Overheard: Common Craft video explains Google docs in plain English

The challenge with this video was to drive home the idea that email attachments are a poor way of sharing digital documents. Lee LeFever, Video: Google Docs in Plain English

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Overheard: Web 2.0 metrics

Page IQ (interactive quotient) is the number of unique visitors who take some action on a Web site (clicking, scrolling down, entering information) divided by the total number of visitors to the site.

Overheard: Microsoft in Siberia

Microsoft is discussing plans to build a data center in Irkutsk, one of the largest cities in Siberia. Microsoft Plans Data Center in Siberia

Cheap electricity and moving the datacenter someplace cold may prove to be a good solution until we have more efficient hardware. Or maybe Siberia is just where they’re sending the Vista developers.

Overheard: The network is the computer

When the network becomes as fast as the processor, the computer hollows out and spreads across the network. Eric Schmidt, 1993

Mr. Schmidt worked for Sun when he wrote that — now he works at Google.

Overheard: The desktop is dead. Long live the cloud.

The desktop is dead. Welcome to the Internet cloud, where massive facilities across the globe will store all the data you’ll ever use. George Gilder, The Information Factories

According to the Wall Street Journal:

Google is preparing a service that would let users store on its computers essentially all of the files they might keep on their personal-computer hard drives — such as word-processing documents, digital music, video clips and images, say people familiar with the matter. The service could let users access their files via the Internet from different computers and mobile devices when they sign on with a password, and share them online with friends. It could be released as early as a few months from now.

Now you can forget to back up stuff on your gDrive too.

Overheard: Mobile business model about to change

Google is going to put serious pressure on the wireless communications industry to change their business models from subscription based survival to active air time marketing based on their numbers of subscribers. Gary E. Sattler, Android: Google’s answer to open source mobile

Note to self: Need to find out more about “active air time marketing” and what the business model will look like.

Overheard: OpenSocial — For those of you who are tired of throwing chickens

Facebook isn’t threatened — for now. Application developers are going to go to where the heat is, and that heat is red hot at Facebook. Charlene Li, Google OpenSocial will (hopefully) make social apps more relevant

Used to be that Facebook was a place where you poked people and threw sheep or chickens at them. Since Google opened it up, there are new applications being launched every day. Widgets, move over. It won’t be long till those social apps jump out of Facebook and land on a web site near you. Right now Facebook is the wild wild west. If you haven’t visited lately and looked around at the business groups, you’re missing out on the next revolution.

Overheard: Linus Torvalds looks ahead at 2008

One of the things I personally am really interested in is the move over to SSD (solid-state drives) disks. I’m a huge believer in reducing latency, and some of the better SSDs are changing the whole game when it comes to access latency, which in turn has potentially big impacts on the kernel — and while they are currently expensive enough to be a pretty minor player, that is certainly looking to change in 2008 and later. Linus Torvalds, Torvalds on where Linux is headed in 2008 (article by Charles Babcock)

Overheard: Creating the semantic graph with RDF and OWL

Now when another application such as App A comes along and looks at App B’s data it can reference App B’s ontology to see for itself what was intended by the “has team” link — it can see exactly what that link implies and what can be inferred by it. It understands how to use App B’s data set, and how to correctly make new links using that data set which are consistent with the meaning of the links it contains. Nova Spivack, Defining the Semantic Graph — What is it Really?

This is the real point of the Semantic Web open standards — RDF enables data to be represented in a database independent manner, and OWL enables the semantic of that data to be defined in an open machine-understandable way so that other applications can use that data without having to first be programmed to do so. As long as they speak RDF/OWL, applications can use any data they find and lookup the meaning of any data they need to use so they can use the data appropriately.

Overheard: More 3D printer magic

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This seems very surreal…but it’s real. The future is now.