The fallout of an interview for the SWR. Tackles the physical structure, connectedness and bottlenecks (which could be control points as well), countries and people falling into the digital divide, the access problem and the danger of google dominating the world. And some austrian whining on plagiarism in the humanities being supported by google. The diagrams created from the netdimes project are really nice..

Inspired by swarm intelligence, human centric computing and the general fear of all things social a short piece on why intelligence is socially based, what kind of role the Internet plays in fostering this type of intelligence and who the enemies are. Includes a discussion of Shirky's "here comes everybody".

The web is an incredible source of information - if it can be tapped. Google is doing it rather successfully. But how can you tap into this well? Machine learning is getting really important in the context of collaborative sites on the web. How can you extract information from web and wikis? How do semantics and search work? How do you use meta-data as annotations to drive new and better GUIs? The answers:

Two rather new books on social and psychological aspects in search and web applications. The "soft" sciences are really getting into our turf...

Use tech talks to learn more on scalability, mashups, model-based-testing etc.

Semantics, searching based on different approaches, data-mining and meta-data used by ever more Javascript on the client side. Read more about current projects with UIMA etc.

Just a short piece on a missed opportunity: could Xlink have done a lot of things that are now done with javascript? Where did the markup for interaction get lost?

Links and critical questions on e.g. how Google does the integration of Google Maps. How does XMLHttpReqeust really work with respect to security? Changes in plans for this? How do you overcome cross-domain-restrictions and still provide security to users? Any help in this area is welcome.

Looks like our usability workshop was quite a success. Here are some ideas about what could be done to improve developer awareness. In the summer term we will make a workshop on usability in mobile computing. Contact me if you'd like to present something.

Performance and Availability are core requirements in server architectures. How do you achieve this based on open source products (Apache Web Server, Tomcat Servlet Container, JBoss Application Server)?

Web searches play such a vital role in research today that it is well worth to improve ones skills in this area. The new book on "100 Google Tips and Tricks" by Dornfaest and Calishain.