ReadWriteWeb

From embedded sensors to high-frequency stock trading to everyday mobile Web applications, the race is on for technologists to build the most efficient systems for quickly streaming large sets of data from one device to another. Sometimes the language that data is communicated in can come with high costs in terms of efficiency. Today the Web's most venerable standards body, the Word Wide Web Consortium (W3C), announced official support for a new standardized data format for super-efficient transmission of data.

Efficient XML Interchange, or EXI, is described as a very compact representation of information in XML (extensible markup language). EXI is so efficient that the W3C says it has been found to improve up to 100-fold the performance, network efficiency and power consumption of applications that use XML, including but not limited to consumer mobile apps. It is particularly useful on devices with low memory or low bandwidth.

James Clark, technical lead for the World Wide Web Consortium's XML activity, published a blog post today about the perceived competition between JSON and XML. Twitter and Foursquare both recently dropped support for XML, opting to use JSON exclusively. Clark doesn't see XML going away, but sees it less and less as a Web technology. "I think the Web community has spoken," Clark concludes. "And it's clear that what it wants is HTML5, JavaScript and JSON." Clark cites a few particular reasons why JSON is winning the hearts and minds of web developers.

To keep up with the growth of cloud computing and virtualization, networks keep evolving. But unlike Twitter's Trending Topics, IT budgets don't scale up. In fact one of the major initiatives in many IT shops is creatively reduce their own expense.

To get to a scalable cloud infrastructure where costs are contained, it sounds like the network industry is going to see a time where a "Linux" arrives on the scene. An open source alternative to building networks may disrupt the networking landscape and give network admins an open source network operating system.

Today is an important day in the history of politics and technology - the US Senate voting record is finally available in machine-readable XML (extensible markup language) format. Mashups, vote tracking and comparison applications, will now be welcomed in the front door of Congress as first class technologies.

On May 1st South Carolina's Senator, Jim DeMint, officially asked the Senate Rules Committee to make the data available and just four days later the feed is here. Not everyone is happy about about the information being made publicly available like this, however.

Editor's note:This guest post was written by Aaron Strout and John Cass, two marketing professionals who are monitoring how the semantic web will help companies and marketers help consumers.

What is the semantic web, you wonder? Don't worry, you're not alone. The term "semantic web," or "Web 3.0" as some folks have started calling it, means different things to different people. In this post, we'll clarify what it is and why we think it will play an important role in the world of marketing.