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The Windows Sidebar is modeled after Apples Dashboard, which allows customized applets to be displayed and used. A useful cautionary note mentions that the Sidebar gadgets dont save data or configurations when closed. You must start all over again.

Actually, this "warning" of losing preferences when closing gadgets also applies Apple's Dashboard: any widget removed from the Dashboard loses its preferences. The act of moving a gadget (widget) from the Gallery (Shelf) into the Sidebar (Dashboard) is what instantiaties a new gadget (widget). Persistence of configuration data is only acheived by keeping the gadget (or widget) alive. Both platforms save configuration data between logouts/shutdowns -- but for instantiated widgets (gadgets) only. Close them, and their done.

And now, some shameless self-promotion for you Vista early adopters, courtesy of lifehacker:

Turn any web widget into a Vista Gadget
The Amnesty Generator for Windows is designed to let you convert any embeddable web site widget (including Google Gadgets) into a Vista Sidebar Gadget with very little work.

Compared to Vista's Gadget library's relatively meager 275 gadgets, Google Gadgets for your web page, for example, currently sports over 3000 widgets - meaning that if you're a fan of Vista Gadgets and you want to expand your palette, the Amnesty Generator looks like a good way to do that. If this sounds at all familiar, OS X Dashboard-lovers may remember that Amnesty Generator is also available for Dashboard. Right now the generator still has a few kinks (particularly in the looks department), but in all it seems to work fairly well.

Amnesty Generator for Vista

t's good for temporary use but I agree with the premise of using widgets as apps.

You can convert any Dashboard widget into an OS X app using Amnesty Singles (awhich also lets you select what level your widget app sits in, so it isn't floating all the time).

Another solution is to use the shareware apps Amnesty Widget Broswer or Amnesty Singles, which unlike the "devmode" trick actually allow you to set the window level your Dashboard widgets stay in on the desktop.

Another solution is to use the shareware apps Amnesty Widget Broswer or Amnesty Singles, which unlike the "devmode" trick actually allow you to set the window level your Dashboard widgets stay in on the desktop.

• Amnesty Generator – converts Google web page hosted gadgets into Dashboard widgets.
• Google Maps Plugin – integrates Apple Address Book with Google Maps and Google Earth.
• Dashalytics – gives you quick access to prettified Google Analytics stats in a widget.
• Spanning Sync – syncs iCal with Google Calendar.

From macintouch.com:

Mesa Dynamics released Amnesty Generator 0.5b, a utility that converts any Google web page gadget into a Mac OS X Dashboard widget. The software "automates the process of embedding [Google's] gadget code into locally hosted web pages that are implemented inside Dashboard widgets."

It's success will probably hinge on its execution. Many people dislike Dashboard widgets existing in a seperate desktop layer than the rest of the OS. The KDE implementation would be wise to allow a desktop-centric Dashboard widget manager like Amnesty for OS X.

You can also use Amnesty Widget Browser if you want Dashboard widgets on your desktop selectable from the system menu bar, with opacity, window level adjustment, widget scaling and rotation etc. But it does cost $. Bonus: allows Panther 10.3.9 users to run many Dashboard widgets too.

If you're on Mac OS X, the easiest way to check out OpenEXR is to download the freeware utility OpenEXR Viewer. That page also has a direct link to the official distribution's sample images.

Or use Amnesty to get mutliple window levels (not just floating) for Dashboard widgets, plus settable opacity, auto-updating, virtual dashboard spaces, etc.

Bonus: runs on Panther too.

Well...

In fact, leveraging WebCore is the strategy used by Amnesty for running Dashboard widgets on the desktop under Panther (10.3.9) and Tiger.

But doing the same on a cell phone OS is problematic because many widgets use BSD system calls, embedded AppleScripts and Cocoa plugins to do their work.

So, CSS, JavaScript and HTML support is only adequate to support the very simplest of widgets.

Although I find the Semantic Web project intriguing, the idea of tagging data to define it is somewhat of a cop-out. The "meaning" of any given page is already there: in the page. Instead of spending so much time tagging pages, how about working on algorithms to derive meaning from the content. Surely those in the field of Computational Linguistics can make a real push at this: "artificial" corpora aren't needed anymore: the web offers more data than you'll ever need.

Shameless promotion: for OS X users, theConcept offers an example of mining key words and phrases, and contextual elements automatically from pages returned by Google queries.

For years, advanced client-side developers have frequently wanted a clean way to maintain a "connection" with the server so that transactions can occur in the background, and newly updated data gets inserted into the current page. Many have tortured themselves by using techniques such as hidden self-refreshing frames and "faceless" Java applets.

Users will now be prompted before a widget downloads to their hard drive.

Another problem, besides "auto-install on download" is that Dashboard's "warning" to a user on newly-installed widget launch is a simple yes/no proposition without any indication of the access sought by the widget.

It would be nice to see Apple adopt something similar to Amnesty Widget Browser, which presents the following dialog on newly-installed widget launch.

Although this project isn't strictly "wrapped around" (pardon the pun) Berners-Lee's semantic web, but rather an external semantic "space" defined by a conceptual foundation and then refined by users in the inteface, it still fails to address to metatag/metdata problem, namely:

1) The metadata sink. Creating an "mSpace" around classical composers is one thing. Doing the same on "quantum mechanics and philosophy" is another. As you broaden the concept, you have to depend on a more-refined framework of contextual and categorical distinctions. Eventually, you may be creating more metadata than data.

2) The metadata reflection problem. Metadata, in that it is not the data itself, cannot possibly reflect every notion, category of thought or context -- many of those things depend on the user's own interaction with the data (e.g. what you find "funny" I may find "dumb."). And, as often mentioned, metadata may in fact be missing, ouright misleading or incomplete.

IMHO, though metadata projects such as these are intriguing, the true "holy grail" of classifying data is understanding context. Thus, why worry about metadata when you have the data write there in front of you? Even a statistical anaysis of word/phrase frequency over say, 100 pages returned by Google on "quantum mechanics and philosophy" can yield concepts and connections without any metadata creation/foundation at all (i.e. the user analyzing the key words/phrases can make those connections on his/her own).

Clearly I'm biased, as I work on software for OS X that does just this, but still, I honestly believe that creating more data, just to describe what is an increasingly massive corpus (the web), is the wrong solution to the "understanding" problem.

My company develops a data mining program for OS X (theConcept) that uses Google (or other search engines) to provide links to data for mining.

For example, searching on Google for "tom cruise" brings up pages upon pages of links, but -- from a cursory glance at the results -- it is impossible to learn anything about Tom Cruise unless one visits those results.

Our software visits each of those results (for example, the first 100) and looks for the most significant keywords and phrases used over all the data. As you might expect, these typically end up being the names of people (e.g. Nicole Kidman, Penelope Cruz) or movies (e.g. Top Gun, Color of Money) that are associated with Tom Cruise. As far as our software goes, this is ample for doing keyphrase analysis.

But the problem with deriving any additional meaning from the Internet web space is this: the biases that exist due to the very reasons for mentioning Tom Cruise (namely those things he is famous for) simply outweigh -- by a wide margin -- any other quite relevant interesting data about Tom Cruise. So, in fact, the web, in general, is an awful corpus of valid semantic data.

If you want a rough model of popular ideas then perhaps Google and the web en masse is useful (it is for our software). But if you want any real meaning at all you come to the same conclusion that has given rise to sites like Wiki: the web, to be blunt, has a whole lot of shit in it. Coming up with a perfect (and rational) filter is quite a task.

• 
  operating system
  linux kernel
  free software
  

• 
  Linus torvalds as the moving force behind the operating system that is reshaping the computing industry.
  
  Andrew tanenbaum has been derided for his heavy hand and misjudgements of the linux kernel such a reaction to tanenbaum is unfair.
  
  Respect for richard stallman's contributions to the free software movement and consider him the real pioneer in the field but I believe...linus who has turned that dream into the beginning of a reality by bringing...next level.
  

Agreed. The ticker is not a bad design in itself, but most of them have been poorly designed.

RSS tickers drove me batty until I found that some remove headlines from the ticker when I mark them "not interested" as well as when I click on them to open a story. Only the headlines I want to keep stay in the ticker.

PS: For me, it was a very close call between Tickershock and NewsTicker, but NewsTicker won. Their site and help are not that informative, but I liked seeing headlines from different sources in different colors.

I feel so spoiled having a *nix-based system with so many great apps to choose from.

I was constantly staring at the news feeds as they scrolled by and re-reading the same headlines over and over.

This is really a criticism of application design and not the model per se. If the KDE applet doesn't allow you to "see each item once" then that is probably a good feature suggestion.

As the developer of an RSS ticker (Tickershock, for Mac OS X) I find that the happiest users are those who aren't interested in peering at news headlines all day, but rather enjoy the randomness of "catching a good story" every now and then.

Tickers aren't for eveyone (but neither are email-style aggregators) so if the tickers on CNN/MSNBC/FoxNews/etc. drive you crazy, you're probably right to steer clear of them on your desktop.

For those OS X users interested in thematic keyword search (either in desktop docs or on the Web), take a look at theConcept. Copernic Agent is a somewhat similar product.

</shameless promotion>

Although the caching solution seems intriguing, the onus should really be on the aggregator authors to do at least local caching for RSS access between "refresh" intervals and even better, use HTTP conditional GETs. It's also important to use sane default "refresh" intervals and constraints.

During our product's development, our debugging refresh interval was 5 minutes and hardcoded to Slashdot. As you can imagine, it didn't take us long to discover Slashdot's unique banning mechanism -- it woke us up to the problem of letting people check feeds way too often (this also before we had implement local caching).

However, if this bandwidth issue keeps getting worse, someone like Akamai is certainly going to think of a corporate solution.

To search, just use this URL:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/%s

where %s is your keyword.

<ShamelessSelfPromotion>
Or if you're running OS X, use the Flickr search engine in Beholder.
</ShamelessSelfPromotion>

Hey Danilla, Great search engine research. If you have a Mac (and the time) maybe you can try theConcept and give a similarly detailed analysis of its use (perhaps data mining results from Google). Since it's my company, I'm biased on its usefulness (as a keyphrase analyzer its approach to search is somehwat different from the "find the answer" test your trying) but I'd definitely be interested in your comments or suggestions, given your expertise in this field.

Tickershock fits the bill.

People keep making more because the "optimal" UI metaphor for RSS is still being determined. The authors in the article have products that run the gamut from three panel email-like (NetNewsWire, Pulp) to iChat-like (NewsFire), to Finder-like (Shrook). And recently, authors such as myself (ahem, plug follows) have been working on ticker-like RSS/Atom readers such as Tickershock and Stickler (a competitor -- equal time rules in effect).

And with Apple getting in the mix with their browser-style Safari RSS, we'll just have to see what pans out of the mix.

Google probably doesn't think it's worth competiting with Spotlight, given it will be bundled with Tiger and accessible system-wide (argubably more convenient than Google's Desktop web-enabled UI).

And if you're looking for targeted desktop context and keyword analysis (as opposed to simple key matching in all files) OS X users can always use theConcept (disclaimer: my company).

theConcept is a client-based clustering/thematic search engine that works with Google, Wiki, DMOZ and other search engines (it data mines result and analyzes most significant keywords from the source pages). If you have OS X, you can check it out for free.

</shameless plug>

The common thread to the Semantic Web is that there's lots of information out there--financial information, weather information, corporate information--on databases, spreadsheets, and websites that you can read but you can't manipulate. The key thing is that this data exists, but the computers don't know what it is and how it interrelates. You can't write programs to use it.

IMHO, the problem with the Semantic Web is the same problem that evolved the Web from a linked knowledge store to a commercial-driven directory.

Yes, it would be nice if all data were tagged and understandable, but let's be honest: the commercialization (and its result: exploitation by marketers) of the web would certainly spill into the Semantic Web, and so Berners-Lee's vision would be once again ruined by 1) incorrect/misleading tagging, 2) competing standards and 3) out and out fraud.

I assume what Berners-Lee really wants is for a machine to truly understand that, using his example: something is a calendar, and that you are interetsed in it, and that you should add the event to your schedule and then book a flight for it.

But the chances are -- one day -- machines will be able to understand how data is typed by understanding the context around it (just as a human would go through the aforementioned process manually).

Obviously, this type of reading "comprehension" is a long ways off, but the "search engine wars" are resulting in a lot of mind power thrown at the problem of understand context. And I'm guessing it'll be a reality before anything as pure as the vision for the Semantic Web is realized.

(and to throw in a plug for my own copmaniy's attempt at understanding web context: theConcept).

If you've got a Mac, try running theConcept -- it does clustering via keyword extraction and does auto-citations via search engine data mining on the client side (as opposed to a web-based solution like Vivisimo).

Disclaimer: Yes, I'm the developer.

Since he's a Mac OS X user, he could have used Trapeze to drag and drop convert his PDF to HTML. If he had to do it over again, of course.

Or perhaps even Mesa Dynamics, for their search engine data mining technology...
</plug>

I reckon it won't be long (after the IPO?) before Google expand their APIs a lot further, to make image, news and group searching available to third party apps. Then things will get really interesting.

One problem with the Google APIs is that the licensing agreement is awfully restrictive: its fine for clever hacks, but not esepcially conducive to thrid-party commercial development.

Of course, it's always possible to communicate with Google via HTTP. For example, my company's image searching desktop app for Mac OS X, Beholder queries Google, AltaVista, Ditto, etc. by implementing its own web browser. So, things can actually get "really interesting" today.

If this kind of research interest you, and you're a student looking for an area of study, Computional Lingustics is an (IMHO) amazingly rich field of study, sausage notwithstanding.

void CShameless:Plug()
{
If you're running OS X, check out theConcept for an example of statistical language processing in action.
}

My company is working on something akin to this, but more focused on extracting a digest of significant ideas/terms from the content of text, Word, PDF, HTML, etc. from your local disk or from the Internet. So it's not quite a pure "search" tool; more of a "research" tool.

If you're interested, and have Mac OS X 10.2 or later, you can check out a tech preview of theConcept.

OK, they are looking at the anchor text. Then what? As long as HTML is the language, I'm afraid there aren't that many more things they can do.

You're right that the source (HTML) may be limited in its context, so one thing Google can do is look at their user base's interaction with a given query.

For example, if "theory of relativity" has been searched a million times, that is one million samples of PageRank filtered by human (user) intelligence: what sites did users visit most often from the search results? How much time between click throughs to other results? ( i.e. a rough indication of how much time was spent on a particular result -- up to the penultimate result). What related queries followed the first (e.g. "time dilation")?

But perhaps more importantly, Google has a mindboggling large cached snapshot of the web. IMHO, that is where their future lies: billions and billions of words just waiting for sophisticated context analysis. My company's interests lie exactly in that arena.

My bet is that Google (and others) have a long, long way to go yet. But the real question is: can they make money doing it?

A lot of articles (including this one) are focused with how Google (and their would-be competitors) can improve search via algorithms like PageRank; and again and again the proposed/imaged solutions are based on server-side computation. IMHO, the real solution to improving search is client-side -- and I don't mean search toolbars -- but rather using the computional power of the client to provide a better experience than what is available inside your browser. Searching in a browser is cool, but why not build a powerful Google search client app?

As a simple example: if your a Mac user, Beholder is really a much more useful image search frontend than using images.google.com alone (yes, I've mentioned this before, but hey, a developer has to eat).

"Google Image Search has been significantly updated," said Sergey Brin, Google co-founder and president of Technology. "We've doubled the index to more than 880 million images, enhanced search quality, and improved the user interface."

For Mac users, I recommend using Beholder to power your Google image search. Google's minimal UI changes notwithstanding.

(Mod +1 Self-Promotive)

If you have our freeware image searcher Beholder, you can view the iTunes RSS feeds as collections of album art via the search engine templates that are now available online.

If you have our freeware image searcher Beholder, you can view the iTunes RSS feeds as collections of album art via the search engine templates that are now available online.

Please consider obtaining my freeware app, Beholder, a fast, programmable, web image search frontend. It kicks Sherlock's current image searching channel's keister. I know I'm not an employee, so it'll cost you -- but isn't Sherlock worth it?

(yeah, yeah, okay -- a shameless plug...)

can be found here