Back in the old days (maybe in Web 0.9) Analog, the popular web analysis program, automatically added a ‘Valid HTML’ button at the bottom of each report page it produced. This was before the W3 Consortium took up the banner of validation, so the button was provided by a third-party site (webtechs.com). Either through a ‘clerical error’ or an invoice not paid the domain name being used to supply the image lapsed - and it was then taken over by someone else who decided to add in a completely inappropriate picture with the same filename.

If we move forward to the present day, then in Web 2.0 the idea of bringing in content from other sources is the distinct flavour of the month. In some cases this is still just images (for badges), but the norm is either to have RSS feeds (essentially bringing in HTML code, usually with no filtering …

As I was coming to terms with the harsh reality of being awake at the end of last week, I caught an appeal on behalf of the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) on the radio. It set me to thinking again (with the aid of coffee) how they could benefit from building a badge/widget response network.

The typical patterns for badges/widgets are either to provide ongoing functionality (e.g. Flickr badges or Google Adsense) or to offer something time-limited for a specific campaign. For someone like the DEC where the timescales are compressed the second option isn’t really worth pursuing. They do have a Rapid Response Network for more traditional media outlets, e.g the main television and radio networks, the national newspapers, etc.

I think they could benefit enormously from providing a badge/widget that is available all the time. If there’s an appeal happening then content connected with that is delivered, otherwise …

One feature of Web 2.0 sites is the opportunity for others to piggy-back on the functionality or content in order to build new services that the original owners hadn’t contemplated or didn’t want to pursue. So for example someone interested in running a music website (err, for instance me) can sign up to the Amazon Web Services which will allow them to perform searches on the Amazon product database and display the results on their own website, etc. The theory is that Amazon increases it’s visibility to those interested in buying, whilst the music website doesn’t need to worry about building a huge database and can get commission payments without being involved in the messy e-commerce business. You might also have come across talk about mashups (I’ll be posting about some new mashup tools in the near future), these use similar technologies.

Much of the focus has been about …

Ironically as I was starting to write this post I had a quick check in my Gmail spam folder and found an email starting:
Dear PayPal customer!

As part of our security measures, we regularly screen activity in the
PayPal system. We recently contacted you after noticing an issue on your
account.We requested information from you for the following reason: …
Well apart from not having a PayPal account, I’m certainly suspicious of anyone asking me to go to something other than the expected url and even if it did I would be very wary. Unfortunately you’re probably familiar with this type of scam and have a similar careful response.

And as if on cue I’ve just received a Security Bulletin from Microsoft which contains a digital signature so that I can verify that it was sent by them.

Phishing has effectively ruled out the use of emails to customers in the …

There’s a buzz in the web developer community over the new Yahoo! Pipes service - it’s been flagged up on O’Reilly Radar and Read/Write Web. It’s not as pretty as GoogleMaps but more significant in what it can allow you to do.

As the name suggests it is more to do with the plumbing behind the scenes than enhancing the user experience. However there are many exciting possibilities that it opens up - bringing content together from disparate websites and then combining them until you have something that could be feed into your own site.

The idea is borrowed from the pipes and filters functionality offered in Unix - take the information coming out of one process and feed it into another. Yahoo! Pipes applies that paradigm to the Internet. You start off …

There’s a specialised human rights search engine that’s been launched - Hurisearch - involving most of the larger players in that field, and offering the opportunity for small organisations to join in.

Given the recent announcements about Google’s customised search offering I was anticipating that it would be built on the back of that technology. Instead it’s a service that has been developed over the last 3 years by FAST - an enterprise search company.

The timing of the two announcements though has the perennial development debate whirring away in the back of my mind - when is it better to use a ’shrink-wrapped’ solution or to ‘roll your own’?

In this case there’s an interesting fact tucked away in the Hurisearch documentation - they need $187,000 a year to keep the service going. Given the prominence …