Standards Vs Market

An interesting split is occurring inside the group developing the next iteration of HTML.  Many of the individual companies working in the group would like audio and video support (in the style of appropriate codecs that would be embedded inside the browser executable). Reaching agreement on which particular formats should be supported is the problem:

The current situation is as follows:

   Apple refuses to implement Ogg Theora in Quicktime by default (as used
   by Safari), citing lack of hardware support and an uncertain patent
   landscape.

   Google has implemented H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome, but cannot
   provide the H.264 codec license to third-party distributors of
   Chromium, and have indicated a belief that Ogg Theora's quality-per-bit
   is not yet suitable for the volume handled by YouTube.

   Opera refuses to implement H.264, citing the obscene cost of the
   relevant patent licenses.

   Mozilla refuses to implement H.264, as they would not be able to obtain
   a license that covers their downstream distributors.

   Microsoft has not commented on their intent to support video at all

However – Mozilla (Firefox) and Google (Chrome) have committed to actually supporting Ogg, despite some questions about the quality that is possible. Will the market simply respond to these by using them? Or will the proliferation of (perceived) freely available codecs mean that nobody cares? It’s well worth looking at some of the astonishing apps built using javascript and an embedded codec to see what’s possible (Ajaxian has great coverage):

Update: arstechnica has a detailed analysis

links: whatwg webmonkey

Social Capital in the Web 2.0 world

Currently working on a literature review of Social Capital – obviously a massive area, so will attempt to narrow it down to recent applications in the specific area of learning and web 2.0. Hopefully the volume of literature will not be too overpowering.

Gale helpfully suggested starting with this:
A Bayesian Belief Network Computational Model of Social Capital in Virtual Communities

Bit irritating to discover that a lot of what I was thinking about covering is knocking about already, although the reference list (and the fact that it was published mid 2007) helps.

Hello WordPress

Managed to get WordPress installed on a 1&1 account. Not actually too difficult, but the catch is that 1&1 offers frame and HTTP redirects from purchased domain names to separate areas. After a lot of failed attempts (which typically required using phpmysql admin to directly change the values in the database), I discovered the correct sequence to get good URLs:

Choose frame redirection under the 1&1 hostname to the correct webspace name

Edit the wordpress fields so that the Blog address (URL) points to the ‘other’ name.

Not a lot of detail here, but this is what worked for me.