Categories
Communications Enterprise 2.0

Every Cloud has a Chrome Lining

via-vietteYesterday I downloaded Microsoft’s Live Writer after Neville Hobson gave it a plus. Trouble is it downloaded not only the Blogging tool but a villain’s swag bag of other goodies too. I now need to find a new ’round-2it’ to unpack them and see what’s on offer. As the angel fish are looking fed up and after a big water change I don’t think this will happen soon.

Another big factor are all the WordPress Plugins I’m now using, especially the SEO and Tagging ones. These have now become key factors in my publishing as I try and increase readership and reach (OK get Google to find me) and ensure that my content is tagged right for Calais/SemanticProxy.

And then there’s RSS. The integration between Flock and RSS is the best I’ve seen. The fact I can flip from a side bar of feeds to my RSS summary pages is a big plus for me when I’m writing my Blog. It’s then a case of copying the quotes and URLs from that browser to Chrome. Well that would be OK if there wasn’t a big big problem here.

What I find is that if I run Chrome and Flock simultaneously then the old Dell box I’m using grinds to a halt. There seems to be some sort of resource hogging going on between them and Chrome loses the battle. Chrome is an app I like, but maybe it’s a bridge too far for Google. 

lego-googleInternetnews wonder this too and base this not on the fact that it makes an old dicky PC run so slow it’s in reverse, but on the fact that it is such a new app. Chrome they point out was in beta for just 4 months before going gold. ‘Why so rash for Google?’ they ponder and come up with the answer that Chrome is not only part of Google’s secret operating system, it’s the actual UI for the OS. And perhaps they wonder, perhaps…

Perhaps Google’s browser is a new UI to the cloud.

And they’re not alone here. PC Advisor advise us that Android is already an OS and that Chrome takes us nearer to…?well the cloud:

By so carefully binning the user agent string from its OS, Google has ensured that other, less sensitive data is retained. Or to put it another way, it’s the perfect security setup for an operating system based in the cloud.

chrome-girlWhat’s more…it’s all Free. Woo Yay for the ‘great unwashed’ say PC Advisor:

Users tend to be a great deal more forgiving of software that’s free, than that they’re forced to shell out a mint for.

CNET are of a like mind and point out that it complments Googles already impressive swathe of freebies. Add to that a canny observation from the Google Operating System Blog that Google are conducting a highly aggressive promo for Chrome. Now it’s out of beta so quickly they point out, it can be bundled with those other freebies that people want such as their toolbar or Google Earth. This distribution as we learned earlier could be done with some crafty fast caching

google-wallpaper1Thus in a jiffy, Google have set up all the means to distribute via a 2-tier fast-track, a spanking brand new OS, with a funky UI via the cloud and for the cloud.Let’s just hope it’s ready when they release it.

Categories
Communications Enterprise 2.0

Calais : I Tagaroo, do you?

tagaroo_logo_fina_2501

Plugin Tagaroo
This Blog is now supported with the WordPress plugin Tagaroo. This plug-in looks very very tasty. It’s not like your ordinary plugin, oh no. Tagaroo is one small plug in something bigger and that bigger is SemanticProxy.

semanticproxy

In the future…
Now if this is all old hat, please leave me a comment on what else I might have missed lately but if not here’s what SemanticProxy aims to make it so:

In the future the entire web will be one giant tightly interconnected information asset. Beyond just publishing information for humans, every site will expose its content in a way that’s readable by machines. Those machines will mix, match, filter and aggregate information to greatly improve things for us humans.

What SemanticProxy aims to do,  is to help achieve this by building and supporting apps and plugins such as Tagaroo and its globalised tag machine. Check out their gallery for a synch up with other tools including Drupal.

Calais on my heart
SemanticProxy itself is all form part of an even more ambitious project sponsored by Thomson Reuters called Calais (or OpenCalais in some quarters) They hope going to transform the web as we know it:

calais_logo1We want to make all the world’s content more accessible, interoperable and valuable. Some call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the Semantic Web or the Giant Global Graph – we call our piece of it Calais.

What Calais claims to do is create maps of meaning with the meta data in this or any document. The range of its includes is impressive: calais-02


Linked Data Cloud is so sexy
The next big release of all this will be in January. Calais say it’s going to be a big deal and reading the quote below, even if they half-deliver, they’re going to be right!

The Gist: Release 4 of Calais will be a big deal. In that release we’ll go beyond the ability to extract semantic data from your content. We will link that extracted semantic data to datasets from dozens of other information sources, from Wikipedia to Freebase to the CIA World Fact Book. In short – instead of being limited to the contents of the document you’re processing, you’ll be able to develop solutions that leverage a large and rapidly growing information asset: the Linked Data Cloud.

Hermenuetics
Not for one minute do I profess to understand all of this. What interests me is the flow of information and the creation of meaning – the hermeneutics of data. What attracts me is the fact that I can jump right in and play with the technology. I like this interplay between the now of available technology and its interface with Theory.