Homework

Harry Potter out this week in the US. Over $100 million takings, so it went better than most others by a long chalk. Must get out there to watch it with the kids. Must get Midnight to the same state.

Midnight has moved on, I'm part way through building the Midnight shopping website. I'll publish the link when it goes live. We are trying to have a big push with the project over the Christmas period. The graphic novel is coming out this week. Order through Diamond Distribution. Everyone seems to be giving it a chance, so let's hope we get part of the merchandising action. If we make enough, we might have some more funding for the film. The guys have produced another version of the animation. More depth to the story now, as we have enough footage to edit it correctly. The voices are still a bit amateur, but the animation is good for the amount of time we've had. Francis is due to take it down to Brighton for the UK Comic Expo. He's on the stage, talking down there and is sure to pull in a few more enthusiasts for the cause. The new DVD should be playing on the plasmas again. We've now actually got the Beyond Starlight site into the rankings. I know it's just over four millionth, but it's nice to get some recognition of the work. It can only get better now, so we should look at advertising deals for all the sites.

The easyIndex web rankings are back up thankfully. We are back in the listings after a couple of weeks missing. Strange how that happened. Putting easyindex into UK mode was a bit of an effort, but I didn't think we had let up on the push for the site. We should have been on the increase all the time, but it showed that we were under par for almost two weeks. Now that the site is UK wide, we should be able to take it back to the associations and get them on board. There are now a lot of options for us. Let's mail a few people and see what happens.

The EasyIndex cinemas page is going well with all the video previews of the movies. I shall try to put this into the Google Base pages. Google has started the pages for any information that people want to make available. These seem to cover all sorts of ideas, from sales to sermons. They say that it is not there to be competition with ebay, but the sort of items that people have already put up there seem to fit the sales idiom. Similar to Loot and the classified ads but with a myriad of both useful and useless information. Someone needs to set some standards for people to use to enter their data. It should be like the microformats in that people could format their data in a particular XML data format that everyone used for the same type of data. Data spiders could then search for and aggregate all the sources and be the provider for the main news streams. All these various feeds could be linked into the whole set of listings on the the main Google site. Not sure how it might affect the reankings, but we might as well put something in there.

You never know.

Google and Microsoft - more sparring

Google have now opened their new London offices, down in Victoria. They have a huge list of jobs available. It's interesting to see if you can guess what direction they are taking. Looks like WiFi and Mobile are the main areas of development over here. The UK must be spending more money in this area. Perhaps they'll offer to do the same for London as they have offered to San Francisco, full wifi coverage of the city. That would be so convenient, but I'm sure that many of the phone companies must be having similar ideas. There's going to be a lot of money spent before any return. Sounds like the 3G auction doesn't it! Sounds a great place to work tho'. Free lunch twice a week, free breakfast once a week, 10 percent of your time should be on your own projects, 20 percent on blue sky ideas. What more could you ask for!

How did Microsoft get the www.live.com address. Did they have it for a few years, or have they just bought it? Would be expensive to buy. Looks pretty similar to Google with lots of space and a smattering of adverts. They'll be competing soon, so I should try to put up all the pages from our websites to get them logged into the search database. Do it this week. The sidebar seems different but isn't it the same as the Bookmarks area in Firefox/Explorer? Seems that people are moving towards configuring a page for all that they need to use. We can add our email to the window, if we have Live Mail or Hotmail, have a weather forecast in the corner, add some RSS feeds to give us information as it happens. These are all things that can be added to Firefox or Explorer with plugins, but MS Live will have it all built in, and delivered with the Operating System. It will be a big advantage and something that Google will find hard to overcome. Firefox has put a dent into Explorer, but it hasn't got major penetration yet. Google has that major penetration, so we shall see how quickly Microsoft Live takes up its share. Maybe the Vista OS will be its salvation, by opening up as the machine is powered on. It's extendable as well. Gadgets are Microsoft's name for plugins. They have their own dedicated site. Already they have some new ideas there, with people asking for things that thay are used to having on their msn sites.

I'll try using it, see what more there is to it. Might even build a gadget. There's probably a Wizard in the new Visual Studio 2005 developers kit to do it.

To counteract this publicity and to take the fight in a different direction, Google have leaked out their new GoogleBase It allows people to post any information they like up to it and tries to categorize it in some or several ways. Searching is similar to Google, but the items you come up with might be information, trying to sell something, event dates, jobs etc etc. Quite confusing. They say they are not aiming it at ebay, but it seems to have a lot of people on there selling things already. I must get the web sites published on there as well. Anything to add to the links count. Who know which direction this may take. I'm sure that there will be a lot of people using it and, being a beta, it will grow to be more useful as people come up with more ideas.

There are an awful lot of web pages out there on the net. Around 4 billion by all accounts, with around 17 billion links between them. But will all these pages around, over half of the people browsing, go to only the top 500 sites. That is an awfully small percentage, as well as being an awfully large number of people. How can I get them to my site?....answers on a postcard....

Around 5 million sites get a significant amount of traffic, enough to survive on. What are the rest doing? It would appear that you just have to have a web site for the few occasions that people want to find you, but it is a hard task to set some pages up to make a living from. One in a billion chance that this blog will ever be read by anyone? I only started it so that I could remember what I was doing the previous year. It is there to remind me of all the ideas that I should have looked at, but have been too busy for. The internet just seems to give me more ideas that my brain can cope with! Better go do some work!

MicroTags and microformats

I've been looking at HTML techniques this week. More accurately, the indexing of HTML pages that contain these tags called micro formats. They seem to be cropping up everywhere. Instead of trying to invent new XML formats, people have been starting to use the old HTML tags in a structured way, to be recogniseable to other, perhaps automated, systems. Information can be tagged in this way, to make it available as a "search for" item. The tags might be harvested like Google harvests pages, but the structure of the microformat makes it much easier to catalogue particular types of information. Inserting semantic information can be done in several ways without interfering with the existing presentation of the pages.

Meta tags can contain a lot of data that describes the page.
Class attributes can be used to show the type of the data being shown.
Rel tags use the "rel" attribute to attach data to other HTML tags.
Abbr and Span elements can extend their normal use to add information in a structured way.

These are largely ignored by current browsers when laying out a page, unless the class is involved in the css description. The information embedded in them is waiting for some more complicate searcher, that is either spidering the pages, or is to be built in the the next generation of browsers.

For a simple example, we can look at the date-time design pattern.

The page would show,

The party is at 10 o'clock on the 10th.

But the HTML would contain,

The party is at <abbr class="dtstart" title="20051010T10:10:10-0100">10 o'clock on the 10th.


where the datetime is specified in a fully machine readable format. This tag can then be read by the browser to allow the system to add it to the calendar etc. Page editors will have a plugin to add this html in just the same way as you now add the href to a link.

I had a look at the XHTML Friends network which tries to hold people's relationships is rel tags but it's a complicated area. How they will cope with people that meet and then marry then split up, is too complicated for my part. The links that they are laying down are held in pages that may not be retrieved in the same order. I don't see how that might work. Freinds and aquaintances, meetings etc should be ok, but not reversible situations. Have a look at http://gmpg.org/xfn/ if you feel a bit more positive than I do.

The relTag idea is similar. Authors of pages can add particular labels to links, for example, to show the type of link that they are describing. The following link,

Animation facility

would allow a spider to search out animation links, rather than relying on pulling the idea from the text in the page. There will be a flood of specific tag labels for different industries and areas, and there will be facilities for people to search for a variety of these links across the web. Again, a simple HTML tag has become a much, much more useful piece of information, without any impact on the readability of the page. It will allow us to set up tag links to search through our web space, or the web as a whole. If users are allowed to add the tags, as Flickr do with the photos that people add, it allows others to come along and search in a more structured fashion, using the cross-site tagging that has been created. Adding the data at source is much more efficient than trying to add it later, and it's done by the users rather than being a load on the system.

Another format that seems to be popular is the hCard which is an HTML version of contact information formatted so that a machine reader can convert it to a vCard contact information block which Outlook and other mail programs can use (Not Thunderbird yet?). It allows people to give correctly formatted information, while keeping the page readable. Quite why people want to put their email into a public place is beyond me! I'm sure there's a reason.

More information from the microformats site

A path through the jungle
More high tech rumblings this weekend. The usual suspects are all trying to round up the available technology, and to find a way to make a profit out of what they have.

Microsoft have pulled out the www.live.com domain...how much did that cost? and did whoever sold it realise that Microsoft were buying it? It looks like Google in that it has plenty of white space, there are ad's on the right. Blogging and email as well. How did they get the idea. Everything seems to be moving into a browser interface, it seems. As the technology moves on, the devices will get smaller, or phones will get bigger and the connection to the portal would seem to be what they are all fighting for. Content is King? Maybe not. Content might just be yet another minor reason for goint to the site.

Talking of content... Yahoo! have now linked up with TiVo to allow their content to be downloaded to the TiVo box.They have linked up with Google to put the Google content on to mobile phopnes and similar devices. Google Maps and then Google Local will be the first to move across. Phones that support Java software will be able to download the Google Local application. From there, they can conduct searches for businesses or services in a specific geographical location and view the search results plotted on a map. Is this app a browser, or is is Google/Yahoo's own version? Lookout Firefox? Maybe Yahoo will have it built into the Nokia Yahoo mobile phone.

Location services will become important and should pull the rug from all the directories out there, including easyindex. They seem to be sticking with Yellow Pages to provide the data. Perhaps there's an opening to provide web ad's to a mobile device. Build ad's automatically? The big players get bigger and competition becomes harder, or more expensive at least.

TiVo might make a comeback then. We need a clever recorder that can listen to IP messges to make it do what it is told. The new Sky box can somehow get content from the internet as well. They should be competing products. Depends when it comes out, and at what price. The current Sky+ box has only just turned a million users. Doubled in a year tho'. TiVo will now allow content from Yahoo to be downloaded on their box. You need a Yahoo email to connect. They are also looking at producing a search engine that will allow users to search the internet for video content, and download form there. Maybe the equivalent of open access iTunes, where the iTunes are just pointers to the real content. RSS versions anyone?

New Mod for Half Life

We've been playing aroung with Gary's Mod for a while now. It's amazing to me how much you can do with a mod. There seems to be so many additions that must take almost as much time to create as the original game! The kids meanwhile, just take it in their stride as something that is entirely normal. How I wish they appreciated how much work has gone into the system, from the number of transistors in the graphics card, right through to the dedication of the Half Life modders community. It couldn't be done by one person, but one person can so much to the whole experience. I must find out more about Gary.

I must also find out more about how to drive these graphics cards. All the lighting effects in the new technical Mod for Half Life 2 that my son has. It's a seaside area and looks as tho' it is done to show off some of the techniques that Valve are looking at. The lighting is the main source of inspiration. The software uses HDRI images to enable some fantastic lighting effects. The scene is dulled down when looking at a bright light, just as though your iris is closing a little to cope with the brightness. The seaside water reflections are great. Valve also offer a talk through of all the effects, explaining the pros and cons of each. You should definitley look for this download and check it out. It's called the "Lost Coast".