Jason Hong's Confabulations

This is a really neat feature in Google Spreadsheets: To insert the number of Internet users in Paraguay: =GoogleLookup("Paraguay"; "internet users") To insert the Earned Run Average of Roger Clemens: =GoogleLookup("Roger Clemens"; "earned run average") http://documents.google.com/support/spreadsheets/bin/answer.py?answer=54199

Many of you have probably heard about this new OpenSocial platform that Google has released, which is basically an open form of FaceBook that various other social network platforms (like Orkut, Ning, LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Salesforce.com, Oracle, iLike, Flixster, RockYou, and Slide) will conform to. What's interesting here is that we actually covered this topic in our Social Web course (with some help from Information Rules ), discussing why leaders tend to opt for closed platforms (primarily because they can force a lock-in and ensure customers) while a common strategy for those not in the lead to band together under an open platform to try and beat the leader. History may not repeat itself, but it does have themes. Some of the questions in class included what Google's strategy would be (keep in mind that this was before the OpenSocial announcement), whether it would fit into their long-term goals ("take over the world", as one student said), and whether they cou

Finally, a technologically sound answer to the eternal question "where should we go for lunch?". Take Yahoo Local, mix with Wheel of Fortune, and you have Wheel of Lunch. http://www.coverpop.com/wheeloflunch/

After seeing Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg's excellent talk about Many Eyes, a web site for social visualizations , it dawned on me that the web is starting to move towards a component architecture based on Application Service Providers. To wit, if you want a video on your blog, you turn to YouTube , which makes it easy to embed one into your blog page. If you want a map, you turn to Google Maps . And now with Many Eyes, if you want an interactive visualization, you turn to them. It's pretty clear Google has already caught on to this idea a while back, given their recent efforts in making it easier to embed Google Maps into web pages and their recent announcement about embedding embedding Google books as well. One of my colleagues, Brad Myers, commented that there may be interesting analogies with ActiveX components. There used to be a somewhat active market for Visual Basic components about a decade ago (no idea how it's faring now). These components made it much

This is new: companies used to release products and label them as alpha or beta. Then, web sites rolled out the perpetual beta . Now, Google Docs has a search and replace feature that is labeled alpha. I hope this is something that will not catch on, but as Software-as-a-Service becomes more pervasive, I'm afraid it will. (FYI this screenshot also shows a working version of the syllabus for The Social Web course that I will be co-teaching this fall)

My department's former dean has a blog entry about a panel of venture capitalists, hosted by Berkeley and CMU West. My favorite point: Avoid Web 2.0 companies based upon AAA - Ajax, Adsense, and Arrogance This makes me wonder what the carrying capacity of Adsense is. How many companies / blogs out there can Adsense fully support?

This looks like an interesting paper: The Ghost In The Browser: Analysis of Web-based Malware Abstract: As more users are connected to the Internet and conduct their daily activities electronically, computer users have become the target of an underground economy that infects hosts with malware or adware for financial gain. Unfortunately, even a single visit to an infected web site enables the attacker to detect vulnerabilities in the user’s applications and force the download a multitude of malware binaries. Frequently, this malware allows the adversary to gain full control of the compromised systems leading to the ex-filtration of sensitive information or installation of utilities that facilitate remote control of the host. We believe that such behavior is similar to our traditional understanding of botnets. However, the main difference is that web-based malware infections are pull-based and that the resulting command feedback loop is looser. To characterize the nature of this rising

This fall, Robert Kraut and I will be teaching a course entitled The Social Web: Content, Communities, and Context (links to PDF of our course flier).

The second edition of our book The Design of Sites is finally out! It includes some new design patterns on the mobile web, AJAX technologies, and security. There are also: Seventeen new design patterns to add to the original ninety More than twenty significantly updated patterns 450 four-color screen shots and diagrams, including more than 150 new images You can also check out this interview with my co-authors, James and Doug (I was out traveling at the time :) http://www.lets-talk-computers.com/guests/awl/design_of_sites/

From the Devil's Dictionary 2.0 The name given to the social and technical sophistication and maturity that mark the— Oh, screw it. Money! Money money money! Money! The money’s back! Ha ha! Money! http://www.eod.com/devil/archive/web_20.html

Google has just released a web toolkit that lets you convert Java GUIs to AJAX. I proposed something like this as a class project for SAUI (Software Architectures for UIs), and even thought about doing this as a long-term research project. I'm now glad I didn't because I would have been seriously scooped. http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/

I've been chatting with many of my friends and colleagues about an issue that's been bugging me for a while, namely whether academic research has any role to play in the emerging Web 2.0 . I've been slowly coming to the conclusion that the answer is not much. I had a similar discussion with other researchers at HotMobile a few weeks ago. When the web first came out, pretty much every systems researcher ignored it because it was so ugly. The web was not very sophisticated in terms of distributed systems, HTTP lacked elegance, HTML conflated many different ideas, and so on. There were also not any really new ideas with the web, as evidenced by the fact that Tim Berners-Lee 's first paper on the Web was (probably rightfully) rejected from an ACM conference on hypertext. I'm sure one thing that really irked researchers about the nascent web was that it completely ignored the large body of work in hypertext and distributed systems that had preceded it. Even in 1997, as

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/business/yourmoney/15techno.html Interactions with many Web sites boil down to modern and extremely fast versions of an old and often slow process. If you go to a government office or a bank, for example, you fill out a form, hand it to the clerk or teller and eventually get something back. That is essentially the way most Web sites now work. You enter data on a Web page. You send that information to a distant computer, by pressing "Enter" or "Continue" or clicking a link. Eventually the computer sends something back. The page it sends is usually as static as a form you receive from a clerk. If you want to see something more - the next group of search results, other flights on different dates - you have to send another request and wait for another response. ... At maps.google.com, pick the satellite view of any point in America. Then click on the map, and pan it east or west or use the right or left arrow keys for the same effect. W

http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,1039514,00.html Tractors that steer themselves. Property that "knows" it's been stolen. Airplanes that land without a pilot. The opportunities surrounding the global positioning system are already mind-boggling, but now the industry is set to skyrocket. This spring the U.S. government will launch its first next-generation GPS satellite -- to complement the 30 older models already in service -- creating stronger signals, increased bandwidth, and lots of potential for smart entrepreneurs. ... The most visible GPS applications tend to radiate from huge companies. UPS, for one, plans to outfit 75,000 drivers with GPS-enabled handhelds this year to help them reach destinations more efficiently. But startups offering similar navigation and tracking services could also make out nicely. Consider AtRoad, a Fremont, Calif., firm that went public in 2000. It offers "geo-fencing" software that triggers e-mail alerts if a comp

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000917034960/ Engadget's HOW-TO: Make your own annotated multimedia Google map One of the great things about Google maps is it has its roots in XML. To translate for the non-web developers out there, it basically means Google maps are user hackable. This how-to will show you how to make your own annotated Google map from your own GPS data. Plus, you’ll be able to tie in images and video to create an interactive multimedia map. We’ll walk you through the steps we took to generate an annotated map of a walk we took recently through our hometown, now that it’s actually starting to get warm enough to want to walk about! ...

Looks cool, I'll have to try this out to see how well it works. ---- http://www.citeulike.org/ CiteULike is a free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser. There's no need to install any special software.