Blue Sky On Mars

• Welcome to Google Sites
  JotSpot reborn. Looks cool.
  (tags: google collaboration web wiki)

• Senator Clinton’s “Million Little Pieces” moment. – Here Comes Everybody
  “Senator Clinton’s campaign has launched one of the oddest bits of political propaganda in the history of modern politics”. A new website tries to convince super delegates that they should vote for Hillary despite the fact that many more people want Obama
  (tags: politics)

I’m just back from attending this meeting:
Refresh Detroit » February 27, 2008 Meeting: JavaScript Library Techniques, Tips and Tricks. Part of the abstract:

The advent and popularity of JavaScript libraries has caused front-end programming paradigms to change drastically. Design patterns are emerging, object-oriented concepts are common place, and the line between client-side scripting and server-side scripting is beginning to blur.

The talk was given by Brian Reindel of Niche Retail. (Brian formerly worked at Fry Multimedia and his wife currently works there. I never worked at Fry, but I worked with a few Web Elite people who moved on to Fry.)

Brian was angling for a tricky sort of talk. He was shooting for a talk that would expand people’s horizons from doing very simple “everything is a global… just call it in onclick” sort of JavaScript work to more complicated techniques like the module pattern and callbacks. He briefly highlighted some of the techniques used by JavaScript libraries (jQuery is Brian’s favorite). There were some good questions about accessibility (I mentioned that this is one of Dojo’s strong suits) and other JavaScript-library related topics.

I think Brian did a good job for a fairly brief talk. It would have taken a long time for him to get into closures and prototypes which are topics that many casual JavaScript users are not familiar with.

This is the first Refresh Detroit meeting that I’ve attended. It seems like it’s hard to get the word out about local technology-related groups around here. Some of the group’s areas seem interesting to me, and it’s possible that I’ll do a talk at a future meeting.

The NYTimes is reporting that Google is losing altitude as their “clicks go flat”. Investors nailed the stock 4.6 percent yesterday on word that ComScore thinks that Google’s click throughs on ads were flat between January 2007 and January 2008. Two analysts are quoted in the article as saying that Google’s problems are self-inflicted (or at least half self-inflicted). From the article:

Mr. Cleland said the most recent quarter, when Google’s revenue grew at 51 percent while profit rose only 17 percent, was the latest sign that the company was overspending. “If they cut their spending a little, so that they could start gaining earnings momentum again, their stock valuation would return,” he said.

Could it be that Google isn’t concerned about near term earnings momentum? Perhaps they’re investing in the long term growth of the business? For example, joining up with a group spending $300 million on a new undersea cable. It’s likely that they’re also spending to come up with new applications that will ultimately diversify their revenue. Check this out:

“I think at least half of it is self-inflicted,” said Jordan Rohan, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets. Mr. Rohan noted that Google has reduced the clickable area in text ads to avoid accidental clicks, which earn it revenue but are of little value to advertisers.

Does the quote really go with the “noted” part? This quote from the article makes it sound like improving ad click quality is bad for Google’s bottom line. Maybe for the near-term, but…

“Google has had this history of making major changes to the platform that have had terrific impact on monetization,” Ms. Wolk said. “Given the track record, we will give them the benefit of the doubt.”

Indeed. When Google was at its peak of nearly $750 per share, I definitely thought it was overvalued. At today’s price, GOOG has a P/E of about 35. Though that’s double the historical average, Google is still a fast grower and I think they still have more tricks up their sleeves. Where the rest of the market seems concerned about short term results, GOOG starts to look better as a long term stock. This is part of the reason that Google does not give earnings forecasts.

• 21:23 funny… trying to watch the debate live on msnbc.com. debate doesn’t work, but the commercials come up fine #
• 21:26 @hiflyer mentioned in the NYTimes, no less! #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Yesterday, Adobe shipped AIR 1.0, an open source toolkit and runtime for creating desktop apps using web technologies. For a time there, I really wondered why someone would want AIR, rather than just building a normal webapp that runs from the server. I can now think of four reasons:

1. offline – This one is obvious. AIR is a Google Gears competitor as a way to take a webapp offline.
2. performance – Rather than relying on the browsers’ caching behavior to make parts of your software load snappily, just ship the whole app to the user so that the whole thing is local as they navigate.
3. browser consistency – Maybe you’re sick of trying to make IE work (I wouldn’t blame you for that, really). AIR uses WebKit, which is a nice browser platform to target. Of course, this is a lame reason to use AIR. Forcing one’s users to install the AIR runtime and accept the download of one’s app rather than just using a good JavaScript toolkit and common cross-browser coding practices seems like a bad attitude toward one’s users.
4. local data access – You can manipulate files on the user’s hard drive. This lets you more comfortably do things like build a password manager. Pownce uses AIR to allow people to conveniently drag-and-drop files into the Pownce service.

Installing your first AIR app is amazingly easy. I’m not sure what trickery Adobe pulled to do that, but it’s pretty cool. The only app I’ve used so far is eBay Desktop. In my opinion, there’s no reason that app is an AIR app rather than just a normal webapp. As far as I can tell, you need to be online to do anything useful with it. I don’t think any of the 4 criteria above apply to eBay Desktop.

It’s also notable that SitePen has announced AIR support with Dojo 1.1. That means that you can build cross-platform desktop applications using Dojo. That’s nifty.

AIR is a gamble for Adobe. From what I’ve seen, they seem to be putting a lot of money into it. Time will tell if any truly compelling apps appear.

This time of year is when I start thinking that moving to Hawai’i would be nice. It’s often very cold and grey and it’s been going on for too long by now. That said, I do like these mornings when everything is covered in fresh snow. The view out of my home office window:

• New screen cleaner
  (tags: humor video funny)

• VTD-XML “The Future of XML Processing”
  Interesting approach to handling XML documents. Claims to be much faster and more memory efficient than DOM (with similar benefits) and even faster than SAX to boot.
  (tags: xml xpath WebServices)

• Repair or replace your broken appliance? – Green Living Online
  Good tips on the repair/replace question that comes up as appliances get older. Our house turns 10 this year, so we’ll have to start thinking about these things soon enough.
  (tags: appliances energy efficiency repair)