Tag Archives: web 2.0

What Geni is Missing…

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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The (already!) multi-million dollar startup Geni has a lot going for it. It taps into the obsessive “art” of genealogy – once you get going, you can’t stop. It has tons of money (from 0 to a 100MM in two months!) and a huge work-force. Unlike all other genealogy websites: it doesn’t really need maintenance. Family trees are created by the users, and maintained by the users. End of story.

But Geni is missing something – the big picture. I can create a family tree and propagate it as well as I can, and sure, I can invite anyone ON the tree to join in the fun – just put their email in the box, and they’re invited to join the family tree and start expanding. But the problem is, it’s lacking the one thing that makes genealogy so exciting: finding someone new.

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My.Netscape: Two Years too Late?

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Pardon the word-play, but the “all-new” My.Netscape launching tomorrow may very well be two years too late. When talking about a highly-dynamic market like the social web, it’s important to be on-the-ball with what you offer and when you offer it. It’s a cut-throat market, and being a month late can make all the difference – hence this prediction: “My.Netscape 2.0” isn’t going to make the cut.

For one thing, Netscape doesn’t offer anything that’s not already there, provided by the now more-popular social web homepage services, like NetVibes, PageFlakes, Live, Yahoo!, and Google. The most important thing to keep in mind is: users have already left. If they have no reason to switch back to My.Netscape, why should they? They can get equal/better services elsewhere on the web, they’ve already configured them, and they’re more or less happy there.

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How Pioneers in Technology are Different

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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While reading Amy Armitage of Lunartic’s interview with Eric Meyer, the biggest advocate of CSS, it became obvious that there is something completely different about pioneers in computers and technology. Although we can’t testify to having personally spoken to explorers and inventors in other fields, we think it’s highly unlikely that they’re as down-to-earth normal as the “geeks” and “nerds” that bring computing and technology to the next stage.

Reading through the interview, you can’t honestly tell that this is man is the epitome of what some would call “geek;” after all, you can’t write six books on a topic without being some kind of half-human half-android hybrid, can you? But geek or not, here’s a guy that lives in Cleveland, has a BA in History, and had his own radio show for an entire decade.

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The Need for Creating Tag Standards

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Web 2.0, blogging, and tags all go together, hand-in-hand. However, while RPC standards exist for blogs and the pinheads boggle over the true definition of a “blog,” no one has a cast-in-iron standard for tags. Depending on where you go and who you ask, tags are implemented differently, and even defined in their own unique way. Even more importantly, tags were meant to be universal and compatible: a medium of sharing and conveying info across the internet — the very embodiment of a semantic web. Unfortunately, they’re not. Far from it, tags create more discord and confusion than they do minimize it.

To Space or Not to Space, that is the Question

This one is probably the most obvious obstacle and the most destructive when it comes to tallying tag popularity or making those pretty tag clouds: Can tags have spaces in them or not?! If tags don’t/shouldn’t have spaces, then what do you do with multi-word tags that you just can’t shorten? Do you replace the spaces with underscores, dashes, or just take ’em out? Does it matter?

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The New & Improved Google Translate

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Everyone’s favorite search-engine/social-networking multi-billion dollar corporation is at it again. Following the addition of several new features to the Gmail platform earlier this week, Google has also revamped certain portions of its language tools – in beta of course. It’s not available for all languages, nor is it in a place where most casual users would find it, but Google’s newest feature makes online translation of websites and documents a bit more enjoyable.

The trick is – use the Arabic. About a month ago, Google launched its brand-new (beta) English-to-Arabic and Arabic-to-English translation service, making it the first free online translation tool that actually gives decent results… of sorts. At any rate, that’s another story for another day; right now, it’s the (“Web 2.0”) technology we care about: Dynamic switching between source and destination languages on a translated webpage.

For instance, here’s our “WordPress-in-the-Name Issues” story from a couple of weeks ago in Arabic; it’s ideal because of it’s more “natural” language and glaring lack of code boxes, technospeak, and general all-around esoteric content. If you understand Arabic – ignore the grammar, it’s really bad. If you don’t, that’s ok, it doesn’t matter.

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