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The Web's Edge -- peering into the future

Is the venerable PC dead?

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Category: The Web's Edge -- peering into the future
Published on Monday, 23 January 2012 15:20

Could this be the year the PC starts it slow death?

Predictions are that more Android phones will be sold this year than pcs.   PC shipments have flatlined after a 35 year climb in sales. 

Whether that plays out or not, you can be sure that the market share of smart devices is much more diversified now, and the PC is just another player.   Already, iPads represent a market share that is threatening rivals and smart phones are able to do much of the web browsing we all love to do.

It is not longer useful to think of the computer world as pc's and mainframes.  It is more useful to think of computing devices as something you carry around, supplemented by PC's for older or more complex tasks.

The PC industry is heading for collapse

IBM inventor: PC is dead

The Desktop PC Is Dead--Long Live the Desktop

Hotel Maps -- search price, quality by map

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Category: The Web's Edge -- peering into the future
Published on Sunday, 08 January 2012 21:23

Has this ever happened to you?

You have an appointment in a city you have never been in and are looking for a hotel nearby.

On that is comfortably priced, but not too trashy?

HotelMaps.com shows your selected city with icons with room rates and hotel star ratiMaybe you have a trade convention and want to see how far you are going to have to walk or go by taxi to get to the hall.

Sleections choices

It searches what seems like a couple dozen sites so that it doesn't miss anything  -- the names fly by on the screen, so you get to know what is going on in your search search.

Don't like what you see.   The icons stay there even if you decide to select a nearby city. 

Since the map is served up by Google, you can switch to the street view and get a good feel for the surroundings.

This takes the vertical search market into a new level of usefulness and "that was something I have always wanted."

 Give HotelMaps.com a try.  Let me know what you think about it.

CiteLighter -- the new woven web

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Category: The Web's Edge -- peering into the future
Published on Thursday, 05 January 2012 16:07

With all the new sites coming out daily, you probably missed Citelighter.  It, after all, didn't offer much that you were looking for.

Unless of course you wanted a good understanding of where the web is going. 

The site, designed to help students and other build research into a term paper or the like, is an amazing stew of web technologies.

Sure, you can highlight and save quotes from relevant web pages (not so clever of a technology anymore.)  Sure it captures the reference and lets you choose APA, ALA or Chicago styles.

Sure, it lets you notify friends ( after all we are on the social web) -- and fosters team work.

It also pastes all of your reference into a document and lets you build your own thoughts and writings around it.

But, the real difference here is that is dumps all of this stuff into a formatted word document with footnotes and references.

What's left for you to do?  Put the pretty polish on your words.

The key here is tying diverse technologies together.  I think this is where the web will shine in the next few years.  Not those web sites that give you a calendar, or an online processor.  The shining web sites will be the ones that go through your work process and

  • simplify it,
  • automate it,
  • and improve upon it.

After all, isn't that what technology was always suppose to do?

Even if you will never use it, watch the video.  Then use  Citelighter as a yardstick the next time someone tells you she has the greatest new site on the web.

 

 

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Helioid -- searching incrementally (Mashups)

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Category: The Web's Edge -- peering into the future
Published on Sunday, 08 January 2012 20:55

Coming in fifth place in the 2011 API Mashup Contest, this search engine mashup gives a new twist to searching incrementally. 

Type in "rice" for instance, and the engine returns results with a list of about eight categories.  Now, you have the option of

  • hiding some of those,
  • viewing results for only one,
  • seeing more categories, 
  • seeing the results by site, and
  • sharing the results (I suppose this is for use when you have your results better refined.)
Each of the entries that are returned has a colored dot to show you which category it belongs in.
 
What interests me about this is the continuing work that is going into mashing up search APIs. I don't feel that the web has come up with a good incremental search engine yet, but Helioid shows what can be done with the state of things.
 
Why don't we have a good incremental search engine yet?  
 
The engines I have used have a tendency to get you lost if you have been drilling down several times.  What is needed is bread crumbs to find you way back. As well, we need a better way of seeing where we are in the overall search -- in case we want to go back up a level or two and correct a fork that we didn't quite do right.
 
Give Helioid.com a try and let me know your thoughts.
 
 

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