Lots of Goodies

I've got all kinds of good stuff queued up, so here goes:

• Paul Bausch used AWS to add camera images to Flickr - "I wrote a quick Greasemonkey script that does the work of looking up the camera model for me."
• The Mech Turk blog reviews the Sheep Market - "The internet allows strange things to happen."
• One of my standing web searches found this picture of me addressing a conference. Nothing special, but the odd thing is that I'd have to check my records to tell you when and where that conference took place!
• Among many other European engagements, I will be speaking to the Perl / Web 2.0 group in London on the evening of the 15th.
• Jon Udell interviewed Nathan McFarland of CastingWords in this podcast, and Oshoma Momoh wrote a handy review.
• The Geek Limit blog says that humans can teach machines to be more human. There are several great ideas in the post, including this one: "If we can take the programming of an Artificial Intelligence program, say, for a fire-fighting robot, as post 100,000 pictures of fires-in-progress, we might be able to use MT to gather the intelligence of thousands of fire fighters and build a pretty good AI."
• RIchard Miller talks about ways that the Amazon Mechanical Turk can assist in genealogical work by digitizing and transcribing records.
• The Virtual VAN says that they use Amazon's Web Services to do some amazing things. They have layered their enterprise-class messaging engine on top of Amazon S3 and SQS.
• If you are building a site around the Amazon E-Commerce Service, you'll want to read about search engine optimization for Amazon Web Services. On the topic of ECS, you can use it to retrieve album art for your iPod. If you do this, be sure to read and respect the terms and conditions in the license agreeement.
• Some good Web services food for thought was posted on the Zimbra blog:
  
  "Unlike Web 1.0, Web 2.0 emphasizes decoupling presentation from data. Specifically, presentation logic is implemented using JavaScript which is downloaded and executed by the browser. By utilizing AJAX, this code is able to call into server side APIs that implement necessary business logic and provide access to the underlying information. These APIs are generally implemented by using technologies such as Web Services and REST. This clean decoupling allows developers to build compelling browser based applications that can access, aggregate, and present information from different sources and systems."
  
  Note that word decoupled. It has been a part of my presentation vocabulary for several years now. Understanding that a web service implementation breaks apart data and presentation (like we all learned in CS 101) is one of those fundamental mental roadblocks that must be overcome in order to truly understand the power behind the web service paradigm.
• Dion Hinchcliffe talks about the two main architectural models for mashups (client and server) in his new article Making the Most of the Web: Creating Great Mashups. As Dion notes, "When done with a little care, powerful integration scenarios, even enterprise-class integration, can be achieved simply by sending some properly crafted Javascript to a browser using a simple one-line URL."

Whew! That will do it for today.

-- Jeff;

Comments

[The Technocrat]

Hey, thanks for the link!