If you have an idea, but don’t want to submit it as a talk feel free to tag it on del.icio.us with “for:brady”. If you want to see examples of what I am most excited about you watch my ETech delicious feed (this also applies to my other conferences Where 2.0 and the Web 2.0 Expo).

ETech 2008 CFP is Open

Personally I think that products that help people mange information overload while providing them a social experience are going to take off in the year or so. Basically finding ways to tailor information towards the individual instead of just analyzing the data for the general population.

Startup News | What will come after web apps and social sites?

It’s an architecture for pluggable gadget components. There’s a hardware interface, which I know little or nothing about (I’m a software guy). It was explained to me as “60 pins” — they said they interface all the capabilities of the chip, whatever that means. But at a software level, each of the components interfaces with XML over HTTP. It’s as if they read my mind. The pieces are all fractional horsepower HTTP servers. They are using RESTful interfaces everywhere. I haven’t actually seen the XML, let’s hope it’s simple.  

Bug Labs (initial review) (Scripting News)

Today we’re happy to announce that we are adding support for the hCard microformat to Google Maps results. Why should you care about some invisible changes to our HTML? By marking up our results with the hCard microformat, your browser can easily recognize the address and contact information in the page, and help you transfer it to an addressbook or phone more easily. Firefox users can install the Operator or Tails extension; IE or Safari users can use one of these bookmarklets.

Official Google Maps API Blog: Microformats in Google Maps

Rather, what counts is the ability to tap (better yet, create) many different kinds of revenue streams, offsetting the systematic risk of investing in the space in the first place.More simple – as I put it in my talks – at the edge, business models happen.

There are many other criteria that make a great next-gen consumer investment, to be sure. But this is one of the biggies.

Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab

Facebook does strike me as genius for one thing, though – being the first social network with no one specific social object something I initially talked about back in 2005, but being completely flexible about it.

Social object is the main thing the social network is about. Flickr has photos, Last.fm has music, 43Things has activities, Twitter has social statuses.

Through the facebook API, they’ve managed to allow external developers to inject any social object into Facebook. A few examples would be the applications to track movie tastes, music tastes, photos, etc. Now that is smart – I’ll go as far as saying Facebook wouldn’t be 1% as interesting if it wasn’t for that.

Webreakstuff » Facebook is a scary beast

Facebook does not officially support OpenID. But would the Facebook Platform make it possible for 3rd party developers to implement OpenID App on top of it? I’ve been thinking about this lately while reading the API documentation. I think it is not possible to implement OpenID consumer, so those of you who wanted a way how to log in to Facebook with their existing OpenID might now stop reading.
OpenID provider on the other hand should be possible.

blog » Facebook OpenID App

So here we are: Babel is intended to address these concerns. It bundles a “pre-compiled” version of the Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR), which contains a whole lot of information about many of the worlds different locales. Based on that data, it implements localized date and number formatting (and in a way that doesn’t require setting the process-wide locale via the locale module.) It provides data such as the translated names of many of the worlds countries, languages, time-zones, currencies, and more.

That’s the part that’s comparable to the functionality provided by zope.i18n and PyICU. But there’s more. Babel also implements an extensible message catalog extraction system that we think is a better fit for Python applications than good old xgettext. It comes with an extractor for Python source files, but extractors for other source files can be added by third-party packages. The latest release of Genshi, 0.4.2, comes with a Babel plugin that provides simple message extraction from markup and text templates.

Babel does not have any hard dependencies outside of Python itself (there’s a dependency on setuptools for the lookup of extractor plugins, but we intend to soften that link in an upcoming release). It’s not tied into any particular framework or larger system. It tries to provide functionality in a way that encourages other projects to use it and contribute back, instead of everyone rolling their own limited I18n functionality over and over again.

about:cmlenz – Announcing Babel

It’s hard to explain sometimes just how time-consuming it can be to get Web things done on some Java frameworks. This post will be a handy thing to point at next time I’m lost for words

Bill de hÓra: Design for the web

Earlier this week I spoke at the Web 2.0 Expo about Mozilla Labs’ interest in microformats. The talk covered:

1) What are microformats?
2) Why does Mozilla care about microformats?
3) What does a microformat-aware Web browser look like?
4) Why should Web sites expose their content using microformats?

Download the slides (PDF, 54.8 MB)
View on slideshare

Alex Faaborg – » Web 2.0 Expo Presentation

This is why, for Twitter to scale nicely, it probably makes sense to use a message bus that can scale out nicely. Pull versus Push / the loose coupling can really help you out, and you can copy what NASDAQ does instead of Basecamp.

The message bus could be Ruby, could be ActiveMQ, could be TIBCO Rendezvous.

This architecture change would surely do a lot more for you than “re-write it in Java”, which may give you a slight boost e.g. more out of less machines, but is like adding lanes to 101 instead of using public transport.

techno.blog”Dion”: TIBCO on Rails

In bottom-up SOA, he said, anything goes — “developers create whatever services they want, and have other apps adopt them as those developers see fit, based on a somewhat ‘laissez faire‘ democratic approach.” Of course, the polar opposite would be a Soviet-style Five Year Plan in which everything is dictated by a central authority.

Nick advocates a “middle ground” between Service-Oriented Anarchy and Soviet-Oriented Architecture…

» The middle road between Service-Oriented Anarchy and Soviet-Oriented Architecture | Service-Oriented Architecture | ZDNet.com

Matt Mullenweg: PHP core has never shown any particular regard for its biggest apps, as evidenced by the above bug and others, so I’m not sure why we should go out of our way to promote their upgrade. [emphasis added]

Approximately eight years ago I submitted an outline of an approach to integrate PHP4 with Java. The response was in essence, I can’t find it at the moment “here is your CVS account”. This fundamentally changed my notion of us and them.

Sam Ruby: Popular Sovereignty