Ajit K

Some pros and cons about it (a cons actually might be a pros, depending on the perspective).
+ points:

Portability.

Allows protection of intellectual property (IP).

Support for publishing scientific media (mathematical notations etc.).

Efficient packaging of content (less memory and high quality).

- points:

Difficult to edit and add comments without installing Acrobat Professional.

Difficult to Copy & Paste

Difficult for collaborative editing and publishing. It is more like an end product rather than a material to be worked upon. Probably, PDF wasn’t meant to be for this purpose at all.

References:
http://weblog.404creative.com/index.php/2007/02/24/a-few-reasons-not-to-send-files-in-micorosft-word-format/
http://wordprocessing.about.com/od/choosingsoftware/a/pdfsharing.htm
http://www.afb.org/afbpress/pub.asp?DocID=aw060604
http://www.its.monash.edu.au/staff/web/slideshows/accessibility-pdfformat/

As the writer, adventurer, artist, and aeronautical engineer Antoine de Saint-Exupry once put it, writing about the design of airplanes:

La perfection est atteinte non quand il ne reste rien ajouter, mais quand il ne reste rien enlever.

It means: “Perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove”.

Taken from ESR’s writing available here.

Freebase is live and a lot of people are talking about it! The people and the concept behind this are (supposed to be) really cool. Rich Skrenta talks about the people behind it:

Danny Hillis is a computing legend, having founded a company to produce the Connection Machine, one of the first massively parallel computers and a very slick piece of work. John Giannandrea (”jg”) was a Netscape founder, and recently CTO of Tellme, which built a massive voice-recognizing telco application. He runs a tier-1 colocation business as a side hobby to his day jobs. Not just vision here but deep technical implementation experience.

Orielly has been talking about it too, though his response is more cautious.

Seems to be another step towards the realization of Web 3.0? After UGC (user generated content), time to get real meaning out of the web by interlinking information.

Usually, online learning is supposed to follow a cookbook approach. But, the way we learn things are still being guided by old methods that we have used to follow. For example, copying the books we have created ebooks. But how effective are ebooks as a tool for learning, other than the ease of sharing (*downloading*) has it changed anything significantly. I don’t think so. It hasn’t changed the way we learn things. Rather, it is grossly undermining the computing power that we have.

This definitely has opened up great many options for us to improve. Current development in the suite of online word-processing applications is a step forward and will aid in its growth (even though the current aim is to cater to office applications). The potential of a collective book (wiki books?) can’t be underestimated. There can be various approach that can be followed for the development purpose. Such a creation will have to consider various factor such as:

• Flexibility of content
• Contribution and moderation
• Ability to merge or branch multiple versions ~ Editions
• Portability: The content may be downloaded.
• Preserving the original and trusted content.
• Innovation and accommodation of user needs

There could be many features that one may need to incorporate. Though, one must be prepared to be flexible and tend to user needs. And we need to think and start implementing.

Hmm… need to think clearly. This seems to be a nice idea and am sure many people must have started working on this technology. Lets see.

Food for thought:

Why is PDF format so popular? Is it because it is portable or is it because it preserves the original content or something else?