Research e-Labs

I gave a presentation Feeds for Thought in June for the Government Web Community covering trends around feeds, microformats and the web slice. The presentation has been updated and is relevant as collateral to the draft 2008 NZ Government Feed Standard.

A few folk here at SSC recently decided to set up a IPv6 network. As most will know, global IPv4 addresses are running out and IPv6 introduces a far larger address space. What follows is a diary or log entry style format showing my progress and thought patterns.

The hCard microformat is an open format for representing people, companies, organizations, and places with machine-readable semantic HTML. We have published a tool (beta) for generating hCard code for a typical New Zealand address and testing the mapping of that address with Google maps.

For many users the way to insert a macron (ā,ē,ī,ō,ū) whilst writing is to find a page with one and copy/paste the needed character. Obviously there are easier ways, in this post I explore and experiment with a few methods to easily add macrons when entering content for the web.

There is increasing recognition of the economic impact of Open Source Software (OSS), offering productivity gains for local industries and generating export revenue by servicing offshore markets.

The Australian Open Source Industry Community Report 2008 says “…conservative projection of earnings suggests that the Open Source industry generates $500 million in revenue each year, with over 50% of that being directly related to Open Source”

Web feeds - also know as Atom or RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, allow you to read and keep up to date with articles from multiple sources (websites, blogs, wikis etc). This is done by the publisher creating a web feed (an XML file in a specified format - e.g. Atom or RSS) at a web address.

Almost every web user will have encountered a ‘404 - Not Found’ error at some point. After reading an interesting discussion topic started by Ben Bradshaw on the Web Standards Wiki about 404 good practice I decided to fix our site’s 404 error page.

A revealing video from The Office of Privacy Commissioner of Canada highlights privacy issues on social networks.

Well - maybe you don’t yet. It’s one thing to promote standards for exchanging information and transactions across the web, quite another to manage the result.

Within the New Zealand government domain, a framework is taking shape that aims to manage key objects and make them available. Object types include XML (and other) schemas for data exchange, agency or industry defined coding schemes, web service definitions and many others.