a journal about writing, interactive whatsits, and everything else
Posts
The shape of things to come
Two more or less disconnected thoughts on the future of things:
1. The frontier of the Internet seems to be knowledge now, not documents. There was a recent hubbub on reddit about Wolfram Alpha, which reminded me of Cyc, and Tim Berners-Lee’s TED talk on Linked Data sets forth a pretty cogent argument for it as well. The key concept here is that as amazing a service as it is, Google doesn’t really know anything. It doesn’t know that the sky is blue, it only knows that most people have said “the sky is blue” often. Cyc, Wolfram Alpha, and Linked Data all try to store and shape data in its rawest form. This seems pretty quixotic to me — there is obviously an absolutely staggering amount of pure knowledge out there, even at a really basic level — but it’s interesting to see people take up the challenge.
The fascinating to me is that we are running into this very same thing at work. We often end up developing reports for our administrative end users that let them answer questions that are really important. The problem is lag time — sometimes they need to know the answer to a unique question really quickly, and it takes time for us to craft a report for them. In a lot of cases, it makes sense to let them at the raw data, instead of fiddling around with pie charts to create a report that may or may not have long-term use. How do we do that now? Exporting to Excel format. But that doesn’t scale, obviously.
2. Firefox, I think, is in a lot of trouble. It’s lagging behind Chrome, Safari, and now even Internet Explorer in features. I know that faster JavaScript and a private browsing mode is in the works for 3.1, but it’s weird that the most exciting work in browser development is sliding away from them. I’m still using Firefox for the foreseeable future — until Chrome adds plugin support, anyway…
Write a comment