Another blog bites the dust

I have read “Beneath the Metadata” as well as its reply by Dave Weinberger.

I’ve also read Thomas Vander Wal’s response.

I personally think that folksonomies are not here to replace taxonomies.

If Elaine fears the use of folksonomy for classifying Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs), she should not.

Folksonomies will (probably) never completely replace taxonomies since the science, understanding, principles and experience behind classifying items into a taxonomy are very extensive and cannot be overlooked.

At my day job (Yedda, if you dont already know) we just introduced a whole bunch of new features.

Some of the new features includes these cool Widgets that you see on the left side of this blog which allows you to interact with Yedda.

• The first widget is the AskBox widget – it allows you and your readers to post questions directly from your blog or Web site into Yedda. Each posted question will contain a link back to your blog or Web site stating that this question was posted from your blog or Web site.
• The second widget is a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) widget – You specify topics that you wish to view in your widget and when placed on your blog or Web site you’ll see a list of these questions.

If you have your own blog or Web site go to the Yedda Widgets page, create a widget and place it on your blog or Web Site.

I just read this post about the deal that eBay and Google signed which will also allow Google Talk and Skype to interoperate and possibly be able to communicate even via chats.

It them folloed by an enlightened moment (Ka ching!) where I thought of an idea that Google can use to deepen Google Talk`s penetration in the corporate environment.

Google Talk is based on the solid and open standards of XMPP (Jabber).

It seems that Mike of TechCrunch fame posted about Yedda.

If you don’t know what Yedda is (and you should after reading Mike’s post) just go and sign up :-)

Did I say why it was quiet here for quite a while? oh yes I did ;-)

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been very busy with Yedda and it is the main reason why it’s been very quite here.

But now, you can check out my Profile at Yedda as well as see questions I’ve answered and questions I’ve asked.

And as Yaniv pointed out, this is also a test question. I’m not really into baking and stuff…

Technorati : Answers, Eran, Knowledge, Questions, Social Software, Yedda
Del.icio.us : Answers, Eran, Knowledge, Questions, Social Software, Yedda
Ice Rocket : Answers, Eran, Knowledge, Questions, Social Software, Yedda

A while back Google added a feature to Gmail so that you can see which of your friends is online and chat with them.

While this might look cool there is another side to this story, people can actually see when you are reading your Emails on your Gmail account.

I, for example, use GAIM as my main IM client and since Google Talk (GTalk) uses Jabber as its underlying protocol, it means that every Jabber supported client can connect to GTalk. Jabber has built in support to show your status and the client you are using and most Jabber clients (besides GTalk) allow you to see this text.

After Passport Windows Live ID and the Liberty Alliance Project now comes Google Account Authentication, which opens up the ability to use anyone’s Google Account to perform authentication to a system.

What surprises me in this whole deal is that it seems we are going backwards, back to a “one authentication to rule them all” idea that Microsoft tried to introduce with Passport (errr) Windows Live ID which, as you know, didn’t go quite where they wanted it to be.

According to this, Google is opening an R&D center in Israel in the Tel Aviv area.

This is the second center, the first one opened in Haifa.

Microsoft has a research center in Haifa from 1991 and it was published in the Israeli press (sorry, I couldn’t find an English reference for this) that they are planning to open another research center in the Tel Aviv area.

The only company now from the big GYM (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) that doesn’t have an R&D presence here in Israel is Yahoo.

I just saw that Google released the Google Ctemplate library.

While they do need to get some kudos for their efforts of releasing various code bits out as open source, I do have a problem with the Ctemplate library itself.

I don’t know when they wrote this library, but what I do know is that its yet another templating language to use. Why couldn’t they have used a standard language such as JavaScript (more exactly, ECMAScript) instead of inventing their own syntax? There are so many templating engines out there, why invent yet another one instead of trying to use an official syntax know by many?

Zoundry released a new version of their Blog Writer product. Some of the more prominent features added (which a lot of users including me asked for) are:

• XHTML Editor – You can now see and edit the generated XHTML
• Spell Checker – No more copying and pasting stuff to another spell checker :-)

Check out the full feature list and download.

I’ve been using Zoundry for the past 6 months as my primary posting tool for this blog as well as my Advanced .NET Debugging blog and it has been really helpful. With the new features now released it is now a kick ass blog writer.