Crossword Puzzle Contest ! Win RM30 !

Link to us: http://sn.im/crosspuzzle

Stand a chance to win RM30 cash prize just by doing a crossword puzzle ! Getting money for that couldn't be easier !

Grand Prize : RM30 cash

Second place : Six Subway "Buy 1 Free 1" coupons (valid till 31st March)

Third place : Three Subway "Buy 1 Free 1" coupons (valid till 31st March)

Regulations:

1. ONLY INTI College Subang students and faculty are eligible to participate.
   
   
2. Only ONE entry per person
   
   
3. Submission of answer sheet is STRICTLY through INTI ONLINE for identity verification purposes.
   
   
4. Deadline for submission is on 24th March 2011 by 12.00 PM. Any submission after the stated time and date will be ignored.
   
   
5. In an event where there are 2 winners, the one that submitted the earliest will be chosen as the grand prize winner. So get moving !

Registration & Submission

1. Participants are required to submit their details to the contest organizes :

• Emil Anthony: j10007751@intionline.inti.edu.my
  
• Thiru Rao: j10007705@intionline.inti.edu.my
• Hartrishen: j10007707@intionline.inti.edu.my
  
  

2. Registration details to include are:

• Name :
• Student ID :
• Programme :
• Email :
• Contact number :

Subject of the email should be your name followed by contest registration. For example, "Rustin Contest Registration".

Submission of answers should be attached to the reply email to us, also through INTI ONLINE.

Thats about it, Good Luck !

Weekly Poll

Link to us: http://sn.im/poll6th

So we're into our sixth poll and for the first time we've got a 100% rate for the correct answer!

6 voters chose yes to our question. Now although the question may have seemed a bit too straight forward, we posted it hopping to see if our readers were certain of the benefits of Web 3.0.

Well it clearly appears that their crystal clear. We can only hope for more results like these for the upcoming polls. As usual, a big THANKS ! to our voters for their participation once again.

Future Proofing Mobile Websites

Link to us: http://sn.im/27h5mr

We've been talking about Web 3.0 from a general perspective all this while but what about the mobile devices like smart phones? With emerging operating systems like Android, Apple iOS, and Windows Mobile the number of users on the Web are bound to increase tenth fold. Which is why it's important for web developers to begin making their websites more compatible with these devices.

A few ideas that will prepare your site are:

• Making sure your mobile version site contains user agent detection such as WP-Touch which can prompt a mobile-formatted CSS of your standard site or redirect it to a mobile friendlier version in your sub domain or directory.
  
  
• Provide an option switch back to a standard web version (without the Web 3.0 features)

• Do not block Googlebot-Mobile within your robots.txt. It checks the Doc Type in deciding inclusion into mobile site index, like for example if you used the XHTML Mobile or Compact HTML type.

• Avoid using pixels and absolute rendering, a process of generating an image from scene files which are in computer codes. You can choose percentage or relative.

• Hyper linked text should be minimized for clearer viewing and visual reasons.

• Make buttons larger when hovered over. Mobile users don't appreciate having to realign their thumb to select something. Currently there are 2 types of touch screen technologies, resistive and capacitive. Resistive touch screen requires pin point contact with the tip of a finger or a stylus whereas capacitive (iPhone) needs a larger surface contact with the screen, i.e your thumb.
  

• Submit your website to W3C for verification and MobiReady to test load time and mobile device rendering.

These are some ways that can prepare a site for the next generation Web and Devices. Would you start surfing the web more on mobiles devices when these implementations roll out?

Reference:

Raven, [ONLINE], Retrieved 12th Feb 2011.
URL: http://raventools.com/blog/mobile-seo-preparation-for-a-semantic-web/

Yummly

Link to us : http://sn.im/27abi7

Who doesn't enjoy food? I' m sure each of us likes it in one way or another. Cooking for instance can be one of them. Today there's a number of online sites to find recipes such as, Epicurious, Bing and Food Network.com. New to the game now is Yummly, a semantic food search portal that aggregates recipes from connects over 500,000 recipes around the web.The unique feature of Yummly is it's filtration system which is not only based on the type of food, course, and ingredient but can now intelligently break down recipes by diet, allergy, nutrition, price, cuisine, time, taste and sources.

Adding more to it's uniqueness, Yummly is able to recalculate a recipe and reflect the alterations of ingredient amounts and display a breakdown of calories, fats, proteins and carbohydrates. As we've mentioned before, the web learns about you in Web 3.0. So does Yummly which learns from the users preferences, searches, and saved recipes; thus, providing them with more relevant results for every recipe search.

Yummly was founded by former StumbleUpon and eBay employee David Feller in 2009 and today as turned out as the leading search engine for recipes and food matters alike.

Well, you hungry yet?

References:

Techcrunch ,[Online] Retrieved 13th March 2011

URL:http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/21/yummlys-semantic-search-engine-is-the-ultimate-online-cookbook-for-foodies/

Poll Analysis

Link to us : http://sn.im/5thpoll

From the results, Bing really does blow the rest away with 6 out 8 votes, with Hakia and Sensebot each getting one vote.

I have mixed feelings over the results though. In a way it's good that the readers know that Bing is a semantic search engine as well (an article on Bing coming up soon). However with Sensebot and Hakia only receiving one vote each is disappointing since we have mentioned it a number of times in a few articles, in fact just recently i did one on Sensebot.

From another perspective perhaps I feel that Bing may have gotten 6 votes due to its popularity compared with the other two. It is a Microsoft service after all. I really do hope that Hakia and Sensebot do some more advertising about their search engines and what they have to offer compared to the competition.

As always, our gratitude goes out to our readers.

Privacy

Link to us : http://sn.im/webprivacy

There was so much hype bout web 3.0 and we have posted so many articles regarding web 3.0 in our blog such as the features, advantages and disadvantages, and even a poll analysis which resulted in 63.64% voters wants to upgrade to Web 3.0. Well that a good thing, but how would you prepare for it?

The main aspect in preparing for web 3.0 is providing it with a lot of information. The more information it gets better it will be. And the best place to start with is social sites likes of Facebook. This is becauce surely you would already have a Facebook account and Facebook shares it’s member’s information with other services with its API such as Mafia Wars Game and Texas HoldEm Poker. Certain information that Facebook shares are:-

* Location
* Gender
* Date of Birth
* Relationship Status
* Employment and Education Status
* Likes – books, films, music, etc.
* Fan pages

This for sure will make the users to think that their privacy is invaded and Facebook doesn’t care about its member’s security but there is an article by Eric Harber “How much is your privacy worth?“. In that article, Mr. Harber stated, “we’ve been trading our privacy in for perks and benefits for years and therefore there can be little doubt that we’ll continue to do so in the future”. He is trying to say that its user’s choices to safe guard their privacy but in this data driven world, privacy is illusion. More of user activities are watched and for example, how sure are you that the photo that a user deleted is surely not in the web anymore. All I am trying to say that to use Web 3.0 to a certain extent, users have to be prepared to share some private information unless they are using false information :D

Web 3.0 is not released but once it does, are you prepared to share your information for a better web experience?

Reference:

SOCIAL COMPUTING JOURNAL,[Online], Retrieved 7th March 2011.
URL: http://socialcomputingjournal.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=828

TECH FLASH, [Online], Retrieved 8th March 2011.
URL: http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2009/03/How_much_is_your_privacy_worth41625437.html

OnLive !

Link to us: http://sn.im/onlive

Do you all remember my previous article on cloud computing, with the cartoon cloud image?

This is a follow up on that article, in which i mentioned that cloud computing is also faster. Faster in what sense? Well i gave an example but how would you like to know that it's been implemented in the real world?

Say hello to OnLive. A cloud based video gaming on demand service. Thus, video games are now computed on multiple web serves. It was launched on 17th June 2010 only in US, but they do intend on going international.

Aside from that, who would want this? Those for example that wish to play Need for Speed Hot Pursuit (2010) but their system is using integrated graphics or worse yet, their running a netbook (LMAO).

This is where OnLive shines. The service targets users that don't have the adequate hardware to run games and not those of you that have Nvidia 3 way SLi or ATI Quad Crossfire setups. The advantage to this is that mid range gaming can now be brought to all sorts of devices, yes netbooks included. Doubt it? Don't, it even runs on an iPad and soon, Android tablets.

Plus, you don't even need a PC to run this service actually. It can also come with a microconsole, a device about the size of a calculator which directly connects to your HDTV via HDMI and internet via the RJ-45 Ethernet port. (This means war against the console giants....Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo)

Despite these benefits, there are some drawbacks. Frame rates are low around 20 - 30 on average and resolution capped at 720p (this isn't full HD 1080p). Also, it requires a minimum internet connection speed of 4Mbps and above. This clearly isn't a product for countries such as ours where the majority of internet users subscribe to speeds around 1Mbps. While appearing to be a unique solution for bringing gaming to all devices, OnLive would be more suitable for gamers in the future.

Standardization and creating a unified Web OS is part of the Web 3.0 idea. OnLive, is another example that shows this idea being put to practise with video games, enabling a unfied experience throughout various types of devices.

Eager to play Crysis 2 on your netbook now?

References:

Chris Angelini, OnLive, [Online] Retrieved 7th March 2011
URL: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/onlive-gaming-cloud,2671.html

Poll Analysis

From the bar chart, 7 out of 11 voters chose to upgrade. They surely can’t deny the benefits that await them.

3 voters chose to stick with Web 2.0. Now I feel there could be two reasons for this. Either their unsure of the outcome of Web 3.0 or they rather stick with their comfort zones. There are some of us that just aren't fond of change and that's perfectly fine. Do fire away in the comments if I got the wrong idea.

While it may strike some surprise that 1 voter wished to return to the Web 1.0 era, I somehow feel that perhaps with all these every growing content in Web 2.0 and complexities, scams and crimes, it may be a reasonable choice after all.

So, with our results, we’re glad to see that most internet users are ready to upgrade as technology improves. Last but not least, we would like to thank all our voters for their votes.

SenseBot

Continuing from my previous article on Semantic Search Engine, I would like to elaborate further on the SenseBot search engine

One might ask what technology does it use, well it uses a semantic search engine, in other words it attempts to understand what the result pages are about that uses text mining to parse Web pages and identify their key semantic concepts. More often it performs multi document summarization of content to produces a coherent summary. And also the purpose of the semantic search engine which uses the concept of the dot-com bubble that gets 10 links of context. Anyway trying to understand dot-com bubble you would have click on the links some of the pages you might have been familiar but others might have been too shallow, biased or just wayward links to other resources and not based precisely on the questions only leading to redundant information.

In order to save time you might as well click at SenseBot which is one final link and receive a precise summary compared to dot.com.bubble. The SenseBot actually generates a summary from the top most relevant pages on the subject. By then you would have got some ideas about dot.com bubble phenomenon and understand the model and decide which sources you want to know deeper. But the SenseBot will drop the sources that are shallow on the content relevant to the topic. In accessing the SenseBot you not only saving time and effort by also providing the right source by the first click and the summary may revel to you which of the sources are worth drilling further for a precise answer which can be used in search on education, learning, medical queries, business intelligence and news analysis. Basically we can conclude that SenseBot is a rescuer who understand a concept or a particular area of knowledge, or get a digest on a person, an event, an activity that identifies quickly the best source of information on the topic.

Currently we are continuously working on improvement of the quality of the summaries. We have a number of Products based on the technologies used in SenseBot.

SenseBot, [Online] Retrieved 1 March 2011
URL : http://www.sensebot.net/about.htm

HTML5 Delayed. Web 3.0 still on Track?

As we all know by now (or should know) that HyperText Markup Language 4.01 is the most widely adopted version. Since 2008, HTML5 has been buzzing around. The fifth revision has been in development and was said to be finalized in December 2010 by the wise folks from W3C. However the finalization date has now been pushed back to the 1st quarter of 2014.

Hmm doesn't this sound like HTML5 may very well trail the development of 3.0? And i'm sure you're wondering the meaning and relevance to all of these?

Well HTML5 does play a vital role in the semantic web. If you remember my second article on which i spoke about the features, i mentioned ontology/meta data? Where by context are tagged with their characteristics like a ball, colour = "red" and type = "futsal".

And so, with HTML5, it provides support for Microdata. It's basically meta data for HTML elements / tags.

I'll use an example from briancray.com



The itemprop attribute is short for item property. By tagging the elements, the search engine will be able to infer that this message is associated to an event from "itemscope". Next, this big event is due to take place on the 4th of July (guessing you figured out the big event) at 6.00pm. So by tagging it with startDate and datetime this message now bears some understanding to a machine.

That example has been edited due to some space constraints, do checkout the site for the full example.

We can clearly see with this HTML5 feature, it has the potential to drive the development of Web 3.0. With the postponement of the finalization, i truly hope it doesn't keep websites and search engine developers from implementing them into their applications and sites sooner. Heck, they now have 3 more years to thinker around with it.

In your view, good or bad?

References:

Douglas Perry, HTML5 to be finalized in 2014, [Online] Retrieved 15th February 2011
URL: http://www.tomsguide.com/us/html5-w3c-internet-web-browser,news-10127.html

HTML5 Microdata, [Online] Retrieved 28th February 2011
URL : http://briancray.com/2010/09/08/html5-microdata/