Adrian Holovaty, "EveryBlock: A News Feed for Your Block"

May 13 2008

O'Reilly Video Building on its influential predecessor chicagocrime.org, EveryBlock takes the local-data mashup to new levels. Founder and hacker Adrian Holovaty talks about the philosophy and technology behind EveryBlock, the untapped potential of address-specific news, open data, and life after... read more

Geoff Zeiss, "Convergence of Architectural and Engineering Design and Location Technology

May 13 2008

O'Reilly Video Geoff Zeiss (Autodesk, Inc.)--Convergence is about breaking down islands of information based on traditional disciplines or professional categories or those created by the traditional organization of the architecture, engineering, construction, transportation, and utility and telecommunications industries. The convergence... read more

Paul Torrens, "Modeling Crowd Behavior"

May 13 2008

Paul Torrens (Arizona State University)--Ambient crowds are the new distributed computing platform. Smart mobs are fashioning new architectures for social networking. Armed with cell phones and mobile gaming devices, they are the new business model for location-based services. Seditious crowds are creating havoc in urban theaters of war and at… read more

A Look at MapQuest's Users

May 13 2008

.vbutton {padding:5px; border:groove 3px; background-color:#c0cCFF; color:white; font-family:Verdana; text-align:center; font-weight:bold; font-size:12pt; cursor:pointer;} .vbutton:hover {background-color:#e0e0ff;border:outset;} .vbutton:active {background-color:#a0a0ff;border:inset;} O'Reilly Video James Greiner, Senior Vice President and General Manager, MapQuest, Inc. In preparation for Where 2.0, MapQuest conducted an ethnography study. The massive... read more

State of the GeoWeb

May 13 2008

.vbutton {padding:5px; border:groove 3px; background-color:#c0cCFF; color:white; font-family:Verdana; text-align:center; font-weight:bold; font-size:12pt; cursor:pointer;} .vbutton:hover {background-color:#e0e0ff;border:outset;} .vbutton:active {background-color:#a0a0ff;border:inset;} O'Reilly Video Since Google first presented a snapshot of the geoweb at last year's Where 2.0, it has considerably evolved: more Geo data is... read more

Understanding XML:Making Models and Watching for Swans

April 09 2008

XML.COM Newsletter There's a problem with living life on the bleeding edge. For all of the exhilaration of being one of the first to play with a new technology (or in some cases even to create that new technology), it's... read more

The Joys and Dangers of Impedence-Free Societies

April 02 2008

A couple of weeks ago, when I was in New York for the AJAXWorld conference, the city welcomed me with a major downpour most of the time I was there. The metaphor about storm clouds building over Wall Street was... read more

Seeking XML, SOA, Semantic Web Bloggers

March 21 2008

I have recently accepted the position as Site Editor for the XML.com site, becoming responsible for the content appearing throughout the site as well as helping to guide functionality and look and feel for this particular portion (and to a... read more

Merger-mania

February 01 2008

Merger-mania is in full swing of late, which is rather astonishing given the current credit market problems. Oracle finally managed after months of trying to snare business services provider BEA, and Sun's purchase of mySQL was both hailed as a... read more

Systemic Thoughts on the Eve of an Economic Meltdown

January 22 2008

It's been a while since I've written a "non-directed" blog for xml.com, so while I will be covering a few XML topics here if you're not interested in economic systems theory, then you might as well skip this. As I... read more

Thoughts on Firefox 3.0

January 14 2008

Over the last couple of years, I've worked extensively with Firefox, and while it still has its warts (and while I believe that its days of double digit rises in adoption are probably coming to a close) overall, I've found... read more

XML Outlook for 2008

December 29 2007

Overall, 2008 should prove to be an interesting, if somewhat nail-biting, year. read more

XML Moves to mySQL

December 24 2007

The unification of XML and SQL relational data has taken another significant step forward recently with the introduction of significant new XML functionality in mySQL, the world's most popular open source database. In versions 5.1 and 6.0, mySQL adds the... read more

XForms - Who Needs Killer Apps?

December 16 2007

The XML 2007 Conference has come and gone, with as usual a number of thought provoking talks and controversies. During the evening of the first day, there was a special XForms Evening, with a number of the industry gurus in... read more

Cheers for the Prince

December 02 2007

A few years ago, I was briefly involved with a publishing company that was interested in packaging and producing eBooks. The challenges that we faced in trying to go from client submissions in Word, the occasional PDF and even straight... read more