During our debate, Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the Web) made a brilliant observation which was totally marketing driven and not at all technical.

Tim Berners-Lee’s response

People are used to seeing WWW on business cards so it’s expected.

Technically, we don’t need the WWW in our Web addresses. However, many Web masters are failing to park their domains properly. Could you be turning away potential visitors?

Does your Web site work when you remove WWW from the address?

Aidan explains how to ensure your site works with and without WWW.

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The most applicable point for me in Damien’s post, was

It was in a past blog post here where I said that if we controlled our activity data, we could actually make money from search engines and the likes of Microsoft HealthVault, so there’s potential there. So I was quite interested when Mozilla announced Weave, their system which will store your Firefox preferences on their servers and when you install a new Firefox on a new computer, it can go to the Mozilla servers and download all your preferences and bookmarks.

According to Mozilla

The idea behind Weave is that all your personal information — bookmarks, passwords and account names, for example — are synced to your Mozilla account via Firefox. If you lose your computer, you can download Firefox, log into your account and you can restore all that information. You can do some of this today if you use Google Browser Sync and Dot Mac services. You can start by creating an account with Mozilla Services. You will need Firefox 3.0 or higher to get this working.

This is relevant to me as the functionality behind the Mozilla Weave has been available in Glaxstar‘s Firefox browser for more than 2 years. When I say available, I’m referring to every single last detail. Whilst Glaxtstar’s Glubble browser is new, I’ve had insight to their technology for quiet some time.

Glaxstar is possibly the only development company in the world that could build a competitive Firefox browser to Mozilla in my opinion (Flock is a 1.0 effort compared to what these guys can do!). That’s if Ian decided to take that route. As it happens, he’s just interested in helping guardians to protect their loved ones from inappropriate content.

Note that I didn’t say, help to protect minors, or help governments protect people. That’s not his job. It’s not Google’s job, it’s not Segala’s job and it’s not the Government’s job either. Ian’s job is to help guardians who are responsible for deciding what’s appropriate and inappropriate for the people they’re responsible for. Technology should be perceived and used as an enabler, not a prohibiter. Furthermore, what a guardian in Germany deems approproate is not likely to be the same as what a guardian thinks in the UK for example. This is why I’d like people to perceive Content Labels as an enabler to help mainstream search engines and browsers to provide better content discovery, not a method for policing the Web.

So, I wouldn’t be surprised if Glaxstar gave the Weave code to Mozilla given that they’ve had it for more than a couple of years and they built Mozilla’s mainstream browser extensions for companies such as Google, Yahoo!, PayPal and eBay. They also maintain spreadfirefox.com and are responsible for resolving defects in the mainstream Firefox browser. That makes Glaxstar the most qualified company in the world to build Firefox add-ons in my opinion.

Luckily for me, Ian Howard, Founder of Glaxstar, is a personal friend of mine. So, who better to build Segala’s Firefox trust extension (not plug-in, that’s something different) Search Thresher. Our extension really is based on The Semantic Web, unlike the claims made by many of the co-called Semantic Web search engines.

Sorting the wheat from the chaff

As I’ve said, Glaxstar and Segala have been working together for the past couple of years. Although, we haven’t updated our extension in over a year (I guess that demonstrates how ahead of the curve we’ve been). As of February though, you should expect to see regular updates for our Trust extension.

Search Thresher is just one of the pieces in our jigsaw to help demonstrate why and how we feel very confident that 2008 is the year to tell Segala’s story. You will notice me talking less about conferences that I host and Chair and more about our Semantic Web method of classifying content.

What’s with the name?

The thrashing machine, or, in modern spelling, threshing machine (or simply thresher), was a machine first invented by Scottish mechanical engineer Andrew Meikle for use in agriculture. It was invented (c.1784) for the separation of grain from stalks and husks.

For thousands of years, grain was separated by hand with flails, and was very laborious and time consuming. Mechanization of this process took the drudgery out of farm labour.

Today, searching the Web is equally laborious. You may or may not find what you’re ’searching’ for and even when you do find what you want, can you trust what you find?

Think of Search Thresher as a threshing machine. It’s a Firefox extension used to demonstrate to search engines and mainstream browsers, how they can (and should!) provide users with more trust on the Web using a method called Content Labelling.

We haven’t touched the extension for over a year as we’ve been focused on other stuff that I’ll tell you about soon. If you’re a designer and would like to be recognized for your work, please feel free to volunteer your services to rebrand the Web site. Search Thresher is a non-profit standards based browser, so this may be of interest if you’re a standards enthusiasts.

We’re not emotionally attached to the name Search Thresher. What do you think of it? We’re open to suggestions if you can propose something better.

Read more about Content Labels – this post also includes sample use cases.

Watch a quick video about Content Labels

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What’s worse, is that most developers force you to install their application just for someone else to use it with you. For example, if you want to add me to your best friends, I need to install the application, even if I have no intention of adding anyone. This is down to poor insight to human behaviour and a huge assumption that this approach will guarantee mass adoption.

Could the new Google approach attract more developers to build more compelling applications which in turn, will encourage more users to join their networks. One thing is for sure in my mind, we’re likely to see some good vertical social networks come out of the Google camp.

Source TechCrunch

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I picked this up last night from BBC Technology. Naturally the entire world is going virtual more and more each day, but we never thought that every device connected to the internet would require an IP (Internet Protocol). Naturally, there isn’t an infinite number of IP addresses. The horror of running out of IP address would be nasty in this virtual Century.

Currently we use IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4), which is the fourth iteration of the Internet Protocol (IP) and the dominant network layer protocol on the Internet. Problem is, IPv4 uses 32-bit (4-byte) addresses, which limits the address space to 4,294,967,296 possible unique addresses.

You might think that’s a huge number, but around 19 million unique address are reserved for private networks and multicast addresses, which reduces the possible unique addresses that can be assigned to public networks.

At the current pace which the whole world is connecting to the net, from game consoles to mobile phones, it’s inevitable that within the next 3-4 years IPv4 unique addresses will hit Zero. Vint Cerf who is one of the founding fathers of the net (Google’s chief internet evangelist and departing chairman of ICANN), told the BBC in an interview-

There is a risk of not being able to get online….
The rate of consumption of available remaining IPv4 numbers appears to be on track to run out in 2010/11.

So as you can see, the threat is just about to knock our door.

So what’s the solution?

Well off course Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), which is designated as the successor of IPv4 nearly a decade ago, but it hasn’t been rolled out at speed. The primary change from IPv4 to IPv6 is the length of network addresses. IPv6 addresses are 128 bits long, whereas IPv4 addresses are 32 bits; where the IPv4 address space contains roughly 4 billion addresses, IPv6 has enough room for 3.4×1038 unique addresses (let me count- it’s around 335 trillion).

There are misunderstandings regarding IPv4 exhaustion that when IPv4 ran out of addresses the net would stop working, actually the net will still be the same as it is, but if the Internet doesn’t support IPv6, and unable to allocate address to your IPv4 device, you can’t connect to it. In July 2004 ICANN already announced that the root DNS servers for the Internet had been modified to support both IPv6 and IPv4.

So now the hardware manufacturers should build their devices to support IPv6 and ISP’s to be ready for IPv6 as well. The U.S. Government, for example, has specified that the network backbones of all federal agencies must deploy IPv6 by 2008. China has a five year plan to change the whole network infrastructure.

So we’re going see a lot of changes on the Internet as well as devices in the coming years. Is your network IPv6 ready?

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Mozilla’s revenue, which includes Mozilla’s foundation and corporation, came in at $66.8 million in 2006. That’s up from $52.9 million in 2005. Sounds like Google vs Microsoft, not Internet Explorer vs Firefox. I’ve also noted that Mozilla has withdrawn cash and invested it elsewhere.

Larry Dignan on ZDNet has the full detail.

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The points were well made but when it came to Microsoft fulfilling each of these areas the speaker came on a little too strong. Showing a video, via Silverlight, in full screen, HD and the volume up high doesn’t showcase how Silverlight delivers a cinematic experience. Sitting in a large tiered room with a large screen gives that effect. Saying that the rest of the presentations picked up and I have to say I have gained some faith in the company.

Michael Tirion, user experience evangelist from the Netherlands, spoke about his desires for a better designer – developer workflow. He went into Microsoft’s Expression studio in detail cover each package, how they tie in together and how they aid the design – developer relationship.

Most surprising to me was to hear the W3C mentioned. Microsoft’s Expression Web package is standards compliant. ‘So they say’ of course, but, I spoke with Michael after the presentation and I’m convinced they made a decent effort at the very least. On top of the source code for the .NET framework will be available to developers now. The explanation is that Microsoft’s IP doesn’t rely only on their code but in the combined package and development structure they are offering through the Expression Studio.

Something that really caught my attention was the Blend package, mainly because it supports ‘real’ 3D, e.g., importing .obj files from applications such as 3D Studio Max and Maya, seriously looking forward to getting my hands on that. Tafiti is worth having a look at, their take on the next gen search engine and Photosynth was really impressive, there’s no dev kit yet, but there are a few examples to play around with on their site, great fun!

I’m finishing up while I still have some soul left. I’ve never been a huge Microsoft fan and I’m far from devoted now, even after my rant. I’m an open source fan but I still use Microsoft products and services. I suppose similar to the Mac/PC debate, there’s room for both and ignorance to either means losing out on an easier more productive solution or missing a beat on what your competition is up to. Either way it’d be a shame to ignore what these guys are doing.

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Plesk is a control panel for our server in Rackspace – it provides an online front-end for the server – sort of like a web-based desktop for a really (REALLY) big computer.  Similar to your PC desktop, Plesk allows the admin to create server users or “clients” like the “users” facility on the control panel of your PC.  You assign users privileges and assign them domains, etc.
The “one-click” applications are pre-installed applications, which you would normally have to upload and configure to a database yourself.  This can be time-consuming if you have a few of these to set-up and you have to go through each of the set-up instructions.  So, you can have a new application such as WordPress or TUTOS set-up with only “one-click”.

Plesk was created by SWsoft and is used by professional hosting service providers for shared, virtual and dedicated hosting.  Apparently, it’s the only control panel on the market that is both Linux and Windows based.

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