Web 2.0 shows its data muscle
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Building mashups gets faster Mashups are, of course, the "new black" in the world of web services, but building them does mean getting access to data on different databases and services - and that can sometimes be a bit of a problem.â¦
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New .mobi and .jobs, a shift in the ownership of .net
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(InfoWorld) - Call it the second Internet bubble, a Web 2.0 revolution, or just a resurgence in really useful tools for busy end-users -- Web applications are catching on quickly. The advantages are clear for applications that work well on the Web: Anytime and anywhere access to your data, good application speed over a broadband connection, automated backups, and streamlined user interfaces that are far easier to use than the bloatware of yesteryear. Well-known services, such as Plaxo.com and Basecamp.com, offer to mobile users the added benefit of being able to tap into their contacts or projects from a smartphone. One of the most compelling reasons to use applications on the Web is that they are almost all free -- at least for now. Here are a few new -- or at least lesser-known -- Web sites that can serve as good replacements for equivalent desktop software. In this roundup, I'll cover the features that make each one noteworthy and offer a few ideas for other candidates worth exploring. Gliffy Gliffy is a flow chart and diagram application that works exactly like Microsoft Visio. To create a flow chart, you just drag icons onto the document area. You can then use arrows and other pointers to create the chart. Like many full-blown Web apps, Gliffy allows you to collaborate with other users by sharing your flow chart in a public workspace. Brainstorming sessions, marketing demos, or just a clear plan on how to implement a hardware or software rollout in a large company become quick and easy -- there's no desktop client to install or site registration to think about. Although Gliffy lacks the pizzazz of a commercial application -- some of the icons for creating a networking flow chart, for example, look too simplistic -- the Web application ran without any problems in both IE7 and Firefox. It does lack a way to quickly align objects or rotate them in set increments using a modifier key. As with most Web apps, Gliffy stores your diagrams automatically and introduces new features without requiring an upgrade. Priscila Melendez, a senior consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, is a Gliffy user. "I used Gliffy when working on a marketing effort to share network security diagrams with other team members who were off-site," Melendez said. "The ability to share the images created and then to be able to save and use them in publications and documents makes this a great collaboration tool. I believe the way diagrams can be generated and shared is the greatest asset, especially as more companies are starting to open up to telecommuting." ThinkFree Anyone who relies heavily on a word processor for business communication, project documentation, or even just quick cover letters probably already knows the features they like best. For me, one feature that is obviously missing from Web word processors -- including ZoHo Writer and Google Documents -- is the inline spell checker. ThinkFree, billed as "the best online office on earth," distinguishes itself by offering a spell checker -- and it even has custom dictionaries. When you misspell a word, ThinkFree adds a red underline that you can click on to select the correct spelling. It might seem trivial, but because this feature is missing from many other online word processors, it's a definite plus. Of course, ThinkFree Office offers a bevy of additional features: 1GB of storage for documents, Microsoft Office read-and-write support, a global search for both public and private documents and two options for word processing -- a quick edit function with a limited (but more intuitive) feature set, and a power edit mode with more advanced functions. ThinkFree supports word processing, spreadsheets, and online presentations. It uses Java, which means it should support multiple browsers, but at press time, it didn't work with the latest version of Firefox 2. In Internet Explorer 7, all three beta apps worked without any crashes. YouSendIt One of the nagging problems of Web e-mail is that there is no progress indicator that shows you when a large attachment is transferring to the recipient. In Microsoft Live Mail and Gmail, you just wait until you return to the inbox. Even in Microsoft Outlook, the progress bar isn't terribly accurate about how long it will take to send a large attachment. And it's also a guessing game as to whether the recipient can receive a large file or not. One solution to this problem is YouSendIt. The free version allows you to send a 100MB file to any recipient -- neither the sender nor receiver has to register for an account. What I like about YouSendIt more than other options like DropSend.com and MailBigFile.com is that it actually works. I tested about 10 files, each one to a different recipient, and they all worked flawlessly. Other services tend to stall or lose track of the upload. YouSendIt offers scaled membership levels for different transfer capabilities. The $4.99-per-month Plus version, for example, can send attachments up to 2GB in size. There's also an enterprise-level version with extremely high bandwidth so that once you transmit the file, it will become available as a fast download for other corporate users. GrandCentral Think of GrandCentral as a more intuitive and Web-enabled alternative to fixed mobile convergence, allowing you to use one unified phone number for work, home, and cell phone. Granted, it's not an enterprise application with an application programming interface that you can tie into corporate networks, and there are no security features for corporate compliance. But for sales agents or other mobile workers who want more control of their voice communications, GrandCentral works perfectly. Once you understand the benefits of unified messaging -- that people trying to contact you call one number, but all of your phones ring at the same time -- you can go well beyond this core functionality to personalized greetings by phone, call recording, call screening and blocking, and a unique feature called RingShare that plays something different than the traditional "ring ring" sound for callers while they wait for you to pick up. You can even program it so different groups of people hear different sounds. Xdrive Some laptop users have learned the harsh reality of magnetic-media storage: Your local disk can fail, and if you don't have a recent backup for Outlook, your business documents and even seemingly trivial settings like Internet Explorer bookmarks, there's no way to retrieve lost data. Some external storage drives, such as the Western Digital MyBook, provide an Internet storage option, but they're hard to configure and use. Xdrive.com has a new beta service called Web Backup that offers more control over online backups. Just register at xdrive.com (AOL users, just log in with your AOL account) and click on the Beta button and then click Web Backup. You can configure Xdrive to archive documents, photos, and even IE favorites with just a few clicks. Unlike competitors like Mozy.com, it runs entirely on the Web, so you can use it on any computer to archive the contents of that PC. Xdrive is entirely free and comes with 5GB of storage. You can also upload a large file and then share the link with a co-worker so he can download it. An ancillary service called Xdrive Shows is an online presentation system for photos of business slides. Web apps or Web 2.0? You might wonder: what's the difference between a Web application and Web 2.0? Some would say "not much." But Web 2.0 is a broad term that implies usefulness and social engineering. Twitter.com is a good example of a Web 2.0 site because it doesn't look like a desktop application running on the Web, yet it's useful and has a distinct social aspect. Meanwhile, a Web application is less about connecting with friends or even connecting to other Web services and more about being productive. Some people believe that sites like Twitter.com could be part of a short-lived fad and that they don't appeal as much to the business user. John Brandon is a freelance writer and book author who worked as an IT manager for 10 years.
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Masala, an add-on to IBM's DB2 database, queries far-flung info sources on company networks.
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One of the major issues plaguing search engines right now is the growing list of web documents available online. While no exact numbers are available, there are billions of search results to sort through. But, they can&#8217;t all be relevant both on material content and time &#8212; can they?  Of course they&#8217;re not, and Google [...]
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Search reality check From BEA Systems and its soon-to-be owner Oracle, from mighty IBM to a myriad of social network and online office start-ups, vendors have been telling us how the "Google generation" and Web 2.0 will change the way we work. Many have been flogging applications and middleware products, strategies and marketing puff to back this up.â¦
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The Semantic Web, a concept tossed around for years as a Web extension to make it easier to find and group information, is getting a critical boost Tuesday from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).W3C will announce publication of SPARQL (pronounced "sparkle") query technology, a Semantic Web component enabling people to focus on what they want to know rather than on the database technology or data format used to store data, W3C said.The potential of the Semantic Web cannot be underestimated. By scanning the Web on behalf of users, even Google's ad-based business model could be impacted, an analyst said.SPARQL queries express high-levels goals and are easier to extend to unanticipated data sources. The technology overcomes limitations of local searches and single formats, according to W3C."[SPARQL is] the query language and protocol for the Semantic Web," said Lee Feigenbaum, chair of the RDF (Resource Description Framework) Data Access Working Group at W3C, which is responsible for SPARQL.Already available in 14 known implementations, SPARQL is designed to be used at the scale of the Web to allow queries over distributed data sources independent of format. It also can be used for mashing up Web 2.0 data.The Semantic Web, the W3C said, is intended to enable sharing, merging, and reusing of data globally. "The basic idea of the Semantic Web is take the idea of the Web, which is effectively a linked set of documents around the world, and apply it to data," Feigenbaum said."One way to think about the Semantic Web is the Web as one big database," said Ian Jacobs, W3C representative. A database, he said, enables querying and manipulation of data. More database-like Web sites are emerging, he said.Comparing the Semantic Web to search sites such as Google, Jacobs said Google allows for searching through document text, essentially. The Semantic Web, meanwhile, allows for automation and combining of data, he said.While the Semantic Web concept has been talked about for several years, Feigenbaum believes momentum is building. He cited DBpedia, which extracts structured information form Wikipedia, as an example of a Web site based on the Semantic Web.With the Semantic Web's ability to hone in on just the information a user needs, companies based on a Web search advertising model such as Google may have to reconsider their plans, said analyst Jonas Lamis, executive director of SciVestor."They may need to rethink their business model because if I have an agent that acts on my behalf and finds things that are interesting for me, it's not necessarily going to be reading Google ads to do that," Lamis said.The goal of the Semantic Web is to serve as a giant set of databases that can be integrated, Jacobs said. The Semantic Web has seen a lot of uptake in the health care and life sciences, he said. The drug discovery and pharmaceutical fields can use it to take clinical results and learn from data, according to Jacobs.At pharmaceuticals company Eli Lilly, Semantic Web technology is being used for research."We're using it for our targeted assessment tools, which helps us to find out as much information or find out lots of information about drug targets of interest," said Susie Stephens, principal research scientist at Eli Lilly and chair of the W3C Semantic Web Education and Outreach Working Group. A drug target is a protein in the body that is to be modified with a particular drug."We use Semantic Web technologies to help us link to lots of information about the drug targets," she said.The SPARQL specification works with other W3C Semantic Web technologies. These include: RDF, for representing data; RDF Schema; Web Ontology Language (OWL) for building vocabularies; and Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages (GRDDL) for automatic extraction of Semantic Web data from documents.SPARQL also can use other W3C standards such as WSDL.The W3C RDF Data Access Working Group has produced three SPARQL recommendations being issued Tuesday: the SPARQL Query Language for RDF; SPARQL Protocol for RDF; and SPARQL Query Results for XML Format.Participants in the working group include persons from companies such as Agfa-Gevaert, HP, IBM, Matsushita, and Oracle. W3C released statements of support from numerous parties, including HP and Oracle."SPARQL is a key element for integrated information access across information silos and across business boundaries. HP customers can benefit from better information utilization by employing semantic Web technologies," said Jean-Luc Chatelain, CTO of HP Software Information management, in the company's statement."HP's Jena Semantic Web framework has a complete implementation of query language, protocol, and result set processing," Chatelain said."As an active participant in this working group, Oracle believes the standardization of SPARQL will play an instrumental role in achieving the vision of the Semantic Web," said Don Deutsch, Oracle vice president of Standards Strategy and Oracle, in Oracle's statement.
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Could this be an end to broken links? New software replaces and updates links on Web pages.
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CES has always been about gadgets, but the addition of using gadgets to access Web 2.0 services intensified this year.
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The Defense Intelligence Agency is becoming a government trend-setter in using Web 2.0 tools.
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The Web 2.0-social networking phenomenon's seemingly irresistible force field has ensnared yet another niche: travel.
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Not even a club with no rules...yet Microsoft may be going gangbusters on Web 2.0-related technology, but the arrival of tools such as Expression and WPF means little unless they are out there being used.â¦
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The explosive growth of Web 2.0 and user-generated content is changing the way we use the Internet and interact with one another. So congratulations, Time Magazine's Person of the Year 2006 is you.
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As the big name CIO keynoting at this yearâs Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Rob Carter of Federal Express could have been forgiven for doing a deep dive on how his 7,000-person IT team is using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), mashups, Web video, LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl/PHP/Python), and other checkbox items from the cool-tools list. But Carter took things in a different direction: talking philosophically about how the Internetâs impact is accelerating changes in the way the world interacts and in the way IT works.
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Corporate IT will finally widely embrace Web 2.0 technologies in 2008, according to Forrester Research.
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AJAX, .Net, PHP and other Web 2.0 programming skills top the in-demand list.
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Macromedia promises to speed development of Internet applications with a new tool for its Flex platform. With Flex, enterprises can add interfaces to strategic applications, including visual