Media Blog

The entire Mozilla Labs website got a redesign Tuesday. The site is the hub for Mozilla’s sandbox — the place where new functionality and emerging tech, mostly for the Firefox browser, is developed and tested in full view of the public.

As part of the redesign, every major Labs projects gets its own, dedicated community site with a WordPress blog; one each for Ubiquity, Test Pilot, Jetpack, Prism, Personas, Snowl and Bespin.

And of course, one for Weave. Lest you’ve forgotten, Weave is Mozilla’s framework for privately storing your Firefox user data in the cloud. Not just bookmarks, history, identities and preferences (which Weave can sync now), but fully encrypted credentials and other sensitive stuff, complete with APIs to access everything (all of which are on Weave’s roadmap).

On Monday, Google announced the much-anticipated bookmark syncing feature for its Chrome browser was available for anyone in the browser’s developer channel.

For most people, it was a “no big whoop” moment. But for the web futurists among us (that’s all of us, right?) the enhancement points to Google’s plan for creating a personal cloud-based storage service for all kinds of user data. Monday’s developer release was just about bookmarks, but it’s clear Google has set its sights much higher.

Everything is going to have a real browser eventually — your work machine, your phone, your netbook already have one, and your iTablet/toaster/thingy isn’t far off — so it makes sense that our data and all of our services will be accessed through the internet as our lives get spread out across these devices. That’s the grand plan that all of the largest makers of web-enabled software are drawing for us. Most Google users have a massive personal footprint spread across the company’s myriad services. Windows has its Live Services platform ready to go huge with Windows 7. Apple is building a huge data center for… something.

And in a post Tuesday on the brand new Labs site, Mozilla took the occasion to remind us it’s in this game, too. Not to be upstaged by Google’s announcement that Chrome can now sync your bookmarks, the Weave team posted an updated Weave roadmap.

There’s one part of the post titled “Weave is more than just Sync“:

Weave, as a Mozilla Labs project, is a collection of experiments around integrating services in/with the browser. The two most active experiments we have going on are related to synchronizing your web experience and integrating identity in the browser. While we want to drive both of these forward while still carrying on new experiments, our current focus is on stabilizing Sync.

This means, in the short term, Weave is going to be mostly about Sync. We are also thinking about launching a separate development train for all the neat experiments we’ve been planning. Once we do that, I think the true potential for the Weave platform will start to become clearer.

See also:

• Weave Update for Firefox Syncs Your Web Identity
• Mozilla’s Weave Ties Your Desktop and Your Personal Web Together
• Mozilla Labs Wants to Know Your Browser Fantasies
• Mozilla’s Chris Beard on the Future of Firefox and Online Services

The entire Mozilla Labs website got a redesign Tuesday. The site is the hub for Mozilla’s sandbox — the place where new functionality and emerging tech, mostly for the Firefox browser, is developed and tested in full view of the public.

As part of the redesign, every major Labs projects gets its own, dedicated community site with a WordPress blog; one each for Ubiquity, Test Pilot, Jetpack, Prism, Personas, Snowl and Bespin.

And of course, one for Weave. Lest you’ve forgotten, Weave is Mozilla’s framework for privately storing your Firefox user data in the cloud. Not just bookmarks, history, identities and preferences (which Weave can sync now), but fully encrypted credentials and other sensitive stuff, complete with APIs to access everything (all of which are on Weave’s roadmap).

On Monday, Google announced the much-anticipated bookmark syncing feature for its Chrome browser was available for anyone in the browser’s developer channel.

For most people, it was a “no big whoop” moment. But for the web futurists among us (that’s all of us, right?) the enhancement points to Google’s plan for creating a personal cloud-based storage service for all kinds of user data. Monday’s developer release was just about bookmarks, but it’s clear Google has set its sights much higher.

Everything is going to have a real browser eventually — your work machine, your phone, your netbook already have one, and your iTablet/toaster/thingy isn’t far off — so it makes sense that our data and all of our services will be accessed through the internet as our lives get spread out across these devices. That’s the grand plan that all of the largest makers of web-enabled software are drawing for us. Most Google users have a massive personal footprint spread across the company’s myriad services. Windows has its Live Services platform ready to go huge with Windows 7. Apple is building a huge data center for… something.

And in a post Tuesday on the brand new Labs site, Mozilla took the occasion to remind us it’s in this game, too. Not to be upstaged by Google’s announcement that Chrome can now sync your bookmarks, the Weave team posted an updated Weave roadmap.

There’s one part of the post titled “Weave is more than just Sync“:

Weave, as a Mozilla Labs project, is a collection of experiments around integrating services in/with the browser. The two most active experiments we have going on are related to synchronizing your web experience and integrating identity in the browser. While we want to drive both of these forward while still carrying on new experiments, our current focus is on stabilizing Sync.

This means, in the short term, Weave is going to be mostly about Sync. We are also thinking about launching a separate development train for all the neat experiments we’ve been planning. Once we do that, I think the true potential for the Weave platform will start to become clearer.

See also:

• Weave Update for Firefox Syncs Your Web Identity
• Mozilla’s Weave Ties Your Desktop and Your Personal Web Together
• Mozilla Labs Wants to Know Your Browser Fantasies
• Mozilla’s Chris Beard on the Future of Firefox and Online Services

The web’s governing body wants to make it easier for researchers to find the data they’re seeking using web-based tools.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a whole department, the Semantic Web group, dedicated to integrating data from different sources under a set of common formats. On Tuesday, the group adopted a set of standardized organizational tags that anyone publishing data on the web should start using.

The model, called the Simple Knowledge Organization System, or SKOS, is a set of schema for categorizing data by topic in a way that’s human-readable. But it’s also machine readable, making the process of researching the same topic within different data stores using search and other common tools much easier.

Here’s what SKOS is, from the W3C’s Overview:

The Simple Knowledge Organization System is a common data model for knowledge organization systems such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading systems and taxonomies. Using SKOS, a knowledge organization system can be expressed as machine-readable data. It can then be exchanged between computer applications and published in a machine-readable format in the Web.

A practical example, via the W3C Semantic Web group’s statement, released Tuesday:

A useful starting point for understanding the role of SKOS is the set of subject headings published by the US Library of Congress (LOC) for categorizing books, videos, and other library resources. These headings can be used to broaden or narrow queries for discovering resources. For instance, one can narrow a query about books on “Chinese literature” to “Chinese drama,” or further still to “Chinese children’s plays.”

Library of Congress subject headings have evolved within a community of practice over a period of decades. By now publishing these subject headings in SKOS, the Library of Congress has made them available to the linked data community, which benefits from a time-tested set of concepts to re-use in their own data. This re-use adds value (”the network effect”) to the collection. When people all over the Web re-use the same LOC concept for “Chinese drama,” or a concept from some other vocabulary linked to it, this creates many new routes to the discovery of information, and increases the chances that relevant items will be found.

See also:

• W3C Drops Audio and Video Codec Requirements From HTML 5
• W3C Wants Better Browser Security

The web’s governing body wants to make it easier for researchers to find the data they’re seeking using web-based tools.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a whole department, the Semantic Web group, dedicated to integrating data from different sources under a set of common formats. On Tuesday, the group adopted a set of standardized organizational tags that anyone publishing data on the web should start using.

The model, called the Simple Knowledge Organization System, or SKOS, is a set of schema for categorizing data by topic in a way that’s human-readable. But it’s also machine readable, making the process of researching the same topic within different data stores using search and other common tools much easier.

Here’s what SKOS is, from the W3C’s Overview:

The Simple Knowledge Organization System is a common data model for knowledge organization systems such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading systems and taxonomies. Using SKOS, a knowledge organization system can be expressed as machine-readable data. It can then be exchanged between computer applications and published in a machine-readable format in the Web.

A practical example, via the W3C Semantic Web group’s statement, released Tuesday:

A useful starting point for understanding the role of SKOS is the set of subject headings published by the US Library of Congress (LOC) for categorizing books, videos, and other library resources. These headings can be used to broaden or narrow queries for discovering resources. For instance, one can narrow a query about books on “Chinese literature” to “Chinese drama,” or further still to “Chinese children’s plays.”

Library of Congress subject headings have evolved within a community of practice over a period of decades. By now publishing these subject headings in SKOS, the Library of Congress has made them available to the linked data community, which benefits from a time-tested set of concepts to re-use in their own data. This re-use adds value (”the network effect”) to the collection. When people all over the Web re-use the same LOC concept for “Chinese drama,” or a concept from some other vocabulary linked to it, this creates many new routes to the discovery of information, and increases the chances that relevant items will be found.

See also:

• W3C Drops Audio and Video Codec Requirements From HTML 5
• W3C Wants Better Browser Security

Google has introduced a much easier way to share documents for online, collaborative editing — using Google Groups.

Previously, sharing Google Docs and Calendars was limited to two basic options, the entire world (public docs) or individual e-mail addresses added by hand. But what about situations where you want to share a document with, say, several hundred people on a mailing list?

Provided your mailing list is through Google Groups, now you can do just that. The new Groups sharing feature adds an option to share Docs, Calendars and Sites with all the members of a Google Group. The group’s members can then simultaneously open and edit the same document, and everyone you’re sharing with will see the other parties’ edits appear as the doc updates every few seconds.

While the new features aren’t exactly as slick as what we’ve seen in previews of Google Wave (the company’s experimental, collaborative editing tool), they do offer similar automatic, “just works” style sharing with almost zero latency. And, unlike Wave, these sharing features are here today. Google is expected to open up public access to Google Wave on September 30. It is also strongly expected to develop Wave into a full-fledged web-based platform, complete with add-on applications from third parties which take advantage of the platform’s real-time updating capabilities. So, it’s possible this enhancement to Google Docs’s sharing ability is just a sign of more powerful real-time sharing to come.

If you want to share a document with a Google Group, just type the Group’s email address (groupname@googlegroups.com) in the sharing dialog and your document will be automatically shared with all your group’s members. But the real win is the new automatic updating. As people come and go from your group, the shared document’s list of approved editors (or viewers, if you don’t hand out editing rights) updates as well, adding new members as they join the group and dropping the old when they leave.

See Also:

• Google Waves Goodbye to E-Mail, Welcomes Real-Time Communication
• Google Docs Redesigned to Mimic Desktop Office Apps
• Google Docs Update Adds More Offline Features

Google has introduced a much easier way to share documents for online, collaborative editing — using Google Groups.

Previously, sharing Google Docs and Calendars was limited to two basic options, the entire world (public docs) or individual e-mail addresses added by hand. But what about situations where you want to share a document with, say, several hundred people on a mailing list?

Provided your mailing list is through Google Groups, now you can do just that. The new Groups sharing feature adds an option to share Docs, Calendars and Sites with all the members of a Google Group. The group’s members can then simultaneously open and edit the same document, and everyone you’re sharing with will see the other parties’ edits appear as the doc updates every few seconds.

While the new features aren’t exactly as slick as what we’ve seen in previews of Google Wave (the company’s experimental, collaborative editing tool), they do offer similar automatic, “just works” style sharing with almost zero latency. And, unlike Wave, these sharing features are here today. Google is expected to open up public access to Google Wave on September 30. It is also strongly expected to develop Wave into a full-fledged web-based platform, complete with add-on applications from third parties which take advantage of the platform’s real-time updating capabilities. So, it’s possible this enhancement to Google Docs’s sharing ability is just a sign of more powerful real-time sharing to come.

If you want to share a document with a Google Group, just type the Group’s email address (groupname@googlegroups.com) in the sharing dialog and your document will be automatically shared with all your group’s members. But the real win is the new automatic updating. As people come and go from your group, the shared document’s list of approved editors (or viewers, if you don’t hand out editing rights) updates as well, adding new members as they join the group and dropping the old when they leave.

See Also:

• Google Waves Goodbye to E-Mail, Welcomes Real-Time Communication
• Google Docs Redesigned to Mimic Desktop Office Apps
• Google Docs Update Adds More Offline Features

Tr.im, the popular URL-shortening service for Twitter and other social networks has found a new lease on life. After announcing it would shut down by the end of the year, the team behind Tr.im has decided to continue on as a community-supported open source project.

Rather than closing its doors, Tr.im is throwing them wide; releasing all its code under the MIT open source license and offering developers unfettered, real-time access to all the link-map data associated with Tr.im URLs.

While not entirely solving URL-shortening issues like link rot, Tr.im appears poised to at least become a bit like the Mozilla of short URLs.

Tr.im founder Eric Woodward says “Tr.im will being accepting donations to help meet its operating expenses,” but goes on to say that he will “cover operational costs personally,” if there is any shortfall between the donations and costs of running an open source Tr.im.

Woodward also says that the Tr.im code will be ready for outside users by September 15.

But perhaps most interesting for mashup creators or those interested in harvesting real-time link data, all of Tr.im’s click data and statistics — the very thing that made Tr.im popular with Twitter users — will be made available anonymously through the new service provider Gnip.

Woodward says this will involve “a variety of time-based snapshots of aggregated destination URLs, the number of Tr.im URLs created for any given destination URL, and aggregate click data.”

While we still think URL-shortening services have some serious potential problems, at least a community-operated, open-source option like the new Tr.im avoids a few of them — particularly the problems that come locking all your link data up with a closed, third-party service that may or may not be around when you need it.

See Also:

• Tr.im URL Shortening Service Closes its Doors
• Why URL Shortening is a Threat to the Web
• Digg Relents on DiggBar, But URL Shortening Is Still a Problem

Tr.im, the popular URL-shortening service for Twitter and other social networks has found a new lease on life. After announcing it would shut down by the end of the year, the team behind Tr.im has decided to continue on as a community-supported open source project.

Rather than closing its doors, Tr.im is throwing them wide; releasing all its code under the MIT open source license and offering developers unfettered, real-time access to all the link-map data associated with Tr.im URLs.

While not entirely solving URL-shortening issues like link rot, Tr.im appears poised to at least become a bit like the Mozilla of short URLs.

Tr.im founder Eric Woodward says “Tr.im will being accepting donations to help meet its operating expenses,” but goes on to say that he will “cover operational costs personally,” if there is any shortfall between the donations and costs of running an open source Tr.im.

Woodward also says that the Tr.im code will be ready for outside users by September 15.

But perhaps most interesting for mashup creators or those interested in harvesting real-time link data, all of Tr.im’s click data and statistics — the very thing that made Tr.im popular with Twitter users — will be made available anonymously through the new service provider Gnip.

Woodward says this will involve “a variety of time-based snapshots of aggregated destination URLs, the number of Tr.im URLs created for any given destination URL, and aggregate click data.”

While we still think URL-shortening services have some serious potential problems, at least a community-operated, open-source option like the new Tr.im avoids a few of them — particularly the problems that come locking all your link data up with a closed, third-party service that may or may not be around when you need it.

See Also:

• Tr.im URL Shortening Service Closes its Doors
• Why URL Shortening is a Threat to the Web
• Digg Relents on DiggBar, But URL Shortening Is Still a Problem