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December 21, 2004
Web-based Applications Keep Getting Better
I believe 2004 was a turning-point year for web-based applications, or weblications:
I have the feeling that we've turned a corner, and that more "only obvious in hindsight" web-based application tricks will be developed in the years to come -- thereby solidifying The Web As A Platform and continuing the spread of The Web Way as more users become True Believers who won't give up their web-based applications no matter how hard the "fat, rich client" camps try.
The future looks bright for webdev, in part thanks to Google, as Joyce pointed out...
Posted by adam at 06:39 PM | Comments (0)
December 18, 2004
NYT Hightlights Decentralized Nature of Modern Filesharing
The Ninth Circuit had found Napster liable because the company itself maintained and controlled the servers that searched for the digital files its users wanted to download. Grokster and StreamCast, by contrast, operate decentralized systems that allow users to find each other over the Internet and then exchange files directly. Consequently, the appeals court said, the two services did not exercise the kind of control that could lead to legal liability for infringing uses.
Justices to Hear Case on Sharing of Music Files
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
Published: December 11, 2004
WASHINGTON, Dec. 10 - The Supreme Court, accepting urgent pleas from the recording and film industries, agreed on Friday to decide whether the online services that enable copyrighted songs and movies to be shared freely over the Internet can be held liable themselves for aiding copyright infringement.
For the entertainment industry and for everyday consumers, the case is likely to produce the most important copyright decision since the Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that the makers of the videocassette recorder were not liable for violating the copyrights of movies that owners of the devices recorded at home.
The earlier decision, Sony Corporation of America v. Universal City Studios, ushered in one technological revolution. The new case, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios v. Grokster Ltd., No. 04-480, comes as another is already well under way. More than 85 million copyrighted songs and a smaller but rapidly growing number of movies are downloaded from the Internet every day by people using file-sharing services.
A lawsuit filed by the entertainment industry in 2000 eventually put the earliest file-sharing network, Napster, out of business. The industry then brought suits against individuals who shared copyrighted material over the Internet, but that proved inefficient. The defendants in the case the justices accepted today are two of the newer services, Grokster and StreamCast Networks, which offers peer-to-peer software called Morpheus.
Two lower federal courts in San Francisco, the federal district court there and the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, ruled that the technology of the new services is different from Napster's in a way that immunizes them from liability for aiding copyright infringement.
The Ninth Circuit had found Napster liable because the company itself maintained and controlled the servers that searched for the digital files its users wanted to download. Grokster and StreamCast, by contrast, operate decentralized systems that allow users to find each other over the Internet and then exchange files directly. Consequently, the appeals court said, the two services did not exercise the kind of control that could lead to legal liability for infringing uses.
In their Supreme Court appeal, the recording industry and the Hollywood studios are arguing that the Ninth Circuit erroneously relied on a distinction without a difference. "The Ninth Circuit has immunized Grokster and StreamCast from copyright liability for the millions of acts of copyright infringement that occur on their services every day, and that could not occur but for the existence of their services," the plaintiffs' brief told the court.
The large group of plaintiffs includes the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, Warner Brothers Entertainment Inc. and a class of 27,000 music publishers and songwriters. The Supreme Court will hear the case in March and is expected to decide it by late June.
The plaintiffs' appeal included dire warnings about what would befall the entertainment industry and individual artists if the Supreme Court failed to intervene. The brief asserted that the Ninth Circuit's decision, issued in August, "poses a grave threat to the very foundations of the copyright law's incentive system for promoting the progress of science and the arts, and will profoundly reshape our nation's system of copyright in the digital era."
Friend-of-the-court briefs were filed on the industry's behalf by the attorneys general of 40 states; a group of 130 recording artists; and 15 national organizations, including professional sports leagues, that described themselves as dependent on "meaningful copyright protection."
For their part, Grokster and StreamCast described the plaintiffs' arguments as "hyperbolic" and told the court that there was no need to enter a dispute that Congress was able to resolve. Several bills that directly address file sharing are pending before Congress now, the brief said.
As part of their argument that the plaintiffs' cries of doom were exaggerated, the brief quoted a 1983 warning by Jack Valenti, then president of the Motion Picture Association of America, which was challenging the video cassette recorder as a copyright infringer, that "the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone." Video sales turned out to be very profitable for the studios.
Grokster and StreamCast offered their own "friends of the court": the Computer and Communications Industry Association, representing software developers and Internet service providers, and the Internet Archive, a nonprofit "Internet library" of historical collections. They urged the court not to interfere with new technology forms and markets.
How to interpret and apply the 1984 Sony decision is likely to be central to the Supreme Court's decision. The court held there that because VCR's were capable of "substantial noninfringing use," like time-shifting by people who recorded programs for later viewing, the manufacturers should not be liable for any infringing uses. The Ninth Circuit applied that principle to the file-sharing context. But the plaintiffs argue in the new case that because it is undisputed that most users of the file-sharing services use the software in ways that violate copyright, the immunity the court gave the VCR manufacturers should not apply.
Posted by rohit at 08:07 AM | Comments (0)
December 17, 2004
Froogle Product Reviews
eWeek on Google moving into product reviews:
Google Inc. is combining online reviews into its Froogle shopping-search service, but rather than eliciting new opinions it is aggregating reviews and ratings from around the Web.The Mountain View, Calif., company announced on Wednesday a beta of Froogle Product Reviews, which so far is limited to electronics products such as MP3 players and computers.
Google also recently rolled out a feature within Froogle that is common on online shopping sites—the ability for users to store shopping lists and wish lists. By creating a log-in, users can add products found from searches onto their lists and make the wish lists accessible to friends and family, Google announced.
Here's a review of Archos AV340. Note that these reviews come from scraping, not from an epinions-like interface.
Posted by adam at 10:51 AM | Comments (0)
December 13, 2004
CiteULike: A Del.icio.us-like system for academic papers
Found this as a link from SemanticBlogging.org, which is itself described in an article in this month's CACM on the Blogosphere and also uses tags to label postings in collaborative ways...
CiteULike: All about CiteULike
CiteULike is a free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser. There's no need to install any special software.
Because your library is stored on the server, you can access it from any computer. You can share you library with others, and find out who is reading the same papers as you. In turn, this can help you discover literature which is relevant to your field but you may not have known about.
When it comes to writing up your results in a paper, you can export your library to either BibTeX or Endnote to build it in to your bibliography.
CiteULike has a flexible filing system, so you actually stand a chance of being able to find that article that you stored a few months ago when you need it.
Only links to the papers are stored, the papers themselves stay in archives like JSTOR or PubMed. At the moment the database is dominated by biological and medical papers, but there is no reason why, say, history or philosophy bibliographies should not be equally prevalent. The system currently supports: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) portal, American Meteorological Society, arXiv.org e-Print archive, CiteSeer, IngentaConnect, JSTOR, MetaPress, PLoS Biology, PubMed, PubMed Central, ScienceDirect, but more systems will be supported soon.
CiteULike is a free service, and will remain that way. You will always be able to manage your own personal library, and view other libraries on the site at no charge. The central database is backed up every fifteen minutes, and the information in your library is safe and secure.
Posted by rohit at 01:56 PM | Comments (0)
CACM to focus on 'Semantic E-Business' & RFID next year
Can't find much more about the specific submission process for those issues yet...
SEPTEMBER 2005: Tagging the World: RFID Technologies and Issues
Passive radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags will make it possible to add tags to almost every manufactured object, spurring a revolution in how the physical world is connected to the ever-growing information environment. Though motivated by the needs of supply-chain management, RFID tags are likely to find consumer applications as well. Only beginning to be addressed are many theoretical and practical issues in data management, distributed systems, privacy, and data mining.
..
DECEMBER 2005: The Semantic E-Business Vision
As research in the foundation technologies for the Semantic Web develops, the application of these technologies to enable Semantic eBusiness is of increasing importance to the professional and academic communities. Ever-growing competition is forcing organizations to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their business processes, placing increased onus on managers to develop systems incorporating emergent technologies that offer seamless availability of knowledge. Semantic eBusiness provides organizations with means to design collaborative and integrative, inter- and intra-organizational business processes and systems founded on that seamless exchange. This section will present examples of innovative, knowledge-rich business models that enhance the vision of Semantic eBusiness.
Posted by rohit at 01:50 PM | Comments (0)
Only (!) 50% of devs concerned by multiple WS-* specs
ACM's analysis of the article, Computer Magazine - Are Web Services Finally Ready to Deliver?, follows.
"Are Web Services Finally Ready to Deliver?"
Computer (11/04) Vol. 37, No. 11, P. 14; Leavitt, Neal
Standards organizations and industry consortia are working on Web services specifications, but without the presence of an all-encompassing authority, developers are unsure of what standards they will support in the long term, according to Evans Data analyst Joe McKendrick. Groups include the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), whose early Web services specs often concentrated on low-level, core functionality; the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), whose focus has been on security, authentication, registries, business process execution, and reliable messaging; the Liberty Alliance, whose mission is to develop an open standard for federated network identity that complies with all existing and emergent network devices; and the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), which releases guidelines and tools to help developers create software enabled for existing Web services specs (the WS-I Basic Security Profile and WS-Federation, for example), and has been working to address interoperability problems by encouraging collaboration among Web services vendors. OASIS is examining BEA, SAP, and IBM's Business Process Execution Language for Web services spec as a possible business process automation standard, while a subgroup of the W3C is developing Web Services Choreography Description Language 1.0 as a standard set of rules governing the interaction of different components and their sequential arrangement. Of the two rival reliable messaging specs, WS Reliable Messaging and WS-Reliability, only the latter has been sent to a standards body, and Hitachi's Eisaku Nishiyama reports that proponents of both specs are attempting to arrive at a compromise. A survey from Evans Data indicates that developers are split nearly 50-50 on whether multiple competing standards could hinder Web services deployment, though W3C's Philipe Le Hegaret doubts this will stifle the adoption of Web services.
Posted by rohit at 12:46 PM | Comments (0)
December 12, 2004
Caltech/UCLA's jMarkets open source toolkit
There are some screenshots from their demo site.
"The main asset of the Caltech Laboratory for Experimental Finance (CLEF) is its markets software, called jMarkets. It allows us to run large-scale financial markets experiments reliably and flexibly over the web. jMarkets is pure-Java and J2EE compliant. It was developed from the beginning to become open-source, and a first release to the academic community is planned for 15 November 2004. We decided to make jMarkets open source, in order to promote experimental research on financial markets. Our research to date has demonstrated the potential of experiments, paving the way to investigating longstanding questions. But many more exciting questions exist than we can address on our own. jMarkets' features will make it accessible to other research groups, usable in a variety of locations and populations. It is to become a tool to which many research groups will have easy access and to which they will be able to contribute."
jMarkets is meant to provide the infrastructure for running large-scale experiments. It is built around a specific theoretical framework, namely, General Equilibrium Theory (GE). This is the branch of Economics that studies large, competitive, interdependent systems.
...
Peter Bossaerts and William Zame are the scientific supervisors of the jMarkets project; Walter Yuan is the technical supervisor; Raj Advani is the lead programmer.
Posted by rohit at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)
Can Brain Imaging Reveal the Seat of Strategy?
Below is a tantalizing paper combining fMRI imaging with an economics experiment. The headline's a tease, of course, but it's that kind of grand thinking that even gets little ideas rolling. The paper itself doesn't sound too astounding, and certainly isn't explanatory, but it was also only written up six months ago...!
Social Science Working Paper No. 1189 wp1189r.pdf
Mental Processes & Strategic Equilibration: An fMRI Study of Selling Strategy in Second Price Auctions
Grether, David; Plott, Charles; Rowe, Daniel; Sereno, Martin; Allman, John. 06/2004.
Abstract: This study is the first to attempt to isolate a relationship between cognitive activity and equilibration to a Nash Equilibrium. Subjects, while undergoing fMRI scans of brain activity, participated in second price auctions against a single competitor following predetermined strategy that was unknown to the subject. For this auction there is a unique strategy that will maximize the subjects' earnings, which is also a Nash equilibrium of the associated game theoretic model of the auction. As is the case with all games, the bidding strategies of subjects participating in second price auctions most often do not reflect the equilibrium bidding strategy at first but with experience, typically exhibit a process of equilibration, or convergence toward the equilibrium. This research is focused on the process of convergence.
In the data reported here subjects participated in sixteen auctions, after which all subjects were told the strategy that will maximize their revenues, the theoretical equilibrium. Following that announcement, sixteen more auctions were performed. The question posed by the research concerns the mental activity that might accompany equilibration as it is observed in the bidding behavior. Does brain activation differ between equilibrated and non-equilibrated in the sense of a bidding strategy? If so, are their differences in the location of activation during and after equilibration? We found significant activation in the frontal pole especially in Brodmann's area 10, the anterior cingulate cortex, the amygdala and the basal forebrain. There was significantly more activation in the basal forebrain and the anterior cingulate cortex during the first sixteen auctions than in the second sixteen. The activity in the amygdala shifted from the right side to the left after the solution was given.
Posted by rohit at 06:35 PM | Comments (0)
A "Decentralized" A-life Visualizer
the breve simulation environment : home
breve is a free, open-source software package which makes it easy to build 3D simulations of decentralized systems and artificial life. Users define the behaviors of agents in a 3D world and observe how they interact. breve includes physical simulation and collision detection so you can simulate realistic creatures, and an OpenGL display engine so you can visualize your simulated worlds.
breve simulations are written in an easy to use language called steve. The language is object-oriented and borrows many features from languages such as C, Perl and Objective C, but even users without previous programming experience will find it easy to jump in. More information on the steve language can be found in the documentation section.
breve features an extensible plugin architecture which allows you to write your own plugins and interact with your own code. Writing plugins is simple and allows you to expand breve to work with existing projects. Plugins have been written in breve to generate MIDI music, download web pages, interact with a Lisp environment and interact with the "push" language. To develop your own plugins, you'll need to download the plugin SDK from the download section.
Klein, J. 2002. breve: a 3D simulation environment for the simulation of decentralized systems and artificial life. Proceedings of Artificial Life VIII, the 8th International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems. The MIT Press.
[from a recommendation by Kai Mildenberger]
Posted by rohit at 05:25 PM | Comments (0)
December 11, 2004
Newswire: Cornell's decentralized news network ("zNN")
Newswire - Collaborative real-time content delivery
Why Newswire? Newswire is a peer-to-peer, fully decentralized system that brings news to your desktop, within seconds after it is published. This technology gives the community the power to weave a collaborative infrastructure for the delivery of essential information to individuals in a robust, scalable and secure way. Newswire is a survivable system which will deliver news to subscribers even if large parts of the infrastructure are under attack or stress.The development of Newswire followed discussions after the 9/11 attacks when flash-crowd effects made it impossible for many to reach essential news sites. Email and weblogs proved more effective technologies in that situation, although both still suffer from the centralized risks of overload and single-point-of-failure. A more robust approach is to use a peer-to-peer structuring of the system and provide strong incentives for people to collaborate on the delivery of information to everyone by giving up a bit of bandwidth and CPU cycles.
Newswire has the additional effect that it can significantly reduce the load on the websites carrying real-time news information by providing hints about when information has changed. This would change the frequent redundant poll behavior seen by many news sites into more effective visits.
The Newswire Technology What is the technology that makes Newswire so special? At the core is epidemic communication and state management to maintain distributed knowledge about subscriptions, participant network capabilities and forwarding load. The epidemic technology was first developed by Alan Demers and friends at PARC, but has been completely revised at Cornell in the past years
The structuring into zones and virtual hierarchies is based on the small worlds phenomenon. When you organize participants into small groups of local participants with some knowledge of other remote nodes you can construct very effective routes in a decentralized, autonomous manner.
These technologies are used to build a loosely coupled, dynamic overlay network, that continuously monitors network load and capacities to achieve a fair load.
Subscription information stored in Bloom Filters is aggregated such that simple forwarding decisions can be made anywhere in the network based on the location of the publication and the direction where possible subscriber are localed.
Vogels pointed to half a dozen really great papers in All Things Distributed: Epidemic Computing at Cornell
... that having to scale up your system is no longer a burden, but it becomes an advantage and you can deliver on the true promise of scale-out: more nodes means a more robust system.
Also, he noted: All Things Distributed: Wired on the Scalability of Feed Aggregators
We have had some legal issues with the deployment of the newswire beta, and a new core communication component is being developed. But I would be happy to break open the ideas in the system and work with others to see whether this can be a good experimentation platform.
Posted by rohit at 03:27 PM | Comments (0)
The Supremes Learn About Sharing
The Ninth Circuit had found Napster liable because the company itself maintained and controlled the servers that searched for the digital files its users wanted to download. Grokster and StreamCast, by contrast, operate decentralized systems that allow users to find each other over the Internet and then exchange files directly. Consequently, the appeals court said, the two services did not exercise the kind of control that could lead to legal liability for infringing uses.
Posted by rohit at 11:34 AM | Comments (0)
December 10, 2004
Service Oriented Patents
CNET on CommerceNet:
A mysterious bidder paid $15.5 million Monday in a bankruptcy court auction of dozens of Internet-related patents--and then rushed out of the courtroom.I get the impression we have not heard the last of JGR...On the United States Bankruptcy Court auction block were 39 patents owned by Commerce One, a bankrupt software company in Santa Clara, Calif., that's in the process of shutting down and liquidating its assets.
The patents cover a set of key technical protocols known as Web services, a popular method for exchanging business documents over the Internet. The protocols are in wide use today; Microsoft, IBM and other software companies both large and small have incorporated them into their programs.
The winning bidder was a company called JGR Acquisitions. An attorney representing JGR was mum about his client, dodging reporters' questions as he rushed out of the court room at the close of the auction.
Attorneys for Commerce One and the bankers who solicited bids for the auction also declined to discuss JGR. A document the company filed with the court was scarce on information as well, so JGR's business, its owners, its location and its plans for the newly acquired patents all remain mysteries.
Although the patents may be too broad to enforce or may be otherwise invalidated if challenged, the auction has drawn the attention of some big names in Silicon Valley, including Google, Oracle and Sun Microsystems. Representatives for those and about a dozen other companies convened a meeting last month to discuss the auction and the danger of infringement suits from whomever won it.
The companies also considered a proposal to pool funds in order to jointly bid on the patents and retire them if they won. But the effort apparently never got off the ground. CommerceNet, the nonprofit group that floated the proposal and offered to place the joint bid, did not participate in Monday's auction.
Posted by adam at 09:39 AM | Comments (0)
December 09, 2004
Play That Funky Web Way
I've recently gotten some kudos for my post on The Web Way:
The Web Way is a philosophy toward Web-based services:
- They should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.
- They should have clean designs for user interfaces and clean designs for programming interfaces.
- Where it's useful, they should embrace REST.
- Where it's useful, they should embrace loose coupling.
- Where it's useful, they should embrace glorious, nonblocking, asynchronous pubsub. ;)
- Where it's useful, they should embrace microformats, a/k/a lowercase semantic web.
- Where it's needed, they should embrace the time-tested principles of Scalable Internet Architectures (three simple rules: optimize where it counts, complexity has its costs, and use the right tool).
Posted by adam at 11:48 AM | Comments (0)
December 08, 2004
Decentralizing BitTorrent
Courtesy of zLab Associate Kevin Hughes' KevsNews:
Slashdot | Decentralizing Bittorrent
... "Exeem is a new file-sharing application being developed by the folks at SuprNova.org. Exeem is a decentralized BitTorrent network that basically makes everyone a Tracker. Individuals will share Torrents, and seed shared files to the network. At this time, details and the full potential of this project are being kept very quiet. However it appears this P2P application will completely replace SuprNova.org; no more web mirrors, no more bottle necks and no more slow downs. Exeem will marry the best features of a decentralized network, the easy searchability of an indexing server and the swarming powers of the BitTorrent network into one program. Currently, the network is in beta testing and already has 5,000 users (the beta testing is closed.) Once this program goes public, its potential is enormous. "
Posted by rohit at 10:40 AM | Comments (0)
December 07, 2004
E-commerce is still tiny
Brad DeLong quotes Andrew Samwick:
...the fraction of all [US] retail sales that are conducted via E-Commerce ... [is] still only 2 percent, at about $17.6 billion out of $916.5 billion last quarter. The growth rate for [US] E-Commerce is about 2-3 times the pace for total retail sales, but even though that sounds like a lot, it will take a while for the E-Commerce share to become very important in the aggregate. (Simple extrapolation of the last five quarters of growth in each series would get to an 8 percent share in another 10 years.)
(I've taken the liberty of inserting qualifiers in the text --- the original author seems to have thought unimportant the distinction between ecommerce and American ecommerce. But he's talking about American ecommerce and quoting figures from this Census Bureau report.)
So there's still a lot of B2C commerce that's still not using the web. Even in the $23-billion-a-year American book industry, Amazon has a minority --- Amazon's selling US$2 billion a year in the US but $5.8 billion a year overall. (Notice, again we have the long tail: Amazon has the most online transactions, but most online transactions aren't on Amazon. America has the most sales, but most sales aren't in America.) I think online book sales in general are only a small multiple of Amazon's sales, and Amazon apparently only has around 9% of the book market (assuming all of Amazon's sales are books, which isn't quite true).
(As another footnote, eBay's gross merchandise volume is around $30 billion, of which more than half was in the US's $70 billion a year [from the above Census report].)
So American retail ecommerce is 2% of American retail sales; presumably in the world, ecommerce is an even smaller percentage, particularly by PPP. Even in industries like book publishing, which is almost perfectly suited to online selling (large numbers of different products, each highly standardized, costing many dollars per kilogram, not perishable, requiring significant research to find products suited to the buyer) online selling seems to be a minority of all selling.
How can we make ecommerce more useful? It clearly has a long way to go.
Posted by kragen at 03:22 PM | Comments (0)
December 06, 2004
Health Care Technology Is a Promise Unfinanced
"Congress, in its infinite wisdom, zeroed-out David
Brailer's office," said Newt Gingrich, the Republican
former House speaker, who is the founder of the Center for
Health Transformation, a health policy group. "They
couldn't find $50 million to signal that David Brailer has
a real job and what he's doing is important. Frankly, I
think it's a disgrace."The Bush administration, Mr. Gingrich said, bore most of
the responsibility. "No one in the White House or in the
senior staff of the Department of Health and Human Services
fought for this," he said.Most of the investment for electronic health records and
networks for sharing information will now have to come from
private industry, probably billions of dollars over the
next several years.The $50 million requested for Dr. Brailer's office was to
have been used to provide seed money for health information
demonstration projects that would encourage the industry to
agree on technology standards, hasten investment by private
companies and accelerate the adoption of modern information
technology by doctors and hospitals.
Posted by adam at 04:19 PM | Comments (0)
December 05, 2004
Next Generation Email Architecture
Meng Wong describes a framework called Aspen under which spam is addressed by authentication, accreditation and reputation. Accreditation, according to Wong, "lets third parties vouch for senders with whom they have a prior relationship." Reputation is more of a ratings system for senders and accreditors.
This is part of a next generation email architecture:
"Over the last few months, a small group of email innovators have been working on developing a prototype for a next-generation email architecture. That architecture is based on the concepts of authentication, reputation, and accreditation developed at the Aspen Institute in Dec 2003 and embodied by standards like SPF, Sender ID, and DomainKeys. On Nov 16 that group will meet face to face for the first time. They plan to demonstrate their prototypes and test interoperability between them. These prototypes are an important step toward a spamproof email system. INBOX Event participants will be invited to a special demonstration in the afternoon. That demonstration will show the prototypes working together and invite discussion and feedback from the audience." Get ready. Building on email authentication and digital signatures, reputation and accreditation systems are poised to enter the spotlight.
Posted by adam at 04:43 PM | Comments (0)
December 04, 2004
The Feedmesh, So Far
Great summary by Phillip Pearson on the Feedmesh list...
The feedmesh and related ping-distribution services, so far, in
alphabetical order:
- blo.gs distributes pings in a streaming changes.xml; see
http://blo.gs/cloud.php for info, or telnet to ping.blo.gs port 9999
for the stream.Info distributed: blog name, blog url, feed url, ping time
NB: the stream is currently uncompressed, but will become
zlib-compressed at some point in the future.- pingomatic.com collects pings and distributes them by pinging a
number of other services. Contact the operators to get them to ping
you too.Info distributed: blog name, blog url (maybe rss url?)
- pubsub.com distributes pings and post info in a XMPP stream; see
http://www.pubsub.com/docs/pubsub_xmpp_draft.html for info, or
telnet to xmpp.pubsub.com port 5222 for the stream (but read the
tutorial at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/feedmesh/message/112
first, as some work is involved to get data out).Info distributed: lots of blog info, lots of post info
- topicexchange.com distributes pings in a traditional streaming
format; see http://www.myelin.co.nz/post/2003/12/16/#200312161 for
info, or telnet to topicexchange.com port 9123 for the stream.Info distributed: blog url
- weblogs.com distributes pings in an XML file that you can poll. For
24 hours of ping data, read http://www.weblogs.com/changes.xml. For
5 minutes of ping data, read
http://www.weblogs.com/shortChanges.xml.Info distributed: blog name, blog url, ping time
Posted by adam at 03:23 PM | Comments (0)
December 03, 2004
Wanted: Your Ad on eBay
eBay takes a giant leap in the Classifieds direction: a new feature that allows customers to post want ads for items they are looking to buy on its Web site.. Amazon has Wishlists, and now eBay does too... CNET:
The launch of the "Want It Now" feature represents a departure from eBay's traditional setup, which allowed people to search the auctioneer's listings, but didn't give them the opportunity to display what sort of products they were looking to purchase.
The company also created a tool that allows individuals selling products on eBay to search the want ads and find buyers who might be interested in their auctions.
Using the system, registered eBay users can place a 30-day ad that describes what goods they would like to buy. The system gives anyone searching the postings access to the buyer's background information, such as their community feedback rating and geographical location. The tool does not give sellers direct access to customers' account names, but instead allows them to e-mail information on specific auctions to an eBay member, while keeping the potential buyer's screen name anonymous.
The "Want It Now" tool appears to be catching on with eBay users already, despite the fact that the company has not yet publicly promoted the feature. eBay first started letting people post the ads Nov. 30. By Friday morning, close to 200 people had created want ads in the eBay Motors section of the company's site, one of its most active product categories.
eBay expects the new feature to allow its customers to find the items they are looking to buy faster, while giving people selling items a chance to make sales more quickly. The company also believes the system will give its sellers a chance to gauge demand for specific categories of products.
The launch of the want ads represents eBay's full-fledged entry into the classifieds sector, a business it recently stepped into when it bought a 25 percent stake in Craigslist.org, a bare-bones classifieds site operating in 45 major cities. In early November, eBay announced plans to buy Marktplaats.nl, a Dutch classified-advertising Web site, for about $290 million in cash.
Posted by adam at 03:07 PM | Comments (0)
December 02, 2004
A Competition for WS Composition
Entry notification due Dec 10th... (Last Updated 11/16, notes on bottom)" href="http://cssun.georgetown.edu/~blakeb/EEE05/">EEE-05 Contest Technical Details:
The EEE-05 Challenge is perhaps the first web service discovery/composition competition. As such, in this first year, we expect that the technical details of the competition will evolve as we learn more about the nature of running such a competition. The intention of this web page is to continually update the participants with contest details and quirks as they are discovered.Objectives. The objective of the competition, in this first year, is to encourage participants to concentrate on syntactical matching and chaining for Web Service Description Language (WSDL)
documents. A successful software entry will be able to accurately and efficiently find services using the part names underlying their input and output messages. Secondly, entries will have to create chains of services by linking output part names to the subsequent input part names. The intent of this first year is for participants to create part name matching components/agents that will set the foundation for later years of this competition (i.e. each year with more technical rigor). Participants should also focus on robust system design and efficient programming techniques....
Evaluation. We are still working on the most effective approach to evaluating the software. We anticipate that one aspect will be a subjective score on the system design. The other aspects will be performance and accuracy. One idea is to allow the discovery and composition to proceed for a limited amount of time and count the accurate number of discoveries or compositions, respectively. Although, the developing the evaluating technique is still be considered by the advisory board, we assure participants that the
competition will be run with the best intentions to keep the judging fair.Posted by rohit at 02:00 PM | Comments (0)
December 01, 2004
Beyond Web of Trust: Enabling P2P e-Commerce
Beyond "web of trust": Enabling P2P E-commerce:
The long-term goal would be to design a fully functional decentralized system which resembles eBay without eBay's dedicated, centralized infrastructure. Since security (authenticity, non-repudiation, trust, etc.) is key to any e-commerce infrastructure, our envisioned P2P e-commerce platform has to address this adequately. As the first step in this direction we present an approach for a completely decentralized P2P public key infrastructure (PKI) which can serve as the basis for higher-level security service. In contrast to other systems in this area, such as PGP which uses a "web of trust" concept, we use a statistical approach which allows us to provide an analytical model with provable guarantees, and quantify the behavior and specific properties of the PKI. To justify our claims we provide a first-order analysis and discuss its resilience against various known threats and attack scenarios.In support of our belief that C2C E-commerce is one of the potential killer applications of the emerging structured P2P systems, we provide a layered model for P2P E-commerce, demonstrating the dependencies of various security related issues that can be built on top of a decentralized PKI.
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Price-Triggered RSS Feeds
Congrats to Sergei Burkov of Dulance for creating the world's first price-triggered RSS feed that "turns any newsreader into a personal shopping agent."
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