MiramarMike: Blog

Just read an an excellent CIO article, Web 2.0 for the Suits: One Visionary's Take , which ends with JP Rangaswami's Credo (from his Confused of Calcutta blog) I believe that it is only a matter of time before enterprise software consists of only four types of application: publishing, search, fulfillment and conversation. I believe that weaknesses and corruptions in our own thinking about digital rights and intellectual property rights will have the effect of slowing down or sometimes even blocking this from happening. I believe we keep building layers of lock-in that prevent information from flowing freely, and that we have a lot to learn about the right thing to do in this respect. I believe identity and presence and authentication and permissioning are in some ways the new battlegrounds, where the freedom of information flow will be fought for, and bitterly at that. I believe that we do live in an age of information overload, and that we have to find ways of simplifying

[Updated] Seems the only app (via IE or Firefox) using Google Gears as I write is Google Reader - shame Gmail, Calendar and the rest of the Google Apps line wasn't released at the same time ... not that I care as I only work "online" anyway. Google Gears - let's you run web applications (Gmail, Blogger .... ) "off line", i.e. not connected to the Internet. You do need to download somefink to make it all work and stuff but I'm sure it's kosher so give it a whirl and tell me what you think ... and then I'll try it ... if I don't have to do any programming, API calls or anything I wouldn't expect 99.9% of the population to be able to do. With Yahoo!'s Pipes and Google's Gears (blog) we might be able to make the perfect web bicycle. And then we can all peddle away from the PC ball-and-chain for ever. What others are saying: Search Engine Land: Google Gears Brings Offline Web Applications To Life Lifehacker: Access your Google Re

Josh over at Read/Write Web has reported that Yahoo! are claiming that search will not dominate the Web as it currently does. My view (left as a comment on Read/Write Web ): Future isn't search? Possibly - I think it comes down to what people use the Web for. Most people currently don't 'live online', they hop on to do stuff - search will find them places do 'do stuff' (wanna book a train in Mongolia, Google it and away you go). If, however, people* may start to use the Web as the place to 'be' - this is where I share my photos, write my draft novel, talk with my mates, watch "TV" ... then search may well become secondary. Ultimately, I believe that they will co-exist. For instance: I wake up, check my emails, have a natter over the webcam with my Father in Wales, see that the team is online and finish off writing the business case together. At the same time I need to book a train in Mongolia, find out if Fat Freddy's Drop is playing to