The project's lofty goal is to essentially create an open web of books where anyone can publish their books and make their content available via search.

Although still in the early days of development and potentially taking years to complete, the BookServer project will allow search engines to index books from all over the web. What that means for an end user is that you could type a title into a search engine and the engine would return results listing everywhere you could get that book in digital format including online bookstores, libraries, or a direct method from the publisher itself. Depending on your needs, you could borrow the book or purchase it and then download it to your digital device.

While the project isn't exactly a direct effort to take down Amazon's online bookstore or Google's upcoming online eBook store called Google Editions, it will provider book publishers and online libraries with the means to more effectively compete with those companies. By allowing publishers to set their own pricing and manage the distribution of their books, they will be able to take back control from Amazon and Google who would rather dictate those terms for them.

An Open Marketplace for eBooks

A secondary goal of BookServer's open system is to fight back against the proprietary marketplaces, such as Amazon's Kindle Store, where books are only sold in a copyright-protected format (.AZW) that only works on the company's eReader device, the Kindle. Elsewhere, some book sellers use other proprietary formats, others use the open ePub format, and still others distribute books as Adobe PDFs. For consumers, this multitude of choices only leads to confusion. People don't know what formats their particular device can read or where to get them. It brings to mind the similar issues consumers have had with digitally distributed music. To this day, many are still confused about whether their iTunes purchased music can play on other devices or whether tunes purchased from other online MP3 stores will play on their iPods.

While Google promises its Google Editions store will allow anyone to access digital books as long as they have a web browser and internet access, it's still unknown at this time how the company plans to make the digital content available offline. Will it require the use of special web browser plugins to do so? Until Google reveals more about the technical details, it is not possible to know how truly open their online store will be. And even if their store is 100% open, they are still a company whose ultimate goal is to profit from their work of digitizing books. BookServer's goal, on the other hand, is to provide universal access to book data made available in open formats.

Today, a few booksellers have partnered with the BookServer system including Feedbooks, O'Reilly, Adobe, and the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project.

At the very least, the service represents a good first step in bringing the web to the TV without losing that essential "TV experience" which has more to do with passively holding a remote than it does with actively typing onto a keyboard. That psychological barrier between participation levels involved in surfing the net and watching TV is probably what led early internet-enabled TV experiences to fail...like "Web TV" for example. People just don't want keyboards in the living room. Verizon seems to understand our need for more passive interaction and has made nearly everything about their web-enabled TV service easy to perform with the Verizon FiOS remote control.

Hands-On: Facebook on the TV

First things first. Before you can have any fun with the Widget Bazaar, you have to configure a parental control password. This may seem a bit odd, but it's understandable given some of the Twitter hashtags we've seen become trending topics lately. To set up the parental control passcode, you have to delve into settings. It's not really that difficult and the process was complete in a matter of moments.

Now you can enter your new passcode to access the Facebook widget, but before you begin you still have to scroll through pages and pages of an end-user agreement and select "I agree" at the end.

Once you're past these initial setup configurations, you can proceed with logging into your Facebook account. The Facebook widget only appears on one half of your screen, so you can play around with it while still continuing to watch whatever program you have on.

On the next screen, you're presented with boxes to enter in your Facebook email address and password. There's a handy option to "Remember Me" so you don't have to re-enter your email each time. You're also prompted to set up an optional numeric passcode which you can use in the future in lieu of entering in your password. I recommend doing so - pushing numbers on your remote is a lot easier and faster than using that on-screen keyboard.

Once logged in, your new Facebook sidebar appears with your current program still playing to the right. There's an option at the top to "switch user" which will probably introduce a whole new way to fight over the remote control (it's my turn on Facebook!). The first option - the one to view your "Profile" - is actually quite boring. It just displays your current profile photo and status, two things you probably don't need to see. Unfortunately, there's no way to use the on-screen keyboard to post a custom status update from within this area.

Both the "Friends - Status Updates" and the "All Friends" section looked exactly the same to me. I thought the "All Friends" section would be more like the News Feed (so-and-so posted a photo, so-and-so requested help in Mafia Wars), but that didn't appear to be the case. It's possible that all my friends were just surprisingly inactive on Facebook at the time I launched this section, but I'm not so sure. In any event, both sections looked exactly the same: a list of friends and their status messages.

The "Albums" section was particularly fun and probably the most useful of all the options. Here, you can launch a list of your Facebook photo albums and then scroll through the pictures they contained in a slideshow-like format. Another tap on the "OK" button would launch the pictures full-screen.

Finally, the best part: updating your Facebook status. An option at the bottom allows you to update your status with a pre-configured message that says what show your watching. Although I still wish that I could customize my message, this simple, one-button post option is a great feature to have.

Hands-On: Twitter on the TV

Before you can start using the Twitter widget, you have to agree yet again to another Terms of Service. Besides the typical lawyerly stuff you'd expect to see, there was an interesting section that pointed you to www22.verizon.com/terms to read more about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for info on how to contact Verizon with claims. There was also a section that informed you how to report child pornography posted to Twitter. (I wasn't even aware that Twitter had that problem, but I guess Verizon's lawyers were just covering all their bases).

Unlike with Facebook, you don't configure your own Twitter account within this widget. That means you can't see your replies, direct messages or your friends' timeline. In other words, this widget isn't a Twitter client. That's disappointing because I'd like to be able to tweet from my TV...at the very least I think you should have the same option as in Facebook to tweet what you're watching. Sadly, that's not the case.

Instead, the Verizon Twitter widget provides more of a read-only experience. You can check out a list of the latest trends and see the related tweets, perform keyword-based searches, or even configure "favorite topics" for custom saved searches of your own. (Hint: set up a favorite search for your Twitter username to keep track of replies).

The interface to all these options looks the same: tweets on the right, TV show playing on the left - just like with the Facebook widget. The tweets don't update automatically, but you can press "OK" on your remote to refresh them. You can also scroll up and down through the list to see more.

The absolute coolest option within the Twitter widget is its ability to display tweets about the current show. In my case, I was watching "Pan's Labyrinth" on HBO (which is, by the way, an odd but interesting tale). Surprisingly, there were a few others tweeting about this movie, too. Of course, had I been watching something more common - like American Idol for instance - there surely would have been tons more tweets to see. The only problem with the way these tweets are displayed is the lack of a timestamp. I really don't know if these folks were watching Pan's Labyrinth with me right now or if they were watching it sometime in the past.

Conclusion

Overall, I'm thrilled to have this sort of functionality on my TV, but I'd like to see a few improvements. I'd like the option to make the Twitter widget more of a client so I can tweet an opinion about what I'm watching or at least that I'm watching something. Although the on-screen keyboard is cumbersome and slow, what better way to kill time in between commercials? I'd also like to type in custom Facebook status messages in the same way.

The only other major complaint was speed. There was a bit of a delay when scrolling through photos in my album, for example, and hitting the scroll button again and again only led to the selection moving way too far ahead of where I wanted to go. I should have known better than to keep mashing it, but with TVs, you expect instant reactions. Channel Up changes the channel immediately, for example, without any delay.

Also, when viewing tweets, scrolling up and down through the list did a weird refresh of the entire screen which was distracting. I didn't see the same type of refresh when scrolling through Facebook updates, so it seems like something is really off there. Perhaps the widget also doing a search to look for more current updates...I'm not sure. In any event, it needs to be fixed.

But at the end of the day, despite these issues, having Facebook and Twitter on my TV is truly incredible.

Oh, I should also mention that the Widget Bazaar introduces two other widgets: Sudoku and ESPN Fantasy Sports. More widgets will launch in the future. I've only included a selection of images in this post, for all the photos from my TV, you can visit the online album here.

Because it can't. It does not understand. It has no access to most sources. It lacks the semantic understanding and common sense to build bridges between information.

It is critical that machines gain a new level of understanding. Instead of statistically computing how well a search term matches a document, a machine must literally be able to understand. Therefore, knowledge bases are needed to look things up. Examples of these knowledge bases include:

• an encyclopedia containing knowledge to look up the semantic meaning and context of a particular term (e.g. to understand that Berlin is a city, how many people live there, and where it is),
• Yellow Pages or a service pool to query often-changing and more complex information (e.g. a route from Berlin to Porto by car, or the current temperature of Porto in Celsius),
• a people database to look up profile information, with user permissions, which could improve personalization and recommendations.

The Web of Data

The idea of the Web of Data originated with the Semantic Web. People tried to solve the problem of the inherent inability of machines to understand web pages. Initially, the aim of the Semantic Web was to invisibly annotate web pages with a set of meta-attributes and categories to enable machines to interpret text and put it in some kind of context. This approach did not succeed because the annotation was too complicated for humans who had no technical background. Similar approaches, like microformats, simplify the markup process and thus help bootstrap this chicken-egg problem.

These approaches have in common the effort to improve the machine-accessibility of knowledge on web pages that were designed to be consumed by humans. Furthermore, these sites contain a lot of information that is irrelevant to machines and that needs to be filtered. What is needed is a knowledge base for machines to look up "noiseless" information. But wait! Who said that machines and us humans need to share one web anyway?

The idea of the Web of Data came about as a result of both this limitation and the existence of countless structured data sets distributed all over the world and containing all kinds of information. These data sets are the property of companies that trend to make them accessible. Typically, a data set contains knowledge about a particular domain, like books, music, encyclopedic data, companies, you name it. If these data sets were interconnected (i.e. link to each other like websites), a machine could traverse this independent web of noiseless, structured information to gather semantic knowledge of arbitrary entities and domains. The result would be a massive, freely accessible knowledge base forming the foundation of a new generation of applications and services.

Linking Open Data

One promising approach is W3C's Linking Open Data (LOD) project. The above image illustrates participating data sets. The data sets themselves are set up to re-use existing ontologies such as WordNet, FOAF, and SKOS and interconnect them.

The data sets all grant access to their knowledge bases and link to items of other data sets. The project follows basic design principles of the World Wide Web: simplicity, tolerance, modular design, and decentralization. The LOD project currently counts more than 2 billion RDF triples, which is a lot of knowledge. (A triple is a piece of information that consists of a subject, predicate, and object to express a particular subject's property or relationship to another subject.) Also, the number of participating data sets is rapidly growing. The data sets currently can be accessed in heterogeneous ways; for example, through a semantic web browser or by being crawled by a semantic search engine.

To get a feeling of how this machine Web of Data feels like, you may want to look up:

• the company Yahoo! on CrunchBase,
• the city of Berlin or the game Tetris on DBpedia,
• the book iPhone: The Missing Manual on O'Reilly Media.

With every fact available on the Web of Data, more general and specific knowledge is made accessible to machines that will enable a whole new generation of services to be created. Highly sophisticated queries become machine-processable and accessible to the next generation of, say, search services.

Check out Tim Berners-Lee's talk at TED about the Web of Data. How do you think about it? Do you encounter the same issues being overloaded by information or too much noise?

(Photo by zorro-art. Graph by the Linking Open Data project.)

Any serious Twitter user will tell you that half the fun of watching a major television event or popular show is tuning into the backchannel provided by those twittering their thoughts and reactions to what's being broadcast. An excellent example of this type of live backchannel was seen during President Obama's recent public address - a hotly tracked item on Twitter where the hashtag to follow was #NSOTU (aka "Not State of the Union.") Even lawmakers were getting in on the action by twittering from the House floor while listening to Obama speak.

This real-time view into the reactions of the crowd has been at times insightful, at other times humorous, but is always an interesting and interactive way to participate in any event, including something shown on TV. Yet when it comes to Twitter and the television, it's often a two-screen experience involving a web-connected laptop or phone and the TV itself.

But with Verizon's new widget platform, developers will be able to build widgets like this one which displays Twitter updates on your TV. But unlike Twitter's own search tool that only lists the trending topics, Verizon's widget demonstrates how Twitter could enhance your TV-viewing experience in a whole new way. When launching this widget, for example, one of the options is "current channel." Select that and all of a sudden you're seeing the tweets related specifically to the program or movie that you're currently viewing.

Another widget, this one for Facebook users, lets you update your status with a message about what you're watching. It also provides access to your friends and your photo albums.

These two widgets were built in-house by Verizon engineers and won't necessarily ship with the upcoming update to the DVR... but they could. In a recent demonstration of the software's capabilities, Joseph Ambeault, Director of Consumer Product Development Video, hinted that the company had talked to various internet companies about their providing widgets for the new platform. However, he would not confirm any specifics. (There were some very cagey head rolls - half nods, half shakes - when providing the non-answers, though!). We specifically asked about Twitter, but the Verizon representative said he could not comment. We're taking the decided ambiguity to mean talks began but nothing is official.

In fact, seeing the widget in action makes us wonder - is this a part of Twitter's mysterious business model? It very well could be. Verizon's widgets, which could potentially reach several million customers here in the United States, will be monetized through on-screen advertisements like banner ads. These ads, similar in look and feel to those seen on the web, will launch a quick TV commercial when selected with the remote control.

The Widget Ecosystem

At present, Verizon has widgets for weather, traffic, headlines, horoscopes, and community information. There's also an ESPN Fantasy Football widget which provides stats on your players and scores. But when the widget platform goes live, the potential for an entire ecosystem of widgets will explode. However, the questions as to how this ecosystem will look and behave are things Verizon is still figuring out as, up until now, they've solely focused on the technical aspects of the solution.

What they can say now is that widgets will be programmed using LUA, a standard technology which many game developers will be familiar with already. The process for signing up to create a widget won't involve any laborious steps, either. Instead, there will be a quick web form to fill out and then developers can gain access to the company's SDK (software development kit). According to Verizon, they're not interested in tightly controlling which widgets become available to their FiOS customers - they just want to provide tools for widget creation and sharing. As Ambeault describes it, the ecosystem's level of openness will be "somewhere in between Apple and Google" - a reference to the variation between the App Store approval process for the locked-down iPhones versus the wide-open Google Android platform.

Also of note, Verizon seems less interested in competing with the other newly launched widget platforms, like the Yahoo/Intel TV widgets that are being integrated into new televisions themselves, and are more interested in working to port those widgets to their platform. But when asked if they were working with Yahoo, the only answer was yet another cryptic head roll.

Internet Video with No Extra Box (Just a Computer)

Another aspect to the upgraded Verizon Web + TV experience is the introduction of internet content, searchable through their "Interactive Media Guide." When the new software launches, Verizon FiOS DVRs will stream software from YouTube, DailyMotion, Break.com, Blip.tv, and Veoh. The format conversion that makes this possible actually takes place on a computer connected on the home network running Verizon Media Manager software, not on the DVR itself. Verizon says they configure this software for consumers at the time of installation.

This Media Manager software also allows customers to stream videos and photos from their PC to TV.

Beyond the Net

Multiple upgrades to the DVR software will take place over the course of the coming year. The first upgrade, due out this summer, will deliver new features like the updated program guide with its richer contextual menus. Here, for example, customers will find things like colorful thumbnails of movies when searching through on-demand titles - an experience somewhat reminiscent of Netflix. Also included will be the ability to preview programs from channels you don't currently subscribe to and the option to then order the channel using your remote. Most notably, though, the summer upgrade (from version 1.6 to 1.7 of Verizon's 2nd-generation software) will introduce the internet video content. Later this fall, the widget SDK will launch.

Given Verizon's position as a TV company, phone company, ISP, and wireless provider, they plan to maximize their new software across all various platforms. Already Verizon mobile phones can access TV through V-Cast, but in the future they may be able to use the widgets too. Mobile phone users can also program their DVRs remotely.

Of course, this news is only of interest to Verizon FiOS customers - still a relatively small market here in the U.S. when compared to cable but one that's growing in key markets. However, Verizon's move is raising the bar as to what consumers will come to expect from their web-connected TVs in the future, whether the web content comes from Verizon, is built into the TV itself, or arrives as part of whatever comes next.

Halevy, who heads the "Deep Web" search initiative at Google, described the "Shallow Web" as containing about 5 million web pages while the "Deep Web" is estimated to be 500 times the size. This hidden web is currently being indexed in part by Google's automated systems that submit queries to various databases, retrieving the content found for indexing. In addition to that aspect of the Deep Web - dubbed "vertical searching" - Halevy also referenced two other types of Deep Web Search: semantic search and product search.

Google wants to also be able to retrieve the data found in structured tables on the web, said Halevy, citing a table on a page listing the U.S. presidents as an example. There are 14 billion such tables on the web, and, after filtering, about 154 million of them are interesting enough to be worth indexing.

Can Google Dig into the Deep Web?

The question that remains is whether or not Google's current search engine technology is going to be adept at doing all the different types of Deep Web indexing or if they will need to come up with something new. As of now, Google uses the Big Table database and MapReduce framework for everything search related, notes Alex Esterkin, Chief Architect at Infobright, Inc., a company delivering open source data warehousing solutions. During the talk, Halevy listed a number of analytical database application challenges that Google is currently dealing with: schema auto-complete, synonym discovery, creating entity lists, association between instances and aspects, and data level synonyms discovery. These challenges are addressed by Infobright's technology, said Esterkin, but "Google will have to solve these problems the hard way."

Also mentioned during the speech was how Google plans to organize "aspects" of search queries. The company wants to be able to separate exploratory queries (e.g., "Vietnam travel") from ones where a user is in search of a particular fact ("Vietnam population"). The former query should deliver information about visa requirements, weather and tour packages, etc. In a way, this is like what the search service offered by Kosmix is doing. But Google wants to go further, said Halevy. "Kosmix will give you an 'aspect,' but it's attached to an information source. In our case, all the aspects might be just Web search results, but we'd organize them differently."

Yahoo Working on Similar Structured Data Retrieval

The challenges facing Google today are also being addressed by their nearest competitor in search, Yahoo. In December, Yahoo announced that they were taking their SearchMonkey technology in-house to automate the extraction of structured information from large classes of web sites. The results of that in-house extraction technique will allow Yahoo to augment their Yahoo Search results with key information returned alongside the URLs.

In this aspect of web search, it's clear that no single company has yet to dominate. However, even if a non-Google company surges ahead, it may not be enough to get people to switch engines. Today, "Google" has become synonymous with web search, just like "Kleenex" is a tissue, "Band-Aid" is an adhesive bandage, and "Xerox" is a way to make photocopies. Once that psychological mark has been made into our collective psyches and the habit formed, people tend to stick with what they know, regardless of who does it better. That's something that's a bit troublesome - if better search technology for indexing the Deep Web comes into existence outside of Google, the world may not end up using it until such point Google either duplicates or acquires the invention.

Still, it's far too soon to write Google off yet. They clearly have a lead when it comes to search and that came from hard work, incredibly smart people, and innovative technical achievements. No doubt they can figure out this Deep Web thing, too. (We hope).

Thanks to technology, we never have to forget any experience of our lives. We can snap photos, annotate them, and share them with others instantly. We can archive them to the timeless web for posterity. And maybe one day, our great-great-grandkids can pursue our social network profiles in the cached pages of Internet Archive and learn everything we ever wanted the world to know about us.

And yes, that's great. It's amazing, really. But what about us and the lifetime we spent recording these things? Did we waste our lives documenting them and forget to live?

A great example of people missing the moment

With technology having progressed to the point where it's nearly effortless to use, we've begun to integrate it into our lives in ways that have never been done before. No longer is the computer this appliance that connects you to a web of slow-loading pages. No, today's web - our global brain - is pocket-sized and accessible from anywhere.*

Photos (and now videos) can immediately be published from device to web thanks to ingenious creations like Eye-Fi's wireless SD card, a technology that makes our real life just another feed of content for the ubiquitous pages of the ever-expanding web. A web whose very creation may represent humanity's attempt to understand the concept of our universe. For how will tomorrow's web be described? It's a entity that has no beginning** and no end; it's an ever-expanding repository for all (digital) life.

Forgetting to Live

As we progress through our short span here on this planet, living our lives and documenting them along the way, we may be forgetting...for moments at least...how to actually live. And living, like it or not, means that sometimes we need to disconnect, put the camera down, and enjoy a moment for once.

Jane Maynard of Silicon Valley Moms reminds us that this is now a common issue for everyone, not just technophiles. As she writes about watching her children perform at a concert, she describes the problem: "Cameras. I actually struggle a bit with this issue myself. In an attempt to document the wonderful things happening, sometimes life itself gets missed. You know, like watching your child's piano recital through a video camera viewfinder rather than with your own eyes. It's a tricky balance I'm sure we all think about and deal with, especially in this digital age. I make myself put my camera away sometimes, no matter how badly I want to record something, so I can live in the moment as it happens. I never regret those times...[but] these observations gave me pause. How often am I so focused on the perfect shot with my kids that I miss the moment?"

When Should You Disconnect?

The fine line between what's worth documenting and what's not is a hard one to define. We immediately assume that the most important, the biggest, the most incredible moments are those that should be recorded. But it's these very moments that are best to experience live, with our full focus.

As religious-focused blogger Martin Kelley notes, "there are times where our presence is much more important than any documentation." (He had just surprised himself by reviewing the grainy, blurry photos he felt it necessary to take while watching a bride walk down the aisle. In retrospect, this was exactly the kind of moment that could have gone unrecorded.)

"Stop trying to live your own life vicariously. You're already there. You don't need to prove anything," says Kat Orphanides, while watching people recording a band's show instead of enjoying the music. In reality, it's easier said than done. But if you've ever felt a twinge of tech-induced guilt when you unplug from the web (how can I not Twitter what I just saw? Ooh, I need to take a picture of this!), then you're bordering on having merged completely with the machine. Maybe it's time to remind yourself that it's OK to just live - well, at least sometimes. You may not have proof of everything you experienced in your amazing life, but that life might be a more fulfilling one in the end.

* Obviously, these statements refer to the parts of the world where modern technology like smartphones and broadband are common. The entire world does not have access to these things. I know.

** The very first web page is here, but it's only designated as a "web" page because it is hyperlinked to other pages using HTML markup. So was it really the first? Or did it spring into existence at the same time as the others? Is it really the beginning of the web?

Even more interesting is that the simultaneous media usage for men decreases the older they get, but for women it's the opposite. Up until the age of 40, it's the women who are the better multi-taskers. Amanda Welsh, head of research for IMMI, thought the trend was surprising, given the amount of sports-related programming on the web. What does this mean? She says that they're interpreting the data to mean that "women are more inclined to multi-task than men."

What About the Digital Natives?

Arguing against hard data is difficult, but we have to agree with Amanda - this information is surprising. It seems to support the age-old theory that women, because of their "natural" abilities as mothers and in running the household, have some sort of innate multi-tasking abilities that allow them to engage in different activities at the same time more often (and the subtext implies "better") than men.

But is that still accurate? We're not entirely sure. The ability to take part in different activities when surfing the web is something today's teens and young adults, aka the "millennials'" or "Generation Y," also reportedly do well. Because this generation grew up with the internet a part of their world from the day they arrived, multi-tasking while online just became a normal part of their existence - for both boys and girls. Surfing the net while instant messaging, listening to music, and/or watching TV, is something that this younger generation of internet users are known for. And since these millennials are a part of the age range (15-48) involved in this study, you would think their learned multi-tasking behavior would have some impact on the reported results. But Instead, the results seem to uphold the more traditional view about women and their multi-tasking abilities.

Then Again, Multi-tasking Could Be a Myth

This idea of multi-tasking being a skill to boast about is left over from the days when technology like desktop PCs and email systems were being integrated into the workplace. Suddenly, HR managers were looking for "multi-taskers" able to focus on several different aspects of the job at the same time. However, in later years, it's been discovered that multi-tasking is more myth than reality, since the human brain can only really focus on one thing at a time, no matter how many activities a person is engaged in. The new advice for increased productivity is to slack off, work simpler, and ditch multi-tasking altogether.

So perhaps women sit in the living room with notebook PCs on their lap more often than men, but let's be honest - they aren't multi-tasking. They're just tuning out the TV to engage in something more interesting instead; the internet.

The Noesis search engine (PDF) is different than regular search engines because it employs the use of semantics to help its users better shape their search queries. The results of this lead to better, more accurate, and more complete sets of search results. Those results can then be refined even further by Noesis' end users if necessary.

The goal of the Noesis project is to provide scientists working in the field of Atmospheric Science a way to better search through the "hidden web" of scientific catalogs that traditional search engines cannot reach. Because these catalogs are built using a standard vocabulary, the most efficient searches on the catalogs involve using specific terminology.

To create Noesis, researchers simply annotated those specific vocabulary terms with ontologies - the machine-readable definitions for the words that help computers understand the concept of the term and its relationship to other terms. Of course, annotations alone do not make a semantic web search engine. The ontologies must be coupled with a tool that's capable of searching through them. To that end, Noesis employs something they call the Ontology Interface Service (OIS), a SOAP-based web service interface to an inference engine. When a user performs a search, the OIS is also immediately searched for associated concepts. The Specializations and Generalizations discovered are returned in a tree structure which the user can navigate further. Synonyms and related terms are also shown, and, using checkboxes, they can be appended to the original query to refine it further.

Although the project was designed for use in one select area of science, its framework could easily be replicated in other scientific fields of study.

The Semantic Web: Better in Niches?

The main problem with the semantic web today is that the assignment of those above-mentioned ontologies - the pieces of code that allow machines to grasp meanings that humans innately understand - is that there's no solid way to automate their assignment. At the present time, no automatic or semi-automatic processes to do so have been achieved...at least, not to the point that a true vision of a new, intelligent web can be realized.

Most of the time, annotating web resources must be done using manually inserted bits of code placed into various web pages. Obviously, that's a challenge when you consider the size of the internet - it would be impossible to manually annotate this ever-growing resource. Unfortunately, without automated methodologies, a true semantic web will remain an unrealized dream.

However, in smaller communities, the semantic web can easily become a reality. Scientific data catalogs only represent small portions of the web as whole. Because of their limited size, manually annotating the resources they contain is a manageable feat. This is the case with Noesis. It shows there is promise for the semantic web after all - if only in small niches.

Image credit: rule100

As with the Internet Archive, the data in Zoetrope's database is a backup of the entire web, including those pages which have changed over time. But this archive won't be limited to the somewhat inconsistent periodic snapshots of the web's content like the Internet Archive offers. It will encompass everything.

Using the intuitive Zoetrope interface, a user could compare historical changes of various data through time by comparing snapshots of different pages on the web. Analyzing different, changing elements on web pages, side-by-side and over a period of time is downright difficult today - if not impossible. But Zoetrope makes it happen.

The process is done using Zoetrope "lenses" to draw boxes around elements, connect data from one site to another, and pull up charts of relevant data, all while manipulating a slider to scroll back and forth through time. That may sound hard, but if you watch this video, you'll see that it looks surprisingly easy.

For Everyone, Not Just The Computer Savvy

In a way, this project is similar to Google's new visualization API, which lets developers use historical web data to build charts, graphs, gadgets, and the like. However, where Google's tool is aimed at the technically savvy programmer, Zoetrope, on the other hand, is for the average user. Says Dan Weld, a UW computer science and engineering professor who worked on the project, "Zoetrope is aimed at the casual researcher. It's really for anyone who has a question."

As noted in the Washington University article on the project, example uses of Zoetrope could range from the basic: checking historical rankings of favorite players on a sports team, to the advanced: comparing daily air pollution levels in Beijing to number of world's records broken each day in the 2008 Olympics. 

"Your browser is really just a window into the Web as it exists today," said Eytan Adar, University of Washington computer science and engineering doctoral student who's also a co-author of the research paper on the project.

"When you search for something online, you're only getting today's results...This is really a new way to think about storing information on the Web."

The researchers hope to offer Zoetrope for free as early as next summer.

Image credits: Color, Torley; Others, University of Washington

The internet has not only impacted this last election, it has forever changed politics in America.

Please enjoy this flickr slideshow of what we saw last night - the election, as seen on the web:

Cooliris has always been one of our favorite web browser plugins as it re-imagines the entire experience of browsing through the web. Designed with surfing media in mind, the browser plugin lets you surf through a 3D wall of content and then zoom in and out on the images and videos found. The plugin doesn't work on all web sites yet, but several big names are already supported like Flickr, YouTube, Kodack, Amazon, Photobucket, Picasa, DeviantArt, Smugmug, MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, Google Images, and more. You can also Cooliris-enable your own web site with only a bit of code.

The iPhone App

Now, with the Cooliris iPhone application (iTunes link), the 3D media surfing experience has been delivered to the mobile web, too. For those familiar with the Cooliris browser plugin, the iPhone experience will be very familiar. The only difference is that you no longer need to use a mouse to move through the wall of media - you only need your finger.

Search

You're able to do Google searches with the iPhone app, so, if nothing more, Cooliris offers a unique way to to visually search the web using a Google-powered search engine. However, the Cooliris app also allows for searching other sites, too, including Flickr, Yahoo, SmugMug, and DeviantArt.

Discover

With the Discover feature, the app uses the iPhone's built-in GPS to detect your location in order to deliver personalized feeds for your locale. For example, here in the U.S., one of the categories available is for the U.S. Elections. Other countries will have their own local news featured here instead. As you read through the news in the Cooliris app, you can easily pull up a related story by "clicking" on the associated metadata the app displays. This lets you visit related web content without having to leave the Cooliris app to view the parent web site back in Safari. In other words, in addition to being a visual search engine, Cooliris is an alternative browser too.

You Have To Try This!

If before you felt that the Cooliris web browser plugin was cool, but wondered if it was all that useful, you'll definitely want to see it in use on the iPhone now and think again. The marriage of the 3D technology and the mobile web is the perfect combination. Cooliris seems as if it was designed just for the touchscreen iPhone.

This app represents what is only the first release for Cooliris on the iPhone. Later on, the app will include more features ported over from the web client as well as new features designed specifically for the iPhone. The company won't hint what those may be, but we're definitely going to stay tuned.

A new report by Carnegie Mellon University, authored by Aleecia McDonald and Lorrie Faith Cranor, states that online privacy policies take an average of 10 minutes to read. If every U.S. web user read the privacy policy at every site they went to, the time spent reading privacy policies would total 44.3 billion hours per year. Their recommendation? Regulation. They concluded that regulation might be necessary to "provide basic privacy protections."

Of course, you can imagine a lot of companies are not happy over this proposal, specifically those that take advantage of long privacy policies which they know no one reads. Online advertisers are the worst for abusing the average user's ignorance over how the internet works. They deploy behavioral targeting platforms that track users and their behavior across the net. Instructions for opting out of these programs may be found in the privacy policies, but few people take the time to read them and discover how to do so.

Cranor, who's also a member of the EFF, thinks that people shouldn't have to read these extensive privacy policies in order to protect themselves - the FTC should get involved and regulate if companies aren't willing to improve the readability of these online documents.

Should Privacy Policies Be Regulated?

If a privacy policy is long, does that mean it fails? We've seen the privacy policies now sent in the mail to us from our credit card companies. They aren't the most readable documents either, but they're legal.

Privacy policies today only seem to be there for the hyper-aware online citizen for whom privacy is a major concern. The rest of us just hear about the breaches of trust when one of those folks takes the time to read the long and boring legalize and then warns the rest of us of their findings.

The problem with privacy policies isn't just their length, though. Alissa Cooper, chief computer scientist at the Center for Democracy & Technology, argues that "It's not only that they're long, but they're also complicated. They're not really written for your average Internet user to understand them."

The average internet user? You mean those people who access the internet for twice a day for a total of 20 hours per month? The ones that spend less than one minute per page? Something tells us they're not going to read privacy policies no matter how clear and easy-to-understand they become.

Image Credits: Computer Eye, Mikey G. Ottowa; Cameras, Urbankudos

About UsableLogin

UsableLogin is a new application from Usable Security Systems which allows you to choose one simple code word and use it to log into any web site. That codeword can be as simple as your dog's name ("fido") or your favorite color ("pink"). Why is this possible? Because the code word is just one layer of security - behind the scenes, the software creates another password for you for the actual web site. The password it creates is strong, complex, and highly secure, just as we know passwords should be.

How It Works

To use UsableLogin, you simply download the browser plugin. After you pick a background image and your easy-to-recall pass code, the login box will appear consistently across every web site you access, whether that's Facebook or your bank.

Web sites can also choose to support UsableLogin by putting a small bit of JavaScript code on their site.

Here's what UsableLogin sign-in boxes look like:

When you log in to a web site, UsableLogin cryptographically combines your simple code word with secret data pulled from separate sources: your computer and Usable Security's servers. This data is combined to create a secure verifier which is used as your complex password. Your code word is never stored and web sites never see it.

UsableLogin can be used on any web site that accepts passwords. It will also work on any operating system and browser.

UsableLogin on Gmail

The Usable Login Dashboard

From the UsableLogin homepage, you can manage all your accounts and view your history - when you last logged on and from which computer. You can also authorize and deauthorize computers from this dashboard, so for example, if your laptop was lost or stolen, you could make sure that no one who got a hold of it could log in to your accounts.

Security Made Easy

Ask any I.T. professional about "multi-factor authentication" and they'll tell you how much more secure it is against attacks. Think of it this way: on your front door you have a doorknob with a lock - that's the extent of protection you have today. Add a deadbolt to the mix, and even though your door's lock is so much easier to pick, the extra lock (the deadbolt) makes it much harder to get into your house. That's multi-factor authentication. (OK, it's actually much more complicated than that, but that's the easiest way I could think to explain it.)

If you want to learn more about UsableLogin, you can watch their entire presentation from DEMO08 here:

UsableLogin will become available in early 2009. You can sign up on their homepage to be notified when it's released.

With social networking sites such as Facebook, Myspace, and Bebo, we find it a little confusing as to why you wouldn't just use their search engines to find a random friend or two. Nevertheless, BuddyStumbler aims to fill that space and help you stumble upon new friends. You can search for new people by interests, usernames, or "buddies of". Type in your keywords, sex, age, and zip code and BuddyStumbler will do the rest. Results will link to the user's BuddyStumbler profile and any of their instant messaging handles or social networks such as Flickr. All in all, you're guaranteed to find a new friend or two via BuddyStumbler.

Ticket Stumbler

Ticket Stumbler could turn out to be a time and money saver for some. Essentially, Ticket Stumbler aims to help you compare, find, and purchase tickets for sporting events. From regular tickets to season packages, you can find tickets for the following sporting events:

• NFL
• NCAA Football
• MLB
• NLH
• NBA

StumbleAudio

StumbleAudio is one of the ultimate music discovery services with over 2 million tracks availble to stumble through. Check out their charts for the most liked and disliked albums. See what other users are listening to the most or the most stumbled genres. StumbleAudio makes a great addition to other services such as Last.FM, Pandora, and iLike for music discovery.

Most of the Web at Your Fingertips

While none of these sites could replace StumbleUpon, they fill different niches that StumbleUpon may not be the best service for. We recommend them all for discovering the best and most interesting sections of the web. Let us know what else you're using to "stumble" through great sections of the web.