Mary Panttaja

The expo wasn’t large—there were more vendors at a utility industry conference I attended in March. The topics covered seemed to be:

• Development tools for Web 2.0 applications
• Development platforms (software as a service) which included tools
• Interactive writing platforms (wikis, primarily)
• Social networks with different spins on how to manage one’s digital life
• A few consulting companies in this space

My perusal of the expo floor and the offerings suffered from the variety of my interests. Right now, I’m not quite sure what I’m looking for—I’m looking to discover what it is I’m looking for. So, here are a few things that caught my attention:

• Buzzword. I had heard about them and, as a writer, I was very interested in seeing where they are going. I will be very excited to see their new editor—I can image many ways to make the writing life better. I was hoping for an editor that could be embedded into a larger application that could manage the meta-structural context of my writings (on which I’ve written before). I was also hoping for an editor that was open enough for me to manage the target object type and where it lands—an xml database, a blog, a wiki. I’m getting a little grim with working with a variety of not-so-efficient editors. So while, I’m still interested in it as an editor, it doesn’t look like it will meet my other demands.
• Yoono. These seemed like nice guys. Another thing I’m looking for is a way to capture and share my research with my partners. We want to choose a platform for our evolving information base. They are currently in a private beta of a social-based home page where you can track your site/links/research and share it with friends or the world.
• Coghead. I stopped by the Coghead booth. Coghead is an online application development tool for Microsoft Access-like database applications. They host the resulting application for a subscription fee. It’s a clever idea in an always-connected world. They were demoing a pretty complicated application. I tested the early beta and felt a little short-circuited by the limitations; it will be interesting to evalute and see where they’ve gone with it. The application in the demo looked like it had more depth.
• Wikis. I briefly looked at Mindtouch and Socialtext, but didn’t go into a lot of detail. They don’t seem to provide one feature I’m looking for in my personal writing environment, but are leading wiki-platforms. Wikis are group collaborative writing environments that organize the material through tagging. I will be evaluating for their appropriate use for our business.
• Adobe Apollo. This is something we are very interested in. Jim’s team at Sapias has been using Adobe Flex (which deploys in the Adobe Flash player) for their relatively complex application which runs as a “rich internet application”. As a developer-geek, Flex looks like a lot of power and control (and fun) for a development environment. Apollo then allows one to deploy Flex and Flash applications not only as web-based applications but also to the desktop for disconnected work. This is a new area for web developers, though it’s a circle back to the applications we were building in the nineties. If we decide that our future includes choosing a platform, the Adobe Flex/Apollo direction would be high on the list.

What I didn’t find was any type of meta-structural writing tool (context, threads, streams, etc.), or the components to put one together. I obviously have to look into other markets and technologies. Some of the responses I got was that folks in the areas of ontologies and semantics have basically “given up” on trying to solve the problem I described to them. We’ll see. I’ve got more research to do.

New topics for the rest of the week.