Monday, February 02, 2004

Sun Microsystems Fires Back at Longhorn. A very interesting interview with eWeek's Steve Gillmor came out today: Sun's Jonathan Schwartz takes on Longhorn. Makes tons of good points. This will be an interview that'll be useful to talk about for some time. It's funny. I'm a Longhorn Evangelist working at Microsoft. I carry around a Visa card in my wallet from Target that has the Java runtime in it. Jonathan believes that's leverage that's going to let Sun get a new customer and developer base in the computing industry. Our view is, um, a bit different. But, I want to see what other people say about this interview before I get involved. What do you think about Sun's vision vs. Microsoft's vision? What's good about both? What's bad? [The Scobleizer LonghornBlog] 9:21:03 PM    comment []

MBP 2.0 Hits the Streets. Microsoft on Monday rolled out Version 2.0 of its Microsoft Business Portal (MBP) portal software for small/mid-size businesses. [Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley] 8:52:29 PM    comment []

RSS self-defense. Now that I'm accumulating my inbound feeds as XHTML, in order to database and search them, I find myself in the aggregator business, where I never planned to be. The tools I'm using to XHTML-ize my feeds are Mark Pilgrim's incredibly useful ultra-liberal feed parser and the equally useful HTML Tidy, invented by Dave Raggett, and maintained by folks like Charlie Reitzel, one of CMS Watch's Twenty Leaders to Watch in 2004 (along with yours truly). ... [Jon's Radio] 8:52:00 PM    comment []

Content-aware search. At InfoWorld's 2002 CTO Forum, Google co-founder Sergey Brin threw cold water on the idea of instrumenting content for intelligent search. "I'd rather make progress by having computers understand what humans write," he said, "than by forcing humans to write in ways that computers can understand." Brin's pragmatic stance sharply opposes the idealistic view of the Web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, who continues to evangelize his vision of a Semantic Web full of carefully encoded content that we can precisely search and fluidly recombine. My own humble contribution to this debate is a prototype search engine, now running on my Weblog, that tries to steer a middle course between the Scylla of simple fulltext search and the Charybdis of unwieldy tagging schemes and brittle ontologies. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] I keep trying out phrases to capture what I'm aiming for. One is 'dynamic categories,' another is 'interoperable content.' Probably neither will stick, because these only describe how to do something, not why. The why, of course, is productivity. ... [Jon's Radio] 8:51:40 PM    comment []