TechNayak(mirror)

Here’s a nifty little tool from Microsoft that lets you search for keyword analysis. Upon searching you are given a history of searches, also the geographical concentration of the search and also a forecast of how many people will search for the keyword in the coming future. Great I must say, people working on SEO are going to have a field day with this.

 http://adlab.msn.com/ForecastV2/KeywordTrendsWeb.aspx

There are a lot problems that Ajaxifying a site presents and one of them is navigation control. Bookmarking and the back button functionality namely the user behavior when using a browser have been around since the early days of the browser. With the advent of Rich applications and more Ajax, the concept of browser navigation is challenged. Gmail did a god job of navigation control, though I still remember struggling during its early days wondering why the back button wouldnt work.

Whilst coding some of my infant steps in Ajax, I looked around for hacks to the back and the refresh button functionality but was unable to find any . Thankfully I did read some useful pointers about hacks on the navigation front from Brad Neuberg( thanks YUI blog for getting me back to this article). Even a old school article about how not to disrupt user behavior when developing Rich apps.

But there is hope in the horizon and a new addition to the recently released YUI v2.2.0 intends to do just that. The new version of YUI has browser history manager, a simple library that helps in developing rich apps, all ajaxified, yet maintaining the traditional behaviors like bookmarks and navigation. Its still experimental, but worth a look if you are trying to break that browser history barrier.

I hear a lot about usability around the blogosphere and frankly am impressed with the efforts coprorations are taking to help physically or visually challenged people utilize their services. Matt Bailey maintains writes the accessability blog, whereas Dr T V Raman from Google keeps writing updates on the Google Blog with his ground breaking work on usability.

After some reading up on usability, I have found that very small, and I mean very small, amount of websites are actually perfectly accesible. Web 2.0 also did not help in terms of usability with dynamic behavior aka Ajax playing a devastating role. The medium of accesing the internet has changed dramatically from just a browser to hand helds, to xBox’s, Screen readers for the visually impaired. Its more than an arduous task to develop websites that adhere to usability standards. The problem arises from javascript to layouts, dynamically changing DOM etc. Are these generics like usability, internationalisation, collaboration etc becoming a standard for the future or are considered hinderance to the evolving web is still yet to be seen. Will the next evolution of the web see these aspects or will the underlying technologies like browsers, screen readers or handhelds will evolve alongside the web and pave a path to easy standards? Could this be the next big profession? Comments awaited …..

Almost all of my favorite websites, be it flickr, meebo or more recently gdocs, have been internationalised to more than one language. As internet defines a truly global network, it just makes sense that a popular service must support more languages for people in countries like Russia, Germany or France to use.

Though most of these internationalization happens through wikis and tools, I don’t think they really cling on to the colloquial essence of the language, which is generally more acceptable. The problem lies in the dual paradigm that in most languages in inherent, one being the speaking or more familiar part of the language and the other being the official part of the language. Take any Indian language for example, I know Tamil and am fluent in conversing, but I cannot understand a single word in any of the news channel. The language on news channel is more of the official type, with official words, one that you would find in government forms or letters. Its understood most of the languages have this dual paradigm and most website functionalities point towards the official language. Clearly people cannot connect to that language on the official level, try localizing your phone and you will find yourself struggling to change the setting back.

Isn’t it a waste of time internationalising a site and not allowing relevant people to relate to it? I see this becoming a profession for many a people , as internationalization becomes a necessity for any site. The trick will be to develop it with a sound understanding of the local (s)language and provide more familiar words than to confuse a person with official gibberish. Even developing applications will require forethought about internationalisation and certain design patterns have to be applied to display and internationalize a site with least possible effort. I am aware of such patterns and methodologies but haven’t really seen them being standardised or used appropriately. Its catching on and pretty fast !!

Yahoo is really going after the mashup craze, releasing some amazing products one after the other. The latest in their offering is Yahoo Pipes. Let me be honest, I was totally astounded at the brilliance of this wonderful product. Forget sites making mashups of content, in pipes any user with little bit of an IQ can create his/her own mashup feed and publish it.

Get from any RSS /ATOM source , combine, tailor, sort add, rename and mix match all the feeds to create your own mashup of content, be it yours or someone else’s.

Pipes was inspired by Unix Pipes, which provides a mechanism of communicating between two process, share information and basically, do wonderful things. I , myself remember the time when I studied and implemented a small unix pipe as a part of my curriculum. Well , Yahoo now lets you pipe your content from many sites and lets you make a mashup of them and publish them. One look at the site and you will see people creating content like price alerts, news feed from top news sites, top blogs , property searches in and around teh bay area etc. As I always say, possibilities are endless and I appreciate yahoo for supporting such an amazing idea and giving it out to their customers.

Mashups are big and pretty soon, it will take over as home page in many browsers. Makes sense, doesn’t it? A feed of all the things that I wish to keep in touch with, this could include videos, phots, news, blogs and many more. Take a look at this pipe based mashup I created , this basically is my entire online syndicated presence. Feeds from three of my blogs and also photos from flickr.

Me Online : http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/GokWYhC_2xG_AmTHZYQMOQ

A screenshot of how I created the pipe ( marvel at the complexity !!!)

Yes, I just downloaded Notepad++, an open source light weight editor(built in C++) that lets you code in C++ and Java and its awesome . I really mean this because lots of times we just have to tinker with code and doing so with an IDE is really time consuming, I used to use notepad to do those one character tinkers, now I shall use notepad ++ . There is java but no jsp support

I also love Editplus because its really light, but dont like licensing bit. But for some really serious Java freaks use jEdit. Its one hell of an editor and you need a masters degree just to figure out and use its multitude of features and also shortcuts, then again its a swing application and takes the charm out becuase of its loading and refresh times. Anyway Notepad++ looks good now, let me see if I stick on with it.

Socionetting is nothing uncommon, but socionettign for something good isn’t. Yes thats what Change is about to change. Change.org is a social network that will let users join “changes” aka groups , which will change the way people interact with Non profit organisations. They already have listed almost every NPO possible, so you just join any cause that you feel worthy or something that youare just passionate about. It could be anything from world peace, to global warming, compulsory primary education to more. You can join a change and let others know that you support the cause.

Obviously you can donate to the Changes by credit card but for those who aren’t really the donating types, you can donate time by participating in certain events that happen in your locality. Finally I see a positive angle to social networking   , do you want to change the world ?

Source code searches are in demand a lot and there is another player in this space, AllTheCode. Joining into the already crowded space of Google code search, Krugle and others alike, AllTheCode searches source code from all the files that it has indexed based on keywords. The upported language is only Java now but the site promises to support more languages. I really don’t see any intelligence built into the site , nor did I see the highlighing of the search term in the search results, which are basics of code search. Showing the occurance of the file also helps in traversing to unneccesary files. Well its worth a watch when you are looking for a solution now aitn it ?

Collaboration is the future, more and more apps are going the collaborative way with people finding new uses for almost every other collaborative app, take Jot for example. Well when there are so many innovations happening in the web front, progress certainly hasn’t stopped on the desktop front. Microsoft has just released Multipoint CTP, A novel concept in which multiple users can use multiple mouses on a single computer.

Educators and teachers in under developed countries suffer a poor a student to PC ratio and this technology will enable them to make any students work together on a single PC. All you have to do is buy USB slots and more mice, the technology will provide distinct colored mouse pointers ont eh screen for each mouse. Students can then work on a collborative enviroment, porbably on a quiz, a puzzle, a painting  or a game of some sort.

A SDK is also ready to let people harness this technology and is available for download here. If you feel your application is something that can work better in such an environment then go ahead. The scheduled release date is sometime in May.

Yahoo is going to release almost 100 sites based on  content from their other sites. Yahoo will basically create a mashup of all information regarding a particular brand and will release a site in hopes of popularity and page views. The information will come from del.icio.us , flickr and Yahoo answers. Its nice knowing that Yahoo has so much content under its belt that it can do something of this magnitude. Now i dont know if these will be automated portals or will it be monitored for relevance of content. Yahoo undoubtedly has showed that they have the content, but is that information relevant is what seems to be seen. User generated content is really big is so is the non relevance of data when you try finding teh data you need in that haystack.

The content has to monitored for relevance and also cleanliness, as most of these brands revovle around products for kids. Take their first offering  the Wii site for example. More  information here. I just wonder how much information does Yahoo have, can that be quantized? how much does google have then ?