Posts from March 2007

Last week I started a new weekly podcast covering news and trends in the web technology industry. I plan to sit down with different newsmakers and experts each week to examine the changing state of web technology and hopefully capture a snapshot of how this changing world affects our lives and livelihood. Niall Kennedy's Podcast is a bit like an extended conversation on the topics I like to cover on Niall Kennedy's Weblog. I'll post short summaries to my blog for each new episode, but if you're interested in full write-ups and enclosures you should subscribe to the podcast feed....

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Adobe released early bits of its next big product bet on Monday morning, a web and desktop hybrid code-named Apollo. Apollo is the first child born out of the Adobe-Macromedia merger of April 2005, bringing together the desktop strength of Adobe PDF combined Macromedia's web-savvy Flash and Apple's web browser engine. Apollo will continue to receive heavy marketing from Adobe building towards a 1.0 launch in the fall. In this post I'll break down the components of Adobe's Apollo framework, identify opportunities for application development, and compare the promised features against other software offerings. What is Apollo? Apollo combines...

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This month's CSO Magazine features an interview with MySpace security czar Hemanshu Nigam. The article discusses the wealth of available information about the site's 150 million members for both good and bad purposes, and ways MySpace is working to clean up and protect its community and brand. Parent company News Corp. wants to create a safe community attractive to new users and advertisers, yet MySpace members are so active and so varied it's not always an easy task. Nigam formerly worked for heavy-handed intellectual property enforcers Microsoft and the MPAA. Interesting excerpts No senior citizens MySpace members can no longer...

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Ask.com's local search product AskCity launched new tools last night that allow searchers to define the scope of a search by drawing on a map. Ask has always been focused on liberal search queries you might ask a concierge and this new search feature again puts the user in charge while abstracting some complexities of local search. In my example search above I searched for coffee near The Palace Hotel, a popular web conference spot. A search for the hotel put a marker in the middle of Market Street, but it didn't matter in the case of my search. I...

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Gadget platforms have many levels of integration and customization beyond a metadata wrapper and some markup. Beginners and tinkerers might stick to the basics, but some gadget authors go beyond the plain essentials and add support for multiple languages, tabbed views, and specify any requirements a gadget may expect. In yesterday's post I provided an overview of the Google Gadgets ecosystem, detailing the types of content and authors producing Google universal gadgets. Today I'll dive into developer features and observed implementations. Language support Content types Gadget height Top built-in libraries Gadgets produced by Google Extra requirements Summary Language support Google...

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Last week the Google Gadgets team released page view numbers for gadgets in its directory, giving outsiders their glimpse of gadget activity across Google Personalized Homepage, Google Desktop, and syndicated throughout the web through Google Gadgets For Your Page. Over the weekend I crawled the entire Google Gadget directory, collecting information about every listed gadget to create a better and more complete understanding of a widget/gadget ecosystem including its level of health, geographic diversity of authors and supported users, popular categories, and some of the most popular gadget programming methods (just to name a few). In this post I'll share...

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