Fav5

It's Spring Sing weekend at Harding, and the sun is shining. Here's my pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. Technology Review has just released its top 10 emerging technologies of 2008, those technologies that are most likely to make a huge impact on the way we live. I personally find offline Web applications to be most interesting. This is an area Adobe and Google are vigorously pursuing.


2. Joan Smith (my former office-mate in graduate school) and Michael Nelson (my former Ph.D. adviser and pioneer of digital preservation ) just published an article in D-Lib Magazine showing a year's worth of crawling activity on some specially designed websites. Make sure you check out the animated images in Tables 3 and 6- they show the crawling behavior of an aggressive Google and timid Yahoo and MSN.


3. Ethics 101: You're a popular search engine that allows users to see emergent news from a number of sources. But you're housed in a country where the authorities often seek to squelch information that doesn't hold to the party line. If you show news stories that make the authorities look bad, your search engine will be shut down or blocked. What do you do?


4. Joel Spolsky writes an excellent article about IE 8 and the many difficulties of creating software that supports "standards". This is required reading for all you software engineers and CS students. (The article is a little long, but it's worth it.)


5. While we're on the topic of web browsers, almost a year ago Steve Jobs announced that the next version of Safari (Apple's web browser) would run on Windows. Now Apple is using iTunes to push it out to the Microsoft world. My guess is that many unsuspecting users are going to think they need Safari to run iTunes since it appears in the same dialog box they always see when needing to install an iTunes update. Many users are going to downloaded it and puzzle over the new icon on their desktop. This should be interesting...