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Technology Articles by Alex Iskold

Alex Iskold, Founder and CEO of AdaptiveBlue, has written extensively on a number of topics such as Web Browsing, Semantic Web and Attention Economy. He is a regular contributor to one of the top web analysis blogs - Read/WriteWeb.

Below is a list of his selected articles that are relevant to the work we are doing here at AdaptiveBlue. Read more on AdaptiveBlue's blog, and find Alex's complete writings on his Technology Blog.

Browsers: Smart Browser, Where Art Thou?

Web 2.0 Magazine
It is obvious that memory plays a critical role in human intellect and human interactions. Yet today our interactions with computers, and the web in particular, are disappointingly stateless. We keep going back to the Google search box and re-entering the same stuff over and over again. The computer simply has no idea what we are looking for and how to help us find it. Ah, you'd say, but how can it? Don't we need artificial intelligence for that? My claim in this article is that no, we do not.
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Browsers: Why Browser Wars will Heat up in 2007

Read/WriteWeb
The early days of the new Browser war is about ad clicks. But it is not likely to stop there. Microsoft has no choice but to expand the war further, because it has not been able to gain any ground on Google online. So since the online war is lost (or at least not looking promising), it makes sense for Microsoft to fight back via the browser. After all, some things never change - whoever controls the browser controls tens of millions of eyeballs.
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Browsers: Firefox 2.0 Review

Read/WriteWeb
It might not seem like Firefox 2.0 has a lot of new features, but we think it is a solid release. The team's focus on performance, stability, usablity and security clearly results in a better, faster product - and users will be pleased with that. However it is also clear that Firefox needs to do more innovation and web integration in order to gain bigger market share. In future we hope to see better bookmarks, better history, a built-in RSS Reader, more productivity features and more smart web integrations. Perhaps with advanced functionality like this, Firefox would make significant ground on IE.
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Browsers: Internet Explorer 7.0 Review

Read/WriteWeb
IE 7 is a huge improvement over IE 6. There is evidence of really good effort and innovation here - but there are also traces of the old IE that just do not fit. It seems like the IE team was pressured to release the tool (because of what Firefox is bringing out) before they had a chance to rethink and redo everything. Hopefully the shortcomings will be cleaned up in IE 8 - and that we won't have to wait another five years before it comes out!
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Semantic Web: When Web Sites Become Web Services

Read/WriteWeb
Today's Web has terabytes of information available to humans, but hidden from computers. It is a paradox that information is stuck inside HTML pages, formatted in esoteric ways that are difficult for machines to process. The so called Web 3.0, which is likely to be a pre-cursor of the real semantic web, is going to change this. What we mean by 'Web 3.0' is that major web sites are going to be transformed into web services - and will effectively expose their information to the world.
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Semantic Web: Difficulties with the Classic Approach

Read/WriteWeb
The original vision of the semantic web as a layer on top of the current web, annotated in a way that computers can "understand," is certainly grandiose and intriguing. Yet, for the past decade it has been a kind of academic exercise rather than a practical technology. This article explores why; and what we can do about it.
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Semantic Web: A New Approach to the Semantic Web

Read/WriteWeb
Earlier this week we wrote about the classic approach to the semantic web and the difficulties with that approach. While the original vision of the layer on top of the current web, which annotates information in a way that is "understandable" by computers, is compelling; there are technical, scientific and business issues that have been difficult to address.
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Semantic Web: The Road to Semantic Web

Read/WriteWeb
The Wikipedia defines the Semantic Web as a project that intends to create a universal medium for information exchange by putting documents with computer-processable meaning (semantics) on the World Wide Web. The core idea is to create the meta data describing the data, which will enable computers to process the meaning of things. Once computers are equipped with semantics, they will be capable of solving complex semantical optimization problems.
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Semantic Web: The Future of RSS

Read/WriteWeb
There is little doubt that RSS is a disruptive, game-changing technology. The so called Really Simple Syndication (previously also called Rich Site Summary and RDF Site Summary), has powered a fundamentally new way to deliver and consume web content. Before RSS, users had to visit individual web sites to find out what was new. Today, news is delivered via RSS directly to web browsers, desktops and aggregators. With RSS, the dynamics of the web changed into an on-demand medium.
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Semantic Web: Yahoo! Pipes and the Web as a Database

Read/WriteWeb
Perhaps today we are witnessing one of the most vivid examples of emergence - the remixing of the world wide web. The parts of the new web have crystallized - blogs, photos, video, audio, maps, RSS, social network profiles and even plain old HTML pages have formed an impressive network, that now can be mined and remixed. Mashups are really nothing new, the web has been a programmable oyster for at least a few years now.
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Attention: The Attention Economy - An Overview

Read/WriteWeb
When information is abundant, the false positives are very costly - they are basically deal breakers. Consumers happily leave sites, knowing there are a ton of alternatives out there. Unfortunately, this becomes a lose-lose situation, because if consumers rarely find satisfying experiences then retailers won't get consumer dollars. The idea behind the Attention Economy is to create a marketplace where consumers are happy, because if they are shown relevant information - then retailers are happy too, because happy consumers spend money!
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Attention: Towards the Infrastructure of Attention Ecosystem

Alex Iskold Technology Blog
The current attention infrastructure laid out by AttentionTrust is a major step towards enabling the Attention Economy. However, its primary focus is the capture and storage of the userŐs click stream. To facilitate truly open ecosystem, this infrastructure needs to be augmented with generic attention format, allowing the other types of attention, and Individual Information Storage API for both reading and writing the records. With these two pieces in place, not only the users will be in control of their information, but they will also be able to receive wide range of attention and personalization services.
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Attention: Continuous Partial Attention

Read/WriteWeb
The ways in which we consume and pay attention to information are changing. The changes are not minor, they are big and profound. Right now, it impacts us all individually - but soon the change will be visible on a global scale. We are splitting our attention over a rapidly growing body of online information. To cope with that we replaced reading with skimming and learned to work in an environment with constant interrupts. We no longer have time to pause and reflect, let along think for a while.
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