There are some problems with video on the web today. The numerous video formats make things difficult for both content creators and viewers. Different video formats require different plugins, and therefore content creators are forced to choose a format and hope people will be able to play it.
For now, Adobe Flash is the closest web video comes to having one single unified standard, but unfortunately it has its own set of problems. More… »
As you may know, Facebook has added custom profile URLs that are by default based on your real name. Your choice is understandably permanent, but that has at least one unintended consequence. At least in the United States, women usually change their last name when they get married, but they won’t be able to change their Facebook profile URL accordingly. That could be particularly bad in the event of a divorce, if a woman chose to revert her real name.
At a recent TED talk, Sir Tim Berners-Lee shared what could be a powerful idea about the future of the Web. To summarize, he wants web sites to offer linked raw data in machine readable form. That way, computers could combine data from all over the Web, understand how it’s all related, and then manipulate and display it in interesting ways. Berners-Lee’s idea would result in far more data being available than the relatively limited amount of data Wolfram|Alpha has access to.
Wolfram|Alpha is not a search engine. It is not a Google competitor. It uses databases containing facts, and performs on-the-fly computations/comparisons using those facts, in a single step without the answer having to be previously posted on the web. Read their FAQ for more details.
720p video from YouTube. Yes, YouTube. Click to enlarge.
Update: My bookmarklet has been broken by Google, but the script it was based on has been fixed and has added support for 720p HD downloading. Use that instead.
In addition to expanding their player to 960px wide for all videos, YouTube received a more quiet upgrade today. In addition to normal quality and high quality, they have now added 720p HD video. Few HD YouTube videos exist at the moment, but for those that do you can simply append &fmt=22 to the end of the URL. Interestingly, I seem to be the first to have figured out how to actually download (rather than stream) these new 720p HD videos directly from YouTube. More… »
Steve Jobs’ announcement of Safari for Windows at the WWDC yesterday was puzzling to many. What was in it for Apple as a business? iTunes for Windows made sense because of increased iPod sales and iTunes Store purchases, but what could Apple possibly stand to gain from porting a web browser? After giving it some thought, nine possible reasons came to mind. More… »