• PR-guru Steve Rubel outcries over Google's new experimental search service SearchWiki, which allows people to comment, vote and reorder search results, provided they are logged in with their Google account. The reordering should only be privately visible, but voting and comments are public to others. Rubel calls this a "PR nightmare", as there is no community moderation of the comments like in Wikipedia for example, and he continues:
  

  of course people are going to run amok on the world's biggest online stage! That's like turning a kid with a massive sweet tooth loose in a giant candy store. It's going to be a haven for spam.

  Tags: Google, PR

• In another piece a couple of weeks ago Steve Rubel foresaw the end of tangible media by 2014, by tangible meaning all physical media like newspapers, magazines, books, DVDs, boxed software and video games. Like Rubel, I'm already almost free of tangible media, keeping only a subscription to Dr Dobb's Journal, which I'll probably quit next year. I'm also buying a handful of books each year, but once there's a Kindle-like device available in this country, at a reasonable price, I'll probably go completely digital.
  Tags: media, trends
• Google's virtual world experiment Lively, which I wrote about at launch in July, will be discontinued at the end of the year. Apparently, the experiment never took off, though Google states that the reason is to focus more on their core search, ads and apps business.
  Tags: virtual worlds
• Adobe labs has announced Alchemy, a research project that aims to bring the wealth of existing C and C++ code to Flash. The C/C++ code is compiled to ActionScript 3.0 bytecode that runs on Flash Player 10 or AIR 1.5. Alchemy is ideally suited for computation-intensive tasks and can be considerably faster than ActionScript 3.0, though still 2-10 times slower than native C/C++ code.
  Tags: Flash, programming
• Josh Catone writes that Yahoo has officially launched their browser extension BrowserPlus, which back in July was suggested as part of a Web 3.0 trend. BrowserPlus offers web developers a number of services, such as drag-and-drop, file browsing, image processing and persistent storage, just to name a few.
  Tags: browser extensions
• A final note on two social media apps: SocialToo, a service that allows you to automatically follow and unfollow people on Twitter, now has a polling feature.
  Tarpipe lets you automate your social media publishing via a Yahoo Pipes-like user interface. Tarpipe supports a number of social services, comes with an API, and supports OpenID, OAuth and Microformats, writes ReadWriteWeb.
  Tags: social applications

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• Adobe CTO calls for JavaScript coordination

• The last word on JavaScript performance among competing browser engines has apparently not yet been spoken. This week it was reported that an updated version of SquirrelFish, dubbed Extreme, which is the native WebKit JavaScript engine, has regained the lead in JavaScript performance. Reportedly it was faster than both the V8 engine of Google Chrome and TraceMonkey of Firefox. The results suggest that Google should have stuck with the original SquirrelFish engine of WebKit, instead of developing their own V8. Can we expect a close comeback from the V8 team? Let the struggle continue!
  Note however that performance reports like these must always be taken with a grain of salt. For example, it is quite easy to optimize the code to perform well on a specific test.
  Tags: JavaScript, Chrome
• Google Chrome will eventually support Add-ons and User scripts à la Greasemonkey, said Google Engineer Ojan Vafai at the Web 2.0 Expo last week. They hope to make a stable implementation, he said, referring to the less stable experience of Add-ons with Firefox. Personally, with Chrome I miss the Google Toolbar, with the Gmail notifier and the PageRank indicator. Hopefully it will be released for Chrome soon.
  At the same Web 2.0 panel, Microsoft's IE platform architect Chris Wilson, hinted that IE might add support for vector graphics and the canvas element, a part of the HTML 5 standard I wrote about last week.
  Tags: Add-ons, Chrome
• If you want to stay on top with the latest updates to Google Chrome, you can join the Dev Channel and get access to more recent but potentially less stable updates to the browser.
  Tags: Chrome
• Google's embeddable 3D virtual world Lively, which I wrote about at launch in July, has hitherto received little attention. Nevertheless, Google has high plans for the service, revealed creative director Kevin Hanna at the recent Game Developers' Conference. They plan to open up the API further to allow for the creation of entire 3D games. In the long run, Hanna hopes that Lively will become part of the backbone of the Web, much like Java, Flash and HTML are today.
  Tags: virtual worlds
• A Pew Internet Project report shows that 97% of all (American) teens, ages 12-17, play some kind of video game on a computer, console or portable device. Further, nearly 50% of all boys visit game related web sites or forums, and 14% contribute to those sites. For girls, the corresponding figures are somewhat lower. The study also shows that about one third of teens play mature or adult rated games. Of those teens, boys are in majority, 79% vs. 21% girls. In conclusion: regulations will always fail, and boys are still boys (phew!).
  Where I think the study fails, is that it does not distinguish online Flash-based games as a separate category, despite the fact that it is an important genre, and presumably popular by younger teens at least.
  Tags: gaming
• Finally a Web 3.0 conference, Oct 16-17, in Santa Clara, Ca. Jupitermedia is organizer and RWW is a sponsor. Semantic Web technologies seems to be a key feature of the event. Don't miss my Web 3.0 review from April, and the catch-up in July.
  Tags: Web 3.0

• Yahoo continues their open strategy with the launch of Search BOSS (Build your Own Search Service). This is a different offering than SearchMonkey, which just allowed you to enhance the presentation of the search results. The new service has quite liberal terms. It allows you to re-order the search results and mix in other results as you see fit. These are desired options I wrote about in my first post on this blog. The terms also have a no-attribution requirement, which expressively requires you not to mention Yahoo in your search offering. Still you are not allowed to use the search index data in any way you might want to. You must provide a search service, with a search box, and only query the index in response to a search performed by a real user of your service. Also, considering the current uncertainty of the future of Yahoo, building a business on top of BOSS seems a bit risky.
  Tags: search, Yahoo
• From the security department, there was much talk about a potential, yet unexploited flaw in the Domain Name System, DNS, the "address book" of the internet, which translates human friendly URLs to IP addresses. Dan Kaminsky, who discovered the flaw, secretly informed the major vendors without talking to the security community, which has spawned some speculation about the significance of the discovery. The details of the vulnerability will not be publicly disclosed until August 7. Though, it is likely related to insufficient randomness provided by the 16 bit session ID of DNS. In that respect, the vulnerability is rooted in the same problem domain as the OpenSLL flaw I wrote about in May.
  Tags: security
• Two news from the virtual world(s): Google launches a customizable and embeddable virtual world called Lively. Second Life, the hitherto largest virtual world, reported on the first successful teleportation of an avatar between two (experimental) virtual worlds. They also recorded a video of the event.
  Tags: virtual worlds
• Ars Technica writes about recent speculations about a new non-Windows operating system in development at Microsoft, code name Midori. To be released some 9 years from now, probably beyond Windows 8.
  Tags: Windows
• The new URL shortening service bit.ly, has a host of innovative features, including an API, as reported by Marshall Kirkpatrick. Dave Winer is one of the brains behind the service.
  Tags: URLs, tools
• Soon we might be able to program Flash using C, meaning a speed boost that is useful in gaming applications, for example.
  Tags: Flash
• Moopz, a FriendFeed conversation aggregator reviewed by Sarah Perez. Among the features are item threading, noise reduction and automatic summary and tag generation. Only items containing a link are considered, thus reducing the noise. First impression is that it's a useful service. (Btw. I'm jobol on FriendFeed.)
  Tags: aggregation, FriendFeed
• Josh Catone is back to blogging. Now at SitePoint, a resource site for web developers and designers, where he is running the News & Trends blog. Glad to have him back.
  Tags: Josh Catone
• Finally, a bonus video on the math theme featuring fractals, found via Brad Feld.
  

• A year ago there was much buzz about companies and public institutions embracing virtual worlds like Second Life, but since then the interest has declined and this year has been really quiet, until now perhaps. ReadWriteWeb refers to an article by Alana Semuels of the Los Angeles Times, who writes about several companies who regularly use private islands in Second Life for meetings and conferences, and entrepreneurs that build virtual conference facilities. The social behaviour of avatars is also getting more controlled and uniform, though some excessiveness still occurs. As she writes: "Just like social culture in the real world, it evolves."
  Tags: virtual worlds
• The useful and free Windows system tools from Sysinternals are now available online, as reported by Ed Bott.
  Tags: tools, Windows
• The browser extension Google Gears turns one and is rebranded as Gears, writes ReadWriteWeb. Gears gives developers early access to future web standards proposed in for example HTML 5, as I wrote in a previous highlight about Gears.
  Tags: Gears
• Alex Iskold has another useful post, this time about the lightweight semantic markup techniques microformats, eRDF and RDFa, where the latter, RDFa, is the most capable, but also the most complex in terms of implementation. Further, he gives some background to the Yahoo! SearchMonkey initiative, which is a way to encourage publishers to add semantic markup to their pages. See also my previous highlight about Yahoo semantic search.
  Tags: Semantic Web, Yahoo
• Finally, there was the discussion about comment ownership that I wrote a separate post about.
  Tags: comments