Africa : Victim without war.

Continent is struggling between devil of drought and the deep blue seas of floods.Activities in rich industrial countries play vital role in spoiling our ecosystem and Africa pays for it having almost no role in it.

BBC writes:

“Climate change is already affecting people across Africa and will wipe out efforts to tackle poverty there unless urgent action is taken, a report says.”

[News link : Read full story here]

Indian presence in WEB 2.0.

IT and Indian presence,that is obvious to find.In case of so-called-second-boom,It took time to find Indian WEB 2.0 startups(dedicated one product startups).Two startups came under my purview this week.

(1) Toufee

Toufee is a new WYSIWYG online Flash movie builder that aims to make it easy for non technical users to quickly create impressive multimedia items for embedding in web pages. Some of the key features include drag and drop element placement, good control over presentation timing and a text-to-speech engine with six relatively human voices. I think there is a lot of potential here – there’s no shortage of people who would like to make Flash presentations without complicated or expensive desktop software.[From Techcrunch]

This is really good tool to use.Only non-technical thing I wonder is name of the comapny/product “Toufee”.Search for most weired names and you will end up on one or another WEB 2.0 startup.Creativity in product ideas gives us new WEB 2.0 products everyday but I don’t understand this part of creativity i.e. naming convention for new product and company.

In fact you will find domain name creator like this.

“74winks,urburn,6monkeys,roadband,3lists,olights,logpiles,oomia,treamroad,7squares,net74,ire28,ehind89,afemarks,opble”

[Generated by above domain name generator]

I understand craziness behind new products but at least we should come up with meaningful names(might be Toufee has some meaning but I am dumb to catch it. ).Again no offense with excellent product Toufee,they did great job.

(2) Slideshare

As name suggests,its about sharing presentation slides.SlideShare is a free service for sharing presentations and slideshows. You can upload your PowerPoint and OpenOffice presentations, tag them, embed them into your blog or website, browse others’ presentations, and comment on individual slides. It’s a great way to share your ideas with others, or to learn from other people. And it’s free.

Slideshare is the work of Uzanto – a small startup based in Mountain View, CA and New Delhi, India.
This is another great tool.Indian teachers (having skills in IT tools) should use it extensively to spread their knowledge.

“Slideshare” has meaning.Even naive web user (which is most likely situation with Indian web sphere) can also understand the use of tool.

Two good startups from India.Nice work.

Enjoy interactive surfing.

GRDDL : Specs. released.

Content creation should not be recondite. It should not be this bizarre arcana that only experts and gold-plated computer science gurus can do.

—Brendan Eich, Innovators of the Net

GRDDL is a machanism for Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages.It is a technique to obtain data from XML documents.The way in which GRDDL empowers authors of web content can be considered somewhat analogous to allowing a non-native speaker to learn the spoken form of a new language first, before attempting to master its written form – rather than trying to learn both simultaneously.

Future of web applications is changing rapidly.2006 is a year of loosely coupled netjungle(mashups) but advent of Semantic web will make shift towards WEB 3.0 and beyond.
Take a look at few examples explaning power of semnatic web adn GRDDL.

• Scheduling: Jane is trying to coordinate a meeting with friends.She uses GRDDL to extract data from each of their calendar pages and combine it in a single model.She then writes a query to filter the events down to those dates when all of them are in the same city.
• Healthcare: Kayode uses a single-purpose XML vocabulary as the main representation format for computer-based patient record. He uses GRDDL to be able to able to query these records both in their XML vocabulary and as RDF, without managing a dual representation.
• Buying experience: Stephan wishes to buy a guitar and visits a site offering a review service. He uses GRDDL to aggregate reviews and profiles of the reviewers in order to select the reviews he can trust.
• Global Library: Adeline designs a system to allow here company to streamline the publication of Technical Reports. The system relies on shared templates for publishing documents and a GRDDL transformation to build an up-to-date RDF index used to create an authoritative repository.
• Education: The Technical University of Marcilly decides to use a wiki with metadata embedded in its pages to tag, structure, navigate and query the resources of the wiki. GRDDL is used to extract these metadata as RDF to feed the different tools of the system.
• WEBAPPs: Voltaire has setup a weblog engine that utilizes XForms for editing entries. He also provides a GRDDL transformation that extracts an RDF description of the XForms that other client applications can use to update existing entries using the identified service URIs, and perform other such services.
• Open archive intiative: The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) publishes an XML schema that universities can use to publish their archived documents. This schema also identifies a GRDDL transform to apply to all its instance documents in order to extract their Creative Commons license.

Explore more about examples here.

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