The Internet is the most important thing for the distribution of information since the age of the printing press. All information which can be online should be online; that is the best and most efficient way to distribute material to the widest possible audience.

This video, created by Clay Shirky explores the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information. This video was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively.

Companies need to make the most of Web 2.0, and web content management, collaboration and networking tools can help firms meet user demand for interactive websites. These tools aren’t simply restricted to the standard content management systems (CMS) used to publish text to a website, but tools that include file sharing, information sharing and instant messenging among others.

Effective web content management requires the capability for business leaders to take full control of the web as an interactive platform, rather than just treating it as another publishing medium. Keeping website visitors satisfied is a tough job. Currently, few corporate websites succeed with static, lifeless pages that lack interactivity. In contrast, pioneering websites, such as Amazon, Google and eBay set user’s expectations high with their compelling and dynamic content.

Because of these pioneering websites, the average visitor now expects targeted and personalised interactions with each and every company with which they come into contact on the web. In recent years the web content management franchise has expanded significantly beyond the 1990s paradigm of creation, management and publishing of content and other ‘resources’. As a result the tools are changing.

Ismael Chang Ghalimi has created an interesting list entitled Office 2.0 at IT|Redux. On this list, Ismael details a wide variety of web based business tools from bookmarking to business intelligence, calendars to contacts, databases to development tools, and beyond. What this list demonstrates is a shift towards new ways of data management, personalisation and targeting. New ways to interact with each and every interaction.

A recent survey from the Economist Intelligence Unit found that, despite early scepticism, “serious businesses” are starting to see that social networking technologies are not just for consumer sites such as YouTube and Facebook, but may also provide a major way for other brands to attract new customers and boost revenue.

 A compelling web experience is no longer based around simple web interactions, but around interactive tools.  The uptake of these tools, however, has been limited and we are only just seeing applications, such as wikis and blogs, join the corporate fold and become a generally accepted business tool.

The excitment is brewing! From the Adobe MAX Europe 2007 website itself: Join us for MAX 2007 Europe, a unique opportunity to connect with the Adobe community for an educational and inspirational experience that can’t be found anywhere else.

We’re bringing together the most creative and influential minds in the community, from designers and developers to executives and partners, that will shape the future of our industry.

Adobe MAX is the one conference of the year where you can meet and interact with the teams who build Adobe platform technologies, such as Flex, Flash and Adobe AIR, that you use and develop with every day. There is simply no better opportunity to gain a deep understanding of these technologies. (Mike Chambers - Senior Product Manager)

For those of you who use Yahoo!’s Upcoming.org, there is now an event entry:

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/235624/

See you there!

With the buzz around Rich Internet Applications (RIA) gaining a serious amount of steam and indeed press, with the likes of Adobe’s Flash/Flex and Microsoft’s Silverlight, Sun have now got in on the act with JavaFX. Announced at this years JavaOne conference, JavaFX makes use of a new scripting language and the Swing API for user interface (UI) design to position itself firmly in the RIA camp.

With 5 million Java developers, Sun is not starting from scratch in building a JavaFX following, and Sun plans to release the source code for JavaFX Script to the open source community. The company also hopes that the 2 billion phones that run the Java Mobile Edition (Java ME) will be an advantage. For desktop applications, however, this might mean large, frequent downloads, which in comparrison to Flash, have not been seamless in the past.

James Gosling, the father of Java and a Sun Fellow, described JavaFX as “oriented around interfaces that are highly animated.” JavaFX can also eliminate some of the security and compatibility issues related to AJAX-based applications, which incidentally do not have good support on mobile devices due to JavaScript restrictions.

Java failed to pioneer rich web applications years ago with the applet, so whether the JavaFX announcement firmly reinvigorates Java as a platform of choice for RIA remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that the RIA scene is becoming increasingly heterogeneous with four leading technologies striving for market dominance; AJAX, Java, Flash and .NET. Each technology has their own, often jingoistic, developer base so the dominance of one technology is not likely to take hold, at least in the short term. Indeed it is likely that the companies will employ a mixture of technologies to best fit the application being developed and the skillset available.

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are just the beginning. A key trend taking place throughout the Web industry is the urgency to integrate disparate systems and software tools to reduce costs, increase developer productivity, reduce the need for manual processing and intervention in transactions, and decrease time to market. To achieve these objectives, organisations have endorsed the adoption of standards-based systems (e.g. XML, Design Patterns, CSS, ECMAScript) combined with the migration to Web Services and Service Orientated Architecture (SOA). This has led to a requirement to create a consistent and intuitive interface to applications, data and services. The immediate goal of these efforts is to provide simpler, quicker and more efficient access and processing of information. Increasingly, Web applications are also offering customers application interfaces that are more personalised and customised to each individual’s specific requests and requirements.

It is clear that RIAs offer the potential to fundamentally change the user experience and in doing so, yield significant business benefits. However, in order for RIAs to be widely employed, and for more companies to receive these kinds of returns, technologies to build RIAs will need to appeal to a wider range of developers. The ability to cost effectively create rich, engaging user experiences that support corporate objectives and reach a broader developer audience without sacrificing development productivity require a new generation of RIA tools. These tools are being developed by a large number of organisations with Adobe, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Sun leading the way with the AIR/Flash/Flex combination, Silverlight, Gears, Quicktime and JavaFX respectively.

The new generation of RIA tools being developed by the likes of Adobe and Microsoft must do the following to allow developers to truely harness the power of RIAs in the commercial environment:

1. Allow developers to write applications using familiar development models to utilise and extend their current skills without requiring them to adopt entirely new or different skills
2. Use standard and standards-based technologies
3. Use industry specific programming models and patterns
4. Use and/or leverage the existing IT infrastructure through wrap and reuse rather than rip and replace
5. Provide pervasive, familiar programming models and an expressive user interface across platforms and devices; and
6. Allow developers to create a solution that delivers scalable, secure, high performance solutions that are bandwidth efficient

These new RIA tools will need to provide the features that enhance IT developer’s abilities to be more creative and to accomplish RIA development with the same or less effort than the tools they use to create other types of applications. What is required are the tools that can help developers achieve these objectives without relying on only HTML or other scripting languages, or having to learn a completely new development approach.

Two vendors which have the technology and capaibility to fully deliver Rich Internet Applications are Adobe and Microsoft. With Microsoft’s Silverlight and XAML, developing rich internet applications to run on Windows platforms will progress at a fast rate. In turn, Adobe has had a head start with the aquisition of Macromedia and the subsequent addition of Flash and Flex to its product offering. Flash and its relative ubiquity across platforms and devices ensures that RIA development and production will be accessible to a large user base and as such puts Adobe at a distinct advantage over Microsoft.

The Web has long promised to be a conduit to connect a business directly with its sales prospects, clients and partners. Yet often the Web fails to live up to its expectation due to limitations of the traditional, prohibitative HTML page-based model.

While Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) apply across a broad spectrum of industries and uses, one of their well-established merits is to allow a company to reduce the complexity that stands between where they are today with their traditional Web applications and where they want to be in the short to medium term. RIAs are consistently bringing companies closer to their vision of their application, closer to their customers, and closer to the business impact they believed the Web could actually have on their overall business model. This is expressed most clearly in what RIAs have allowed or enabled companies to do, namely provide Software as a Service (SaaS) as part and parcel of a Service Orientated Architecture (SOA).

Companies have considered and are choosing RIAs because provide the following:

1. Develop new kinds of applications with features or capabilities that would be extremely difficult or impossible for a developer to create using traditional Web technologies.
2. Engage, guide and listen to their customers on-line more intimately or more closely to how they would do it in person to increase loyalty, improve service, deepen the customer relationship, distinguish the company, or guide product development.
3. Create compelling, attractive and interactive Web sites using audio, video, text and graphics that generate leads, increase sales, simplify communication and create a unique online experience worth returning to.
4. Simplify typically complex processes like registration, configuration or purchasing leading to increased leads, sales, bookings, time on the site and repeat visits.
5. Present information to their employees, management and partners in clear, innovative, intuitive and effective ways to increase productivity, information sharing, decision-making and competitive advantage.
6. Provide an engaging, highly interactive presentation layer to underlying Web Services.
7. Reduce bandwidth costs associated with frequent page refresh for high traffic sites.
8. Dramatically increase sales of their products and services through their Web channel; and
9. Build an engaging, highly interactive Web site or application at a reduced cost compared to using alternative Web technologies.

The term Web 2.0, first coined by Tim O’Reilly back in 2004, describes a cluster of web-based services with a social collaboration and sharing component, where the community as a whole contributes, takes control, votes and ranks content and contributors. Web 2.0 services include social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, weblogs, social bookmarking, podcasts, RSS feeds (and other forms of many-to-many publishing), social software, and folksonomies. Central to this new Web is the idea of tagging — the adding of keywords to a digital object (e.g. a website, picture, audiofile or videoclip) to categorise it. This activity is effectively subject indexing but generally without a controlled vocabulary.

The following list provides examples of sites which include some form of user-based tagging:

Blogs

Technorati: http://technorati.com

Bookmarks

Delicious: http://del.icio.us

Books

Librarything: http://www.librarything.com

Emails

Gmail: http://mail.google.com

Events

GoingToMeet: http://www.goingtomeet.com

People

Tagalag: http://www.tagalag.com

Pictures

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com

Podcasts

Odeo: http://odeo.com

Videos

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com

Tagging of course is not a new concept, especially to librarians, indexers and classification professionals. What is new is that the tagging is being done by everyone, no longer by only a small group of experts, and that the tags are being made public and shared. This is the concept of Folksonomy.

A folksonomy is a user-generated taxonomy used to categorize and retrieve web content such as Web pages, photographs and Web links, using open-ended labels called tags. Typically, folksonomies are Internet-based, but their use may occur in other contexts. The folksonomic tagging is intended to make a body of information increasingly easy to search, discover, and navigate over time. A well-developed folksonomy is ideally accessible as a shared vocabulary that is both originated by, and familiar to, its primary users.

In contrast, in the realm of the Web, taxonomy can be defined as:

the laws or principles of classification;

controlled vocabulary used primarily for the creation of navigation structures for websites

The development of the Internet and the Web, and of search engines, led to users doing their own searching. In the Web 2.0 environment users are now also doing their own content creation and information management.

Because folksonomies develop in Internet-mediated social environments, users can often discover who created a given folksonomy tag, and see the other tags that this person created. In this way, folksonomy users often discover the tag sets of another user who tends to interpret and tag content in a way that makes sense to them. The result is often an immediate and rewarding gain in the user’s capacity to find related content. Part of the appeal of folksonomy is its inherent subversiveness: when faced with the choice of the search tools that Web sites provide, folksonomies can be seen as a rejection of the search engine status quo in favour of tools that are created by the community.

Folksonomy creation and searching tools are not part of the underlying World Wide Web protocols. Folksonomies arise in Web-based communities where special provisions are made at the site level for creating and using tags. These communities are established to enable Web users to label and share user-generated content, such as photographs (e.g. Flickr), or to collaboratively label existing content, such as Web sites (e.g. Technorati), books (e.g. LibraryThing), works in the scientific and scholarly literatures, and blog entries (e.g. WordPress).

The day of the emasculated Web 1.0 where the client-side was functionally poor, where the user interface was akin to the days of the mainframe computer, is rapidly diminishing and the new era of the Web 2.0 has yielded a new way of thinking. The demand for web applications, particularly in the business arena, is increasing at an exponential rate as the benefits of new technologies and paradigms are comprehended by the CTOs, CIOs and decision makers. Web interfaces have significantly restricted the interactive user experiences possible on the Web, and the ability of those Web applications to present increasingly complex information to the user, to date.

To solve a myriad of today’s problems, modern web applications must be able to solve an equal myriad of requirements.  These requirements provide the principles behind the emerging Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and include some, if not all, of the following.

1. Run unchanged across multiple platforms
2. Deliver engaging user interfaces with high levels of interactivity
3. Restore processing power and rendering capabilities to the client
4. Execute well across varying connection speeds (broadband rather than the  archaic dial-up)
5. Utilise audio, video, images and textual content in a seamless mannor
6. Support mobile workflow by allowing users to work on- and off-line
7. Allow the client to decide what content should be accessed and when that content should be retrieved (asynchronous execution)
8. Access any number of middle-tier services (e.g. .NET, Java, ColdFusion) and data stores
9. Provide powerful and dynamic user interfaces
10. Use standards such as XML-RPC, SOAP and REST in Web Services-based applications
11. Integrate with legacy applications
12. Allow for incremental addition of functionality to enhance the Web application environments
13. Be accessible to all
14. and, Utilise ubiquitous content

Candidate technologies for these solutions are developing primarily in the form of AJAX, Flex/Flash and XAML. They do not simply address the limitiations of the page based model as seen in Web 1.0, but provide the above capabilities whilst also empowering developers and designers to create new kinds of engaging and innovative applications and user experiences.

Microsoft finally unveiled its new product, Silverlight. But is it actually a product? Not really. It is more aptly described as a runtime system for a cut-down version of the .NET Framework and just-in-time (JIT) compilers. The runtime is tiny, designed to be a plugin to a web browser much like Flash is also available as a plugin. Microsoft see this technology as a potential “Flash killer”, although it is unlikely to achieve such a status, at least in the short to medium term. They have stiff competition from Adobe with the AIR/Flash/Flex combination which is engrained into the designer/developer community.

From the Silverlight website, it is clear that the project is heavily graphics-orientated and can do interesting things with video streams. Somewhat more interesting is that Microsoft have said that it will be consistent across multiple platforms, running on both Windows and Macintosh operating systems. It may even progress to Linux through the partnership with Novell, not to mention support for Windows smartphones and other Windows embedded devices. This is intriguing, yet promising for a company that historically has shunned competing technologies.

Microsoft described Silverlight as “a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of Microsoft .NET-based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web”. The emphasis is on rich interactive applications delivered over the web. The result being applications which offer a new level of user interactivity to rival that of the desktop and firmly banish HTML-based website to the bin. Sounds familiar? Flash?

So how is it different from AIR/Flash/Flex? Essentially, you can use any of the languages supported under the .NET framework, which means that Silverlight applications can be written in C# or Visual Basic, as well as other languages such as Ruby and Python. Like the AIR/Flash/Flex combination, Silverlight has its own set of development and debug tools in Visual Studio and a complete Expression suite for visual designers.

The Killer Application?

Silverlight on its own will not be the killer application so-to-speak. It is the services behind Silverlight, the data streaming services, that will be a key differentiator. Combining Silverlight with Microsoft’s new initiative, quietly referred to as “Live 2.0″, will provide video storage and streaming capabilities worthy of a Google-styled offering. These streaming services will clearly carry some form of advertising. You don’t have to use the Microsoft service, but the intention is clear; high-bandwidth, high-availability streaming of video data requires huge investment and Microsoft is making that investment to take its own slice of a huge, fledgling market.

Video streaming isn’t the only part of the service. Microsoft plans to develop facilities such as server-side data and credit card processing. This opens up possibilites for an application developed in Silverlight to be hosted, managed and distributed by Microsoft or another partner. I hear alarm bells … hosted, managed and distributed all by Microsoft! This is clearly putting all your eggs in one basket, but prudence is key when choosing which services to sign up to.

The Future Is Online.

With Silverlight, Microsoft has shifted its emphasis and signalled a firm intention that the future is online. It will be offering end-to-end solutions that allow the design and development of systems, and the management and distribution of those systems based around web services running not only locally but out in the etha of the Internet. Utimately we will be able to choose when, where and how we access applications and information. Whether Microsoft’s vision can be successful is dependent on whether this behemoth of a company can metamorphose from a conservative institution into a dynamic one. They have the money, the intellect and the technology, they now need the spirit of a precocious of a teenager.

The Internet has emerged from obscurity to become a dominant platform for application development and is integral to the idea of Software as a Service (SaaS). Unfortunately the demand to build applications of increasing complexity has continued to outpace the ability of traditional Web applications to represent that complexity and expectation. Utilisation of AJAX technologies attempts to reconcile some of the issues, but frequently the result is a frustrating, confusing or disengaging user experience resulting in unhappy customers, lost sales, and increased costs.

We are in a period of expanding opportunity for Internet and intranet applications. The growth in adoption and usage of the Internet has acted as a driver behind technology spending, spawned such terms as Service Orientated Architecture (SOA), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Web Services, and enterprise integration trends that seek to combine back-office infrastructures with new front-office applications and the Internet.

Integral to this is the need to communicate better with employees, customers, suppliers, and partners. Intranet applications, including enterprise information portals and employee facing applications, are increasingly depended upon to share information across a company, while outwardly focused extranet applications seek to more tightly bind networks of partners, suppliers and customers and make communication, business transactions and support easier.

A key reason Web applications cannot represent these types of complexity is because of the limitations of HTML pages. The Internet grew up on the notion of a network of loosely coupled, unintelligent clients that communicate with increasingly intelligent servers by sending requests for pages. The emergence of Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s) has served to blur the distinction between the desktop and the Web and has resulted in smart, powerful and dynamic user interfaces. RIA’s seek to combine the best of the desktop, Web and communication technologies.

As one would expect, the driving forces behind Rich Internet Applications are the big guns in the technology and Web industry; namely Adobe, Google and Microsoft. Each company has produced their own RIA platforms:

Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR)

AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop RIA’s.

Applications can be built using the following technologies:

• Flash / Flex / ActionScript
• HTML / JavaScript / CSS / AJAX
• Combination of these technologies
• PDF can be leveraged with any application

Adobe Integrated Runtime can be found at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/

Google Gears

Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline.

Google Gears consists of three modules that address the core challenges in making web applications work offline.

• LocalServer Cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) locally
• Database Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
• WorkerPool Make your web applications more responsive by performing resource-intensive operations asynchronously

Google Gears can be found at http://gears.google.com

Micrsoft Silverlight

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows.

Microsoft Silverlight can be found at http://silverlight.net