Recent Blog Posts
Blogs ยป Archive for August 21st, 2005
State of AJAX
In State of Ajax: Progress, Challenges, and Implications for SOAs, Dion Hinchcliffe gives his take on just where all the hype and sensation surrounding AJAX is headed. I also editorialized on this subject somewhat in the Tech Times #120.
Despite some claims that AJAX will supercede desktop application development, I believe that certain types of applications are–at least for the forseeable future–inextricably bound to the desktop. That said, thanks to AJAX and its kin, the Web really has grown significantly in the type of user experience it can deliver for the kinds of applications it is suited for.
In his post, Hinchcliffe makes some observations about how the rise of AJAX-style development on the client side will affect some of the trends at the leading edge of server-side development. In particular, he points out that a lot of the new standards being developed for Web Services are not architected such that they will be useful in an AJAX-driven world. Whereas AJAX thrives on many rapid, lightweight, bite-sized communications with a single server, much of the current work on Web Services is towards the exhange and processing of large documents between multiple service providers in a secure and intricately choreographed way.
SEOmoz | Great Site for Learning about Term Weight
Rand Fishkin has found a nice resource for folks who want to understand the science of information retrieval… SEOmoz Blog | Great Site for Learning about Term Weight
Rich Ackerman’s site has pages on the vector space model and a nice explanation of the math behind it.
I don’t get my own blogroll here, but if I did, SEOMoz would be on it…
Google’s tracking links - grrrrrrrrr!
Over the past couple days, I’ve become plenty annoyed with Google’s tracking links breaking, or failing to return any data. I get the same experience with Yahoo (which loves redirection) quite often - at least with Google SERPs it’s only a small percentage of links that are getting tracked.
Hey Google, if you’re going to implement a feature that does nothing for users, I hope you don’t mind losing a few users in the process. I’m going to switch my default search over to MSN for a bit. Every time Google drives a user to try another search, there’s a chance that the other engine will win the taste test.
For the geeks among you, here’s an (edited down) HTTP trail from WebBug on a Google redirect link:
GET /url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=9&url=http%3A//www.roundtablepizza.com/&ei=owYJQ-PUCqb4-AG79tG_Dg HTTP/1.1
Host: www.google.com
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Cache-Control: private
Location: http://www.roundtablepizza.com/
Set-Cookie: PREF=ID=ddccf96dc54d1008:TM=1124665190:
LM=1124665190:S=nwisHxMdrjO4hjbp;
expires=Sun, 17-Jan-2038 19:14:07 GMT;
path=/; domain=.google.com
As you can see, Google is setting a cookie on the way through the redirect. I assume this allows them to see when a user clicks the back button or “bounces” from the target page back to the SERP. Conspiracy theorists, have fun with that… (Note: I added the line breaks in the cookie code to make it fit our page layout.) …
RSS evokes blank stares
(via O’Reilly Radar) Technology investment guru Bill Burnham cites a Neilsen report that found, in a survey of 1,000 blog readers, only 11% use RSS feeds to monitor blogs and nearly two-thirds don’t even know what RSS is.
What would help RSS grow? Microsoft’s much-vaunted support in the upcoming Windows Vista will certainly help, but maybe changing the name wouldn’t be such a bad thing…
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