Netvibes
Scott McClure sent me this article from Slate. I took a quick tour of the netvibes Universes that were recently launched. Check out the link to the bog entry from Tariq (CEO of netvibes) announcing the new feature. He announced the upcoming launch of the feature I have been expecting for over a year:

Personal Universes

Soon, every single Netvibes user will be able to create a personal Netvibes Universe, that is, a Netvibes page that you can build using the content and widgets that you want -- and make it available to the world at large.

Netvibes users will soon have two pages for every account: a private page, where you subscribe to all the content for your personal, everyday use, and a public page, where you can allow others to access your favorite content -- everything that you love on the web.

Netvibes will not only be your start page, but also the page where people who know you (and maybe even some who don't) will go to follow all the feeds, widgets, and sites that you recommend.

I will link my public page to my blog to give my blog readers a sense of what I look at regularly.

3Tera: Complete Infrastructure Virtualization
Very interesting concept! 3Tera claims to virtualize all aspects of an application and its infrastructure into a single package that can be executed on a grid of servers. Here is a link to the detailed list of features of their flagship product, AppLogic. Some of the features that caught my attention are:

• Disposable infrastructure: Infrastructure is assembled visually and stored as part of the application in AppLogic. The infrastructure is essentially disposable; it's instantiated on the grid when the application is run, maintained while needed, and disposed of when the application exits.
• Packaged distributed applications: AppLogic packages all code, data and infrastructure required to run a scalable web application into a single logical entity that can be started, stopped, managed, copied or even exported to another grid without modifications. AppLogic includes several popular open-source applications such as Bugzilla, Twiki, SugarCRM and Zimbra. These applications are pre-integrated and ready to run.

WOW! Imagine if, in the future, large enterprise apps could be deployed and scaled in this fashion. It has become very easy to start a technology business with all infrastructure at a variable pay-as-you-go and acquire-as-you-need basis.

Thanks to my friend Doug Neal, whose article pointed me to 3tera.

New 2D code from Microsoft :-(

I am not sure if adding color to the code will make it more popular and attractive. I strongly feel that standards make or break this type of features. I do not understand why Microsoft insists on driving its own standards. The issue is not the "quality" of the mouse trap but its acceptance. It is more important for the standard to be globally accepted.

Microsoft could have done us all a whole lot of good by supporting qr-codes in Windows Mobile.

Tagging is huge!
Interesting Tag statistics from Technorati in their State of the Live Web (April 2007) report:

• 230 million posts per month are tagged, up from just 200K a couple of years ago
• 35% of all posts tracked by Technorati use tags
• blogs a now heavily using tags

I believe that the future search algorithms will more heavily use tags. The combination of content creator assigned (blogs, mainstream media, etc.) and user defined / selected tags (del.icio.us, etc.) will be a great way to search for information.

Another one bites the dust!
Finished looking at the last print edition of Infoworld - they are going completely digital. A brief notice on their site:

After 29 years and 1,384 issues, we're folding our print publication and
focusing on Web coverage and events business.

So I will not be picking up a printed copy of the latest issue when I get ready to catch my next flight.

Where have I been?
I now understand what two jobs and a vacation in Barcelona, Spain can do to the frequency of blog posts ... take them down to less than one a week!

My hopes that a long overdue vacation might help me break the pace and regain control of my time were dashed on day 1 of my return.