It's not your information... it's how you *use* your information that matters

I saw this map recently linked from a post that made it onto Techmeme:



According to this map from National Geographic, I should have been living large while I was in the Bay Area. That wasn't really my experience, but perhaps all those single men are geeks that don't get out much.

In other strange map news, I read a recent New Yorker article about "million dollar blocks" in NYC. These are not where the wealthy live, but rather, where the very poor and oppressed live. "Million dollar" refers to how much is being spent to imprison residents of those blocks.

Informative, yes.



Here is a Village Voice article about the same topic (the New Yorker isn't online).

Both maps could form the basis of many a research paper (the second one is a whole research initiative). And both are super valuable because of the way they combine information.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Mmmm. Mashups.

What is Web 2.0?

I think I have a definition. Once upon a time, back in the days of IE5 and Netscape Navigator, I gave up on doing much of anything in the browser. It was a nightmare.

So, now, I'm working using AJAX using ruby and prototype and have become a big fan of RESTful
interfaces. All of these technologies use the basic HTTP building blocks. The HTTP error codes are useful, GET vs. POST vs. DELETE is useful. It's all useful. So reading an interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee of "I invented the web" fame he says some interesting things:

LANINGHAM: "You know, with Web 2.0, a common explanation out there is Web 1.0 was about connecting computers and making information available; and Web 2 is about connecting people and facilitating new kinds of collaboration. Is that how you see Web 2.0?"

BERNERS-LEE: "Totally not. Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along."

"And in fact, you know, this Web 2.0, quote, it means using the standards which have been produced by all these people working on Web 1.0. It means using the document object model, it means for HTML and SCG and so on, it's using HTTP, so it's building stuff using the Web standards, plus Java script of course.

So Web 2.0 for some people it means moving some of the thinking client side so making it more immediate, but the idea of the Web as interaction between people is really what the Web is. That was what it was designed to be as a collaborative space where people can interact."

So ... really... from a technical point of view, I offer this definition of "Web 2.0":

The era when both an open source browser lives up to the web standards and Microsoft isn't screwing it up too badly so people can actually make stuff.