Back to life

The time to resume my work on the blog has come at last.

First, I'd like to thank Dr. Ralf Klamma for his kind words in his Keep Blogging article. They are a great motivation for me to restart my work on the Trends in the Web blog.

The regular updates on his blog, related both to scientific research and trends in the web, inspire me to explore in detail the constantly changing world of Internet. What I like even more are his del.icio.us bookmarks. I know now he selects really interesting and innovative web sites which are worth looking at.

I'd recommend to everybody both his beamterherrschaft blog and his del.icio.us bookmarks. Best is to subscribe for the RSS or the ATOM feeds.

OpenID

I've recently seen several posts that Microsoft will support OpenID. There were some comments that for first time Microsoft adopts a innovative and free standard before the competition (most notably Google).

So today I checked what is OpenID and I created my own web identity dimitardenev.pip.versignlabs.com. I checked it on several sites and it worked :). I am very glad about it.

By the way, I set up a new blog, where I'll put maps describing my life: My Life in Maps.

Yahoo! Pipes and more

The day before yesterday I checked Yahoo! Pipes, I liked it but was not enthusiastic about it. Today when I realized that I'd like to check a lot of blogs and news web sites I realized some of the potential of the pipes.

I think that in the weekend I'll create some simple pipes merging the rss feeds which are interesting for me.

Meanwhile I have checked netvibes and moved my personalized home page there.
I have geotagged all my photos on filckr as well, something which I am very proud of :).

Mashups

Today I took advantage of the flickr geotagging service and I assigned locations to all my photos there. Now there is a map for each of them indicating the location.

The reason why I did it was the mashups. I have read that these geotags are actually in such mashups, so what is a mashup ? As far as I understand it is a web application built on the basis of services provided by other applications. Currently the most popular service providers are Google Maps (more than 50%) , Flickr and Amazon. I expect that YouTube and eBay will increase there share as well.

My expectations of the apis provided by these companies was that they will be compliant to the W3C Web Service Specification. I was surprised when I saw that SOAP was supported by very few of the services. Every service though supports REST. Obviously it fits better in the context of mashups.

These apis can be used not only in such mashups, but in every other site (Pedja's mashup). I think that in the future we will not be able to specify which web site is a mashup and which is not.

And in the end a cool mashup site: Video Ranking.

More about mashups at programmableweb.com.