ReadWriteWeb

Students, educators and others interested in finding the best published content, events and experts for learning new things will be heartened to learn that a new metadata markup standard is in the works to make discovery of learning materials easier than ever. Perhaps more importantly, it will make those materials easier for machines to find. Once finding the right content is a solved problem, many new things could become possible.

The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI), a project co-led by the Association of Educational Publishers and Creative Commons, today took the next step towards submitting its specification to Schema.org, the collaboration between Google, Yahoo and Bing that maps out 100 different types of content online in a standardized format.

The jQuery project announced today a new effort to work in support of web developers everywhere who are interested in impacting conversations about web standards but are unable to participate through existing channels, which are often maddening.

The new jQuery Standards Team says that the broad adoption of jQuery, they say it's used on 50% of the top 10,000 sites on the web, means they have a strong perspective on the needs of developers everywhere. They don't mention it, but they are also people that are widely liked who are responsible for very cool technology. At least that's the way supporters see it; the group isn't without its critics. Perhaps as all things standards related are.

SPDY is a hypertext protocol developed by Google as an alternative/compliment to HTTP. It improves the performance of modern websites by adding a few features such as multiplexed requests, prioritized requests and compressed headers. You can read our previous coverage for more information.

How can you take advantage of SPDY on your own site? So far, only Google Chrome (versions 6.0 and up) support SPDY, so you'll need to support two protocols: SPDY for Chrrome, and HTTP for everything else. You'll also need to automatically switch between the two protocols depending on the browser your visitors are using.

Strangeloop Site Optimizer now does just that.

The JSON Activity Streams spec has hit a 1.0 release. Activity Streams provides a common protocol for creating and parsing activity streams. The ATOM version was already at 1.0.

The Facebook Wall is probably the most famous example of an activity stream, but just about any application could generate a stream of information in this format. Using a common format for activity streams could enable applications to communicate with one another, and presents new opportunities for information aggregation.

Imagine a web where our browsers connected directly to each other to do voice, video, media sharing and run applications, using P2P and real-time APIs, rather than going through centralized servers that controlled traffic and permissions. That's a potent idea and if implemented properly could future-proof a part of the web from authoritarian crack-downs, disruptions by disasters and more. It could also establish a permanent lawless zone of connected devices with no central place to stop anyone from doing anything in particular.

It just so happens that something like that may now be under development in the most official of venues. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced today the formation of a new Web Real-Time Communications Working Group to define client-side APIs to enable Real-Time Communications in Web browsers, without the need for server-side implementation. The Group is chaired by engineers from Google and Ericsson. It sounds like Opera Unite to me (see video below), but democratized across all browsers. It sounds like it could be a very big deal.

After five years of interagency collaboration and thousands of points of public communication, a new standard data format for adresses, thoroughfares and landmarks has been approved by the final agency acronym it needs to be in order for the project to reach its culmination. This seems like it could be huge news in a world where mobile location apps are set to define the future of the computing user experience - but for some reason the standard seems mired in government circles with little comment or enthusiasm from the private sector.

The Steering Committee of the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) has endorsed the United States Thoroughfare, Landmark and Postal Address Data Standard, a product of the Committee's Address Standard Working Group. What does that mean? It means it's now possible to start referring to adresses, streets and landmarks with the knowledge that everyone will refer to them in the same way. The standard was developed with the use of drafts posted online in wiki format and received thousands of edits and comments from stakeholders.

This morning, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the first public draft of its Calendar API spec, the technical standard by which it recommends applications and calendars share event data. It just so happens that it was exactly 5 years ago to the day today that Google Calendar released its API!

Such data standards make it easier to develop apps that use your calendar data and make more viable the development of new calendar software without fear that users will be locked out of application ecosystems.

Most of the response from Microsoft's competitors regarding "native HTML" is mockery. Some of that is deserved - it's clearly a marketing buzzword. But where are the substantive responses to Microsoft's performance claims? Demos aren't evidence of better performance, and the overall value of a browser is about more than a bunch of fish in a virtual aquarium. But how does the performance of Microsoft's browser hold up? And more importantly: what does Microsoft's approach mean for open standards and the future of the Web?

"Internet TV" no longer means simply bringing Internet content to the television screen. Internet TV is no longer encompassed by the idea that users want to check their email on the big screen in the living room. Instead, Internet TV has shifted from that of an Internet-enabled device to that of an integrated service, available on a number of devices.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the official standards organization of the Web, has issued a report on the transition of TV to a service, identifying several points that need to be addressed for Internet TV to become a widely available, open, cross-platform service.

Max Ogden is a developer living in San Francisco. He's a Code for America fellow and one of the founding developers of Couchappspora, an open source social network built with Apache CouchDB.

This is the second half of our interview. Part one can be found here. In this half we focus on Couchappspora, Ogden's open source social networking project.