what it might look like, even as the story is developing.)

So let’s state some baseline assumptions and assertions:

Adobe PDF is Adobe’s crown jewel. Their virtual monopoly on this rich format provides them a huge amount of business through their Acrobat product (now in version 8) — and they’ve moved to protect it before.
Adobe Flash Players are installed in well over 90% of client browsers, making it the most widely deployed browser plugin anywhere (note the tie-in to Flash video — and who’s the biggest consumer here? YouTube much?)
JavaScript and ActionScript (Flash’s programming language) are very close cousins — pushing EMCAScript and ActionScript closer through a faster virtual machine inches Flash ever-closer to subsuming the browser.
Apollo offers to wed the best of Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax and PDF — hell, you can even build a browser with this stuff

Contrary to Liz Gannes’ take, I think Adobe might, somehow, be positioning itself very wisely to help shape the future of online publishing, data interchange and rich web experiences. In fact, by nuzzling up to Mozilla and offering more and more open betas (though still with obnoxiously unruly EULAs), Adobe is starting to have the sheen of an open source player.

So let’s think about this: Microsoft is set to release Vista soon — and just as the delineation between web and desktop is finally evaporating — Adobe and Mozilla strike out with a bold partnership that firmly implants Adobe’s engineering technologies into the core equation between browser and desktop. And, given the large number of XHTML and Flash gurus in the wild, this seems like the death nell for XAML before the shrink wrap has even been removed. This isn’t about Flash becoming the web OS; this is about Adobe protecting and promoting it own delivery platforms and formats as it tag teams with Google to suck the “Live” out of Microsoft before it even has a chance to counter.

Adobe wants to be front and center in every browser; it’s smart enough to recognize however, that, like Google, the core threat to their position in the market is Microsoft’s Live platform technologies. An Adobe browser couldn’t dent Microsoft’s platform share, but two open source browsers can by creating the de facto web publishing environment and tools for the future of the web-centric desktop.

An interesting development indeed.

Jimbo Wales has left the building?

Maybe I’m missing something, but isn’t it kind of significant that Jimmy Wales, one of the main drivers behind Wikipedia, Wikimedia and Wikia, has stepped down as chair of the Wikimedia Foundation? Or is this just normal board reorganization within a non-profit? According to Jimmy, he’s too busy. Okay, I could probably buy that.

Internet Explorer 8.0 will support microformats

We now have confirmation that something that many of us in the community have suspected for some time (owing to Ray Ozzie’s Live Clipboard demo): that upcoming versions of Internet Explorer, expected some time in the next 12-18 months, will include support for microformats.

This, apparently, is straight from Chris Wilson, the new platform architect for IE:

“Mash-ups will continue to drive innovation. Componentization and semantic tagging of data will be supported,” Wilson told the Ajax Experience crowd. Wilson touted the harnessing of microformats, like Microsoft has done with its Live Clipboard effort, as “real world stuff” that will “make the Web much more usable.”

“Microformats add meaning to content in HTML,” Wilson said.

With discussions around support for microformats in Firefox 3, and Apple showing strong support for microformats as well, it’s only a very short amount of time before we can move on from the “so who’s using microformats?” question to “okay, so now what can we do with them?”

Apple embraces microformats in new .Mac webmail

If you’ve been playing with the new .Mac webmail application, something under the surface very significant is present, but you’d probably never realize it. In fact, if it weren’t good works like Jon Hicks’ expose-mf.css browser stylesheet (view the above image without the stylesheet), you’d probably have no idea that beneath the surface, Apple was quietly giving a nod to an upstart open source community.

Given the source code that I’ve been provided, I can confirm that Apple has indeed added support for hCard in .Mac webmail, though not without a few errors (notably the ‘n’ optmization).

The significance of this can certainly be understated at this point, as few applications are built to take advantage of microformats browser-side (adding address cards that are already in your address book to your address book doesn’t make much sense) however, with Greasemonkey and other ideas like GreaseKits making the rounds (okay, so I came up with GreaseKits), we can count this as yet another feather in our cap as more and more large vendors make their web properties more semantically rich, opening up possibilities previously inaccessible given the sheer cost of maintaining one-off scrAPI techniques.

Now when you write a script to parse, augment, enhance or “user-interface-ize” microformatted content, it will work everywhere that microformats show up — not just one site at a time. With Firefox 3 looking to add support for microformats, it’s positive support by folks like Apple that will provide fertile ground for what the next generation of mashable web services looks like.

Symantec/Norton on OpenID/Cardspace train

For posterity (emphasis added):

Users, and not Symantec, will control their identity information, Salem said, addressing the main criticism that led to the demise of a similar effort from Microsoft called Passport. Also, Symantec will not create new technology standards, but plans to use Microsoft’s CardSpace and the open-source OpenID technology, Salem said.

Scott Beale calls for the end of happy birthday

…well, maybe that’s a bit strong, but he‘s got a point. After all, Happy Birthday is a copyrighted work, and technically, if you perform the song in a public place, like a bar or somesuch, you’re supposed to pay the owner(s) of the copyright a royalty fee. I kid you not.

For downloads, you’re looking at $8.50 each; to put the track on your website, $800 per year, if you can get the owners to agree to give you a license.

So, what the heck? It’s time for something new. Traditional is nothing if it’s not able to passed around like 99 bottles of beer on the wall, so it’s time to kill Happy Birthday and start anew. I’m no song writer, but I suppose you could call it “Born on the [insert date]” or “Gee, I’m glad you were born today” or “Birthday Birthday Birthday for you” or “You’re older, you’re older, you’re oooolllldddeeerrrr!”

I dunno, whatev. But as long you release it under the Creative Commons Share-alike license (Eran’s suggestion), we can go on celebrating each other’s birthdays without worrying about infringing on someone else’s golden egg. About time.