Two things, one blue-sky (so bear with me) and one more practical.
one | Yes, we are entering the next phase of the web. Tim O'Reilly, Tim Berners-Lee, and even fucking Matt Jones can say this with more clarity than me, so I'll leave most of it to them. But here's where I think it's going to come from: Web services [SOAP, xmlrpc] are symptomatic of a understanding-shift. We know the net well enough now to give it APIs, languages [XML, IM bots], which makes it scriptable. And I think the reasons we're able to make it scriptable is because we understand it. The www itself, now it's a combination of two things: The real life thing and the technology combine to make a virtual thing. And it used to stop there. But because we understand and because the capability for scripting is there, that means we can recombine things on the net that we couldn't touch before. And recombine them, and them, endlessly recombine. Web services [and what they represent] truly are an order of magnitude change.
Oh, but so what. Progress happens. Blah blah grand sweep.
two | People are saying the www is dull nowadays. Well, no, I disagree, we're getting world weary is all. But I do have this vague sense that I'm not experimenting as much anymore, not in the html/www space anyway. There are so many other things to do. If everyone's like this, we lose the network effects. Maybe. Or something. Anyway, this is just a preface to: Does anyone know shitloads of javascript?
Is it possible to track the cursor position on the page to rank popularity of words, navigation elements, weblog posts? Is it possible to server-side cluster the posts in Blogger or Radio Userland and keyword them to make dynamic zeigeist graphs? Can a tool be written to organise all the posts on a weblog into a Yahoo-style tree, interlinked with other trees, all ranked on popularity, without the weblog editor having to learn any kind of code? Can I use the cursor-tracking to present more interesting content, and tailor the navigation?
I don't know shitloads of javascript. But I'd like some help to do the above.
Two things, one blue-sky (so bear with me) and one more practical.
one | Yes, we are entering the next phase of the web. Tim O'Reilly, Tim Berners-Lee, and even fucking Matt Jones can say this with more clarity than me, so I'll leave most of it to them. But here's where I think it's going to come from: Web services [SOAP, xmlrpc] are symptomatic of a understanding-shift. We know the net well enough now to give it APIs, languages [XML, IM bots], which makes it scriptable. And I think the reasons we're able to make it scriptable is because we understand it. The www itself, now it's a combination of two things: The real life thing and the technology combine to make a virtual thing. And it used to stop there. But because we understand and because the capability for scripting is there, that means we can recombine things on the net that we couldn't touch before. And recombine them, and them, endlessly recombine. Web services [and what they represent] truly are an order of magnitude change.
Oh, but so what. Progress happens. Blah blah grand sweep.
two | People are saying the www is dull nowadays. Well, no, I disagree, we're getting world weary is all. But I do have this vague sense that I'm not experimenting as much anymore, not in the html/www space anyway. There are so many other things to do. If everyone's like this, we lose the network effects. Maybe. Or something. Anyway, this is just a preface to: Does anyone know shitloads of javascript?
Is it possible to track the cursor position on the page to rank popularity of words, navigation elements, weblog posts? Is it possible to server-side cluster the posts in Blogger or Radio Userland and keyword them to make dynamic zeigeist graphs? Can a tool be written to organise all the posts on a weblog into a Yahoo-style tree, interlinked with other trees, all ranked on popularity, without the weblog editor having to learn any kind of code? Can I use the cursor-tracking to present more interesting content, and tailor the navigation?
I don't know shitloads of javascript. But I'd like some help to do the above.