21 Things That Became Obsolete This Decade

Bianca Male | 140,890 |47

Goodbye and good riddance.

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Liferay Linked Data Module

By Bryan Cheung, On 12/7/09 6:05 PM

Tags: community, contribution, linked data

Another great example of the innovation that the Liferay community keeps contributing is the recently released Liferay Linked Data Module from IMC Technologies. Linked Data is an approach that lets you both publish and access data in a way that is semantically specified according to standard models, interoperable, cross-referenceable and remotely queryable. This way, you can not only tap on resources available on the web of data, such as DBpedia, but also make your own content available (and thus reusable and cross-referenceable). This makes for mashups that operate directly on the data level, removing the need for different proprietary APIs.

IMC calls this the Linked Data inbound/outbound approach, and here you can see a screenshot of a sample application developed to showcase the inbound approach, in which tag meanings are disambiguated by using DBpedia.

Main features:

• Remote access to Liferay content via SPARQL
• Supports mapping to the FOAF, SIOC and MOAT vocabularies
• Performance optimization
• Open source LGPL license
• Comprehensive documentation

Innovatie zit niet in het bloed van de meeste uitgeverijen

Nederlandse uitgeverijen zijn zoekende, maar de juiste richting lijkt nog niet gevonden. Dat is misschien wel de beste samenvatting van het Seminar Persinnovatie dat gisteren in Perscentrum Nieuwpoort plaatsvond. Op initiatief van het Stimuleringsfonds voor de Pers konden verschillende bedrijven en onderzoekers hun bevindingen met persinnovatie presenteren. De samenvatting die keynote-spreker Robert Picard maakte aan het einde van de dag was ontnuchterend: de Lage Landen lopen niet voorop in innovatie. Veel experimenten komen neer op oude wijn in nieuwe zakken.

Minister Plasterk van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschap opende de middag. Hij signaleerde twee ontwikkelingen: het leesgedrag verandert en de advertentiemarkt zit tegen. Normaal gesproken zou je innoveren om het tij te keren, maar daar is het nu niet de beste tijd voor, aldus Plasterk. Over een ding was hij duidelijk: de journalistiek is belangrijk. Welk medium de journalistiek gebruikt om te publiceren was volgens de minister minder van belang. Hij wees er bovendien op dat innovatie niet altijd om digitale media hoeft te draaien. Hij verwees daarbij naar NRC Next, weliswaar een papieren uitgave, maar wel een innovatief initiatief. Plasterk suggereerde dat uitgevers meer kunnen samenwerken om kosten te drukken, bijvoorbeeld bij distributie of drukken.

In zijn keynote wees prof. dr. Robert Picard erop dat media tegenwoordig in overvloed aanwezig zijn. Dat leidt volgens hem tot fragmentatie en polarisatie. Het is bovendien geen vraaggedreven, maar een aanbodgedreven markt geworden. De echte uitdaging voor innovatie binnen uitgeverijen zit 'm niet in technologie. Het gaat vooral om organisatiestructuren, processen en de bedrijfscultuur. 'Innovatie zit niet in het bloed van de meeste uitgeverijen,' oordeelde Picard. Jan Bierhoff van Hogeschool Zuyd onderstreepte dat met een voorbeeld in zijn betoog. Uitgevers hebben moeite in te spelen op de vraag van jongeren, vertelde hij. Jongeren willen geen kant en klare artikelen, maar gaan graag zelf op onderzoek uit. Ze willen in feite 'half-fabrikanten' waaruit ze zelf hun informatie kunnen samenstellen.

Tijdens het tweede deel van de middag spraken diverse consultants over verdienmodellen, redactionele automatisering en het belang van persbureaus. Ook kwamen er enkele praktijkvorbeelden aan bod van innovatieve uitgeefprojecten. In de eerste editie in 2010 van het magazine InCT leest u een uitgebreid verslag over dit seminar.

What if Oracle's buyout of Sun falls through?

Not likely to survive on its own, Sun would need a new buyer for itself or its technologies

By Paul Krill | InfoWorld

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Today we begin Part 1 of an 8-Part series on building a web application from absolute scratch to a complete product. I am going to kick things off by introducing the idea, and then I will be handling the design, UI, and general front-end stuff. We are going to be going back and forth from here over to my friend Jason Lengstorf’s blog Ennui Design. Jason will be handling the back-end stuff like application planning and database stuff. At the end of the week, we’ll unleash the actual working application for you. Here is the plan:

All Series Navigation

• Part 1 – Planning the App: Basic Idea and Design
• Part 2 – Planning the App: Database Architecture and Development Approach
• Part 3 – Designing the App: Workflow Map and Photoshop Design
• Part 4 – Designing the App: HTML and CSS
• Part 5 – Developing the App: User Interaction
• Part 6 – Developing the App: Adding AJAX Interactivity
• Part 7 – Developing the App: List Interaction
• Part 8 – Security & The Future
• And finally…. the application! Colored Lists

It’s Easy, Right?

What we’re going to create is a “list app”. The idea being focused on simplicity and usefulness. Sign up for an account, and get started making a list in just a few seconds. Sounds easy right? Even the PHP dabblers out there probably could throw something like this together fairly quickly, right? Well the fact is, no, it’s not that easy.

First of all, it needs to work and it needs to work well. That means good back end code that does what it’s supposed to do and well. That means a good UI that is intuitive, helpful, and pleasurable to use. It means keeping the app secure and users data private. None of these things is trivial.

Through this whole 8-part series, we are going to create an app that hopefully does all these things pretty well. We aren’t out to tell you this is the greatest app ever made, but rather, we are going to use this app as a walk-through journey of the app creating process and hopefully do as many smart things as we can along the way.

The Big Idea

This “list app” is going to be called Colored Lists. Lists (in real life), can be for anything: a to-do list, a grocery list, things to bring camping list… As you finish things, you cross them off. Things on a list may be of different relative importance as well. This makes paper lists potentially messy and inefficient. With a list on a computer, we can make crossing off items just a click and we can make rearranging them a matter of drag and drop. For dealing with relative importance, we can use colorization, which could also be used for things like grouping. Computers, and the web, are a perfect place for lists.

Sketch It Out

No need to get fancy right away. Here is a very rudimentary sketch of what the app might look like:

Looks like a list to me. Each list item is a long rectangle, because the big idea here is to colorize each list item, so putting them inside a colored box makes sense. There are some interactive elements to the left and right of each list item. Those are going to be for accomplishing the basic things we intent people to be able to do with their colored list. Lets take a closer look.

Early UI Planning

We don’t necessarily want to be talking about specific technologies at this point, but we should be thinking about how the UI will operate, so we can make choices about technology that can accommodate our UI desires.

• Click-to-edit
• Drag and drop
• Two-click delete
• Automatic saving (after any action)

All this stuff basically adds up to a whole bunch of AJAX. We don’t want to load special screens to do relatively trivial tasks like deleting a list item. That stuff should happen seamlessly, smoothly and with proper feedback in response to mouse clicks without page refreshes. In a sense, we are creating a one-page app, where the majority of interaction with this app happens on a single page. This is certainly by design, and not trying to adhere to any particular fad. Lists are easy and quick, that’s why are useful. If this app is complicated, it’s usefulness is diminished and nobody will use it.

The Screens

Just doing some quick brainstorming of the idea so far, we can come up with quite a number of “screens”, or states the application can be in.

• Homepage
  • Logged out = Intro/Sales Page
  • Logged in = Your list
• Log in page
• Settings page
• Lost password page
• Account activation page
• Emails

Yep, even emails should be considered a part of the “screens”, as they are a vital part of the process and interaction with an app.

“Features”

People love “features”. Things that your app has that other apps don’t have, or that yours does better. This is just as much for marketing as it is for your actual product. All the fancy AJAX this app will have is certainly a feature, but that stuff these days is getting more and more expected rather than a feature. The one feature that we will focus on with this app is “public sharing”. Each list will have a unique URL that can be publicly shared. A visitor visiting this URL can see the list in it’s exact current state, but not interact with it as far as editing/adding/deleting.

Moving On

Now that we have the idea in place of what we want to build, in the next part we’ll dive into looking at what this is going to take in terms of server-side technology.

Series Authors

Jason Lengstorf is a software developer based in Missoula, MT. He is the author of PHP for Absolute Beginners and regularly blogs about programming. When not glued to his keyboard, he’s likely standing in line for coffee, brewing his own beer, or daydreaming about being a Mythbuster.

Chris Coyier is a designer currently living in Chicago, IL. He is the co-author of Digging Into WordPress, as well as blogger and speaker on all things design. Away from the computer, he is likely to be found yelling at Football coaches on TV or picking a banjo.

1. Creating a Web App from Scratch – Part 6 of 8: Adding AJAX Interactivity
2. Creating a Web App from Scratch – Part 8 of 8: Security & The Future
3. Creating a Web App from Scratch – Part 4 of 8: HTML & CSS
4. So Your Client Has This Idea…
5. Design Refresh (Version 5)

4 New Insights Into the Psychology of Search

Posted by Daniel Flamberg on November 09, 2009 at 07:00 AM PDT

Psychological research conducted by Kevin Wise, Assistant Professor of Strategic Communication at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, and published in the Journal of Media Psychology, suggests that how you find information online affects your reaction to that information. The implication for marketers and publishers is that you have to anticipate how people find you and address audiences differently on the basis of their glide path.

This notion is significant because on any given day about 1/3 of all Internet users either search for something specific or come across content by random surfing, according to the Pew study on the Internet and American Life. People invest different types of energy and emotion into finding content online. Surfers undertake what academics call "ritualized" use of media. They flit from thing to thing, sorting one against the other until something catches their eye or captures their imagination. This is a random process that requires less intention, investment and brain processing.

Searchers are "instrumental" users of media determined to seek out and find a specific content and evaluating search engine results against each other to figure out which is most relevant, on-point and worth reading first. Evidently this requires more attention, brain power and more functions from each searcher's CPU. 

To prove this Kevin and his team wired up 92 freshmen in an introductory advertising class to measure heart rate, skin conductance (sweat to us) and electro-magnetic activity (a surrogate for brain processing power). They set up a site filled with awful photos and descriptions of a shooting rampage at an elementary school in Utah. Apparently disturbing images prompt more distinct responses and can be better mined for content, recall and reactions.

Having run earlier research studies to understand the inter-play of getting there versus being there or in regularspeak --finding stuff versus reacting to stuff -- Kevin wondered if how you got there influenced what you found, remembered and how you reacted. Here's what he found:

Heart rates for searchers accelerated more than those of surfers. Purposely looking for content cranks up your ticker faster than stumbling across things. Maybe this suggests a greater investment in the process which leads to an eagerness to find and consume the content.

Searchers remembered more details than surfers. You expect the directed searcher to pay more attention and care more than the casual surfer.

Searchers had more skin response. Searching and finding gets you more hot and bothered than coming across something worth checking out.  There's probably a lesson for keywords in here. Though the result isn't shocking; it's the directed dude versus the laid back dude. Ditto for EMG activity.

Searchers were more disturbed by what they found than surfers. They rated the content as more unpleasant. People looking for something specific add a dose of intensity to their reading or understanding of the searched object? Could this be a self-fulfilling prophecy because we invest ourselves more in the stuff we've invested time and energy to find?

The data suggests that different ways of getting there drive how people react and respond online. The implications are that marketers have to weigh the intensity of searching versus the serendipity of surfing as they design and display information and/or craft keywords and phrases. Assuming intense and invested searching behavior puts the impetus on copywriters and designers (not to mention SEO jockeys to hyper-serve searchers while spreading around enough bait to reel in the random surfer.

Innovation Is Back, Says Accenture—Or Is it?

Posted by: Michael Arndt on November 11

Nearly two years after the U.S. tumbled into a recession, business is starting to think about ways to grow again. And for many, this means spending more money on innovation, says a new study from Accenture. In a survey of 630 execs in the U.S. and the U.K., 48% said their companies had upped their innovation budgets from six months ago. A third said innovation outlays were flat.

There’s a gray lining in these numbers: One in every five companies is still cutting spending on the development of new products or services.

And there are other findings that suggest that companies really haven’t kicked their recession habits. While new products or services have the biggest potential to generate sales and profit, 74% of the respondents told Accenture that their companies were pursuing incremental advances, like line extensions. (How many varieties of Coca-Cola will we really drink?) Along the same lines, 66% said their companies were more interested in short-term gains than long-term ones. (Same question.)

In the U.S., at least, companies may not be getting better at innovation, either. Accenture said 73% of American respondents said their employers didn’t learn from mistakes. (In the U.K., only 30% were such slow learners.) Respondents blamed failed innovation mostly on inability to meet customer needs, being late to market, and incorrect pricing.

What’s going on at your companies? Are you seeing any lift in innovation allocations?