NIEM enables information sharing, focusing on information exchanged among organizations as part of their current or intended business practices. The NIEM exchange development methodology results in a common semantic understanding among participating organizations and data formatted in a semantically consistent manner. NIEM will standardize content (actual data exchange standards), provide tools, and managed processes. NIEM builds on the demonstrated success of the Global Justice XML Data Model. Stakeholders from relevant communities work together to define critical exchanges, leveraging the successful work of the GJXDM.

The White House is requiring federal agencies to consider using a standard configuration developed by the Justice and Homeland Security departments to share information across the public and private sectors. More than a month ago, the Office of Management and Budget issued guidance to agencies on the website of the National Information Exchange Model, a joint DOJ-DHS program. The OMB document, which is not posted on its website, includes instructions for assessing the framework's merits by May 1. "All agencies shall evaluate the adoption and use of the National Information Exchange Model as the basis . . . of reusable cross-boundary information exchanges," said an enclosed memo from Kshemendra Paul, the federal chief architect. "The Office of Management and Budget is working jointly with the NIEM Program Management Office to provide guidance and the tools necessary to help you meet this requirement."

NIEM launched in 2005 with the goal of linking jurisdictions throughout the country to better respond to crises, including terrorist attacks, natural disasters, large-scale crime and other emergencies handled by Justice and Homeland Security. The standards are intended to expedite the secure exchange of accurate information.

EU governments should use open standards and interoperable systems to deliver electronic government services, EU ministers and the European Commission agreed earlier this week. They also stated they would promote the reuse of public sector information. The ministers declared to "embed innovation and cost effectiveness into eGovernment through the systematic promotion of open standards and interoperable systems, development of EU wide e-authentication schemes and proactive development of e-invoicing, e-procurement and pre-commercial procurement."It was one of 29 points agreed upon during a meeting of all ministers responsible for information society from European member states and the European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda.

Open standards are an important element in many open source applications, as these are freely accessible. Development of this type of software can run into problems when using closed standards or when using standards that require payment of royalties. Such standards may change unexpectedly or limit how the software can be used.

Granada declaration (pdf)

By making VP8 open source Google will provide a high-quality and open alternative to H.264 and other existing codecs. When VP8 was first launched its inventors at On2 claimed it could provide "50 percent bandwidth savings compared to leading H.264 implementations." The move has the backing of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) as a way of killing Flash and avoiding potential lock-in to patented technology.

In a previous post, I'd wondered why Adobe didn't spend their time building HTML5 Authoring tools rather than putting so much time/energy/money into their  Flash->iPhone Apps exporter tool for Flash CS5.   As it turns out, Adobe does have some, albeit rudimentary, HTML5 Canvas exporting tools as demonstrated in the video above.   Taking a simple animation, which is the beginning, middle and end of most Flash banner ads that we love, is an export/paste operation.

This is a heads-up that we will shortly start landing patches for a new WebKit framework that we at Apple have been working on for a while. We currently call this new framework "WebKit2". WebKit2 is designed from the ground up to support a split process model, where the web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process. This model is similar to what Google Chrome offers, with the major difference being that we have built the process split model directly into the framework, allowing other clients to use it. Some high-level documentation is available at http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2 Currently WebKit2 is available for Mac and Windows, and we would gladly accept patches to add more ports.

A recent study by the International Data Corporation has shown that the amount of digital data being produced had risen to 281 exabytes (EB, 1018) in 2007 and estimates the total amount of digital information will grow at a rate of 58% per year, reaching 1610 EB by 2011! Each EB is equivalent to 50,000 times the entire U.S. Library of Congress. printed collection

Total mobile data traffic topped mobile voice traffic in the United States last year, for the first time.In fact, globally, data traffic (that includes SMS text messaging) topped voice traffic on a monthly basis last year and the total traffic across the world exceeded an exabyte for the first time in 2009, according to a report just released by Chetan Sharma Consulting, a leading strategist in the mobile industry (clients include AT&T and China Mobile).

The traditional browser plug-in model has enabled tremendous innovation on the web, but it also presents challenges for both plug-ins and browsers. The browser plug-in interface is loosely specified, limited in capability and varies across browsers and operating systems. This can lead to incompatibilities, reduction in performance and some security headaches.That’s why we are working with Adobe, Mozilla and the broader community to help define the next generation browser plug-in API. This new API aims to address the shortcomings of the current browser plug-in model. There is much to do and we’re eager to get started.

As a first step, we’ve begun collaborating with Adobe to improve the Flash Player experience in Google Chrome. Today, we’re making available an initial integration of Flash Player with Chrome in the developer channel. We plan to bring this functionality to all Chrome users as quickly as we can.We believe this initiative will help our users in the following ways:When users download Chrome, they will also receive the latest version of Adobe Flash Player. There will be no need to install Flash Player separately.Users will automatically receive updates related to Flash Player using Google Chrome’s auto-update mechanism. This eliminates the need to manually download separate updates and reduces the security risk of using outdated versions.With Adobe's help, we plan to further protect users by extending Chrome's “sandbox” to web pages with Flash content.

As part of a series of interviews with W3C Members to learn more about their support for standards and participation in W3C, I'm talking to Paul Cotton from Microsoft and co-Chair of the W3C HTML Working Group.

Internet Explorer’s dominance on the browser market has been weakening constantly since Mozilla’s open source browser started getting traction with users. And with the advent of Google Chrome, IE’s share loss only became steeper. Statistics offered by Janco Associates reveal that in February 2010, Internet Explorer has dropped under 65%. Over the past four years, the release of Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 did nothing to halt IE’s crumbling market share.

Janco notes that from February 2009 to February 2010, IE dropped 6.21%, from 70.99% to 64.78%. “The major findings are that in the last 12 months Microsoft's browser market share has continued to erode - Microsoft lost over 6% in the last 12 months; Firefox's market share is unchanged for the last 12 months; Google Desktop and Chrome now have just under 6%; and Netscape is no more,” reads an excerpt from the Browser and Operating System Market Share White Paper.

The thing I find most attractive about Google Buzz is its stated commitment to open standards: We believe that the social web works best when it works like the rest of the web — many sites linked together by simple open standards. So I took a bit of time to look over the standards involved. I’ll focus here on the standards that are new to me.

Consumer Watchdog today called on the Justice Department to guarantee that its ongoing antitrust probe of Google’s business practices include an investigation into if the company is manipulating its search results to favor its own products. The nonprofit advocacy group said it sent a letter to Christine Varney, Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Division, after news that the European Commission had received three complaints against Google alleging the company manipulated search engine results in an anticompetitive way. Also this week U.K. based price comparison site Foundem filed papers with the Federal Communications Commission with examples of how Google products were allegedly favored in its search results.

ongoing antitrust probe of Google’s business practices include an investigation into if the company is manipulating its search results to favor its own products. The nonprofit advocacy group said it sent a letter to Christine Varney, Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Division, after news that the European Commission had received three complaints against Google alleging the company manipulated search engine results in an anticompetitive way. Also this week U.K. based price comparison site Foundem filed papers with the Federal Communications Commission with examples of how Google products were allegedly favored in its search results.

Joaquin Almunia left his job as the E.U.’s economics and monetary affairs commissioner this month to become antitrust chief.

Christine Varney, the head of the antitrust division at the United States Justice Department, warned European regulators in a speech on Monday to restrict imposing obligations to the European Union on American companies that are doing business globally.Regulators in Europe are under pressure from governments, media companies and technology developers to blunt the market power that Google has amassed by running the world’s most popular Internet search tools.

Mr. Almunia also will need to resolve whether to give greater freedom to online merchants like eBay and Amazon which, like Google, are based in the United States. Some specialty goods and luxury goods brands, in particular LVMH of France, have lobbied hard to require that merchants have traditional shops as a precondition for selling goods over the Internet.

Dear Google, With your purchase of On2, you now own both the world's largest video site (YouTube) and all the patents behind a new high performance video codec -- VP8. Just think what you can achieve by releasing the VP8 codec under an irrevocable royalty-free license and pushing it out to users on YouTube? You can end the web's dependence on patent-encumbered video formats and proprietary software (Flash).

This ability to offer a free format on YouTube, however, is only a tiny fraction of your real leverage. The real party starts when you begin to encourage users' browsers to support free formats. There are lots of ways to do this. Our favorite would be for YouTube to switch from Flash to free formats and HTML, offering users with obsolete browsers a plugin or a new browser (free software, of course). Apple has had the mettle to ditch Flash on the iPhone and the iPad -- albeit for suspect reasons and using abhorrent methods (DRM) -- and this has pushed web developers to make Flash-free alternatives of their pages. You could do the same with YouTube, for better reasons, and it would be a death-blow to Flash's dominance in web video.

If you care about free software and the free web (a movement and medium to which you owe your success) you must take bold action to replace Flash with free standards and free formats. Patented video codecs have already done untold harm to the web and its users, and this will continue until we stop it. Because patent-encumbered formats were costly to incorporate into browsers, a bloated, ill-suited piece of proprietary software (Flash) became the de facto standard for online video. Until we move to free formats, the threat of patent lawsuits and licensing fees hangs over every software developer, video creator, hardware maker, web site and corporation -- including you.

Google launched its new social Gmail experiment dubbed Buzz and the “Twitter killer” comments will be a dime a dozen. But from an enterprise perspective, Google Buzz has a far larger target in mind: Microsoft’s SharePoint.

We're happy to announce that over the next few weeks we will be rolling out the ability to upload, store and organize any type of file in Google Docs. With this change, you'll be able to upload and access your files from any computer -- all you need is an Internet connection.Instead of emailing files to yourself, which is particularly difficult with large files, you can upload to Google Docs any file up to 250 MB. You'll have 1 GB of free storage for files you don't convert into one of the Google Docs formats (i.e. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations), and if you need more space, you can buy additional storage for $0.25 per GB per year. This makes it easy to backup more of your key files online, from large graphics and raw photos to unedited home videos taken on your smartphone. You might even be able to replace the USB drive you reserved for those files that are too big to send over email.Combined with shared folders, you can store, organize, and collaborate on files more easily using Google Docs. For example, if you are in a club or PTA working on large graphic files for posters or a newsletter, you can upload them to a shared folder for collaborators to view, download, and print.

PALO ALTO, Calif., January 12, 2010 — VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Zimbra, a leading vendor of email and collaboration software, from Yahoo! Inc.

Zimbra is a leading open source email and collaboration solution with over 55 million mailboxes.  As an independent Yahoo! product division, Zimbra achieved 2009 mailbox growth of 86% overall and 165% among small and medium business customers.