Useit.Com: Flash and Web-Based Applications. The Internet is changing. Although people have primarily used it to read email and Web pages, more functionality-oriented applications are now emerging, with the goal of providing new features that do more for users. [Tomalak's Realm]

For anyone developing apps delivered over the Internet, very interesting reading - includes .NET or Zeepe (which I am tempted to give the subtitle 'WAFFLE' - Web Application Framework - Fast, Light, Efficient. In the light of the above article, perhaps the E should be Ephemeral).

Yet another weblog link tracker. Here's my Technorati Link Cosmos. This one ranks your inbound blogs according to their own number of inbound blogs. I like the name. (Thanks, Ton!) [Seb's Open Research]

I suppose its fun to play with this stuff for a while, but does one return? So much information stored there, but really, apparently so little that's useful done with it.

Sabbaticizing. [...] When I began this project I was focused on collecting repositories of online instructional resources and putting the collection together in a form that could readily be used by instructors at Eastern and other institutions, perhaps via a web site or portal.

Now, after just a few weeks, I've found that there are innumerable online instructional repositories (depending upon how "instructional" and "repository" are defined)--far too many to simply provide a listing and expect that instructors will be able to effectively use the list.

I've also found that there are many overlapping categories, concepts, interests and approaches: digital libraries, learning objects, metadata standards, open source software, instructional repositories, XML, etc. What seems most needed, at least for my purposes in assisting instructors to use online repositories, is a set of guidelines about locating, evaluating, acquiring, and fitting online resources into course planning and revisions/expansions of courses.

At this point there are many more repositories available and under construction than there are guidelines for using collections of learning resources. Instructors don't have the time to search hundreds of repositories containing thousands of learning objects. The promise of interlinked repositories or master repositories is just that, a research promise that may not be fulfilled for many years. So, the question is, How can online instructional resources best be used now? I do not yet have a good answer to this question. [EduResources--Higher Education Resources Online]

I'm concerned that many good resources are underused, not for lack of quality, but because they are for all practical purposes "unfindable". I suspect resource authors will each have to take up the responsibility of providing and maintaining part of a shared, overall map of what is out there, if they want their resources to be used. [Seb's Open Research]

From my experience, maps etc are really not much help; its the amount of information that is just overwhelming. IMHO, what is needed is a system by which the quality floats to the top and the dross floats to the bottom. The question is how do you measure quality; Google uses page ranking which is a sort of peer review and it works reasonably well over the huge, dynamic and active web. Its unlikely such algorithms will work for (school) learning resources. As part of a EU research project, Bristol Uni (I think) were doing a project to implement a distributed search system which included user ranking - what's happended to this I dunno, probably died a death. Despite projects such as Cybrarian, the UK govt and broadband consortia seem to have largely ignored this problem - note quite tru, the UK govt approach is "Kite marking" and providing a single source via Curriculum Online, but this misses the vast quantity of high quality stuff there is out there.

Backend: Formats for Blog Browsers. "I'd like to tell you a story about how I tripped over what may turn out to be a very interesting common feature of weblog software." [Scripting News]

Just for info.

Marc Cantor posts some additional thoughts on my query about whether a blog browser is that revolutionary.

A few key points to respond to:

The idea of a blog-browser or new kind of NON HTML based browser has been around for a while and something Dave has talked about and evangelized - for many years.  I myself have hated HTML since it's inception

This is precisely what we launched with Macromedia Flash Player 6, defining the emerging category of rich clients, that can both live within and outside the web browser; which offer radically richer user experience than what HTML can provide, and which use a web services-based architecture to integrate with remote data and logic (is that micro-content?).

In fact Dave has requested (on multiple occasions) that MacroMedia create a browser with Flash - so that text could be rendered pretty and anti-aliased (among other reasons.) But needless to say nobody at Macromedia understood what Dave was talking about.

It's not true that Macromedia didn't understand this idea.  We've continued to improve the richness of text and document-centric abilities in Flash, and will continue to do so.  Because the object model is rich enough for text, forms and XML, there are now projects delivering full XHTML and XForms support natively in Flash. 

Additionally, though, there's no reason to try and bury HTML.  For a huge range of document-centric content and applications, it has enormous advantages that will continue to play a role in the Internet client landscape.

As for including a full HTML browser/renderer in Flash, it would kill the ubiquity (and thus viability) of the Flash runtime by bloating the download and install to the point where it would take 3 years to achieve ubiquity instead of the 12 months that it takes now.  IE and Mozilla do the job of HTML fine, and there's no need to try and replace or integrate this. [Jeremy Allaire's Radio]

Perhaps Radio Case does something along the lines of what Dave wants, or could do (since blogs are HTML difficult to see how one has non-html blog browser unless one is just rendering the rss feeds, but a lot of those contain html)....

Increasing Permissions for Web-Deployed Windows Forms Applications

Oh well, that's easy then - but then perhaps it shouldn't be easy - but then it is only a bit of one time work hidden under an MSI and away you go. Hmmmm.

On the big day of my first story for O'Reilly, What's New in Visual C++ .NET 2003, and people directed here, they got an empty page-). I lost everything on a hard disk Sunday including Radio. We're in the process of trying to restore stuff (as time allows with work deadlines all week) but for now, thats the drill. In the meantime, old stuff is available either through manipulation of the dates in the http link or Google, and the following stories have been restored:

Multi-paradigm design and generic programming

Is COM Interop Fundamentally Flawed?

Its the Runtime Stupid

Introduction to .NET Languages, VS.NET and Extending VS.NET

From Open Challenge:

I hate cutting and pasting under linux. X-windows apps do it one way. GTK apps do it another way. KDE apps do it another way. None of them work together nicely.

Is this actually true? If so, Linux is lost, sunk, hopeless - the support desks will disappear under a mountain of calls.

E-services need to improve. At an e-summit in London¸ the UK government admits there is a long way to go to achieve its targets for the knowledge economy. [BBC News | TECHNOLOGY]

"Transport congestion, education attainments, health service improvements are all issues that can be tackled on the web," said Dr Kearns.

Oh please do tell me how health service improvements can be tackled on the web. That these people think this is to my mind deeply deeply depressing. Like many others, I have had recent experience of the Health Service. I can't fault the nurses, but I can fault a service that has a severe lack of beds. We were, eventually, lucky. In the hospital where my father spent his final days there was not a single computer - neither he nor the nurses needed a computer or a broadband link, he needed pain management and dignity.