The Elusive RIA

Nine years and several technologies later, rich Internet applications are yet to attain maturity. Though AJAX and Flash have become widely accepted as the latest technologies for building RIA, these are far from being perfect solutions. This article presents a summary of the common problems that have assailed RIA development across successive generations of softwares and platforms.

Information Vending and the New Web

Traditionally, the Internet has always been about information hosting, with the power to contribute in the hands of a select few. The Web 2.0 paradigm has changed all that, bringing the power of publishing to the masses. With such a volume-driven approach, it is only natural that every submission to the write-enabled Web cannot be an original that appeals to a large section of readers. In fact, most of the information floating around is second-hand in nature: repeated and referring to facts and ideas expressed elsewhere.

Second-hand information is not all that bad, so long as it is possible to trace back to the original. The primary benefit is that of information reaching a larger audience, with less effort and diligence on part of the individual. Yet another interesting effect of such repetition is that of ‘information vending’.

Information vending can be defined as the set of processes and techniques by which relevant information from multiple sources reach their intended audience with a high degree of accuracy. Often, the content that reaches an end-user includes the original juxtaposed with inputs from other contributors collected during propagation. There is an element of mediation involved, both automated and human. Automation involves software-based services and hosting platforms while the human element is provided by the ‘wisdom of crowds.’

Browser on Steroids

The last couple of years has been an era of unprecedented information growth. In 2006 alone, 161 billion gigabytes of digital information were created and copied. Even if we were to take a small percentage of this information as ‘relevant’ and ‘useful’, it still is a staggering volume to digest.

If you are a power surfer embarking on an information safari online, the default browser that comes bundled with the operating system proves to be inadequate even before you start. To be sure you will need a variety of additional stand-alone tools, but first, it is time to beef up that web browser.

The Community-Powered Brand Success

In a previous posting, we had an overview of community-powered applications as products that are being continuously enhanced, maintained and supported by their respective groups of end-users. The measurement of success, here, is not just acceptance but also user involvement. This article explores the factors that contribute to the success of community-powered applications.

Community-Powered Applications

Community-powered applications have a significant amount of their development effort and post-rollout support provided by external users¹. While Linux remains by far the largest and probably the first community effort, there are many others that deserve mention under this category.

I Know I Read It Somewhere

An Internet clipbook is a collection of Web page snippets, documents and links organized for easy browsing and quick accessibility. The imagery is drawn from a “real” paper scrapbook that contains among other things, photographs, handwritten memos, newspaper and magazine cuttings.

The Next Big Thing in Online Search

Online information is growing at an unprecedented rate with more communities and users taking to the Web than ever before. In the face of this explosion, the top three search services (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) are encountering serious challenges to maintain the relevance of their results. New solutions are constantly being proposed to augment (and at times replace) the capabilities of these services. In this article we shall take a closer look at some of these approaches that have the potential to grow into the next big thing in the search technology space.