• The next version of Windows will be called simply Windows 7, Microsoft's Mike Nash explains how they came up with that particular number. Interestingly, Windows XP isn't counted as a major release, just a 5.1 release, with Windows 2000 being 5.0. Windows Vista is 6.0, and Windows 7 is actually version 6.1!
  Tags: Windows 7
• Kongregate, the online Flash games site, where the boys are, according to Rafe Needleman, has put up a tutorial series aimed at beginning Flash game developers. The tutorials show how to build a basic space shooting game using Adobe Flash CS3 and ActionScript 2.0, and there is an accompanying developer competition.
  Tags: Flash, online games
• Experienced, but mainstream, Yahoo users don't get OpenID, shows a usability study released by Yahoo Developer Network. If you own a domain you can run your own OpenId server using phpMyID, as I do on the emented.com domain.
  Tags: OpenID
• If you want to use IIS on a Windows server, instead of Apache, to run popular open source PHP applications like Drupal, phpBB, and Wordpress, you're in luck, as Microsoft just has released a Web Platform Installer tool, which simplifies the deployment process to almost a click of a button.
  Tags: PHP, Windows
• Opera released some Web statistics obtained by their "Metadata Analysis and Mining Application", MAMA: 
  

  MAMA is a structural Web-page search engine—it trawls Web pages and returns results detailing page structures, including what HTML, CSS, and script is used on it, as well as whether the HTML validates.

  It's a vast resource for Web nerds, with results ranging from the least and most popular HTML elements to Flash and AJAX usage per country. Some key findings: Apache is used by 68% of web servers, IIS by 26%. The ratio of HTML to XHTML usage is about 2 to 1. The "table" element is more popular than "div", 8th vs. 14th place, respectively. 33% of web pages use Flash. Only 4% of URLs pass the W3C markup validation test. When testing my site, 38 errors were reported, so nobody is perfect. I guess Wordpress is to blame for a lot of those errors.
  Tags: statistics, web standards

• Yahoo continues the roll-out of their Open Strategy, dubbed Y!OS. The latest release is a new universal profile page.
  Tags: Yahoo
• Ars reports on benchmarking results for the new Flash 10 player compared to Flash 9. On Mac and Linux platforms there are substantial performance improvements up to a factor of 4. The Flash performance on those platforms are still far behind the performance on Windows though. Sporting the same hardware, Flash 10 on Vista outperformed Flash on Mac by a factor of nearly two.
  Tags: Flash
• Nonconformist blogger Ted Dziuba has relaunched his rebellious Web 2.0 blog Uncov, after recently leaving his startup Pressflip. It's mostly fun reading, as he tries to be a thorn in the side of the Web 2.0 aristocracy. Additionally, the accompanying pics of Fail and other misfortunes makes it a worthwhile read. On a somewhat related note, Christopher Beam writes here about the popularity of the word Fail.
  Tags: blogs

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• ReactOS: Open source Windows
• Pressflip Founder Quits: "I'm Tired Of The Fight"

• Knol, Google's Wikipedia killer, opened to the public this week. Anyone can write a Knol — "A unit of knowledge", about (almost) any subject. Multiple Knols can exist on a given subject, and it's up to the author to decide whether the Knol can be directly edited by other users, is moderated by the creator, or is closed.
  Interesting commentary from the blogosphere suggests that Knols are ranked high in Google searches, despite being just a day old. Also, duplicate content in Knols is ranked higher than original content on the web, which seems quite a bit disturbing. This suggests that web publishers should consider cross publishing their content to Knols, as a way to claim the ownership of their work. Also noteworthy is that links are "nofollow" in Knols (like in Wikipedia), so that no "link juice" is flowing out of a Knol. This is understandable, otherwise Knols would have been a heaven for link spammers.
  From an international perspective, it's a bit disappointing that only US citizens can have their name verified, though that may not be that important.
  Tags: Knol
• The Open Web Foundation, yet another open web standards organization, was announced this week, possibly most for the benefit of the founders. As Dare Obasanjo points out, there is already an old and well established organization for internet standards, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Possibly if you make the distinction between the Web (linked pages) and the Internet (infrastructure), the new organization could serve the purpose of handling pure web related issues.
  Tags: organizations
• There seems to be a backdoor to the encrypted communications in Skype, allowing authorities to intercept phone calls of suspects. A not too far-fetched guess is that the Swedish authorities have the key to this backdoor, in view of the infamous "FRA law", which allows the Swedish authority FRA to intercept all internet traffic passing the Swedish border, which about all Swedish traffic does, even if the start and end destinations are within Sweden. Using a secure protocol for web mail might be a good idea.
  Tags: privacy
• A story of a developer's journey (Mike Gunderloy of OStatic) from full-time Microsoft contractor to "100% Microsoft-free".
  Tags: Microsoft
• A new freely available collection of astonishing space images from NASA.
  Tags: images
• PlayCrafter, is a new site where you can build your own Flash games using drag-and-drop, reviewed by Marshall Kirkpatrick. The quality of the games are surprisingly high, and it is easy to get stuck playing. The games are embeddable on other sites, and there is an ad-based revenue sharing system for creators. Comparing this to my previous posts about Popfly Game Creator and Scratch, with PlayCrafter it seems to be a lot more easy to create compelling games, though you will not have the benefit of learning actual programming.
  Tags: online games

• 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

• Reaching for the Sky Through The Compute Clouds – Alex Iskold
  Alex makes a brief comparison of cloud computing vs. LAMP, and lists a few scalability issues with the LAMP approach. He does not mention any potential problems with cloud computing other than occasional outages.
  Tags: LAMP, cloud computing
• Tom Coates: Web of Data – Richard MacManus
  Tom Coates gives a presentation at Webstock and talks about a "web of data", which is where "data sources and services are the center of the Web, rather than pages." Examples are Twitter and Flickr. He recommends opening up your data, the main reason is a "network effect", new services can build on the data.
  Tags: open data
• Game On: Zynga and SGN Battle For Social Gaming Developers – Erick Schonfeld
  Social gaming networks are growing. The benefit for a developer to join a network is increased visibility of their application. The Social Gaming Network, SGN, provides an API for their gaming hub, where developers can add their games and leverage the "gaming graph".
  Tags: social gaming, online games
• Crude Android Prototypes Unveiled – Daniel Langendorf
  Pictures of early prototypes of Android mobile phones, mostly circuit boards, displays and solder.
  Tags: Android
• Study: 6% of People Online Contribute 50% of Display Ad Clicks – Marshall Kirkpatrick
  Further, they have a low income and are "more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites."
  Tags: advertising
• The Social Cloud – Kevin Marks
  Kevin Marks has a video up of an interesting presentation he gave at the recent Geneva LIFT conference. A few quotes from the presentation:

  The Social Graph API puts this cloud around finding me and finding my public friends on the web. That means we can assume that that is there and it is abstracted that stuff away, which means we can assume that these public connections that we have already asserted and made on the web, can be discovered and can be reused in other places.

  ... OpenSocial, that puts a cloud around social networking sites, and the details of friends, the details of people, the details of the actions they do and data you store.

  So by the concept of a cloud, he means that something just works, and we, as developers or users, do not have to think about the details of the implementation or how it works. From a developer's point of view, OpenSocial enables the concept of a Social Cloud.
  Tags: Social Cloud, OpenSocial, Social Graph