...more recent posts
Now that's strange. I guess we're not the only ones planning a major site overhaul. I don't think we'll quite be ready on the 1st, but I guess there must be something in the air.
Here's a good, fairly academic look at the history of "Virtual Reality".
Jorn Barger is thinking about XML encoded historical timelines. The more formal page is here. To me this screams for some interaction with the McKenna Time Wave thing. Will that ever be seen as important?
Right now you are part of the internet. Your computer is connected to my computer, and by extension to every other computer on the internet. But aside from the ability to click buttons and fill in various HTML form elements, your browser software basically only receives information. This is the web as we know it. But soon, or so they keep saying, we will move to the next phase of the internet. On this new frontier your computer will be both a receiver and a broadcaster (a client and a server.) This movement is already pressaged by the likes of napster, gnutella, SETI@home, and mojonation, etc... These are very different services, operating in different manners, and employing different protocols. But all have been lumped together (sometimes without too much sense) under the title P2P. That means Peer to Peer, and it stands in contrast to the more traditional server to client model. Or more generally P2P means a flat hierarchy with content information flowing bi-directionally (communication), as opposed to a hierarchy, with most content information flowing in one direction (consumption). A telephone call is like a P2P application; watching a television program is like a traditional client-server model. You can talk back to your T.V., but it's not listening. Guess which model Big Business wants?
Anyway, the web is seriously abuzz about Sun's new framework for designing P2P applications, JXTA. Wes Felter has the quick first look technical overview: So what is JXTA? Dave Winer has a bunch of links including a package of O'Reilly pages (this one being the overview,) the register's rather negative take, and Sun's own press release.
JXTA is at least one whole level more fundamental than anything I ever deal with, but I understand what it is trying to provide. I'll be very happy to employ some of the things that others might be able to make with JXTA. Or with some other set of P2P building tools. A lot of people are in sync on this issue, now it's just a matter of getting on with the slightly more political fight, as the big gorillas (Microsoft, Sun, etc.) fight it out with each other (.net vs. JXTA) and with those weirdo (;-) independent developers who by providing fun applications play a crucial role in a particular framework's acceptance, but who keep insisting that these fundamental layers of the web should