Adobe opening up?

Adobe recently announced the Open Screen Project.

Specifically, this work will include:

• Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
• Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
• Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
• Removing licensing fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

Is Adobe seeing the light that Microsoft isn’t? (The light that I personally think Sun is not only seeing, but adding their own luminance to.) Web developers increasingly “get” OSS and want it. They can use it as students with no money. They can use it inhouse without any licensing problems. (Personally, OSS was a wondrous tool for me when I worked for companies that would not invest a single dollar in software and the licenses to make us legal, and is indispensable in a library with very limited resources.)

There is tremendous benefit to be invested in learning technologies that the user can influence through their community, not being burdened and beholden to corporate control. AJAX is the buzz for this reason. Sun “got it” when they released Java initially as OSS and has more and more fully released control to the community.

I haven’t had a chance to blog about my Competitive Intelligence class, but the focus of my study was on Sun Microsystem, Inc. and I am impressed with their embrace of OSS. They understand that programmers are using OSS. The web by its nature is open and it encourages and demands open technologies. Applications are moving from the desktop  to the Internet with SaaS and the network is the computer as Sun Microsystem’s John Gage famously said over a quarter-century ago.

LCG

Hotmail not so hot.

Patrons were very upset today because of problems logging into Hotmail. I tried to assure them that it was not anything to do with our computers or network, though many still think we control all aspects of the Internet. (Including being able to tell them their forgotten password.) Turns out the problem was pretty widespread according to this article.

The saga continues with another interesting post from the Register : Steve Balmer lies to my mother.

LCG

Congratulation Firefox!

Firefox is about to break has broken 500 million downloads as this New York Times article points out. An interesting point they make is that while most data shows Firefox at about 17% market share, their own analytics shows about 28% for their readers userFirefox.

LCG

In search of….

Another staff member told me about a call from a man who was told that you can find women on the Internet and wondering if we could help him. It may seem humorous, and certainly isn’t the first. We have had several instances of patrons coming in for the first time on this new-found revelation that the Internet, was among other things, a seeming repository for whichever gender you might be searching for. “I just thought I should warn you that he might come in and ask for your help,” my colleague said.

Sure enough, this gentleman did come in. He approached my desk and introduced himself and it was instantly clear that he had some physical and/or perhaps developmental disabilities. He repeated much of what my colleague had already related about finding a woman on the Internet and needing assistance. We found a computer and he sat down nervously. “I’m pretty computer illiterate,” he warned. “Let’s see what we can do about that.” I replied.

I showed him how to hold the mouse and how the movement of the mouse translated to the movement of the cursor on the screen. He worked with it a bit as I showed him where to click and gave instructions on what to type. He struggled pecking out letters on the keyboard, but I kept myself from interceding too much, trying to keep to my theory that if I do something for a patron learning these skills, they will be more dependent on me and really not be learning anything.

The process to sign up for the first site he wanted to go to involved also setting up an email address and all told these two tasks took about an hour. He was getting much better at the mouse and I continued to encourage him. As I worked with him, a previous student looked up from the opposite bank of computers and smiled knowingly.

He comes in nearly every day now and still needs help, but he  is making tremendous progress on using the computer.  I’m not sure if he found what he was looking for (have any of us ?), but it is nice to help him out.

LCG

Blogstats and web analytics.

I’ve posted previously about the interesting blog statistic regarding this blog. In particular,I find the search terms which bring information seekers to this site quite interesting. But, I have noticed another interesting factor today, and that is a referring link from a forum in Estonia and a link from a news article in the Wall Street Journal. The Estonian forum links to my piece about opening MS Office .docx in Linux OpenOffice and I can’t really tell (since it is in Estonian) whether the forum poster is saying something good, bad or other about the blog post. The WSJ links to my blog mentioning Price Tower in a link to related blogs (though it doesn’t seem related.)

I hadn’t realized all along that I had been doing web analytics.

LCG

I Never Metadata I Didn’t Like (not Will Rogers)

Living in Oklahoma, I couldn’t resist the tag line of this piece by Jacob Harris in the New York Times’ Open Source blog.

Another thing I couldn’t resist was his mention of the role of librarians in creating metadata (though not by that term) for the NYT since 1851. Mr. Harris describes these librarians as ” the most advanced computational text-categorizing system known to mankind” Pretty heady stuff for a library student to read.

He points to some of the things that search engines can’t do because of problems with language (esp. English) as it relates to news stories:

Disambiguation — Is this story about Ford the president or Ford the automotive company?

Summarization — This article might quote Nancy Pelosi, but it’s really just an article about President Bush, isn’t it?

Normalization — The text of one story may use “The United States,” while another says “U.S.” Can we label both with the “United States of America” geographic label?

Taxonomies — One story may be about Global Warming and another on Pollution; can we label both of them as being subcategories for Environment?

His point is that carefully creating metadata allows content to be more accurately archived and retrieved. In fact, good metadata is critical and this is an example of a company creating it’s own metadata system to keep track of what they create. He does lament the lack of standards and the sometimes proprietary nature of this information. He also notes that other news services either don’t use or share their metadata. I would argue that a standard could be established and we would all benefit from having access to more relevant news.

The reason I bring this up is because it reflects a view that I expressed on our class discussion board last week concerning Cory Doctorow’s essay Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia.

Perhaps I suffer from nerd hubris, but I tend to believe in the meta-utopia or at least some aspects of it. Some of the same arguments were (and still are) made against OSS. The idea that a bunch of distant programmers could write viable code without being paid was also treated with much disdain, but it is increasingly embraced as a viable (some argue, prefered) model for software development. It took years to make any progress toward this ideal and there is growing momentum.

I think much of Doctorow’s arguments can be shot down with the success of folksonomies. Sure there are a lot of lazy, stupid, dishonest individuals, but in the aggregate we can create extremely useful tags which are metadata.

While the term meta-utopia may be strong, it can’t be denied that metadata in the form of XML is quickly becoming THE standard for describing and expanding information packages. I strongly disagree with his contention that industries can’t set up or follow schema which are really just agreed-upon standards. I agree it is difficult, but most industries recognize it is necessary to follow protocols and standards like those established by the ISO. Also, computer component manufacturers often enter into standards-creating groups to ensure that their products will have wide acceptance, thus avoiding format wars (OK, other than Microsoft and Sony)

I do admit to being a bit of an idealist, and acknowledge that there is definitely truth in the essay. But, if we can envision metadata working to organize the web, we can consciously move toward that ideal. With information growing exponentially, there have to be solutions like this.

LCG