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Opera, the company making what is arguable the most standards-compliant (and least used) internet browser has filed suit in the EU against Microsoft arguing that it should be forced to make it’s browser render pages correctly. While there is certainly an aspect to this suit of Opera wanting to draw attention to it’s own browser, it is absolutely fair to say that Microsoft has done a terrible job supporting standards which would allow developers (that’s us) to build websites much more easily that look the same to all users (that’s us too) in all browsers.

Sure, the newest version (IE7) is leaps and bounds ahead of IE6, but it still lags seriously behind Firefox, Safari, and Opera in terms of reliability in rendering web pages. And though we do strive to make our sites work in all browsers, there is an inordinate amount of time spent tweaking things to work in IE. When we are forced to code outside of the standards, pages become heavier, less accessible, and often suffer reagrding Search Engine Optimization.

It would be unfair to say that all the other browsers work great and render the same right off the bat when I code a page (Safari still gives me the heebie-jeebies from time to time), but Microsoft has a log way to go in this respect.

In other respects, however, IE is great. I do use both, but tend to stick with Firefox due to its superior support for standard HTML and CSS, as well as the incredibly useful extensions that I rely on for building pages. For the average use I can see how using IE would be a no-brainer - since it comes installed on any Windows PC you buy - and that’s the gist of Opera’s suit:

Opera wants the EC to take two actions against Microsoft in response to the complaint. The first is fairly predictable: force Microsoft to either unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows or to have alternative browsers preinstalled on the desktop. The idea, of course, is that Opera would be one of those alternative browsers.

The second recommended remedy is a bit more subtle, but is also ultimately aimed at increasing Opera’s market share. Opera wants the EC to force Microsoft to follow “fundamental and open” standards for how browsers render pages. Although version 7 has improved the situation somewhat, Internet Explorer still significantly lags behind Opera, Firefox, and Safari when it comes to standards compliance (although no browser is 100 percent compliant). Since it’s still the dominant web browser with over 80 percent of the worldwide market, web developers are forced to make sure their sites render properly on IE, often to the detriment of standards compliance.

Full Ars Technica article

Web video has exploded over the past few years. The perfect storm of YouTube (and other video sharing sites), cheap video camcorders, rapidly growing broadband adoption (pdf), and a seemingly endless number star-wars kids and dogs on skateboards has created a web where video is becoming ubiquitous. Even long-term internet staples, like The Onion and MLB.com have added video content. And while some ISPs are arguing (pdf) that their tubes can’t handle the bandwidth from online video (an argument that is, incidentally, specious (pdf)), there’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle with regard to online video.

That having been said, for all that online video can do - illustrate something better seen than read, empower users to create their own content, or destroy politicians with their own words - it has its weaknesses. In particular, video’s not great for skimming or sampling, it’s tough to reference, and can be tricky to pass around at the office or classroom (well, unless you’re our office - these three videos got quite a bit of play at Beaconfire last week). In addition, it can be tough to search a video library for a particular section - particularly if it’s an audio reference, searching may have to be done in real time.

MIT has found a way to mitigate this last problem, and they’re using their own video lectures as a guinea pig. From MIT’s technology review:

Announced last month, the MIT Lecture Browser website gives the general public detailed access to more than 200 lectures publicly available though the university’s OpenCourseWare initiative. The search engine leverages decades’ worth of speech-recognition research at MIT and other institutions to convert audio into text and make it searchable.

This is simply an amazing innovation. More on why this could mean an explosion for online video in the future below the fold.

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Let me start off stating that I’m the administrative assistant here at Beaconfire, and an unlikely candidate to write a tech blog. With that in mind, let me tell you what I know about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. 

In 1769, a Hungarian fellow by the name of Wolfgang von Kempelen created a life-sized robot that could kick your butt at chess. It kicked Benjamin Franklin�??s butt; are you trying to tell me that you think you�??re better at chess than Ben Franklin? The invention was commonly known as �??The Turk,�?� on account of his thick (Turkish looking?) mustache and turban. How did this early model of artificial intelligence work, you ask incredulously? Well, von Kempelen crammed a guy who was really good at playing chess inside of the robot. Von Kempelen was eventually exposed as a hack, though I personally continue to be impressed with his ingenuity, as apparently do the good folks down at Amazon.

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My Must Haves:

• Web Developer
• Firebug
• Tab Mix Plus
• View Source Chart
• IE Tab

For Convenience/Fun:

• Context Highlighting
• Cooliris Previews
• del.icio.us Bookmarks
• Download Statusbar
• FireShot
• Split Browser

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I do not own a Blackberry or an iPhone, but I still dish out a fair sum of money every month for my cell phone service and I would not say the device itself was too cheap either. So, is it too much to ask for a decent interface on my phone? The Open Handset Alliance does not think so.

According to them, it is estimated that there are close to 1.5 billion televisions in this world, and 1 billion people using the internet. Still the most successful consumer product is clearly the mobile phone with around 3 billion users [Source]. So why aren�??t cell phones easier to navigate and customize to our needs, the way our computer operating systems are?

Google and others have come up with a way to change all this. Follow me below the fold for more�?�

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When was the last time this happened to you: you’ve got a killer new idea for a campaign. You’ve found a name that fits perfectly. You run a WHOIS check on it, and, because the ICANN gods are smiling down on you,  your domain name is open. You run it around the office to get the final approval, come back the next day to pick up the domain name and… it’s taken. And no, it wasn’t your officemate playing a joke on you (though you should consider putting his phone in jello to be safe).

While it may seem like bad luck when this sort of thing happens, it’s possible that you’re actually the victim of a new type of fraud called, "domain name front running." An AP story explains:

That has led to suspicions that someone with access to search requests has been using the information to gauge interest in a domain name.

By buying the domain first, that person can then try to sell it to the interested party for a profit. This is different from traditional domain name speculation because the buyer knows for sure that the address is of interest.

This is just the latest in a long line of abuses of the domain name registry system, and it’s causing companies and non-profits to have to go through costly procedures to get their good name back. Find out more, and what you can do to stop it, below the fold.

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The past two weeks have seen some exciting developments as both Kintera and Convio launched Open API programs, Kintera Connect and Convio Open respectively. Here at Beaconfire we�??d like to applaud both vendors for listening to the nonprofit community, vendors and organizations like NTEN etc as the concepts of openness, APIs and the transparency of Web 2.0 communities have changed the software landscape for good. See we can all have an impact!

In the interest of full disclosure, Beaconfire is partners with both Kintera and Convio and we share some of our largest clients in common. We have been involved in discussions and briefings with both vendors and are discussing projects with clients that will give us the opportunity to really dig into these APIs. We hope to share our findings from working with the APIs based on these real world examples.

Rather than comment on the differences and pros/cons of their offerings, I do have some thoughts on how to evaluate or compare these APIs, programs or approaches. I�??m actually working with the good folks at Idealware and NTEN on evaluating APIs so this is top of mind for me already. So, let�??s talk about the things that could be important in comparing APIs and not worry so much about how these two compare just yet. For initial reviews, check out fellow Nonprofit techies Michelle Murain, Allan Benamer, and Judi Sohn.

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Until recently building a Facebook application meant either having to use your own real account, which could cause friction with friends who get with invites for your application in development or having to create a test account that would likely get banned and force you to start over. As the Facebook Wiki notes:

Facebook’s Terms of Service require that all accounts be linked to your real identity, so its not allowed to make fake accounts to test things with. The status quo is the following cycle: developers make test accounts, developers test with those accounts for a little while, our Customer Support team comes across those test accounts and identifies them as fake and disables them, developers are annoyed and frustrated, developers make more test accounts. This is pretty bad.

No longer - in a little-ballyhooed announcement, Facebook recently opened up the ability to create test accounts that would live in a quarantined zone, free from fear of banning. More below the fold…

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A article in the Times caught my eye earlier this week - it purported that HP had developed an easy way to print using a mobile phone. The idea intrigued me - I’m always on the lookout for cool SMS tools (there’s got to be more to it than poorly spelled messages filled with “ur” and other expressions used to save people the agony of typing two more characters… but I digress) and being without a printer on the road can be a nuisance - having to transcribe Google Maps directions by hand sort of defeats the point.

So I read the article and was disappointed to see that it’s not so much printing from a mobile phone as using a mobile phone as one of several devices in the process of getting something to print, sort of like saying you walk to work because there’s a parking lot between your house and your car. Here’s how it works:

The service requires users to first �??print�?� their documents to H.P. servers connected to the Internet. The system then assigns them a document code, and transmits that code to a cellphone, making it possible to retrieve and print the documents from any location.

Later, using the SMS message the service has sent to the user�??s cellphone, it is possible to retrieve the documents by entering the user�??s phone number and a document code on the Cloudprint Web site. The documents can then be retrieved as a PDF, ready to be printed at a nearby printer.

The service will include a directory service that will show the location of publicly available printers on Google Maps. The system currently works with any Windows-connected printer. A Macintosh version is also planned.

Make sense? It’s all the fun of using Kinko’s web upload service combined with the hassle of saving every text message that relates to a document you might one day need. But I decided to put my skepticism aside and give it a try - maybe the Times was just making it sound convoluted.

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I’ve been seeing demos of this technology posted around the ‘net for a while now, but Microsoft’s announcement of their new “Surface” technology brings it a lot closer to a consumer market. I initially wanted to post this simply because I thought this technology was really cool, but in thinking about it more I couldn’t help thinking about how this may affect web site designs in the future.

The technology, in a nutshell (see the videos below for a larger bowl of nuts), is a way to allow people to interact directly with “objects” on a table-top computer screen. The new advancement that makes this exciting is “multi-touch” (the ability to touch an object in several places at once, or to touch and interact with multiple objects at once.

As I watch the demos of purchasing and paying for meals at restaurants, sorting and arranging photos, and using maps, I start thinking about how on-line shopping carts, community networking sites, and even the concept of a web site itself could be affected by this kind of technology.

We have already had to adjust how we think about planning and building websites to use newer, dynamic, web technologies. How much further will this re-tooling have to go when users are demanding the ability to remix an entire website to their liking. OK, so that’s pretty extreme and arguably not something that will necessarily result in a friendly user experience, but what about this:

Take a search result of action alerts, draw a circle with your finger around several of the results to group them together by keyword or tag, and then drag them all to where your Wi-Fi phone is sitting on the table-top. The results are automatically cused to create a “related” RSS feed to your phone based on those results. Go to another site and do the same thing. Then call up your contact list on the table-top (pulled from your phone, still just sitting there on the table, not even plugged in to anything) and send your new RSS feed (or selected items from it) to selected people from your contact list.

We’re probably talking about at least 5 years before this stuff is priced for even first-adopter users; currently pricing of around $10,000, and functionality is geared toward businesses like Hotels, Restaurants, and Casinos. I’ve no doubt, though, that some form of this will be in general use in homes as soon as it’s affordable.

Take a look at the videos — Especially the third video on the Microsoft Surface site about paying for meals at a restaurant — and you’ll see what I mean. In this paradigm, devices like phones, PDAs, laptops, credit cards, and even web pages, become simple buckets to move things to and from. The ability to do this simply by placing the objects on the table is what makes it all so amazing.

I guess a big question is, will people want to browse the web on a table-top, or is the vertical screen we all use already going to stay with us? And don’t let’s even start with accessibility issues with these devices! A lot of cool potential, but a lot of potential pitfalls as well. Isn’t that how it usually is?

Jefferson Han:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=RPwaUp4gepU
http://youtube.com/watch?v=UcKqyn-gUbY

Microsoft Official Site:
http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

Popular Mechanics behind the scenes look:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4217348.html