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.

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?

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

Steve Jobs, at the Macworld keynote, sounded the deathknell for Apple computers. This was rightly pointed out by Om Malik.

What does it mean? The meaning is very simple. Users want freedom instead of being locked infront of the networked desktop. The real power of the internet will be unleashed when it becomes mobile. And as the mobile ‘computers’ become good at this job, it will be an end for the ‘desktop computers’. Probably this is what Jobs meant.