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/

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.

Its so cool. I was thinking of the same feature as a must have! To build a WYSIWYG for math equations would be a great and boost for Maths on Web… and Wordpress seems to have done it! Wow! Read more at Wordpress.com

http://wordpress.com/blog/2007/02/17/math-for-the-masses/

http://faq.wordpress.com/2007/02/18/can-i-put-math-or-equations-in-my-posts/

From the Yahoo pipes website:

What Is Pipes?

Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

Philosophy Behind the Project

There is a rapidly-growing body of well-structured data available online in the form of XML feeds. These feeds range from simple lists of blog entries and news stories to more structured, machine-generated data sources like the Yahoo! Maps Traffic RSS feed. Because of the dearth of tools for manipulating these data sources in meaningful ways, their use has so far largely been limited to feed readers.

Tim O’Reilly calls it “a milestone in the history of the internet”. Why are they so important? How do they work? Here are a posts by knowledgeable people which can get you going:

Yahoo! Pipes: Unlocking the Data Web by Jeremy Zawodny by Jeremy Zawodny

Review: Yahoo Pipes by Matt Cutts

Pipes and Filters for the Internet by Tim O’Reilly

The blogosphere is agog with the pipes. Click here to Search Technorati