Google Chrome

Posted on 2008-09-03 by Jon Leirdal

Yesterday Google launched their new Google Chrome web browser. The follow-up in miscellaneous media has been enormous. I’ve tested it myself and I do find it a very interesting application. There are a few features I miss, but I guess Opera has made me a demanding web user. All in all I expect Google to release a solid and innovating new browser when the final version is finished. As usual regarding Google, a few questions concerning the content and other privacy issues do surface. The new secure surfing feature is great, but a few people have issues with the licensing terms:

"By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services."

That is a direct quote from this article at Slashdot. I am not sure this is an issue to fear. It seems that they need that in order to display content on your screen, but we will see I guess.

Finally, if you have not seen the comic from Google explaining the new browser, please read it.

The Web Time Forgot

Posted on 2008-06-20 by Jon Leirdal

The New York Times has this very good article on early ideas of the world wide web. "The Web Time Forgot" describes the how a Belgian called Paul Otlet tried to index all known knowledge, and realised that this was too hard to do by paper alone. So in 1934 he dreamt up this concept of doing this with "electric telescopes". That is an electric device that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. According to NYT he described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even collaborate or congregate in online social networks.

This proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog index-card and telegraph machines, but it included an idea of a hyperlinked structure of information.

“This was a Steampunk version of hypertext,” said Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired, who is writing a book about the future of technology.

I personally liked this little nugget.

…Otlet’s version of hypertext held a few important advantages over today’s Web. For one thing, he saw a smarter kind of hyperlink. Whereas links on the Web today serve as a kind of mute bond between documents, Otlet envisioned links that carried meaning by, for example, annotating if particular documents agreed or disagreed with each other.

The article goes one to discuss Semantic Web in a not so nice way. I admit that I don’t agree with the author on that account, but all in all an interesting read.

Please read the original article in The New York Times.

The blind men and the elephant

Posted on 2008-04-14 by Jon Leirdal

As we should’ve expected (and maybe did?), the dispute around ODF and OOXML is gearing up. There are probably some out there that thought that NOW this issue is dead. We have two formats, what more is there to discuss. Well, a lot it seems. There are open letters in the media, people are protesting against OOXML and the conflict seems as hard as ever. For example has Gisle Hannemyr from the University of Oslo written a little answer to a report that came in February. Actually he pretty much rips it apart. For those of you that read Norwegian and is interested in this issue I refer you to his essay "Formater til besvær – Hvor mye koster det å ta i bruk ODF?"

His main point is that the report is based on one view of the world, and does not include all the facts. He claims that if you want a better model of the world you need expertise from multiple fields of knowledge. You cannot use only economists and not computer experts if you want to model the impact of some new computer technology on the world. Well, I think I agree with him on that at least.

His final words are probably most interesting. He refers to a poem called "The blind men and the elephant" by John Godfrey Saxe. That poem is probably based on one or more of several parables that all tell a somewhat similar story. Several blind people feel up different parts of an elephant and make up their mental model of the animal based on their limited view. Afterwards they disagree fervently on what the animal looks like.

You cannot model something based on only knowledge of a part of the whole. And if you do, your model is highly likely to be wrong.

Microsoft vs Google

Posted on 2008-03-04 by Jon Leirdal

Google has their Google Apps. Now Microsoft has opened up their Microsoft Office Live Spaces. It’s their attempt at utilising MS Office and giving the public the tools for collaboration and sharing that Google Apps has been able to provide. I am looking forward to see what this leads to.

Word 2007 has blog capabilities

Posted on 2008-02-03 by Jon Leirdal

A lot of you out there probably know this, but Word 2007 has blog capabilites that seems to work even with open source blog servers, like my blog server based on Serendipity. This entry was actually written in Word 2007. The integration with MOSS 2007 is of course better than with my little server, but even this little feature is a sign that MS is trying to open their view of integration. I’m quite impressed so far. More to come later!

Update: What is more of a shocker is probably that I didn’t test this until recently. I’ve after all had Office 2007 installed on my job-laptop for several months.