From: “Google Shoots For The Moon - Forbes.com“:
The company on Thursday announced the first 10 teams of competitors in its $30 million contest to send a spacecraft back to the moon to gain greater insights into the solar system and to find new sources of clean energy.
More info is available on the Google Lunar X Prize web site.
Google. Space. Clean Energy. $30M. What’s not to like?
Via Digg.
From Brian Suda’s “XFN encoding, extraction, and visualizations“:
In this article I will take a good look at XFN - the microformat for describing relationships between people. I will look briefly at what it is and the basic markup needed to add the information to your sites, before then going into depth, looking at the benefits you can get from that data by extracting it and using it in different ways. Extracting the data is easier than you think - there is probably a library for your favorite language already! If not, there are also some web services that could do the job that I’ll show you below.
Via a Microformat tweet.
From “Platform Internationalization“:
… we have a quick way for applications to integrate with users in new locales. We are now sending a param “fb_sig_locale” to all canvas pages that signals the locale set for the visiting user. Feel free to use this to begin localizing.
Good thing to know, since Facebook is now available in Spanish, with French and German to come shortly.
From “The future of XML“:
The wheels of progress turn slowly, but turn they do. The crystal ball might be a little hazy, but the outline of XML’s future is becoming clear. The exact time line is a tad uncertain, but where XML is going isn’t. XML’s future lies with the Web, and more specifically with Web publishing. […] Word processors, spreadsheets, games, diagramming tools, and more are all migrating into the browser. This trend will only accelerate in the coming year as local storage in Web browsers makes it increasingly possible to work offline. But XML is still firmly grounded in Web 1.0 publishing, and that’s still very important.
Passthru from Slashdot. Great read from IBM.
From “OpenSocial or OpenGadget? - ReadWriteWeb“:
Steve O’Hear (who edits our digital lifestyle blog last100) has an interesting post on his ZDNet blog that questions whether Google’s OpenSocial initiative is at all about data portability, or if in fact it really just about widget standardization. O’Hear quotes heavily from a recent article by Marc Canter, who is a strong advocate for open standards and data portability, that ran on CNet.
I see the same issue with Facebook’s JS Client Library.
I love client-side technologies, but I’m increasingly thinking that the propagation of such libraries is calculated by the providers more in terms of securing data and activity custodianship, as an alternative to truly opening one’s data APIs, rather than with scalability and processing decentralization in mind, like some argue.
It’s not a bad thing by any stretch, but I’m not sure associating them with true openness and data portability is entirely appropriate.
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