Month: August 2006

Categories
Technology

Gartner’s Hype Cycle

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Gartner has come out with a press release titled 2006 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle which …assesses the maturity, impact and adoption speed of 36 key technologies and trends during the next ten years. The report is broken down into three main categories: Web 2.0, Real World Web, and Application Architecture.

I find myself agreeing with the report, specifically:

* Limited uses of Ajax technologies will have a significant, and positive impact on web sites in the next two years.

* Mashups will hit the mainstream in the same time period, but they are vulnerable since they do have external dependencies.

* Location aware technologies will be fairly common within two years, and I can see a huge increase in functionality within five. Enough so that I plan on focusing much of my energy in this direction.

* We are starting to see corporate interest and involvement in semantic web technologies, such as the use of RDF and ontologies, but I agree: it will most likely be about a decade before this really explodes. Now is the time for companies to position themselves for this explosion, as it takes most corporations years to make significant data direction changes.

About the only thing I have to quibble about the report is the fact that it doesn’t stress enough, in my opinion, how lightweight technologies are going to make an inroad into today’s extremely heavy architecture. It somewhat covers this in several of the key points, but I think its important for companies to realize the complex infrastructure architectures, such as J2EE, with its reliance on extremely over-engineered functionality, are going to begin to fail under their own weight. Even re-engineering something such as EJB (EJB 3.0) isn’t going to be enough to save these in the long run: say Gartner’s high end of ten years.

The advice at the end of the report was spot on:

Despite the changes in specific technologies over the years, the hype cycle’s underlying message remains the same: Don’t invest in a technology just because it is being hyped, and don’t ignore a technology just because it is not living up to early expectations.

“Be selectively aggressive — identify which technologies could benefit your business, and evaluate them earlier in the Hype Cycle”, said Ms. Fenn. “For technologies that will have a lower impact on your business, let others learn the difficult lessons, and adopt the technologies when they are more mature.”

All it all, an excellent report.

Categories
Specs

The importance of standards

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Nat at O’Reilly Radar writes on the importance of standards in web page design, making me very happy. He wrote:

The point of the standards is not just to ensure that browsers can display the pages. The standards also ensure the pages form a platform that can be built upon; a hacked-together platform leads to brittle and fragile extensions.

That’s the problem with some of the Ajax libraries, such as Dojo: a belief that some of these standards aren’t all that important and can be disregarded. A page that uses standard CSS and XHTML can easily incorporate change, as well as integrate new functionality. The use of standard XHTML and CSS is never going to go out of style.

The one paragraph with which I disagree, somewhat, is:

Between Google and Yahoo!’s work on in-page widgets, the spreading effect of microformats, and the rise of the importance of accessibility, we’re finally getting rewards for standards-compliance.

The in-page widgets from Yahoo and Google are nifty, but I don’t see them as an important end-result of standards compliance. I do agree, hugely, on the growing acknowledgement of the importance of accessibility, but microformats, (no offense Kevin), are largely unknown, and most are not based on an independent standards effort I’m aware of.

Aside from this one paragraph, which struck me as a bit buzz wordy, overall I can agree, strongly, with the gist of the post.

Categories
Political

Two from Sheila

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Two excellent posts from Sheila to pass on:

The latest covers the Lieberman defeat and the ludicrous accusations that the Joe Lieberman site was hacked. As was discovered and discussed in numerous publications, the Lieberman campaign hosted the site on a cheap server, and then paid the price when it received too much attention.

Lieberman stood for something once upon a time. Whatever it was he stood for, though, was lost in the 9/11 attacks. He lost his perspective, and now he’s lost the race. Running as an independent, as he has threatened, just shows that he’s about to lose the one thing left: his dignity.

On the other hand, the ‘people’ weren’t entirely the winners, as has been proclaimed. The Lieberman challenger, Lamont, may have made effective use of the grassroots to run his compaign, but he also made a great deal of use of his personal wealth. He wasn’t exactly one of the little people.

Still, hopefully this will shake up the Dems enough to force the party into something other than Republican Light.

Personally, I preferred Sheila’s other story, on juke boxes and a new documentary associated with juke boxes. I loved the boxes from the 40’s and remember fondly the cafe we used to go to at the junction of this highway and that; with its juke boxes at the table, which always left me wondering: how did the system know which song to play next?

The first story is about more important doings, but I’m finding that everything there is to be said about politics and the world at large has been said already: we’re just each taking turns shuffling the words around, some better than others.

The juke box story, now that topic was fresh.

Categories
Photography

The new Nikon D80

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Nikon has released its new D80 digital SLR, and Digital Photo Preview has a first look.

From the side by sides, the D80 is similar to the D200. However, the D80 is focused as a D70 replacement, not a direct competitor for the D200. The D200 has more exposure options and is faster, and also uses compact flash cards, rather than Secure Digital.

I can respect that the use of SD allows Nikon to trim the camera size, but there’s one problem I have with SD over compact flash cards: they’re too small. The compact flash cards are just big enough for me to handle easily in the field. I have a hand held GPS device that uses SD, and I drop the things even when trying to insert them into the device in the quiet of my office.

I think the D80 is going to end up a popular camera. Perhaps it will be popular enough to ease some of the demand on the D200.

Categories
Weblogging

Know when to hold them, know when to fold them

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Ed Batista excerpted part of what Jason Calcanis had to say about re-inventing oneself, taped during a Dave Winer coffee notes:

You have to reinvent yourself, and sometimes you have to kill your previous persona. I had to kill [my] Silicon Alley Reporter persona to become Weblogs, Inc. I’ll have to kill Weblogs, Inc. to be Netscape, kill Netscape to be whatever comes after that. You can’t live on your past brand, or else it owns you, and you no longer own it.

Batista wrote:

…a pre-existing persona can also be a hindrance when you need to make a major change, and sometimes you just need to blow it up and start from scratch.

Though I looked at my butt and there isn’t a burn mark, I have noticed that there are still 466 Blogline subscriptions to Burningbird. That means 466 people are missing out on all the fun.