You've probably seen articles saying things like "HTML 5 will change everything," "the war between Flash and HTML5," and "HTML 5 will kill Flash." My opinion is that most of this is the same steady stream of hype that keeps the publication pipeline flowing. HTML 5 is of major importance and represents a fundamental upgrade and evolution of the foundations of the web.

It's a good sign when I play with new toys.

I love outdoor concerts and this one with The Nadas and the Beach Boys was one of the best. Pretty good for a small Iowa town!

Upgrading my home computer from Vista to Windows 7 went well but took a LONG time. I don't see a huge difference. It seems more solid, the UI has improved, and I'm finding some useful new features. The Windows 7 firewall and backup/restore have solid improvements over Vista.

This is a really great article about the implications of digital abundance by Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail.

I had a lot of fun this weekend playing with OpenLaszlo, a very cool open source development environment for interactive web applications. I was led to OpenLaszlo through my interest in Red5 and OpenMeetings which runs on Red5.

I was thrilled to see Greg Smith's article in MediaWeek, Web 3.0: 'Vauge, but Exciting.' For fun, I play around with semantic web software at home in my spare time.

Archived copies of our Hawthorne Videoactive Report (HVR) newsletters have been showing up as garbage in Firefox and I've finally fixed it using Tip #1 from an Internet post. This I hope is the last of a series of messy cross-platform issues with the newsletter stemming from encodings are handled on different systems.

I saw the book "Everything You Know About CSS is Wrong!" on O'Reilly Safari today. The books description and table of contents indicate that IE8 is a big thing for CSS so I decided to try it. You can learn about IE8 and get IE8 Beta2 at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/default.aspx

is Santa real

The link above is to participate in an experiment to measure how many incoming links it takes to move this post up the charts in Google. You can read more about the experiment at:

http://www.blogonawire.net/blogonawire/archives/197

I started poking around with Drupal's RDF module last night and ended up staying up VERY late. RDF is one of the languages supporting the semantic web and the semantic web may be, or already is depending on your view, the next great thing on the Internet. The idea of the semantic web is to leverage all the content on the web as structured, meaningful data. This would enable automated systems to search and process this data with reference to its meaning rather than just a mass of unstructured text.