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RollingStone.com: The Long Emergency : Politics A story designed to cheer you up like crazy! Hmm. The only consolation I have from this story is that Wal-Mart will die before I do. Ugh.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.

Marshall Whitman, the Bullmoose blogger over at ye old bullmooseblog.com has a great idea. Instead of blogging about all the other crap I was going to write up tonight (including a few nifty links to billmon.org, the future of apple and a few other odds and ends), the Moose has a great idea. If the blogosphere is going to blog about anything, it should be about Darfur, Sudan, and the massacres that are going on daily there. It’s so easy for all of us to take for granted all that we have., especially for white middle class America, which complains about missing out on a bonus or investment opportunity. What about the massacre of your village, your family, you?

Take a second, google for the contact information for your Senator or Representative. Take two minutes, call their office and let them know you think stopping genocide is a “Culture of Life” issue we should get behind, instead of involving themselves in the tragicomic drama that is Schiavo. Tomorrow, pure crap, including dumb things I overheard on the train.

I just joined the ACM. When do I get my beanie?

The second wave of internet applications is coming, one which is revolutionizing HTTP as more than a method of asynchronous communication. Many older interactive types (Alan Cooper, for one, in The Inmates Are Running The Asylum) used to complain that we were throwing away 15 years of desktop technology to move our applications to the web.

No one is ever comfortable with throwing away much of what they’ve learned to re-learn it. Cooper, apparently, never learned this sort patience. We are rapidly approaching the capabilities of desktop applications on the web; a full circle. Perhaps the biggest limit today to these types of applications is the fundamental assumptions a generation of web designers and developers have after a decade (happy 10th anniversary Yahoo!) of learning to scale down approaches to a bare hyper-text minimum.

Today, the line between desktop and web app is blurring, perhaps nowhere more than at Google. Jesse James Garrett and the folks at Adaptive Path are attempting to brand this as AJAX, but that’s a bullshit acronym they’re putting out there to attract clients and attempt to own the space. They seem to be taking a page from the Republican Party’s attempts at semiotics and controlling the discourse. However, once the New York Times picks up on the trend, like in this article entitled Simplifying Web Checkouts, it’s hardly news anymore, at least, in the web world.

This form of communication de-emphasizes communication as transport (the MacLuhan-esque truth of early client-server web apps) and assumes simultaneous communication—a true dialogue without arbitrary system-capability based restrictions on the user’s ability to interact—as an ideal state. Technically, this concept is a group of SGML standards (XHTML, CSS, ECMAscript, XSLT, etc.) and XML-based server components (XMLhttpRequest) being reconfigured to radically change the interaction between humans and computers.

My first experience with this type of approach was for producing small interactive device and kiosks for multimedia products. We used it to send hog-loads of information to the devices and then let the user sort it out as they wished. Here’s Google’s HTML version of that early Microsoft case study.

However, the more interesting examples are:

• Google Maps


• Kayak


• Big coolness: Gibson custom guitar builder app

Not all these use XML, etc., but they are all great examples of customization and user-manipulation of a product or service-related set of objects in a manner unthinkable a few short years ago. This ol’ foggie is lovin’ the internet. For today, at least.

Thanks for the linkies, Taylor and Andrew!