Law X.0

20 New Web Projects to Change the World

Check out Donny Shaw's (Open Congress) list. [JH]

Do You Want a Widgenie?

Not quite “the all-powerful data visualizer" Widgenie claims to be, Mike Gunderlay notes that Widgenie's "process is terribly simple, and the resulting charts are attractive." Read his review on Web Worker Daily, Widgenie Helps Visualize Data, and watch the service for some forthcoming features. [JH]

Create Content Once, Broadcast to Multiple Web Destinations

Aliza Sherman has a great Web Worker Daily post on tools you can use to aggregate your social networking sites for the purpose of broadcasting a message to multiple places. Sherman calls them "social aggregation broadcasting tools" (SABTs) and categorizes the available tools into active, passive, integrated, and narrow SABTs. Very helpful. [JH]

Blogs and Wikis and 3D, Oh My!

Interesting article from Inside Higher Ed: "At Web 2.0 conference, participants delve into academic blogs (are they worthwhile or a waste of time?) and Second Life (is it worthwhile or a waste of bandwidth?)."  [RJ]

Everything is (and Remains) Beta

The Museum of Modern Betas, which track Web 2.0 beta launches, reports that over 90% of the sites reviewed are still in beta. The top five most popular betas from their list of Most Popular 100 Betas are

1. flickr
2. netvibes
3. kuler
4. zamzar
5. delicious

See also Hot 100 Betas (as measured by the number of bookmarks at del.icio.us added within the last 14 days). Google, by the way, has launched more beta services than Yahoo and Microsoft combined.

Hat tip to Web Worker Daily. [JH]

W3C Launches Group to Explore Role of Mobile Technology in Bridging Digital Divide

From the press release: W3C invites participation in a new group chartered to explore the potential of mobile technology to help bridge the digital divide. The Mobile Web For Social Development (MW4D) Interest Group will study the issues that rural communities and underprivileged populations face in accessing information and communication technology. [JH]

Knight Foundation Awards Timothy Berners-Lee $350,000 for Transparency in Journalism Project

Details on Law Librarian Blog. [JH]

SPARQL Tutorial

From the Understanding SPARQL page hosted by IBM:

The Semantic Web, a knowledge-centric model for the Web's future, supplements human-readable documents and XML message formats with data that can be understood and processed by machines. SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL) is to the semantic Web as SQL is to a relational database. It allows applications to make sophisticated queries against distributed RDF databases, and is widely supported by many competing frameworks. This tutorial demonstrates its use through the example of a team tracking and journaling system for a virtual company.

In this tutorial. This tutorial introduces SPARQL and the data formats it is based on. It also covers the RDF, RDF Schema, OWL, and Turtle knowledge representation languages. With these languages, you build ontologies or domain models. For the example used throughout this tutorial, you'll build the ontologies and queries for a journaling and booking system to produce semantically tagged twitter-like micro-blogs. You'll query those blog entries to find those in your company with the skills to make up the team for a project that you are bidding for.

When you complete this tutorial, you will know how to produce RDF and OWL ontologies in the Turtle language. You will know how to host the ontologies using Jena and Joseki and you will know how to query them using SPARQL.

Hat tip to LISNews. [JH]

Simple Spark Catalogs Web Apps

Simple Spark catalogs some 8,500 of the web apps. Each application is sorted by category and subcategory, and displayed with a brief screenshot and description. Users can also add reviews and ratings, and developers (or anyone else) can contribute additional information.

Hat tip to Web Worker Daily. [JH]

The Privacy Toolbox

Check out this list of 100 guides and resources for keeping your personal information safe. [JH]

Professional Widgets with CSS, Dom and Ajax

If you want to create your own widgets, pre-order this book now! [JH]

Professional Widgets with CSS, Dom and Ajax
by Rajesh Lal

List Price: $39.95
Paperback: 350 pages
Publisher: Wiley; Pap/Onl edition (May 12, 2008)
ISBN-10: 0470246642
ISBN-13: 978-0470246641

Book Description: Professional Widgets with CSS, DOM and Ajax is the first guide to building web widgets - tiny applications that can be embedded in a web page or on the desktop and have exploded in popularity in recent months. Inside, award-winning programmer Rajesh Lal provides readers with a methodology for building widgets using standards like CSS and DOM to create widgets that work anywhere. Next he guides readers though the creation of widgets using several popular toolkits and frameworks including Yahoo! Widgets, Silverlight with PopFly, Google Web Toolkit, Microsoft Web Gadgets and more.

Professional Widgets with CSS, DOM and Ajax is heavy on step-by step examples enabling readers to get up to speed and begin building widgets quickly and easily. Topics include:

• Understanding the architecture, design considerations and implementation of Web Widgets
• Working with Data Providers XML Web Services
• Using Ajax to provide the backbone and medium for widgets
• Presentation with CSS
• Browser compatibility
• Programming with Ajax Libraries and Frameworks
• Security, Yes Security

30 Google Apps You’ve Never Heard Of

Well, not really but that's the title of Laura Milligan's article which is useful for listing Google Apps and providing brief descriptions of ones you may not know. I, for example, didn't know Google's News Archive Search existed. Here's Milligan's description of it:

Archive Search: Forget dusting off old microfiche and microfilm from the library to discover archived photos and newspapers. Google’s Archive Search goes back 200 years and “can automatically create timelines which show selected results from relevant time periods” to augment your search.

NB: Google Answer is listed but that app died several years ago. [JH]

The Web Development Cheat Sheet Cheat Sheet

Check out Top 100 Lists of Web Development Cheat Sheets by VirtualHosting's Jessica Hupp. The list is broken down into the follow categories:

• General cheat sheet lists
• Client-side cheat sheet for CSS, HTML, etc.
• Server-Side cheat sheets for PHP, Python, Ruby, etc.
• Blogging
• Others

Hat tip to LISNews. [JH]

HTML5 Working Draft Released by W3W

The W3C has released the Working Draft of HTML5 (Jan. 22, 2008). In this version, new features are introduced to help Web application authors, new elements are introduced based on research into prevailing authoring practices, and special attention has been given to defining clear conformance criteria for user agents in an effort to improve interoperability. See also HTML Design Principles (Nov. 23, 2007) which describes the set of guiding principles used by the HTML Working Group for the development of HTML5.

Hat tip to LISNews. [JH]

40 Excellent Resources for Online Publishers

Lar-Christian Simonsen is writing a mini series that highlights excellent resources for online publishers, In the first part, he looked at forums and social media sites. In the second part, he takes it one step further and recommends some of the most useful blogs and websites containing information which is relevant for publishers. See also 17 Specialty Search Engines Every Web Developer Should Bookmark. [JH]

MacManus Identifies 10 Semantic Apps to Watch

Including several that are still in private beta in the must-read blog, Read/WriteWeb. [JH]

Software's Future: Melding the Web and the Desktop

Check out this interesting Knowledge(at)Wharton article about the future of software. [JH]

Directory of Experimental Library Tools

RSS4Lib is maintaining a Directory of Experimental Library Tools which links to library web pages that list experimental, beta, or trial web tools and services. [JH]