Saturday, April 13, 2002

Russ Documents Radio Why shouldn't we use our (Google) Boxes for the sheer whimsy of it? I feel a tutorial coming on .... if I can do this in ten minutes, so can you. [Russ Lipton Documents Radio] This is where I'm missing the big picture. While the steps I took to create a Google Box were easy and straight forward - I followed Dave's instructions to the letter - I'm not sure how to apply it for every day use. Do I go back through the steps in the instructions and redo them for a new topic every time I want to change? I hope Russ answers some of these kinds of questions! Oh, yeah...anybody know how to make the Google Box narrower or with smaller type? Dave has done it at The Scripting News site. How do I change the attributes of the box? [Steve Pilgrim's Radio Weblog] Oh my I think I'm beginning to understand the relevance of the "Google API". If someone can list the top ten searches for "The New York Mets" it follows that with the right query you could get the API to list "The last 10 New York Met scores". In that way the box would become the XML-RPC feeds that other people are working on. The guy who wrote the script to call the last 10 races at the New Zealand race track could also do it via a Google search. And since it can search the web or your desktop/intranet in this way you once you learn the proper search terms you can pull any information you want into this box. Is this what Dave calls a "bing"? 8:22:12 PM     Web Services John does an excellent job of building the business case for web services. For years, I've been involved in complex application integration projects involving the disparate distribution systems of dealers and distributors. "Importing" an invoice into the dealer's software from the distributor's software when a purchase order was filled and shipped to the dealer was complex and cumbersome. If I understand what is really happening when an application called Radio "talks" to an application called Google, then I have to agree with John that Userland is truly on the cutting edge of what the internet can become. This is great stuff: Desktop webservices and composite applications.  One of the most exciting aspects of desktop webservices is that I can build pages on my desktop that automatically aggregate data from across the web and from webservice enabled corporate applications.  This is effectively a personal portal that could include search (Google) of the Web/LAN/desktop, financial info from a place like Yahoo finance, corporate sales data, corporate financial data, corporate inventory data, news (RSS),  and even data from peer web services (data entered or auto-aggregated by co-workers in a structured format -- contact lists, bookmarks, calendar entries, spreadsheets, etc.). Better yet, I have complete control over the presentation of that data.  With a little programming effort, I can incorporate business rules (with tools that can be automated for me) that do things for me based on that data.   I could also attach a post button to all the data I collect so its easy for me to share it with co-workers via my weblog.  It puts me in control.  This is the ultimate composite application.  A borg that consumes all others.  I don't want to learn or interact with hundreds of different websites or application specific clients.  I want it all on my desktop, running in my browser, where I can modify, manipulate, and publish it. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] When you put it this way, I can understand it! [Steve Pilgrim's Radio Weblog] 7:24:56 PM     Dave has a link to Matt Webb's Web Log. In it he states: Yes, we are entering the next phase of the web. Tim O'Reilly, Tim Berners-Lee, and even Matt Jones can say this with more clarity than me, so I'll leave most of it to them. But here's where I think it's going to come from: Web services [SOAP, xmlrpc] are symptomatic of a understanding-shift. We know the net well enough now to give it APIs, languages [XML, IM bots], which makes it scriptable. And I think the reasons we're able to make it scriptable is because we understand it. The www itself, now it's a combination of two things: The real life thing and the technology combine to make a virtual thing. And it used to stop there. But because we understand and because the capability for scripting is there, that means we can recombine things on the net that we couldn't touch before. And recombine them, and them, endlessly recombine. Web services [and what they represent] truly are an order of magnitude change. Oh, but so what. Progress happens. Blah blah grand sweep. I want to subscribe to this guy's RSS feed yet he doesn't have one. Why not?   7:09:00 PM

© Copyright 2002 Ian Bruk. Last update: 4/14/2002; 6:16:36 PM.