dretblog

Stimulus Feed Details

after blogging about Stimulus Feeds Done Right, i received a couple of comments saying that the post was mostly complaining about the Initial Implementing Guidance for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act guidelines, but not really saying what to improve... Read more →

Atom Feed Autodiscovery

even though most people expect to find feeds made accessible in a browser's address bar, this method is still not used by all feed providers. and surprisingly, even though there were two attempts to standardize how this feed autodiscovery should... Read more →

Finding Stimulus Feeds

while it is interesting to think about what it would take to implement the stimulus feed architecture in a more useful way, it is also interesting to think about where to actually find these feeds once agencies start publishing them.... Read more →

Stimulus Feeds Done Right

one of the interesting developments in the highly anticipated more tech-savvy obama administration is that the Initial Implementing Guidance for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act explicitly mention feeds (page 54: preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS) as a way of... Read more →

APIs Considered Harmful

talking about APIs and web services as being almost synonymous becomes increasingly popular. it is good to see the understanding of the web being extended from a simple set of web pages to the information system that it actually is.... Read more →

Mobile Platforms and Services

with the New York Times reporting about additional traction for Microsoft on LG devices, the more interesting question is how relevant smartphone OSs will be in the long run. the iPhone has definitely stirred up the marketplace, ending the unfortunate... Read more →

Sitemap Names

in our recent investigation of web site metadata, one finding was that only 6.3% of all sites were publishing a sitemap (looking at the web's most popular 100'000 domains). strictly speaking, this is correct, but since sitemaps may exist without... Read more →

Location Privacy

it's only a coincidence, but it was interesting to read about a new service by Google that tracks user locations and about MySpace handing over a lot of private information in response to a subpoena. using Google's new Google Latitude... Read more →

Web vs. Web Architecture

when we recently pitched principles of web architecture and more specifically feed-oriented technologies for projects around sensor data, we also got some negative feedback. surprisingly, it was not only feedback along the well-known web technologies are not appropriate to do... Read more →

On Sitemaps

when working with Web Site Metadata, it is unavoidable to soon run into the sitemaps format, defined by Google. the first important thing to learn about this format is that despite its name, it is not a format for sitemaps.... Read more →