Jon Udell writes about the architecture of data rich spaces

Modernism removed decoration from architecture. Or so the perceived wisdom goes.

But few could argue that Times square, triumphantly modern, is not decorative. Robert Venturi, the father of post modernist architectural criticism used Vegas as his model but the decoration here was a throwback, Egyptian or Classical pastiche.

What is going on at times square is something new, its influences are from Archigram to Bladerunner. More importantly it is a continuation of what has happened throughout the capitalist world, where neon and billboard advertising have kept decoration alive and well. The difference is that the advertising is part of the architecture and now, part of the network. Media architecture is just beginning.

Sony are about to release the gadget I have been dreaming of.

The size of an iPod (that great form factor that fits in your pocket), the ‘PacketPC is basically a WiFi enabled portable bootable drive. Plug this into any computer and use it as if it were your own.

With 60GB internal storage this can hold most of your applications and important data. Lets face it, although many people use more disk space, the critical stuff like email and applications account for far less space than replaceable items such as MP3’s.

The PacketPC has a screen and Palm Pilot style text entry capability, but is primarily designed for read only (I always used to update my palm from scraps of paper when I had it connected to my PC anyway). The built in GPS chip will make use of location aware mapping services and entertainment/travel guides. Without hooking up to a PC the PacketPC is not designed to run much other than a web browser and contacts manager, but to be honest that’s all I would use on the move. It has an MP3 player and headphone jack etc.

The best thing about the PacketPC and the reason why it has pre orders of 150,000 units from Fortune 500 companies, is its simple approach to backup. Sony’s enterprise backup service (a consumer service will be available later this year) means that the PacketPC will remotely sync via WiFi or Ethernet with an identical machine in a datastore. Lose your packet PC and clone replacement will be delivered by Fedex with 48 hours. The backup seems to be a simple disk image so there are no settings to really worry about, the offsite model is an exact clone of whatever is on your machine, and data is transferred in encrypted chunks for the enterprise service.

Jeez I sooo want this, if only for the backup.

Doc asks if Google takes advantage of RSS to aggregate news and if not why not.

The answer is no, and for two reasons:

1. Few RSS feeds contain the full text of the article and a search engine needs this to index. Sure, you could harvest the headlines and then index the site URL for the full text, some sites do this, but this approach is not reliable. Headlines are very dynamic and you increase the risk of synch. problems if you pull headlines from one URL and pull content from another. Google scrapes headlines and indexes articles from the same URL. With RSS 1.0 and 2.0 it is possible to put full text in an item, but commercial publishers are loathed to do this, and even webloggers like myself like the traffic to the original article, where I can deliver the message as I want it to be read, with graphics etc. One possible solution is to have an RSS tag that includes a tokenized version of the full text of an article, so that it can be indexed by a search engine but is not human readable. I proposed this a while back, but there doesn’t seem to be much interest, a tokenizer would need to be built into the publishing tools and RSS readers would need to be able to switch off the display of the tokenized text.

2. On a more conceptual level Google uses fuzzy full text search as opposed to parametric search. What do I mean by this? Full text search engines differ from databases in that they are not optimized for structured queries such as ’select from where’, they use relevance algorithms to rank results. A new breed of XML databases offer the power of structured, parametric searching, combined with the retrieval performance of full text indexing. To fully take advantage of metadata such as is contained in RSS then Google is not the right animal.

Of course, at the moment there is almost no metadata in RSS (a headline, a URL for the headline and a bunch of other stuff that often varies in meaning is thrown into the description tag), but RSS 1.0 and 2.0 are modular and as adoption grows new modules will mean more metadata and greater ability to do powerful ’select from where’ searches across multiple tags.

This does not mean that Google absolutely can’t make use of RSS, just that a search engine built on top of a native XML database will be able to do things that Google can’t. Think about Google and exact phrase matching without removing stop words like ‘the’, this very simple type of query is fudged by Google, they don’t really allow precise structured queries.

lets take a search for the band ‘The The’.

On Google

On Altavista

See, Altavista wins, Google returns many items that don’t contain the search string.

Peter O’Toole turns down an honorary Oscar.

“O’Toole sent a handwritten open letter to the academy saying he was ‘enchanted’ by the gesture, but insisting that he is ’still in the game and might win the lovely bugger outright.’”

O’Toole certainly has a way with words. A friend at high school dated Peter O’Toole’s daughter. O’Toole had a nickname for him: ‘the C**t.’, he would open the door and wave him in with ‘ah, its the C**t’.

United Press International: Peter O’Toole: Not time for Honorary Oscar

Meg Hourihan:

“I tried to watch the State of the Union last night. I even thought about blogging as it happened, but I realized the post would be a reactionary, emotional tirade short on insight and reflection.”

Nah Meg, I’d be listening, and isn’t the ‘a reactionary, emotional tirade short on insight and reflection’ what we normally get from the other side of the fence.

megnut.com - a weblog by meg hourihan

via Kevin Werbach, who is blogging like he’s eaten a whole bag of those coffee bean candies today.

Tony Perkins, publisher of Red Herring has launched a commercial weblog, ‘Always On’.
It looks good, but I am already irritated about the spin. This is an online magazine with permalinks. If people milk the whole commercial weblog thing for magazine sites they will only accelerate a weblog backlash.

AlwaysOn Home

Jonathan Freedland reports on the Israeli election and how attempts to reign in Sharon’s corruption actually helped him.

“A fortnight or so ago, the PM [Sharon] was haemorrhaging in the polls amid allegations of undeclared, million-dollar foreign donations. He was under police investigation. To stop the slide, he gave a televised address. By common consent, it was a disaster, with Sharon rambling and aggressive. Halfway through, he was pulled off the air by order of a high court judge, for violating the election law which bars on-air politicking outside the official campaign broadcasts.
Instantly, and curiously, the slide was halted. It turns out that the judge’s decision had helped Sharon, by confirming what many Likud voters have long believed: that the country’s institutions, including the judiciary, are still run by the same condescending, leftwing Ashkenazi elite of old.”

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Jonathan Freedland reports on the war within Israel

Overture’s Achilles heel is not owning a destination site. As CNET reports, Yahoo’s poaching of an exec from Overture is significant. The barrier to entry is too low for Yahoo to not build its own paid search, avoid a 35% commission fee and sever links with Overture.

Yahoo is putting the pieces into place to replace partnerships with Google and Overture and provide their services in house.

For Google this means that Yahoo will compete with them, but Google owns THE destination site for search and provides its own paid listings.

Overture could become the Inktomi of paid search, beholden to those who own the destination sites, the majority of its revenues come from two partners, one of them being Yahoo. It proved the business model for search, its revenues are impressive and its $1.3 billion valuation quite an achievement, but the business model missed one key ingredient, it doesn’t really own the customer. Its growth looks stalled and its future grim.

Yahoo hires Overture search exec - Tech News - CNET.com

Dave Winer boils down the argument for switching to CSS driven layout, its all about getting rid of the damn awful HTML ‘table’ element which has been slowing down page loads for the last few years.

“People responding to the query about a CSS version of Weblogs.Com are asking why I want to nuke the table. Performance.”

Scripting News

According to a journalist friend, the theory that the Amazon is human created (as quoted in this Atlantic Monthly piece from last year) is gaining support in scientific circles.

“In a widely cited article from 1989, William Bal