It's about the data

I have been trying to figure out what would make me happy. I don't like the net as it is today, it feels to ethereal. Like anything I make, a blog post, a OPML file anything is just going to end up like some old 9 track tape I find some day and can't read or use.

Yea, I could download this stuff and store it somewhere (I do) but must I? Should I? I find that while I have my dug articles from Digg, how many of these links will be there in a year? I'd rather just cut and past them into a personal store. Like the scrapbook firefox extension which I love.

I some ways I would like to see it combined with something like the Simile Piggy / Semantic bank efforts. Perhaps those are what I like and I am just not using them enough yet. At least they are using standards I philosophically agree with like RDF and XHTML and such.

Lately I have been listening about Jini on the Javapossee podcasts and been wondering about how it could be used in data grids vs. the compute grids it seems focused on now.

Now if I could just figure out a portal/dashboard approach I like I would be set. Wonder if KDE's plasma effort will have an easily extensible UI apsect to it ala kramaba (sp) that will make it the wonder desktop. I like the concept of the containers I see so far in it. What I need is a tag based files systems (who needs folders?) and a tagged based UI to go with it. :)

Firefox Application Framework

For some time I have watched the XUL effort at Mozilla. It is interesting as more and more people talk about the creation of "rich apps" (network centric apps.. whatever) to watch various approaches rise to the top. The strong efforts by the eclipse and netbeans camps to form their solutions about their respective architectures is great. There is also the efforts by M$ and their XAML goals eventually. I don't really think XAML is all that "Internet" when you have to run it on a windows machine though.

However, I have been interested to see that XUL, which I felt was only going to be a solution for Mozilla's own apps like firefox, thunderbird and sunbird, gain some traction in the community. The Songbird (http://www.songbird.org) effort is likely the one with the highest visibility, but Democracy TV (http://www.getdemocracy.com/) is also popular. I recently saw on a on-line episide of Command N where they talked about Cletx (http://www.celtx.com) which I guess is also based on XUL. They say it's a firefox app, but I assume the meant XUL.

It would be nice if we had a true XML UI language (yes, perhaps XML is a bad method to represent UI's ... that is another topic) that was a standard. Not that M$ would bother to support it but XUL can't claim to be a standard yet for anything but Mozilla apps.

There are tons of XML UI languages for the Java VM true, but I am not sure they leverage well of the developer community till they get some kinda of buy in from Sun itself. Perhaps with AJAX there is no need. Javascript + DOM + XHTML and go from there, but you loose some of the spiffyness of a true UI (widgets and all). I haven't seen SVG care much for doing it and I refuse to go the flash route.

So I don't know.. if you want to make a true Internet application I guess there is not set of standards to work with other than AJAX approaches.

Web 2.0 semita (footprint)

So I am trying to figure out what my "Web 2.0" footprint looks like and how this compares to my personal computer footprint. The core elements of my web footprint are: (beyond this blog):
Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/fils), Odeo (http://odeo.com/profile/Fils), Tag cloud and Blog lines (don't much care for Blog lines for RSS reading)

I have found I don't care for any on-line RSS tools. Prefering instead my Liferea on Linux, though obviously it is my OPML file that is the most important to me.

For news I see I use: Slashdot, Digg, Newsvine, Last.fm for music and Boxxet (the later more interesting in concept than useful in execution) . For all I have accounts and I should resolve out the URL's for them and get them posted here.

I find tools like Writely and box.net to be rather nice and I have started to use them some.

Why do this

So I am not sure why I just did this. I am not really much of a blogger (at least I don't think I am). However, I have started to try and figure out what it is about web 2.0 that bugs me... so I have to do it to resolve why.