Loosely Coupled

I'm fascinated by all the context sensitive/targeted media that is making it's way into the mainstream. The other day I was reading an email from my wife having to do with bringing some milk home and something about a recent trip we had taken. The Google ads on this page were some that you'd expect - one on how to save gas, another for a baking product. The one that really surprised me was an ad for silica gel?!? Silica gel is a moisture absorber and usually found in the little packets that say "Do Not Eat" included when you buy a new pair of sneakers and many other products. This was intriguing to me because there was no mention of anything related to this in the body of the message. However, my wife works for a company that produces these products and sent the email from her work address. Not only was AdSense was smart enough to pick up on the from address and trace it back to an actual company, it knew what the company produces, and suggested an approp...

I was glad to hear mention of OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) in a podcast I listened to early this week. OLPC (a.k.a. the $100 laptop) is an organization whose goal is to provide inexpensive laptops to children for education. Integrated collaboration is one of the key features offered in these laptops. The belief that information and ideas are meant to be freely and openly shared is a core principal of open source software... and it's revolutionized the software industry. Allowing children to learn the value of this openness firsthand, will hopefully lead to a more open and collaborative environment in other fields (government for one) when these children enter the workforce as adults. To help foster these ideals away from school, children will need access to the Internet at home. Fast and cheap, widespread Internet penetration needs to improve. In the neighborhood I live there is one broadband provider and it's rather expensive - making it out of reach for many lower inco...

I've previously written about Rich Internet Applications and how they bring desktop-like functionality to web applications. The knock on this technology has always been "how do I work if I don't have an Internet connection?" Last week, Google announced Google Gears , a framework designed to address this problem. Google Gears provides 3 modules developers can used to make their web applications available offline. LocalServer allows web applications the ability to store, then serve, web content locally when a user does not have an Internet connection. These resources can be updated when the user is reconnected to the Net. Database provides persistent storage to the application when working offline. WorkerPool allows long running operations to be "chunked", and run in the background without blocking the browser. It's likely Google developed this technology to widen the appeal and availability of it's Google Docs & Spreadsheats offeri...