This post from the Sun BabelFish about Slidy reminds me that there is no significant ongoing effort aimed to replace the ubiquitous MS Powerpoint with a Web 2.0 service, at least that I’m aware of.

Nonetheless a bunch of descriptive formats for slide shows have been recently relesead, notably: S5 by Eric Meyer, Slide ML by Bitflux, PerlPoint by Jochen Stenzel and Slidy by Dave Raggett of W3C.

To me, Slidy and S5 appear to be the more mature and complete projects. The constrains they impose on slide show layouts and features are negligible for most regular Powerpoint users.

They offer:

• Keyboard shortcuts for moving between slides
• Automatically generated table of contents
• Incremental display of slide content
• Automatic font scaling based on window size
• CSS positioning of objects
• Incremental animation
• Free license

The big downsides are the complexity to setup the production environment and the requirement to edit xhtml files in a text editor.

A simple but good Ajax wysiwyg editor is very much missing! The only attempts is from Bitflux with the Biflux Editor, but the complexity for a standard user is still overwhelming.

I cannot believe that no Web 2.0 start-up is focusing on the slide shows business. Company employees are sicking tired of attaching presentations to their email messages. The receivers are tired to download and save them somewhere on their machines. Solve this problem and you could smell money.

Here is a free advice to anyone interested in building a new secretive Web 2.0 company: take the best of Writely and NumSum and apply it to slide shows, don’t forget to be Slidy and S5 compliant!

And now a short checklist of features:

• Sharing and tagging presentations
• CSS template library, huge, open and freely available
• CSS template editing capabilities
• Easy presentation embedding in blog and corporate sites
• Complete storage solutions (image and audio file included)
• Export to PDF and printer friendly versions

Enough for launching a beta. Later you can add more bells and whistles. Anyone interested?

Updates on the blog have languished lately but we are really busy; I am working on setting up the foundation for the new project we are working on, and Marco is having a really tough moment on his personal life, for which I send him and all his family my best wishes.

I have just seen this great post by Wil Shipley:

[…] So, seriously, have you failed today? If not, why the heck not? I mean, think of the consequences of failing, and if they aren’t deadly and/or permanently disabling, then go ahead and bite off more than you can chew. Try to cook something that you just made up. Take a bike ride that’s too far. Take your car into an empty parking lot and do donuts until you learn where the tires give. Start a project that might be too big for you. […]

Me, I did not really fail today; but the project bigger then me is already rolling, so a failure is waiting for me just around the corner.

What a great time to get back to learning mode.

Everybody was expecting them and here they are: rumors of Google acquiring Riya. It can certainly be a sensible acquisition from Google point of view, but I’m not convinced that this is the best option for little Riya.

They do have a real product and they can have several real business models. They can sell subscriptions to their photo hosting service, they can integrate the proprietary facial recognition system with third party platforms, they can exploit their unique tag space, …

Furthermore digital image processing is a relatively old field, but only recently the explosion of digital cameras created the ground for new markets. Spotting the faces of your friends and relatives is certainly a nice application, but smart people at Riya could certainly figure out other services in different areas both for individuals and companies.

Munjal, Tara,
40 millions are a lot of money, but are you sure you want to become the new Blogger? You have higher expectations than that, don’t you?

Maybe, I’m just plain naive but I thought that one of the Web 2.0 characteristics was innovation flowing from small companies and not big corporation. As usual, you say? Yes, true, but this time the small companies have more chances to survive and stay small and healthy thanks to the connected fabric of the Web 2.0.

“Architecture of participation” is beautiful definition of the Web 2.0 from Tim O’Reilly, but it should apply to users and companies as well. If Web 2.0 collapse to fit into the GYM (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) how much space is being left for participation?

Dan Bricklin, the man that gave us VisiCalc, the father of all spreadsheets, just launched his new product, WikiCalc. [via Dave Winer and David Weinberger]

It combines some of the ease of authoring and multi-person edit ability of a wiki with the familiar formatting and data organizing metaphor of a spreadsheet.

I think it’s a brilliant move to embed the functionalities of spreadsheets in a wiki environment. It’s much more intriguing than just a web based implementation of Excel like ThinkFree. As posted in a previous post the only other worth mentioning player in this arena is NumSum: basic spreadsheet functionalities, but nice “social” features.

WikiCalc is written in Perl and it will be available only as a multi platform download. But I hope this is just the beginning of Dan project and I’m eager to see WikiCalc evolve from a standalone piece of software to a seamlessly integrated component of many wiki platforms and services.

It could be a huge success.

I think it’s time for clipperz too to get a real business model. And if nothing profitable comes out, simply reload, and reload, and … laugh!

Tagalag launched months ago without creating too much hype. No top bloggers talked about Tagalag and this fact corroborated my good feeling about the different spirit of web 2.0: pragmatic, focused on solving real problems and enhancing the online experience.

Tagalag is a funny project without strong technological assets and without a viable business model. Since you can tag everything, you could also tag people (actually their email addresses) and this appears to be the only rationale behind Tagalag.

On my opinion Tagalag deserved the silence it got.

But Today Michael Arrington posted about Tagalag in his TechCrunch weblog. And this is a bad sign. Michael is doing a great job mapping what is valuable in the web 2.0 world. His company and product reviews are always an interesting reading. But if a smart and well connected entrepreneur like Michael puts hype on projects and companies like Tagalag, I start smelling bubble …

What was a budding movement three years ago, at the dawn of the revival in technology, internet, and silicon valley, has become a full blown mania.

[From Fred Wilson.]

I cannot agree more with Johannes Ernst. Podcasts and especially IT Conversations’ podcasts have dramatically improved the quality of many situations of my everyday life. Taking a walk after lunch, commuting by train from Rimini to Rome, or just dish washing are all experiences now associated with listening to podcasts. Discussions and presentations from conferences are my preferred kind of podcasts. They gives me the chance to “partecipate” to events without moving to the Silicon Valley or Boston. Thanks Doug, you really deserve the award of “Person of the Year in Podcasting”!

QuickCast, also from IT Conversation, seems a smart move too. If you cannot make to a conference, or it’s too expensive for your pocket, just wait 2-3 weeks and get all the recordings from IT Conversations at 5 dollars per session!

Riya is a service based on facial recognition technology that enable user to spot known people in their photo collections and automatically add tags. See this early review from Techcrunch. I’ve requested an invitation to Tara Hunt, Riya chief blogger, and I’m looking forward to test it on my 2 thousands wedding shots.

But wouldn’t be nice to use Riya as a single sign-on (SSO)platform?

Imagine a web service XYZ that, during the creation of your account, asks to submit a pictures of your face. Then, any time you need to authenticate with XYZ, you can fill in the usual username/password form, or just stare into your webcam. The webcam sends your face straight to a Riya server, meanwhile the XYZ login page send a request to Riya to check if there is a recent pictures of your face matching the face associated to your account in the XYZ database.

The sensitivity of service XYZ will determine how aged could be the picture in the Riya server in order to succeed in the authentication. Less than five seconds for an online banking service, one hour for your web based email, one month for your social bookmark site. (of course given that all requests come from the same IP address)

Since most of our laptops, desktops and mobile phones are equipped with a camera, this scenario could be not science fiction.

Clay Shirky was the first to come up with the idea of “augmented tags”. He said it was time to upgrade from tag to “tag molecules”, adding few additional bits of information to the simple tag, like a timestamp and the dictionary authority. Then, in my previous post, I suggested to build tag molecules without inventing a new microformat like RelTag, but using the , and fields of the regular RSS 2.0 syntax.

The untold assumption was that you shouldn’t scrape tag information from html pages, tags should be defined in a more convenient environment: the RSS feed.

Later Drummond Reed suggested to define tags via XRI, a concept that lays at the core of Mary Hodder’s proposal.

The idea is that a user could tag an object […] where the tag, and the object, would then go out through the RSS feed or be spidered, with some additional information that doesn’t now exist in tags. That tag and object would include the user’s identity, the licensing for that object […] if needed, and the tag. It would remove the requirement for a tag to be coupled with the originating URL (blog post URL) because identity would be inside it.

An iTag will look like this:

<a href="http://xri.dictionary.com/=user.name*(+dog)/dog" rel="tag">dog</a>

where

• The domain name can be the DNS host name of any tag dictionary source that is able to resolve the XRI i-name following the DNS name (the string beginning with the = sign). This allows the author to completely control resolution of the tag — it can resolve to their own tag dictionary in their blog, to a community tag dictionary, or to a general tag dictionary (a la Wikipedia).
• The string starting with the equals sign (“=user.name”) and ending with the star is the i-name of the tag dictionary author.
• The string in parentheses following the star (“(+dog)”) is the name of the tag in the dictionary. By having a formal dictionary name, the dictionary can establish synonyms that software or spiders can use.
• The final segment (“/dog”) is the rel-tag-compliant tag name corresponding to this dictionary entry.

Brilliant! But this wiki page about iTags only defines them as links within an html page. Since it’s not nice to require blog search engines to go scraping the html of every single post, it’s advisable to move (or mirror) such definition of iTag in the RSS domain. Here is my not-well-thought-through idea about how a generic blog post, enriched with iTags, could look like within the RSS feed.

<item>
    <title>Tag camp</title>
    <link>http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/000564.html</link>
    <author>http://public.xdi.org/=mary.hodder</author>
    <pubDate>Fri, 28 october 2005 16:21:36 UTC-9</pubDate>
    <category domain="http://xri.napsterization.org/=mary.hodder*(+itag)/itag"</category>
    <category domain="http://xri.technorati.com/@technorati.inc*(+tagging)/tagging"</category>
</item>

The blogger of this example decided to attach two different iTags with two different dictionary authorities: herself and Technorati. It’s not difficult to envision add-ons for blog platforms that will make a snap the creation of such iTags. Think of preferences that set default dictionary authorities, think of built-in i-name resolver, …

Looking forward to have a nice module for Drupal, maybe from Autowitch, the same guy that gave us awTags.

UPDATE

Kevin Marks, from Technorati, sent in a very pertinent comment. He spotted a mistake due to the evil cut-and-paste demon in my example code. The error also prevented from understanding the chance to create synonyms with iTags. Here is my answer and here is the revised version:

<item>
    <title>Tag camp</title>
    <link>http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/000564.html</link>
    <author>http://public.xdi.org/=mary.hodder</author>
    <pubDate>Fri, 28 october 2005 16:21:36 UTC-9</pubDate>
    <category domain="http://xri.napsterization.org/=mary.hodder*(+itag)">itag</category>
    <category domain="http://xri.technorati.com/@technorati.inc*(+tagging)">tagging</category>
</item>