WebDAV System Administrator's Weblog

New XTech web site, and why we don't sell presentation space: "

My too-long absence from writing much here can be ascribed to two, differently pleasant, activities. First, a fantastic vacation in Cuba, and second, the redesign and launch of the XTech web site.

Of the first, come to my place for dinner and I'll bore you at length about how amazing it was. Of the second, I'd like to bore you right now!

Thanks to Ruby on Rails and a few late nights, the XTech site now has these new features:

• Full conference schedule (apart from 6 Mozilla talks I'm still nailing down)
• A blog. With go-faster Atom 1.0 stripes and everything!
• Details on the newly-added Ajax Developers' Day.

A few more details on the Ajax Developers' Day. As I mentioned before, when putting together the schedule we felt there was a lot of excellent content still missed out (I'm still feeling guilty at having rejected proposals from many good friends and excellent speakers). So, we put together an extra day at the beginning of the conference where we could go further into detail on Ajax technologies.

This day, featuring speakers such as Simon Willison from Yahoo!, XML expert Kurt Cagle and OpenLaszlo's Max Carlson, will allow those working on Ajax projects--either deployment or toolkits--to meet, discuss best practice and move forward on new ideas. Although it's a day-long event, we didn't want to make the price tag as high as a full-day tutorial, so you can register for the cost of a half-day tutorial.

A few implementation details

If that all sounded a little like advertising, here are some technical details worth sharing. The site's CMS is built on Ruby on Rails. Development was done on Linux, with the help of WINE to check out the view from Internet Explorer. The newsletter is managed by the absurdly wonderful CampaignMonitor.

This conference not for sale

Before I went on vacation, there was some debate in various quarters about paid-for plenary and keynote slots in conferences. Though I hope it is obvious, I wanted to state where I, and thus the XTech conference, stand on this issue.

It has always been my policy to maintain a strict separation between the commercial and editorial aspects of XTech. Although each year there's always a company who thinks they can buy a speaking slot, I never let this happen. The content of the conference is formed by editorial selection by the programme committee, who take the scores from the peer review panel as their primary guide.

Aside from what I hope shows in the excellent quality of the talks and generally interesting keynotes (yes, we get it wrong occasionally!), there are two effects on the conference.

• Sponsors are that much more respected. When a sponsor respects the delegates' time and intelligence, but still attends, you know they're serious about engagement with attendees.
  
• A higher portion of the conference cost is in the registration fees than for some other conferences. We're still trying to keep the costs as low as we can, but we're not prepared to compromise the quality of the schedule by letting vendors buy talk time.

(Via Edd Dumbill's Weblog: Behind the Times.)

Design Pattern: Read/Write Div: "

Jonathan Boutelle has written about, what he calls, the Read/Write Div pattern.

What is the Read/Write Div pattern?

A new AJAX convention cropping up in a few places, one that is easy to implement and has real benefit to end users. I haven’t found a description of it anywhere, so I thought I’d write it up here.

The basic idea is that user controls (typically for editing the displayed data) should be hidden from the user until needed. At ‘rest’, an area of the screen displays information in read-only fashion.

Why the Read/Write Div Works

Fewer controls means that the user has to make fewer choices before taking an action, and therefore it takes less time for the user to choose which item to click on. The technical term for this effect is ‘Hicks Law’.

Also, the ‘read-only’ view of the data takes up much less space than the ‘read-write’ view does, so much more information can be packed into a given page, which means that the user doesn’t have to scroll down to read content. Avoiding the scrolling saves the user a measureable amount of time while browsing (3.05 seconds, according to my back-of-the-envelope GOMS keystroke analysis).

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

JavaScript Image Magnifier: "

This is a fun one. A small JavaScript image magnifier has been released.

With a big of JavaScript, you can add magnification to any images on your page.

You can add:

<script type='text/javascript' src='http://valid.tjp.hu/zoom/tjpzoom.js'>
</script>

<div style='float:left'
onmouseover='zoom_on(event,300,239,'image.jpg');'
onmousemove='zoom_move(event);' 
onmouseout='zoom_off();'>
<img src='image.jpg'/>
</div>

You can also have a high-res image for the zoom piece, and use a low-res as the main image on the site.

Could be useful for some Where's Waldo? Product Zoom? and adult sites? ;)

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

what is web 2.0?: "

(Via del.icio.us.)

Ajax-S: Ajaxian slideshow software: "The idea came to me because I wanted a lightweight slideshow based on HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but I also wanted to separate the data of each page from the actual code that presents it. Therefore, I decided to move the data into an XML file and then use AJAX to retrieve it. The name AJAX-S is short for AJAX-Slides (or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML Slides, if you want to)."

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

AJAX is clearly illuminating one of my pet issues: Separation of Application/Service Logic and Data. Even better, the concept of XML instance data is gradually getting much clearer. AJAX has created context for validating the concept of browser hosted Rich Internet Applications (RIA).

AJAX has become a widely accepted framework for the InternetOS that facilitates Rich Internet Application development using Web 2.0 (and beyond) APIs.

Solutions to allow XMLHttpRequest to talk to external services: "

Over on XML.com they published Fixing AJAX: XmlHttpRequest Considered Harmful.

This article discusses a few ways to get around the security constraints that we have to live with in the browsers theses days, in particular, only being able to talk to your domain via XHR.

The article walks you through three potential solutions:

1. Application proxies. Write an application in your favorite programming language that sits on your server, responds to XMLHttpRequests from users, makes the web service call, and sends the data back to users.
2. Apache proxy. Adjust your Apache web server configuration so that XMLHttpRequests can be invisibly re-routed from your server to the target web service domain.
3. Script tag hack with application proxy (doesn't use XMLHttpRequest at all). Use the HTML script tag to make a request to an application proxy (see #1 above) that returns your data wrapped in JavaScript. This approach is also known as On-Demand JavaScript.

I can't wait for Trusted Relationships within the browser - server infrastructure.

With respect to Apache proxies, these things are priceless. I recently talked about them in relation to Migrating data centers with zero downtime.

What do you guys think about this general issue? Have you come up with any interesting solutions? Any ideas on how we can keep security, yet give us the freedom that we want?

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

Well here is what I think (actually know):

Our Virtuoso Universal Server has been sitting waiting to deliver this for years (for the record see the Virtuoso 2000 Press Release). Virtuoso can proxy for disparate data sources and expose disparate data as Well-Formed XML using an array of vocabularies (you experience this SQL-XML integration on the fly every time you interact with various elements of my public blog).

Virtuoso has always been able to expose Application Logic as SOAP and/or RESTful/RESTian style XML Web Services. This blog's search page is a simple demo of this capability.

Virtuoso is basically a Junction Box / Aggregator / Proxy for disparate Data, Applications, Services, and BPEL compliant business processes. AJAX clients talk to this single multi-purpose server which basically acts as a conduit to content/data, services, and processes (which are composite services).

BTW - there is a lot more, but for now, thou shall have to seek in order to find :-)

2 New Geocoding APIs: "

Two mapping/geocoding APIs have been recently added to the database:

• Ontok: Provides a mechanism for geocoding the latitude and longitude of any US address. The data is based on the US Census 2004 Second Edition TIGER/Line® Files. Here’s an example of the White House. The service is accessible via REST, SOAP and JavaScript APIs. See also the nice mashup UI with Google Maps where you can click on the lower left Input Addresses to navigate.
• ZeeMaps: If you need to geocode addresses outside of the US, ZeeMaps can help. Given an international city, state (optional), and country combination, the service will return a set of latitude, longitudes (along with corrected city, state, country information). They offer REST, XML-RPC and SOAP interfaces.

(Via ProgrammableWeb.com.)

By way of the upcoming TechCrunch “un-conference” style demo-brainstorm-fest Wiki I came across a blog post by Michael Arrington titled: Top 5 Web 2.0 VCs. Here is the entire list (Top 5, Notables, and Up and Coming) extracted from the post (see my linkblog page to get some insight into the motivation behind this post):

David Cowan is a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners and writes a blog called Who Has Time For This . He’s on this list partially because he incubated the hottest and most anticipated company on the web right now, Flock.

Tim Draper invested in Skype. Done. He also sits on the board of SocialText, and his fund was in Baidu.

David Hornik is is a General Partner at August Capital and writes a blog that has over 10,000 RSS readers.
Josh Kopelman, through FirstRoundCapital , is quietly filtering through just about every young web 2.0 company, and investing in many of them.

Fred Wilson is a founding partner of Union Square Ventures and writes the extremely popular A VC . If you are new to web 2.0, start with his Blogging 1.0 post.

Jeff Clavier - Jeff is a former VC and still makes the odd angel investment (Feedster, Truveo, and a few others). His new venture allows him to work with pre-funding companies and get them ready for prime time.

Brad Feld - Brad is a managing director at Mobius Venture Capital and writes a must-read web 2.0 blog called Feld Thoughts. Read his posts on Term Sheets if you are in the process of raising capital.

O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures - This is the only non-person on here. OATV just closed a $50 million fund to invest in young companies. Given the incredible access Tim O’Reilly has to these companies, OATV could quickly become an important fund in the web 2.0 space.

Pierre Omidyar - Pierre founded ebay and is the Co-founder of Omidyar Network , where he’s invested in a number of interesting companies including EVDB, SocialText and Feedster, and others.

Peter Rip - Peter is a founding partner of Leapfrog Ventures , a $100 million fund. Peter also writes Early Stage VC , another must-read blog. His investments include ojos, an incredible new photo-metadata service that is going to be extremely disruptive (and useful).

Peter Thiel - Peter, the former CEO of paypal, has invested in LinkedIn, Friendster, LinkedIn and other web 2.0 companies. He’s just created the Founders Fund .

Thomas Ball - Tom is a Venture Partner at Austin Ventures, a fund with $3 billion under management. He’s their consumer and web 2.0 guy and seems to be spending a lot of time in Silicon Valley and at web 2.0 event.

Dan Grossman - Dan is a principal at Venrock Associates and has recently started a great blog called A Venture Forth (where he wrote a much bookmarked post on Ajax ).

Jason Pressman - Jason is a principal at Shasta Ventures, a young $200 million fund that has a deep commitment to and expertise in consumer-focused businesses.

Great report from Dare as usual :-) Beyond the obvious value of the post (information wise), I am also using the post placement here as a simple demonstration of what Blogs can offer (if driven or built atop a Web 2.0+ platform like Virtuoso). See the post that follows...

Web 2.0 Conference Trip Report: Mash-ups 2.0 - Where's the Business Model?: "

I attended the panel on business models for mash-ups hosted by Dave McClure,
Jeffrey McManus, Paul Rademacher, and Adam Trachtenberg.

A mash up used to mean remixing two songs into something new and cool but now the term has been hijacked by geeks to means mixing two or more web-based data sources and/or services.

Paul Rademacher is the author of the Housing Maps mash-up which he used as a way to find a house using Craig'sList + Google Maps. The data obtained from Craig's List is fetched via screen scraping. Although Craig's List has RSS feeds, they didn't meet his needs. Paul also talked about some of the issues he had with building the site such as the fact that since most browsers block cross-site scripting using XMLHttpRequest then a server needs to be set up to aggregate the data instead of all the code running in the browser. The site has been very popular and has garnered over 900,000 unique visitors based solely on word-of-mouth.

The question was asked as to why he didn't make this a business but instead took a job at Google. He listed a number of very good reasons

1. He did not own the data that was powering the application.
2. The barrier to entry for such an application was low since there was no unique intellectual property or user interface design to his application

I asked whether he'd gotten any angry letters from the legal department at Craig's List and he said they seem to be tolerating him because he drives traffic to their site and caches a bunch of data on his servers so as not to hit their servers with a lot of traffic. 

A related mash-up site which scrapes real estate websites called Trulia was then demoed. A member of the audience asked whether Paul thought the complexity of mash-ups using more than two data sources and/or services increased in a linear or exponential fashion. Paul said he felt it increased in a linear fashion. This segued into a demo of SimplyHired with integrates with a number of sites including PayScale, LinkedIn, Job databases, etc.

At this point I asked whether they would have service providers giving their perspective on making money from mash-ups since they are the gating factor because they own the data and/or services mash-ups are built on. The reply was that the eBay & Yahoo folks would give their perspective later.

Then we get a demo of a Google Maps & eBay Motors mash-up. Unlike the Housing Maps mash-up, all the data is queried live instead of cached on the server. eBay has dozens of APis that encourage people to build against their platform and they have an affiliates program so people can make money from building on their API. We also got showed Unwired Buyer which is a site that enables you to bid on eBay using your cell phone and even calls you just before an auction is about to close. Adam Trachtenberg pointed out that since there is a Skype API perhaps some enterprising soul could mash-up eBay & Skype.

Jeffrey McManus of Yahoo! pointed out that you don't even need coding skills to build a Yahoo! Maps mash-up since all it takes is specifying your RSS feed with longitude and latitude elements on each item to have it embedded in the map. I asked why unlike Google Maps and MSN Virtual Earth, Yahoo! Maps doesn't allow users to host the maps on their page nor does there seem to be an avenue for revenue sharing with mash-up authors via syndicated advertising. The response I got was that they polled various developers and there wasn't significant interest in embedding the maps on developer's sites especially when this would require paying for hosting.

We then got showed a number mapping mashups including a mashup of the London bombings which used Google Maps, Flickr & RSS feeds of news (the presenter had the poor taste to point out opportunities to place ads on the site), a mashup from alkemis which mashes Google Maps, A9.com street level photos and traffic cams, and a mash-up from Analygis which integrates census data with Google Maps data.

The following items were then listed as the critical components of mash-ups
 - AJAX (Jeffrey McManus said it isn't key but a few of the guys on the panel felt that at least dynamic UIs are better)
 - APIs
 - Advertising
 - Payment
 - Identity/Acct mgmt
 - Mapping Services
 - Content Hosting
 - Other?

On the topic of identity and account management, the problem of how mash-ups handle user passwords came up as a problem. If a website is password protected then user's often have to enter their usernames and passwords into third party sites. An example of this was the fact that PayPal used to store lots of username/password information of eBay users which caused the company some consternation since eBay went through a lot of trouble to protect their sensitive data only to have a lot of it being stored on Paypal servers.

eBay's current solution is similar to that used by Microsoft Passport in that applications are expected to have user's login via the eBay website then the user is redirected to the originating website with a ticket indicating they have been authenticated. I pointed out that although this works fine for websites, it offers no solution for people trying to build desktop applications that are not browser based. The response I got indicated that eBay hasn't solved this problem.

My main comment about this panel is that it didn't meet expectations. I'd expected to hear a discussion about turning mashups [and maybe the web platforms they are built on] into money making businesses. What I got was a show-and-tell of various mapping mashups. Disappointing.

"

(Via Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life.)

Microsoft Gadgets, Start.com and Innovation: "

A lot of the comments in the initial post on the Microsoft Gadgets blog are complaints that the Microsoft is copying ideas from Apple's dashboard. First of all, people should give credit where it is due and acknowledge that Konfabulator is the real pioneer when it comes to desktop widgets. More importantly, the core ideas in Microsoft Gadgets were pioneered by Microsoft not Apple or Konfabulator.

From the post A Brief History of Windows Sidebar by Sean Alexander

Microsoft 'Sideshow*' Research Project (2000-2001)

While work started prior, in September 2001, a team of Microsoft researchers published a paper entitled, 'Sideshow: Providing peripheral awareness of important information' including findings of their project.
...
The research paper provides screenshots that bear a striking resemblance to the Windows Sidebar. The paper is a good read for anyone thinking about Gadget development. For folks who have visited Microsoft campuses, you may recall the posters in elevator hallways and Sidebar running on many employees desktops. Technically one of the first teams to implement this concept

*Internal code-name, not directly related to the official, ‘Windows SideShow™’ auxiliary display feature in Windows Vista. >

Microsoft ‘Longhorn’ Alpha Release (2003)

In 2003, Microsoft unveiled a new feature called, 'Sidebar' at the Microsoft Professional Developer’s Conference. This feature took the best concepts from Microsoft Research and applied them to a new platform code-named, 'Avalon', now formally known as Windows Presentation Foundation...

Microsoft Windows Vista PDC Release (2005)

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