Content no more

Is The Web Still The Web?

Linked by David Adams on Sat 5th Jul 2008 04:57 UTC, submitted by snydeq

Neil McAllister raises questions regarding the Web now that it no longer resembles Tim Berners-Lee's early vision: Is the Web still the Web if you can't navigate directly to specific content? If the content can't be indexed and searched? If you can't view source? In other words, McAllister writes, if today's RIAs no longer resemble the 'Web,' then should we be shoehorning them into the Web's infrastructure, or is the problem that the client platforms simply aren't evolving fast enough to meet our needs.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

F-Origin, which closed a $5 million third round of capital a few months ago, sees eBook readers such as Amazon’s Kindle as a natural market for its touchscreen technology, which provides tactile user feedback.

But the company already has orders from a mobile phone company, a firm making touchscreen picture frames, and a point-of-service kiosk product maker. CEO Joe Carsanaro is a serial entrepreneur who previously founded venture-backed Bloodhound Software. “I started Bloodhound in my closet in France,” Carsanaro tells TechJournal South. “I got it going and on my first trip back to the United States I came to give a pitch at a venture conference, and got two term sheets.” RTP-based Bloodhound sells software for claims overpayment protection services for health care payers. F-Origin evolved from another of Carsanaro’s previous gigs. As general manager of a Motorola phone business, he was asked to start a group to develop innovative products in the messaging space. A company that wanted to sell its touchscreen phones to Motorola approached the new group. “I didn’t like the phone per se, but liked the technology,” Carsanaro says. When the company failed, he joined several other investors to buy its software and licensing rights to its patents. They include patents on motion (gesture) control of devices, haptics (touch feedback) and innovative touchscreens. The 10-employee company wants a chunk of the estimated $2.6 billion touchscreen market.

Carsanaro says F-Origin’s HaptiTouch products not only provide pressure-sensing touch feedback, they also have good light and low power consumption, he says. “They have the ability to drive the user interface via a finger, a stylus, or a pen,” he says. That means that medical professionals could use a device equipped with the technology while wearing gloves. Its touchpads can be programmed to provide different responses depending on touch force, and the touch sensitive area can be any shape. HaptiTouch supports devices of all kinds, and displays ranging from small mobile phones to screens as large as 15 inches. Its customizable API can be implemented with multiple operating systems. In a previous interview, Carsanaro noted that while portable devices are becoming very sophisticated, that means users have to navigate a bewildering plethora of multi-function buttons. “The result is function fatigue syndrome,” he says.

The company introduced its first product in the third quarter of 2007 and expects to ramp up sales in the third and fourth quarters this year. Carsanaro says the company will likely increase its staff up to 15 to 17 in a year.

On the Web: http://www.f-origin.com/

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

Metabole and tragedy

The word metabole is employed by Aristotle in his definition of peripety (Poet. 1452a 22-23), which Anton F. Harald Bierl, Dionysos und die griechische Tragödie.1991) regards as somehow connected with Dionysus.

He is tempted by the thought that Aristotle borrowed it from the poets, or at least that it belonged to a dramaturgical vocabulary that had already sprung up by the time of HF (143 n. 88, 225). This word, Bierl thinks, signals metatragically the critical moment when the action is about to take a sudden turn (it does just that at the conclusion of the third stasimon, 815ff.). The mad Heracles is characterized in Dionysiac imagery (esp. 889-98, just before he kills his children). According to Bierl, Heracles unites the two sides of Dionysus: he reflects the positive, cultic side of the god in the first half of the play, where he is the embodiment of Bacchic hope in the eyes of his loved ones, and the negative, mythical side in the second half, where he becomes their murderer.
In sum, an evocation of the Dionysus in his theatrical dimension might
(a) serve as a dramaturgical signal, a device to prepare the audience for a subsequent turn of events. It might
(b) induce the audience to experience vicariously the optimism of the dramatis personae (e.g. of the chorus in Sophocles' plays) by calling forth the "positive" cultic context. It might
(c) call attention to the operation of tragedy, especially the sudden reversal, which Aristotle called peripety; theatrical metalanguage (e.g. metabole [HF 735], eleos and phrike [Phoen. 1284-87], phroimion [HF 753]) can suggest the tragic principle of sudden reversal. Finally, it might (d) cause the audience to reflect on the theatrical illusion (Hel., cf. Cho., IT) or on the value of the theater for the polis (Bacch. does this by dramatizing, through the monitory example of Pentheus, the breakdown of theatrical communication).

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Theory of meaning and circularity

Intention-based semantic theories are still popular and are actively pursued.

But they have not entirely succeeded in reducing meaning and psychology to actions and utterances. If meaning is defined as acting so as to induce belief and action in another, theories of meaning must be grounded in non-semantic terms to avoid circularity. And there is some doubt whether this can be done. Individuals act according to beliefs, and the communication of these beliefs eventually and necessarily calls on public beliefs and language.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

Google at the top

In the space of a year, Google supplants Microsoft as No. 1 in a survey of the level of trust American consumers have in various companies, while Microsoft drops to No. 10. Another triumph for the Windows Vista operating system.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

Underlying structure

Chomsky argued that our astonishing creativity with words, and the phenomenal ease with which children learn a language, meant that language users employed and intuitively recognized an underlying structure.

Not a structure, moreover, resting on phonemes or individual words as Ramon Jakobson would have it, but a sort of fundamental, proto-syntax. Any well-formed sentence, for example, contains a noun-phrase (NP) and verb-phrase (VB). From this we could create all possible sentences: The old tutor well described the difficulties. Or: The difficulties were well described by the old tutor. By transformation rules the deep structure can be converted to surface sentences with the correct syntax.

But what of: The old tutor elaborated the difficulties? The meaning is practically the same: we might chose either. But is this a different transformation or a different deep structure? And how do we make the choice or substitution? Critics say that Chomsky's grammar is simply formalizing what is still a mystery.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

What is revelancy?

Google=Stupid? Published June 12, 2008

Johnson Direct , Measurable Marketing , Media , Observing the World Around Us Tags: Advertising copy length, Attention Span Deficits, Google, Information Overload, Media Impressions

Ever since I officially began my professional measurable marketing career back in 1988, one argument has persisted: long copy vs. short copy. “People will never read that. It’s too long. People are too busy to read all that” Clients almost always want to shorten the copy. Rarely, if ever, have I heard, “Can you make this longer?”

The best answer to the question on copy length came to me at a seminar I attended: “People don’t read long copy or short copy. They read what interests them.” That’s why relevancy is even more important today then it was in 1988. People have information overload and, because of Google, perhaps, people have shorter attention spans. That was the theory I came across at a recent Wall Street Journal Blog entitled: “Is Google making us stupid?”

Maybe 1 out of 100 tests I have conducted have proved that shorter copy wins, but as readers of this blog know, you should always test to lift results. The web has added a new dimension, as you can drive them to a site with shorter copy and have virtually no limits on copy length once they click your desired URL.

As for email, it seems to me that the long form email format does a better, more complete job of selling, yet clients still want copy short, especially because it’s email. And, as such, may be short changing their ROI.
I’d love to hear your results…

Grant A. Johnson
Johnson Direct LLC
1-800-710-2750