If you aren’t aware – there is a Federal Government project to filter all internet content for Australia.

No opt-out of filtered Internet
http://www.infoworld.com/news/feeds/08/10/13/No-opt-out-of-filtered-Internet.html?source=gs
Australians will be unable to opt-out of the government's pending Internet content filtering scheme, and will instead be placed on a watered-down blacklist, experts say.

More information can be found on Electronic Frontiers Australia (Protecting and promoting on-line civil liberties).
Labor’s Mandatory ISP Internet Blocking Plan
http://www.efa.org.au/censorship/mandatory-isp-blocking/

And the EFA site – No Clean Feed.  A site detailing how individuals can voice their opposition of the plan.
http://nocleanfeed.com/

Google are set to release a stack of new features in Google Analytics.

Some of them are pretty cool.  They include: Advanced Segmentation, Custom Reports, a data export API (private beta), integrated reporting for AdSense publishers (private beta), multi-dimensional data visualizations called "Motion Charts," and an updated user and administrative interface

You can read the full run-down on the Google Analytics blog.

Labels: google analytics

Microsoft have a new “/web” brand, with a new look and content.
http://www.microsoft.com/web
It is like a big news aggregator.

They’ve also produced two bundle installers which are interesting.

Web Platform Installer
http://www.microsoft.com/web/channel/products/WebPlatformInstaller.aspx
This bundle includes: IIS7, Visual Web Developer, SQL Express, .NET framework

Web Application Installer
http://www.microsoft.com/web/channel/products/WebApplicationInstaller.aspx
This bundle includes: DotNetNuke, Drupal, Gallery, Graffiti, osCommerce, PHPBB, and Wordpress.

It’s exciting to see these changes, and the bundling of non-Microsoft products.


You can read some background on the /web site on Lauren Cooney's blog http://cooney.typepad.com/

Labels: microsoft, Technology

There is now a large market of 3rd party components you can add to your web site. In more recent years, these have become more common, more easily available, and easier to integrate.

The classic example would be YouTube videos. YouTube allows you to embed videos into your web site. They make it very simple. Each video on the YouTube site includes prominent embed scripts which you can quickly copy and paste into your site’s code by editing the HTML, or pasting the scripts into the CMS HTML content editor.

Let me dissect this a little. The scripts are running on your site, and they are pulling that specific video from the YouTube server. You have essentially put a small window on your page which looks at the YouTube site.

Great. It works.

There are many other 3rd party component you can add to your pages. Advertising banners. Tagging. Rating systems. Commenting systems. Google Maps. Search functions. Preview thumbnails. The list is long.

The integration method is most commonly via HTML tags (object, embed, img, iframe, div) or JavaScript scripts.

This makes it easy to create mashup pages on your site to provide a lot of functionality for the user, but there are some concerns you should be aware of.

• If the 3rd party component allows your users to submit data or content, then you might not have control or ownership of that content.
  
• The 3rd party might have different privacy policies.
  
• If the 3rd party service is free, then you have no Service Level Agreement (SLA), no warranty that the functionality will work at anytime.
  
• Some 3rd party components have been developed as an experiment, and they have no business model, no scalability. Many are in Beta. You should consider how the third party is making money to provide the service. Will they value your business and want you to be happy with their service?
  
• What is the usage agreement? Do you need to include logos or links back to the service site?
  
• Your web site has increased risk. Your pages become reliant on two systems rather than one.
  
• Can your pages still load if the 3rd party system is down or slow?
  

Matt Watson, Technical Director

Labels: Mashups, Technology

The final version of Silverlight 2 is out.

You can read about it on Scott Gu’s blog http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/10/14/silverlight-2-released.aspx

And on the Silverlight web site http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/

Matt Watson, Technical Director

Labels: Silverlight, Technology

Users of the iPhone (sorry to drop the “I” word again) know the benefits of location aware applications and have experienced the awesomeness of being able to automatically view data tailored to your current location.  Well, that location aware functionality will be coming to your web site in the future.

Here’s the W3C draft spec for the Geolocation API
http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source.html

This is talking about the next generation of browsers, or browser plugins being able to provide the user’s location data to your web site (if the user allows it). This is good. You will be able to build a location aware web application, and it will work cross-browser, cross-OS, and cross-handset (although we are far from a user interface that could span all these).

Remember that location aware functionality is only really beneficial for mobile computers. You will need to consider what you will do for users who are at home or the office and don’t have location data.

Matt Watson, Technical Director

Labels: geolocation, Technology