Back in November Robert Scoble wrote about the half life of conversations in the blogosphere, which in the early times of blogging (around 2000) could be as long as about a week. Nowadays, on Twitter, it can be as short as five minutes.

• eWeek has a long interview with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch, covering areas such as the open source aspects of Flash, the competition Adobe Air is facing from Google Chrome, Gears and possibly from Microsoft and Silverlight, and a bit about new features of Creative Suite 4 (CS4). Josh Catone does a good job of covering the Adobe Air part and the competition from Google Gears and Silverlight. In conclusion Josh thinks that Microsoft might play an important part in the cloud computing/rich Internet application (RIA) arena, something that Adobe's Kevin Lynch doesn't fully recognize.

  On open source, Lynch points out how Abobe is gradually embracing the open source movement, and he gives several examples of Adobe's contribution to OSS:

  We already open source the core of Flash, the virtual machine, Tamarin. Ten years ago we published the format that Flash uses called SWF. And for a while that format had a license agreement around it where we asked that people not make their own Flash players. And the goal of that was to maintain consistency of the runtime. [...]
  we actually removed the license restriction this year from the SWF format. So anyone can go create anything they want around that format, including a player if they want to. [...]
  But we need to balance openness and consistency. So we're very open about what goes into Flash Player, the bugs in Flash Player, the code and scripting engine in Flash, the format with Flash, the protocols with Flash. 

  On completely opening up of the Flash player Lynch is more hesitant:

  [That] would be somewhat challenging in that there are some codices in Flash that we don't have the rights to all the source to. That's one challenge with that. The other is that I think in terms of what's best here for consistency of Flash on the Web, having multiple implementations and having forking and splintering of that code would be a big loss for the Web in terms of that consistency.

  Well, there might be some truth in that, but there for sure are a multitude of OSS projects that have managed to keep control of the core development, without sacrificing consistency.

  In August I wrote about new directions in the development of ECMAScript, which is the parent language of JavaScript, ActionScript and a few other languages. The ECMAScript Harmony agreement implied a step back for the group working with the more ambitious ECMAScript 4 specification, including Adobe. Kevin Lynch, however, did not express too much worry about this development, saying:

  I think the amount of innovation that we were trying to do with ECMAScript 4 perhaps was too big of a leap for some and they wanted to see a more collaborative approach on that. So the standards process is a collaborative one where there are lots of points of view. And we're happy to continue working in the process to advance ECMAScript. But we're hoping that innovation can happen faster and that we can raise the level of scripting on the Web. So we're going to continue innovating in Flash Player. We're not removing features that we've already deployed because people are relying on them and we think they're good. And we'll keep developing it further. And at the same time we'll keep working with the standards process.

  Tags: ActionScript, Flash

• Microsoft is embracing jQuery, a popular open source JavaScript library, and intend to support it natively in Visual Studio alongside its own ASP.NET AJAX library.
  Tags: JavaScript, Microsoft
• Watch out US, the European Union (EU) wants to take the lead in the development of the next generation of the Web, aka Web 3.0. EU Commissioner Viviane Reding says: 
  

  Web 3.0 means seamless 'anytime, anywhere' business, entertainment and social networking over fast reliable and secure networks. It means the end of the divide between mobile and fixed lines. It signals a tenfold quantum leap in the scale of the digital universe by 2015. Europe has the know-how and the network capacity to lead this transformation. We must make sure that Web 3.0 is made and used in Europe.

  For other definitions of Web 3.0, check out my review from April.
  Tags: Web 3.0

• Automattic, the parent company behind Wordpress, acquires commenting system IntenseDebate, writes ReadWriteWeb, who also reviews Habari, a blogging platform and potential competitor to Wordpress. Habari uses the Atom Syndication Format for feeds and the Atom Publishing Protocol for web site communication. It also builds on PHP, and makes use of PHP Data Objects (PDO) for database access, and it supports MySQL and other databases.
  Tags: blogging, Wordpress
• Ringside Networks, offering a "Social Application Server", which I wrote about in March, is closing up shop. Bad luck and timing could be the reasons.
  Tags: social applications
• Royal Pingdom has a list of ten less known operating systems. For example, MenuetOS is written entirely in assembly language and is designed to be lightweight and responsive, and it fits on a floppy disk (1.44 MB).
  Tags: operating systems

• The greatest news this week (and perhaps this year) is of course Google's launch of the browser Chrome. The news broke while I was finishing the list below, and it puts some of the items in a different perspective, particularly the one about the launch of IE8 beta 2 below.
  Tags: Chrome
• Last month, I wrote about some troubles for Google's Android mobile platform. These problems seem now to be history, with the release of a new 0.9 version of the SDK, which is expected to be quite similar to the 1.0 version running on the first phones. Google is now also improving on the communication side, with the release of a developer roadmap, which promises a 1.0 SDK release and retail phones by Q4 this year. Actually, there are already rumors floating about an Android phone by HTC, the "Dream", slated for November 10th.
  Tags: Android
• Marshall Kirkpatrick writes about feed.informer, formerly known as Feed Digest, a web service for mashing, filtering and publishing RSS feeds. As mentioned by Marshall, the site has some faults. For example, I found that the link to the Docs & FAQs page is broken. Another provider of similar services is Yahoo Pipes. For self hosting, the PHP RSS library SimplePie provides detailed functionality for parsing feeds, though there seems to be no built-in functionality for keyword filtering. SimplePie on this page compare themselves to a few competing libraries.
  Tags: feeds, RSS
• From the JavaScript/Firefox department there were reports on progress in improving the JavaScript execution speed in Firefox, leveraging a technique known as tracing optimization, hence the project code name Tracemonkey. Ars explains the basic idea behind tracing:
  

  The tracing mechanism records the path of execution at runtime and generates compiled code that can be used next time that a particular path is reached. This makes it possible to flatten out loops and nested method calls into a linear stream of instructions that is more conducive to conventional optimization techniques.

  The goal is to achieve execution speed comparable to native code, taking JavaScript performance into "the next tier", and "redefining the boundaries of client-side performance." Wonder how this improvement compares to Google Chrome's new V8 JavaScript Engine?
  Tags: Firefox, JavaScript

• Internet Explorer 8 is getting closer to official, with a Beta 2 release just being announced. It's a massive makeover according to Ed Bott, with improvements in usability, privacy, standards compliance and new features like Accelerators, which are kind of smart shortcuts that perform a task, e.g. search, on selected text, and Web Slices, which provide a kind of subscription to a part of a web page that updates frequently. It's up to the developer to slice-enable particular web pages, by adding appropriate markup. The standards compliance is of course exciting, and it will eventually make the life easier for developers. Though it will take several years, with about one third of web surfers still using IE6.
  Tags: IE8
• BackType is a new comment aggregation service, liked a lot by Michael Arrington. Comments are automatically collected around the web, and can be searched for based on people or subject. You claim your comments by creating a profile and indicating which url you use when commenting. This is my profile. I think it's a nice idea, with an open approach. Blogs can keep their comment system of choice, and still being included. No need for JavaScript solutions à la Disqus (my profile), for example.
  Tags: comments
• Fred Wilson suggests that social sites start using the concept of neighbors, which are automatically discovered people with similar interests like you, instead of relying on so-called friends or followers and the habit of befriending or follow people. Seems like a practical idea to me, not having to manually look for friends, but have them automatically suggested.
  Tags: social networks
• Marshall Kirkpatrick explains the concept of embargoes in blogging and why it generally is a better idea than exclusives. An embargo works as an agreement between bloggers and a company not to write about a new product or service until a specific time. This has several advantages, such as a broader and deeper coverage from multiple perspectives.
  Tags: blogging, PR

• The much hyped messaging/micro-publishing service Twitter is losing in interest among its users, partly due to the frequent and prolonged outages of the service. Dave Winer, for example, writes that Twitter is a ghost town:
  

  [...] the upward momentum is gone, the new idea every 24 hours that so inspired us is a distant memory. Now we're going the other way. When I log onto Twitter these days, it's empty, quiet, a ghost town.

  Though a recent announcement from Twitter infused Dave with some hope for the service.
  Tags: Twitter

• Marshall Kirkpatrick has an interesting article about noise in news, and why it might be a good idea not to filter the flow of information coming at you. For example, a study by Sanda Erdelez shows that "the more total information our minds are exposed to, the more particular items we'll be able to recall in the future." Marshall also refers to a post by Hutch Carpenter, who defines people as "signalists" or "discoverers" based on whether they "filter in" or "filter out" information with a certain content. For example, a signalist would read only content about Apple, whereas a discoverer would read all content except about Apple, for example.
  Tags: news filtering
• Marshall at ReadWriteWeb listened to my request last week for a comment policy, and wrote a post about how to comment without being spammy. In short: Be transparent about who you are, be super humble, and add value to the discussion. Then it's OK to provide a link to your own business.
  Regarding the question of comment ownership, Dave Winer weighs in, and suggests that "I own the collection of comments on my blog, and you own the comments you've placed on my blog and all others," which is in line with my opinion on the subject.
  Tags: comments
• Facebook released part of their platform code as open source this week, and hardly nobody notices. A reason could be the unusual choice of license, CPAL (Common Public Attribution License), which Mike Gunderloy at the OStatic blog gives a good description of. CPAL is based on the more familiar Mozilla Public License, with a couple of modifications. One being an attribution requirement, which acts as a "poison pill" according to Mike.
  Tags: open source
• Mike Gunderloy in another post reports on Wikia Search, which promises to be a truly open search engine, with not only the underlying software being open source, but also the search results themselves being open to editing. A paradise for black hat SEOs and spammers as it sounds, but hopefully that could be fought back with a strong community. After all, Wikipedia manages to be fairly spam free, despite the open editing features.
  Tags: open source, search
• Alex Iskold writes about Zemanta, a "lazy man's" semantic blogging tool that automatically suggests related content – images, articles, videos and links as you type. Fred Wilson currently tries Zemanta, and I decided to try the provided WordPress plugin too. I had some issues with the service updating too frequently, which hangs the UI temporarily and makes the experience frustrating. It would be really nice to be able to disable the automatic updating.
  Tags: blogging, Semantic Web

Whenever someone leaves a comment on this blog, I think the assumption is that while we may not own the comment itself (we won't try to stop you from posting it elsewhere), we at least have been granted full publishing rights to use it as we please. We've always reserved the right to republish comments in other posts (with attribution), as well as remove comments we felt were offensive or inappropriate.

This sounds like a sound policy. A bit discouraging though that he writes that he "think[s] the assumption is ...". Anyhow, I was inspired to comment on Josh's article.

As I point out, I think it is a good idea to have a clearly stated comment policy on your blog, especially for larger blogs that get lots of comments.

Hosted comment service Disqus also joined the discussion and suggested a few points of a "Commenter's Bill of Rights", including a commenter's right to edit and remove his comments, access to all of his comments, even if it has been deleted on a blog, and the right to use his own comments as blog posts. As for publishers, their rights should include whether or not someone is allowed to comment on their blog, to delete a comment, and to modify a comment, as long as the original copy is still accessible and the edit is transparent. All of these I think are valid points and in the interest of both commenters and publishers.

• How to define the Twitter noise ratio, which was highlighted last week, continued to be discussed this week. There are a few related indices, e.g. Stowe Boyd's Conversational Index = (number of tweets / number of replies made by followers), Dave Winer's Twitter Spewage = (number of updates * number of followers) and the Follow factor = (number of following / number of followers). My thought on this, which has also been expressed by others, is that the noise ratio must be based on the number of tweets or updates in a time period of fixed length, e.g. in the past week, not the number of tweets since the user signed up to Twitter.
  Tags: Twitter
• How to break into Techmeme 100 as a solo blogger was discussed by Hutch Carpenter, who suggested three possibilities: 1. Long Slog (slow and steady), 2. Big Events (e.g. recognition by bigger bloggers), 3. Celebrity (e.g. Marc Andreessen). As for me, I am contented with just showing up on Techmeme, which was accomplished by a big event. Apparently, despite linking to three articles currently on Techmeme, my Microsoft-Yahoo post didn't make it.
  Tags: blogging, Techmeme
• Adobe announced the opening up of the file format specifications for Flash (.swf and .flv files).
  Tags: Flash
• Robert Scoble thinks that the most interesting page of a FriendFeed user is the discussion page, like http://friendfeed.com/user/discussion. Louis Gray's success on Techmeme can be attributed to his frequent commenting on others' contributions.
  Tags: blogging, FriendFeed
• YackTrack tracks the conversation around a blog post at disparate sources like Digg, Disqus, FriendFeed, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and WordPress.
  Tags: comments
• Popfly Game Creator was released in alpha this week, a service based on Microsoft's Silverlight technology. It is aimed at non-programmers, and could possibly be something for my 7-year-old nephew, who is heavily into online flash based games at sites like miniclip.
  Tags: online games

This week was quite extraordinary in my short life as a blogger. I was linked to at ReadWriteWeb. I even managed to make a small impression at the high-profile news aggregator Techmeme.

• Trendrr Makes Data Mashups A Breeze – Josh Catone
  Trendrr, a potentially useful service for tracking and graphing data. Comes with an API.
  Tags: graphing
• Scalr: The Auto-Scaling Open-Source Amazon EC2 Effort – Henry Work
  An open source initiative for managing Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service.
  Tags: cloud computing, open source
• Google Gears, a Software Update for the Web – Ionut Alex Chitu
  An embedded Google TechTalk video about what's new with Google Gears - "An open-source mechanism for updating the Web." HTML 5 and Gears have a lot in common.
  Tags: Google Gears
• Europe-Focused Blog Search Engine Twingly Goes Into Private Beta – Michael Arrington
  A Sweden-based blog search engine.
  Tags: blog search
• How to Disagree – Paul Graham
  A disagreement hierarchy in 7 levels: DH0. Name-calling DH1. Ad Hominem DH2. Responding to Tone DH3. Contradiction DH4. Counterargument DH5. Refutation DH6. Refuting the Central Point
  Tags: blogging
• Not Your Ordinary Google Interface – Ionut Alex Chitu
  The Google interface in unusual languages, including "Bork, bork, bork!", the language of my favourite Muppet Show character: The Swedish Chef.
  Tags: humor

• More Bloggers Raising Money. Here Come The Politics. And Here Comes My Rant. – Michael Arrington
  Interesting views on blogging politics from an A-lister, e.g. "Luckily, the newbie bloggers are there to fill in the links when they’re needed."
  Tags: blogging
• Visualizing the .NET Framework – Slashdot
  39 509 types in the .NET framework. A lot for a developer to keep up with. Luckily there is documentation ...
  Tags: .NET
• Productivity, How-to and Advice Sites: Making Linkbait Useful Again – Marshall Kirkpatrick
  Tips on making custom search engines out of linkbait link lists. Mashable is a great source of link lists.
  Tags: custom search
• Slideshare Ramping Up - Leading Online Presentations App? – Richard MacManus
  Slideshare is growing and has a vibrant community. The presentations are embeddable via a widget and there is an API. A useful source to keep up on conference presentations.
  Tags: Slideshare