Ajax: How To Weave A Faster Web

Hey I came across this interesting article. well I would like to share that below.

Hey!! do a search on Google Maps for your house, and you’ll see a nice enough map of your neighborhood. Now hold down the mouse button. You’ll find you can move the map around as quickly as if it were sitting on a table. Zooming in and out, there’s no delay waiting for the page to reload. And you can switch instantly to corresponding satellite photos and even a combined map-photo view.

Who would have thought poring over a map could be so fun? Credit a loose-knit set of programming technologies known as Ajax. It’s helping to spur the explosion of Web sites, from Yahoo! Inc.’s (YHOO ) photo-sharing service Flickr to Google Inc.’s (GOOG ) Web-based e-mail service, that help you take a more active part in creating your own personal Web.

Essentially, Ajax speeds up the Web experience, vastly reducing the notorious World Wide Wait. A Web site created using Ajax updates pages behind the scenes, sending ancillary data you’re likely to want next — such as filling in map data surrounding the current view. No more clicking the mouse and waiting for the page to refresh. Says Jesse James Garrett, director of user experience at Web design consultant Adaptive Path, who coined the term Ajax: “Companies are really starting to recognize that the Web is more than a medium of static pages.”

The upshot: For the first time, the Web has become a place for real applications that match — and sometimes transcend — the performance of desktop software. “Until Google put this technology out there, no one was really thinking of Web pages as applications,” says Sapient Corp. (SAPE ) software architect Francis Shanahan. “In the next 12 months, people will be thinking about the Web in a new way.”

Ajax has rough edges. The programming tools behind it are still primitive, so writing software with it takes longer. And sometimes the resulting software flouts Web browser customs — for instance, disabling the “back” button. But already, Ajax is finding its way into mainstream business applications such as Sabre Holdings Corp.’s (TSG ) air scheduling software.

Future possibilities are intriguing, too. Even with Amazon’s patented “one-click” buying, you have to click on multiple pages to view a book, read reviews, get to the checkout page and shopping cart. Garrett suggests Ajax might allow all that to be done on one page. It doesn’t get any speedier than that.

Tagging: Keeping Tabs On The Net

         Mark Ghuneim, the founder and chief executive of New York City-based Wiredset Digital Agency, started using the Web site del.icio.us a year ago. He took advantage of its free technology to slap “tags,” or labels, on interesting online articles or Web sites. That made it a breeze to go back and find everything he had tagged under “mashup” or “Live8.”

Then it dawned on him. Del.icio.us could be extremely useful for his business. Wiredset helps entertainment companies develop their digital strategies. By following the tags for a band, Ghuneim could let a record company know the level of buzz after a radio interview or live performance. He could find chatter about budding artists. Essentially, del.icio.us would allow him to listen in on the conversations on the Net that he cared about, minute by minute. He’s now obsessed. “There are amazingly few tools I care about on the Web, and this is one of them,” Ghuneim says.

The power of del.icio.us stems from the clicking keyboards of its many members. The service was a homegrown project created in late 2003 by Joshua Schachter, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, to track and share bookmarks. As the system took off, Schachter quit his job and raised venture funding. Now, 200,000 subscribers busily label online articles, blog postings, and more. They use tags like “katrina,” often adding comments such as “Pictures of before and after. Very good.” The process creates a mountain of information subscribers can explore.

Now, companies are figuring out ways to take advantage of this phenomenon. As they tag, subscribers end up collectively highlighting changing trends and raging discussions all available at the del.icio.us site. Increasingly, innovative advertisers and other companies are trying to make sense of these discussions. “The conversation we’re having with clients is, ‘How do you stay on top of tagging? Because you need to, and it can be hugely beneficial,”‘ says Dan Buczaczer, a vice-president at ad firm Starcom Media Vest Group.

Wiredset is on the leading edge. It’s developing a service for record labels that pulls together a variety of online data — sales on Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN ), number of blog posts, tags on del.icio.us. The idea? Allow labels to see, in real time, the impact of their marketing. If Sony BMG Music Entertainment releases an MP3 from the band Franz Ferdinand on MySpace, it can track the buzz. Or watch how an MTV video affects Amazon sales. As a test, Wiredset is tracking the tags of a London band, Bloc Party. Wiredset follows the chatter around the band’s new album to pinpoint influential online players. “It’s good to find and establish relationships we might not know about,” says Adam Shore, a general manager at Vice Records, Bloc Party’s label.

Del.icio.us is getting put to work in other ways. When marketing agency MarCom:Interactive holds seminars, it now creates resource pages with tags to blogs, Web sites, and research presented in the seminar. Afterwards, MarCom and its clients can add more links, keeping the discussion going. Corporations are just discovering tagging. But with its growing popularity, the mountain of tags to explore keeps rising ever higher.

Skype and Tellme: Voice recognition for Skype

Well this is yet another news that I would like to bring it to flash.

Tellme provides speech-recognition services to large apps like AT&T’s 411 service. While riding down to a conference with Don Jackson, Tellme’s VP of Advanced Telephony, yesterday, I asked him about today’s joint Skype-Tellme announcement. (Of course, the current rumor that eBay is buying Skype — presumably for its customer base since it could get VOIP technology for $1.50 at this point — is over-shadowing the Skype-Tellme announcement.)

http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/004435.html

New item move tool released for Open Repository:

It’s been a little quiet on the blog this month, if not in the office. We’re proud to announce that Medecins Sans Frontieres,  Northumbria University and Helsebibliotekets are all moving towards their full production releases, and also to welcome the Museum of London as our newest customer.

As always we’ve been fixing and tweaking where we can, improving speed and efficiency as we go, especially in relation to the browse pages. Meanwhile  DSpace 1.5, the majority of which we implemented last year, has gone into Beta testing for release in March.

We’ve also just released a new tool, a late addition to DSpace 1.5, that will help administrators with requests to move content around the repository. Whilst a tool to drag and drop communities and collections is still some way off, items can now be moved from one collection into another. Furthermore mapped items can also be moved to a new mapping location.

Therefore, if you want to move the contents of one collection into another, or into a couple of collections, this can now be done, albeit one item at a time. This means that with a little careful planning, the creation of new collections, moving of items and deletion of old collections, essentially what we have is a tool to enable a moveable hierarchy!

The item move is carried out through the Edit item page, and full instructions have been sent to senior administrators and will be added to the next version of the admin manual, due at the end of this month.

Twitter Away Your Life With Social Networking:

                   The internet is to human interaction as Pringles are to potatoes. Companionship and closeness are processed into an unrecognizable slurry, then reconstituted as an unnatural recreation of their original incarnation. We start as social creatures, isolate ourselves into small rooms writhing with power strips, then make friends with similarly sequestered people, trying to re-create the very communities we’re avoiding.

There are a lot of people I genuinely like whom I’ve never met in person. I care about them, at least enough that if they got arrested I’d gladly PayPal them bail money. Nonetheless, here’s something I will never say: “Wow, this party is so great, it’s almost as cool as a message board!” Even I am not capable of that level of sarcasm, and I’m a professional sarcast.

With this in mind, I’m not sure why I keep trying out new social networking sites. The very term social networking gleams with utilitarian smarm. If you’re the sort of person who will go home in the middle of a shindig and/or gala to pick up more business cards, you’re a social networker — congratulations, leave me alone.

Really, any verb construct that doesn’t lend itself to the preterite tense should be considered with deep suspicion. “What did you do last night?” “I social networked! I networked socially! I found myself in a social situation, so I networked it!” If I can’t substitute caroused, reveled or at the very least hobnobbed, then it’s not the sort of social I want to network anyway.

Still, I feel obligated to keep up with the cutting edge of web communities, which generally means I just sign up with anything Jason Kottke tells me to. That’s how I got involved with Twitter.

Twitter takes the Pringles analogy to its logical conclusion. It’s something like a collection of personal blogs, only each entry is limited to 140 characters, so you end up with a vertical stack of bite-size, artificially flavored communication snacks. They’re oddly compelling while remaining staunchly unsatisfying, and it always feels like maybe the next one will quell the roiling ennui inside.

Like an elderly widow keeping the TV on for “company,” I keep a Twitter window open whenever I’m online, and accept that as sort of, kind of communication. Over the course of my day I learn that Wil Wheaton enjoys the new B-52s album, Jonathan Coulton is taking a minivan cab and Kottke himself is having a “really crappy morning.”

I think one reason Twitter leaves me unsatiated is that it asks the most boring question possible: “What are you doing?” Call up a friend and ask them what they’ve been doing lately and you might get an interesting response. Ask them what they’re doing right now and you’re almost guaranteed to get a boring answer: “Eating lunch.” “Thinking about doing some laundry.” That’s because if they were seducing a Nobel Prize laureate or rescuing a baby from a burning submarine, they wouldn’t have answered the phone.

Furthermore, the 140-character limit, while discouraging the sort of self-indulgent maxi-musings that characterize LiveJournal, ends up being too short for interesting topics, while remaining way too long for boring ones.

Boring: “I need a new shoelace. Well, I guess I need two. I don’t want mismatched shoelaces.”

Eighty-three characters, and already about 70 too long. I’d suggest shortening this to “I still exist.”

Interesting: “I’m at Six Flags! It’s Robot Day! I’m in the Bourbon-Bot line, and I’m behind Jeanne Tripplehorn! She just asked if I have any massage oil in m”

Insufficient.

Of course, I provide my own contributions to Twitter. I’m not some sort of Twitter-leech. What do I talk about? Hash browns, mostly. I’m keeping a running log of my attempts to cook the perfect hash browns. Seriously.

I must be stopped.

The Beauty of Bridges:

              The bridge is among our most ancient technologies. The moment some distant ancestor thought to place a log where he (or she) wanted to cross the stream, and not where the logs happen to have fallen, the bridge was born.

A bridge inspires us. A bridge overcomes an obstacle and connects someplace to someplace else, with strength and often with grace and beauty. A bridge lets us go to the other side.

The spiritual connection is old. The high priest of ancient Rome carried the title of Chief Bridgemaker, or Pontifex Maximus. The head of the Roman Catholic Church still carries that Latin title, pontiff in English.

The bridge can give reassurance to lovers holding hands, hope to the thwarted and consolation to the broken-hearted. The bridge connects, physically. It unites the divided. It makes one of what had been two.

The world has millions of bridges. To say Happy Birthday to the Golden Gate Bridge, we share with you a dozen of our other favorites.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ducciobartolozzi/286341206/

Really Old: Ponte Vecchio

It’s in the nature of bridges that they draw traffic, and it’s in the nature of real estate (especially commercial real estate) that value is based on location, location, location. “You want to cross the river, you’re going to have to see my goods.” Thus, people built shops (with homes above) on many medieval bridges. The old London Bridge of nursery-song fame is one such and Venice’s Rialto another.

 The Ponte Vecchio (Old Bridge) across the River Arno in Florence, Italy, dates back to Roman times, but the current bridge (so to speak) dates back to 1345 (by Taddeo Gaddi), with the long upper gallery added by the great Renaissance architect Giorgio Vasari in 1564. It is probably the oldest segmental-arch (that is, the arches are not the full semicircles of Roman design) bridge in Europe. It is certainly among the most romantic.

Five People Who’ll Make You Feel Good About the Future:

                When contemplating the world’s environmental problems, it’s sometimes hard not to feel like humanity is screwed. But then you attend an event like Future Cities, a panel of sustainability experts held last night at the World Science Festival, and it seems like we might just figure out how to thrive on this planet after all.

First up was Peter Head, director of sustainable urban engineering firm Arup. He talked about a model city now under construction in Dongtan, China. When finished, it will be the world’s first sustainable city: an eco-paradise of open space, mixed neighborhoods and convenient transportation.

Head said that the Chinese government has commissioned nine cities altogether. “China decided it had to change,” he said. To which I was equally optimistic and skeptical: It’s wonderful to think that China’s government realizes the importance of sustainability, but when they pay your bills, it wouldn’t make sense to say otherwise. But Head later added, “Investment banks take experimental green cities seriously as an investment. They didn’t one year ago.”

(See Wired’s profile of the city at Dongtan here.)

Next came microbiologist-turned-agro-revolutionary Dickson Despommier, intellectual godfather of vertical farming: skyscrapers full of gardens that produce our food and free farmland to return to CO2-sequestering forests. It’s a no-brainer solution for a global population that will be 80 percent urban by 2050 and is in desperate need of a climate change fix: Read my interview with Despommier here

Following Despommier was Majora Carter, the South Bronx born-and-raised environmentalist and MacArthur genius grant winner. She talked of the disproportionate pollution burden borne by the poor — a burden that is both physically and mentally damaging, exacerbating a cycle of poverty, crime and frustration. Carter believes that green-collar jobs can break this cycle: she founded SmartRoofs, a green roofing company, and her nonprofit Sustainable South Bronx offers green-collar job training. 

Columbia University architecture professor and former MIT Media Lab Smart Cities wonk Mitchell Joachim spoke next. I’m not sure exactly what I think about his talk. Pieces of it — such as the City Car he helped design — were inspiring. Other parts, such as the Peristaltic City, seemed less about genuine sustainability than gee-whiz brainstorming given a green veneer. Then again, gee-whiz brainstorming is an important part of the creative process, and helps colonize territories of the imagination that can later be developed more practically. (And I really, really want to live in a Tree Hab someday.) But stuff like the Ecotarium — a cute video of major cities disembarking from land and setting sail for the North Pole — felt frivolous on the same stage with the real-world struggles of Despommier and Carter and Head.

Finally there was green materials guru Blaine Brownell (pictured above), who gave a Willy Wonka-esque demostration of sustainable building products: spherical solar cells, flexible solar cells, zero-energy wallboard, luminescent gravel, kinetic glass, self-healing plastic, structural textiles, air-scrubbing paint and self-cleaning glass.

In short, a whole lot of green ingenuity was on display — and this is just the beginning. Just think how the field will blow up when, as Peter Head hinted, it gets seriously profitable.