racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

They say the next logical step in the evolution of operating systems (if there ever is such a process) is bringing it online. There have been various steps taken toward this end, such as companies coming out with online versions of common Desktop tools, such as word processors, spreadsheets and notepad applications.

ajaxWindows does more, by actually offering a desktop-like interface on your Web browser, consolidating most of today’s popular Web-based apps. It even a media player one can use online!

ajaxwindows (image source)

Ron Miller says the people behind this nifty site might actually get to market their “online OS” soon.

There’s a lot to like there, but conceptually it’s mind-boggling because if you can put the whole OS on the internet, it changes the whole way we interact with and use our computers. The likes of Microsoft (and its high prices) become, dare I say, irrelevant. Of course, there is the entire matter of a business model and it’s not clear what that is. According to the About page on the ajax13 web site they are in fact a software development company, which would suggest they hope to make money from this venture. How they do that isn’t completely clear to me.

Of course in this logical progression of things (i.e., then vs. now being desktop-based vs. online-based computing), the new battlefront would be on the browser arena. Let’s not talk thin clients for now, since I think that’s too drastic.

I don’t see Internet-based OSes as being too mainstream too soon, especially given bandwidth considerations (particularly in my country), and given the marketing and lobbying power of the software giants (this means you, Microsoft). However, apps like ajaxWindows look like small steps in the right direction.

Safari has been my preferred browser of late. One of my only gripes is that it’s not like open source Firefox or Camino, which usually have updates every few weeks or so. Still, Safari seems to be a fast, solid, no-frills browser.

One thing I like about it is that its rendering engine seems to catch mis-coded XHTML quite nicely—meaning, it displays badly coded stuff badly! Another one is the clean RSS view I just access a site using feed:// (url here) and I get a no-frills content-only view of that blog or site (now some would argue against this, but I prefer this when I want to quickly check sites for updates).

Just recently, Apple announced that the public beta of Safari 3 is now available for download. And what do you know—it now runs on Windows!

It’s still on beta, though and I know there are a lot of bugs to be found (and fixed!). I even spot a few UI inconsistencies here and there (like saying OPTION-something as a shortcut, even though Windows keyboards don’t have an OPT key). But I’m pretty optimistic about it, though.

I’ve installed it on my Windows machine, and I can say Safari is pretty spiffy. It’s like software from a different world installed on a Windows-powered computer (much like how Windows users might initially find iTunes). I’ll be installing the beta on my Mac in a while. Hopefully that will resolve some small gripes I have with Safari 2.xx (like the inability to run Google Docs).

It’s up to you if you want to go in the buff in person that day. But I’m talking about the annual CSS Naked day which will come this April 5th.

In 2006, Dustin Diaz declared April 5 to be the annual CSS Naked Day, a chance for the web world to be reminded of the benefits of CSS web page design. By removing the stylesheet for the day, the world would see naked web pages. They would also have a little more appreciation for the skills of web page designers.

CSS, after all, was meant to separate content from the aesthetics. And being naked will help you know if your site or blog’s markup is usable and accessible (and yes, even compliant). Remember the tables and frames of olden days? I hope you ditched them a long time ago.

The fact of the matter is, if you’re writing good solid markup to begin with, it shouldn’t be all that bad anyway. It will be a test case to see how usable your website is to others without a design. So in the meantime, don’t hesitate to prepare your site for the big day.

So I’ll see you (your site, at least) naked on April 5th. If you’re running WordPress, here’s a plugin that automatically disables your style sheet every April 5th.

It started as an idealistic move to help combat spam in blogs, websites and comment threads. But today, some bloggers feel that the rel=nofollow microformat is not a good solution to a widespread problem. Some thoughts here:

• Lorelle VanFossen on the Blog Herald
• Jack of All Blogs
• Google Tutor

The idea behind the nofollow technique was to take away all the “link juice” comment spammers wanted, thus encouraging them to stop spamming. Google introduced the nofollow tag to discourage comment spam from flooding their search indexes, and blogging programs added it to avoid being penalized and jump on the anti-comment spam bandwagon. WordPress and many blogging programs and forums added a nofollow by default for all links within comment areas. This instructed search engines not to follow the link as they crawled the page, taking away the credit search engine page rank gives to incoming and outgoing links. Recently, while late to the party, in an effort to discourage comment spam, Wikipedia has added nofollow to their outgoing links.

The argument against rel=nofollow basically revolves around the idea that Google is penalizing even the legitimate bloggers and commenters (e.g., if nofollow is automatically enabled on blog software), and that spammers still keep on spamming.

Here’s one of the sites that’s actively advocating against nofollow: No Nofollow. Here are 11 reasons why nofollow is not effective, and expanded explanations on these (and 5 more).

Do you think it’s time to retire rel=nofollow? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Why didn’t I think of that before?

Anyway, what brought me to this realization is a recent issue of a lawsuit threat because a blog ranks higher than a business site for a Google search. Search Engine Journal has the skinny.

An online shoe store owner is threatening to sue a blogger Dean Hunt (DeanHunt.com) unless the blogger ‘lowers his Google ranking” for a keyword phrase that the store owner feels he deserves.
...

I have been running the site for over two years and we have been ranked very highly for the search term [edited].

On Thursday morning I checked our google positions and your site is now above us for this term. I haev checked your blog and it has nothing to do with [edited], so I think it would be best all round if you remove your blog from google for this search term.

Please understand that we make our living from this, and you are just writing a blog that has nothing to do with [edited].

If you do not remove yourself from google for this search, then I will call them myself and have you removed.

...

You have to understand Dean that an online business should be higher in Google than a blog.

Don’t forget that Google is a business as well, they obviously make more money from other businesses than they do from blogs, so it is in their interest that I am higher than you for certain searches.

I have also contacted my lawyer about this issue, so you should expect a letter in the post very soon.

Wow. That’s stupid, with a capital S! (That makes it Stupid, then.)

This is why I often advocate the use of blogs by businesses and companies. It helps with the image and helps boost search rankings, as well. “BLOG” standing for “better listings on Google” is very appropriate, don’t you think?

I dread the day the owners of racoma.com come knocking on my door demanding I de-optimize my blog for my surname. Or rather, I think I should look forward to that day. Maybe I can charge a gazillion bucks for racoma.net and racoma.com.ph.