I am currently at The Rich Web Experience 2007 conference. It is interesting to compare it to JavaOne conferences I have been to in the past.

To start, RWE is much smaller. It is about 400 people as compared to 15 thousands at JavaOne. This obviously makes scheduling logistics and eating arrangements simpler, but there is also a very different feel in the air. It feels that it is much harder to walk around without bumping into speakers and/or other moderately famous web people. At JavaOne, it is all about learning, here it is more like sharing.

Another interesting thing I noticed is that a lot more people than I expected were coming from Java server side background. In fact, we had a round of introductions at Web design Birds-Of-Feather session and more than half of the  people in the room had some (often strong) background in Java. To me, this is a great sign as it shows that the path I am taking (adding HTML/CSS/JavaScript to my Java skills)  has already been done by multiple people before without too many problems.

I have gone to the following sessions:

1.  Secure application development with Ajax (by Dean H. Saxe)  - The presentation itself was great and covered interesting topic in details. I did not understand all of the advanced concepts and consequences, but the core message was very clear and the slides give enough hints and terms to do further research on my own. I would have liked a more detailed example (e.g. ‘This is why SOP is not applicable’ ), but overall it was great.
2. Merging Ajax and Accessibility (by Mark Meeker) - Another great presentation. I heard before that designing for accessibility actually has beneficial side-effects of increased general usability and better design practices, but it was good to see it confirmed with large commercial sites. Mark also had great examples and talked about Hijax a bit as a way of building accessibility into the process, rather than trying to bolt it on at the end.
3. Web Design for Server-Side Developers (by Greg Murray) - This one I have found somewhat disappointing. I knew that covering good HTML, CSS, Javascript,  modular design and supporting tools in one presentation might have been too ambitious.  Still, I was looking forward to some sort of high-level view consistent story tying together the bits together with some best practices thrown in. Unfortunately, Greg was not able to deliver that. He spent too much time jumping between the topics. He also talked about jMaki’s  implementation a lot. That might have been useful, but given that some very important issues (Internationalisation, classes vs. IDs, etc) were still not implemented correctly (by Greg’s own admission), I felt jMaki was not yet ready to be shown as an example of best practices.
4. Web design/architecture Birds-Of-Feather session with Aaron Gustafson, David Verba and couple of others. It was actually interesting, because I sat with them at the dinner table without realising who they were. But you could see they were really smart and interesting, even in their unstaged moments. True geeks, in the good sense of the word. The session itself was a very interesting discussing and somehow I even managed to hog the floor for a while with my questions. Hopefully, it did not annoy too many people.

I am looking forward to the second day.

This was the fastest beta invite confirmation ever. Unfortunately, Digger’s Terms of Service do not allow any sort of disclosure about features or results from it. This is very different from Powerset which has been going out of its way to get beta subscribers (even unconfirmed ones) to know what they are doing. Digger does not even seem to have a blog, which contradicts the rules for a web2.0 company.

I hope that the difference is that Digger is in the earlier stage than Powerset. If they are not, then Powerset may win this competition just on marketing alone.

So, the only thing I can say about Digger is that my previous idea about them wanting to be really sticky seems to be right on the money. Until the Terms of Service change, you will have to get a beta account yourself to see any more. Or you could apply for a job there.

Powerset hasn’t even started competing with Google yet and already it has its own competitor.

Digger - which is currently in private beta - does sense disambiguation of the search terms like everybody else. Unlike everybody else, however, they expose the underlying WordNet definitions to the searcher and allow them to pick, rate and even discuss the senses a la Digg or maybe Search Wikia concept.

This probably will not appeal to the casual in-and-out user, but I could see how searchers in niche areas could spend time contributing and clarifying the senses to get better search results in the future. This, of course, makes the search engine more sticky to those people in the long run as well as making it more generally useful. Hopefully, they would also contribute back to the WordNet project itself.

For more information, there are some sample queries available as well as a quick review in the Data Mining blog.

I have requested a beta account and will do a more detailed review, if I get it.

Two books, two views - no agreement, but certainly a lot of sparks. Is the Internet full of junk and by killing off the conventional media we are loosing all our good information sources? That is a point of view of Andrew Keen, author of the book Cult of the Amateur. On the other hand Weinberger, with his own book Everything is Miscellaneous, agrees that there is a lot of bad stuff on the Internet, but argues that there is a lot of good stuff too. More importantly, new mechanisms are being developed that would allow us to find good stuff faster and ignore bad stuff easier. In fact the Internet may make good stuff easier to find than currently possible outside of the internet.

Both authors have argued their points separately and against other people. But now they have squared-off against each other and the sparks are flying. The full text of one of such debates has been published by the Wall Street Journal. Earlier, they also argued at the Supernova conference and the video recording of that debate has been published.

For myself, Weinberger’s argument makes much more sense. I don’t really care about sports, popular music or so called ‘Entertainment’ industry, so most of the content produced by the off-Internet media is of no value to me and often is actually annoying. On the other hand, Internet allows me to track and participate more fully in topics that are actually of interest to me, my work and my research.

Still, even with my alliances so clear, it was fascinating and educational to read and watch both debates. They certainly make you think.

(Update: August 17)

David Weinberger has written a great and  very well thought out follow-up article on the issue. I agree with it completely and just wish I could argue the topics as well as he does.

Dan Farber has written a good article on Powerset.

It mostly talks about their grandiose marketing plans and how NLP (Natural Language Processing) will change the world, however it also has a reasonable explanation of what they are doing with fairly transparent references to (expanded) WordNet, named entity recognition, event extraction and semantic web technologies.

It is also interesting that the article tries to give impression that Google is not using any of these techniques, while the quotes are hinting at more similarities than differences. It does seem to be true that Google uses their statistical/corpus NLP methods even where something like WordNet might have been useful. But then, they do have a huge, up-to-date, corpus to work with.

One interesting item in the article for me is that Powerset may allow developers to build on top of its platform. That might become a game changer for researchers in NLP field, if there were able to incorporate Powerset’s results into their own algorithms.

For example, if I were trying to choose between two options for a complex named entity and if I knew that Powerset had one listed in their index and rejected another, that would be a good confirmation mechanism. This is similar to how researchers already use Wikipedia’s entries for disambiguation and context building.