Nowhere in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence did Thomas Jefferson reference the Internet, eBay, Skype, or Flickr. But if he'd lived another 180 years, to 2006 instead of 1826, I feel certain he would at some point have said something like this...

The significance of blogging is not the word 'blog' whether used as a verb or a noun, but its role as a harbinger of the game-changing Web-as-platform revolution. In particular, the migration of blogging from the individual toward the enterprise...

The World Wide Web, as we know it, is exploding. From its fragments emerges a new 'container based' Web based on Widgets. For the lack of a better term, I shall call it a Widget Widget Web. I have long advocated the power of Widgets to transform the Web as we know it. Hence, I am start...

Adobe today announced that it intends to release the full Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.7 specification to AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, for the purpose of publication by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

Early in 2006 there was a strong sense among industry insiders that AJAX-like approaches were a shoo-in as the new paradigm for fulfilling the software development community's dream of freedom from OS or runtime environment dependent technologies. Was the early optimism borne out by su...

2006 - the year in which YouTube became culturally ubiquitous, Flash video became the de facto video standard of the Web, Microsoft beta-launched Vista, and the Wii entered our lives - was also memorable for one or two other, real-world events such as the hanging of Saddam Hussein, pro...

On Monday it emerged that Microsoft had applied for two patents covering subscribing and discovering what it refers to as 'Web feeds' - sparking a furore in the blogosphere and elsewhere that Redmond had imperial designs on RSS users.

One of Gartner's top 10 predictions for 2007 is that the number of bloggers will level off in the first half of next year at roughly 100 million worldwide. Gartner estimates that there are more than 200M former bloggers who have ceased posting.

'Social change has accelerated beyond the original Wikipedia concept of six years ago,' said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales today as OpenServing, in what he called 'the next phase of this experiment,' was made free. 'We don't have all the business model answers, but we are confident - a...

GWT in a nutshell: 'Write your AJAX code in Java, leveraging concepts and patterns that have become very familiar to UI developers; develop using proven development environments that include good code completion and refactoring tools like Eclipse; debug your apps by running them in a r...

As I write this, the stock price of Google, Inc. just exceeded $500 for the first time in the company's still-brief (two-year) history as a public company. That gives Google a market cap of $150 billion, compared to $19.5 billion for Sun. What's the explanation?

Based on the fact that the first working draft of the design principles for XML were published on 14 November 1996, XML guru Uche Ogbuji declared this week XML's 10th Birthday. Although the actual W3C Recommendation Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 wasn't published till 10 February...

'People are simply amazed when they understand the full scope of this product, its more than 100 components and its suite of visual tooling,' said Kevin Hakman, director of product marketing, TIBCO, as his company yesterday announced the availability of version 3.2 of its acclaimed AJ...

Adobe Systems, owners of the Flash Player currently installed on over 700 million Internet connected desktops and mobile devices worldwide, will contribute the player's source code to the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla will in turn use the code to host a new open source project called Tam...

'It's not often that I wish I was in America,' writes one (UK-based) developer, 'but this week sees the MAX 2006 show in Las Vegas.' He is not alone: around the Web world, bloggers both outside the US and inside have been discussing the many announcements made at this year's MAX and th...

Emergence is a strong, albeit sometimes unpredictable force. The past two weeks have been full of some interesting conversations/observations. Google bought JotSpot. I was reminded yet again that Google Calendar is a great product, Gmail is a strange one and Docs and Spreadsheet are ne...

If the idea of a crafting or collectors club makes you think of dusty community centers and corny newsletters, you're stuck in the wrong century. Today, even small clubs can look professional, run smoothly, and grow membership at the click of a mouse.

From the beginning, the World Wide Web that Tim Berners-Lee imagined was a place where the architecture of participation ruled. Berners-Lee's first application for accessing the information Web was both a browser and an editor, and throughout the early 1990s he worked diligently to en...

Boeing has announced the shutdown of their airborne Wi-fi service, Connexion. It represents a subtle blow to Web 2.0 and gives us all pause for thought.

As you would know from my previous posts, I am a fan of Widgets and I believe in the potential of Widgets (both web and mobile) to transform the web experience as we know it. When I spoke at AJAXWorld, Adam Sah of Google gave a fascinating presentation about Widgets (which Google calls...

Might a phenomenon as young as the Internet have already moved into its second era? Is Web 2.0 more of a rebellion, a corrective to Web 1.0 - or is it a genuine revolution?

I recently read an article in the 'mainstream' media that gave me pause. The author made an assertion that the current trend towards Open Source might just be a passing fad. I thought about this and looked critically at the software industry, thinking about whether there was merit in t...

'With the acquisition of Actimagine's vector graphics technology, we will be able to further enhance the most popular, high-volume mobile and consumer devices as well as broaden our reach into emerging markets,' said Al Ramadan, SVP of Adobe's Mobile and Device Solutions Business Unit,...

'There is a misconception that social networking is the exclusive domain of teenagers, but this analysis confirms that the appeal of social networking sites is far broader,' says a report this week by the Internet research firm comScore Media Metrix. For example, 40% of MySpace visitor...

At the AJAXWorld Conference & Expo and OpenAjax Alliance back to back meetings in Santa Clara, CA this week, it has been hard not to think about the developer community and how Web 2.0 is impacting it today.

Some commentators have taken Microsoft's entry in to the Web 2.0 world as a reason for spreading doom and gloom and predicting the annihilation of small, innovative developers. I disputed this prediction and agreed with entrepreneurs Jason Fried of 37 Signals and Sridhar Vembu of Zoho....

How about if we spelt AJAX differently, asked Håkon Wium Lie, at AJAXWorld Conference & Expo, so that the fundamental role played by CSS was incorporated and immortalized?

'Our new platform goes beyond current enterprise Web 2.0 technologies to help optimize and streamline the actual business activities, increasing the speed and accuracy of decision-making by business professionals,' said JackBe CEO and co-founder Luis Derechin, as JackBe used the occasi...

The first 'Power Panel' of AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2006 just kicked off, with 4 industry experts led by AJAXWorld Magazine Editor-in-Chief Dion Hinchcliffe, discussing 'Web-Oriented Architecture: SOA + The Web + REST.'

The thing that delivers that rich AJAX experience is the decoupling of the technical back end from the user experience. As Bruce Sterling expressed it, AJAX is the equaivalent of 'Roller skates for the Web.' But when are roller skates dangerous? When people are still learning how to mo...

The lightweight AJAX programming model has taken the PC browser market by storm. This panel, moderated by AJAXWorld 2006 Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan and with panelists including both the Father of DHTML and the Creator of the Term 'AJAX,' will look at the totality of its impact and ...

Building modern SOAs and Web 2.0 sites requires an design style that goes with the 'grain' of the Web. REST, a natural extension of HTTP created by the co-inventor of HTTP, is getting a lot of attention these days because it's easy to work with, aligns well with the Web, and is very hi...

Before starting them in on 4-5 hours developing code, Dion Hinchcliffe gave attendees at the first-ever AJAX University Bootcamp a rapid-fire overview of the fast-paced training course ahead of them. 'We're going to try everything from mashups to the depths of Dojo pub-sub,' said Hinch...

The latest person to highlight the precariousness of public understanding of Web 2.0 is one of the absolute pioneers of a richer web, Nexaweb's founder and CTO, Coach Wei. Wei's concern centers on the common misapprehension that Web 2.0 is solely a consumer phenomenon - MySpace, Flickr...

Imbibing AJAX cheek-by-jowl with Yahoo!, Sun, Intel, Nortel Networks, McAfee, and a host of other major headquarters buildings is a salutary experience. It is as if the AJAX approach, which got itself a name in San Francisco but is based on technologies spawned in the Valley and elsewh...

The AJAX wildfire is about to break out at the Santa Clara Convention Center in the heart of Silicon Valley, as the AJAXWorld Conference & Expo - the biggest ever tradeshow devoted to AJAX, Rich Internet Applications, and Web 2.0 - opens its doors October 2-4. The three-day event kicks...

Mark Knopfler once said, 'I don't like definitions, but if there is a definition of freedom, it would be when you have control over your reality to transform it, to change it, rather than having it imposed upon you. You can't really ask for more than that.' Anyone with that kind of gif...

Japan knows web 2.0 - probably better than us in US. But very few people in Japan have heard of or paid attention to MySpace. Their attention is on Mixi, the biggest social networking site in Japan.

With all the noise the Web 2.0 revolutionaries are making, it's easy to ignore another &emdash; this time velvet &emdash; revolution: 'E-commerce 2.0' is coming into maturity and getting ready to relieve its now ten-plus year old predecessor. It's about time.

To make the concept of attention compelling and to prove to the consumers that their attention information is important, we need to build applications that provide useful services. And to build these applications we need a platform for the attention players to plug into. In short, we n...