JD on EP

Scott Adams writes of common internet debating techniques and tricks. The comments pull up tons more rhetorical devices.

An article at JavaLobby titled "Rich Internet Applications and AJAX - Selecting the best product" confused me, because "AJaX" literally means refreshing text without refreshing the page via XmlHttpRequest, and doesn't add any richer media or interactions to the browser itself -- it's hard to see any Ajax-branded approach as being a literal Rich Internet Application. I have to hit the scroll button in my browser 20 times to see the whole article so it's easy to take away the wrong key points... at one point the author does acknowledge that browser renderers aren't that rich... at another point he categorizes work with Flash Platform as "Fancy Animations" for some reason. I think the article may boil down to "What do you need to do, and what can your audience support?"

Joe Chung notes that shoppers often research online but buy offline, and suggests that it's because the online purchasing experience is still unpredictable and varying enough to not be worth the hassle.

The W3C has a new committee to make a new meta-markup language for interactions: "This deliverable should be based on an existing application/UI format, such as Mozilla's XUL, Microsoft's XAML, Macromedia's MXML or Laszlo Systems' LZX, provided the owners of the format are willing to contribute." I'm not sure of the assumptions -- it seems like it would be easier to translate from one XML format to another, dropping features as necessary, than to map all into some type of common markup and then back again, but I'm not as close to this project as others are and likely don't see it clearly yet.

Microsoft Live Local staff respond to concerns about their "Locate Me" functions -- when you visit the Microsoft Live site and click "Locate Me" the server uses wireless and IP connections to identify where you likely are. Boing Boing and O'Reilly Radar had carried worries on the privacy of this feature. But while the response says "your name etc is not sent to the server", it doesn't discuss whether there is any session data or cookie-like persistence associated with the request... where the response says that other websites won't receive any info it doesn't mention the structure of the Microsoft database and what fields it stores. Even when there's an explicit followup question about persistence, the response is about "no personally identifiable data" sent with the requests, and it doesn't tie the *request* with other personal data held on their servers... it answers a slightly different question. (To be fair, most search engines and personality portals don't divulge the nature of their stored data either.)

Rex Hammock had a funny response to the latest debates over the label "Web 2.0"... he spoofs the season with "Yes, Virginia, There Is A Web 2.0".

Joshua Jeffryes offers an essay "We Must Start Fresh as Designers", bouncing on themes of pure-server application failure, offshore design work, the leapfrogging of communication networks in Africa and other less-developed regions, and has a list at the bottom of how eight major beliefs in web work are changing.

AllAboutSymbian.com has an extensive writeup of the Nokia N80 phone... quotes: "... looks set to become one of the most desirable phones of 2006... three years of development have resulted in a phone several generations more advanced... the first smartphone that can be truly described as a modern world phone... will work almost anywhere in the world... will almost certainly be making an appearance in the USA (on Cingular)... Flash Lite also looks set to become a standard part of S60 and the N80 will be one of the first handsets with Flash Lite (1.1) supported out of the box. Flash Lite is becoming an increasingly popular solution for creating small micro-apps. These range from small games to front ends for displaying data retrieved from the Internet, such as weather or traffic information, dictionary look ups and news headlines. Flash Lite 1.1 brings several improvements include support for SVG-Tiny playback and additional audio and ActionScript support." Lots more here too.

ComputerWorld discusses virtualization of the client, where a predictable set of clientside services floats above different hardware and operating systems. The article focuses on Microsoft, and their announcement of (full? partial?) Avalon portability some time in the future, but also discusses other platform-neutral runtimes like Macromedia Flash Player.

Chris Anderson discusses the discomfort with ambiguity that lies behind some of the current debates about Wikipedia integrity... many people want concrete, clear, firm answers and get anxious without certitude. I'm not sure I agree with his assertion "Our brains aren't wired to think in terms of statistics and probability. We want to know whether an encyclopedia entry is right or wrong"... I think we're wired for both belief and agnosticism, with the blends varying for different people, in different situations, at different times in their lives.

The "Google buying Opera?" discussion started with a single person in France saying "according to usually reliable sources" that there's a deal. The speaker had once been an exec at Yahoo/Europe, but so much talk over such an unverifiable third-hand assertion still seems bizarre to me. At least when knitting you'd have something concrete to show after all that finger activity.... ;-)

Clickz reports that standalone ads in RSS feeds draw more clicks than do ads embedded in RSS feeds. I guess this means that some of the Slashdot crowd will be avoiding RSS now.... ;-)