Open Web

I was surprised to learn that Florian's native document parser is a JSON like ripper of OpenXML visual objects.  He doesn't wrestle with structured objects, but simply treats everything as a visual object.  NOOXML might be closer to a virtual print driver than a OpenXML ripper.   So this has me rethinking the OCR/Scan methods used to rip paper documents to create Tagged PDF "structured object" versions.  Structured objects can easily be converted to interactive HTML-CSS or SVG.  Today Google released an OCR enhanced Android gDOCS app.  Not sure if it uses the Bricolage/Bento algorithm, but that would be an interesting approach. excerpt: the Bricolage algorithm for transferring design and content between Web pages. Bricolage employs a novel, structured-prediction technique that learns to create coherent mappings between pages by training on human-generated exemplars. The produced mappings are then used to automatically transfer the content from one page into the style and layout of another. We show that Bricolage can learn to accurately reproduce human page mappings, and that it provides a general, efficient, and automatic technique for retargeting content between a variety of real Web pages.

heavy duty template based CMS, can integrate with Drupal for improved interactivity 

Move over FlipBoard and QWiki and meet Needle.  The emerging market space for automating the process of collecting Web information to analyse, re-purpose and re-publish is getting crowded.   Needle is designed to: acquire data from multiple sources:  A simple tagging process quickly imports structured data from complex websites, XML feeds, and spreadsheets into a unified database of your design.merge, deduplicate and cleanse: Needle uses intelligent semantics to help you find and merge variant forms of the same record.  Your merges, edits and deletions persist even after the original data is refreshed from its source. merge, deduplicate and cleanse: Needle uses intelligent semantics to help you find and merge variant forms of the same record.  Your merges, edits and deletions persist even after the original data is refreshed from its source. build and publish custom data views: Use Needle's visual UI and powerful query language to configure exactly your desired view of the data, whether as a list, table, grid, or map.  Then, with one click, publish the data for others to see, or export a feed of the clean data to your own local database. Flipboard is famous for the slick republishing / packaging process focused on iOS devices.  Allows end users to choose sources. QWiki takes republishing to the extreme, blending voice over (from wikipedia text) with a slide show of multimedia information.  Edn user does not yet have control and selection of information sources with QWiki. The iOS Sports Illustrated app seems to be the starting point for "immersive webzines", with the NY Times close behind.  Very very slick packaging of basic Web information. Flipboard followed the iOS re-publishing wave with an end-user facing immersive webzine packaging design.  And now we have Needle. Still looking for a business document FlipBoard, where a "project" is packaged in a FlipBoard immersive container.  The iPack would be similar to an iPUB book with the added featur

Note: On April 12th, 2011 Needle was acquired by Google.

Content controls are bounded and potentially labeled regions in a document that serve as containers for specific types of content. Individual content controls can contain content such as dates, lists, or paragraphs of formatted text. In some cases, content controls might remind you of forms. However, they are much more powerful, flexible, and useful because they enable you to create rich, structured blocks of content. Content controls also build on the custom XML support introduced in Microsoft Office Word 2003. Content controls enable you to author templates that insert well-defined blocks into your documents. Content controls enable you to: * Specify structured regions in a template. Each structured region has its own unique ID so that you can read from and write to it. Examples of types of structured regions (or content controls) are combo boxes, pictures, text blocks, and calendars. * Determine the behavior of content controls. Each content control takes up a portion of a document and, as the template author, you can specify what each region does. For example, if you want a region of your template to be a calendar, you insert a calendar content control in that area of the document, which automatically determines what that block of content does. Similarly, if you want a section of a template to display an image, create a picture content control in that area. In this way, you can build a template with predefined block types. * Restrict the content of content controls. Each content control can be restricted, so that it cannot be deleted or edited. This is useful if, for example, you have copyright information in a template that the user should be able to read but not edit. You can also lock a template's content so that a user does not accidentally delete portions of it. This makes templates more robust than in previous versions. * Map the contents of a content control to data in a custom XML part that is stored with the document. For example, if you i

iTunes for eBooks. Great conversion sequences.  Focus is on device, not format.  The calibre system handles the formats.

lightweight HTML structured text tools 

JISCPress is an installation of wordpress with the digress.it plugin. This is a JISC branded version of the successful write to reply site. This site has been produced as part of the JISCPress project which also focused on developing the digress.it plugin. The digress.it plugin enables commenting on a document at the paragraph level leading to very focused discussions and feedback. It also uses open calais to semantically tag documents and therefore enables detailed linking between the text of documents. For example, if a number of jisc project reports were added to the site,  it would be possible to browse all the paragraphs of those reports that relate to a certain topic such as metadata. The purpose of JISCPress is to make it easy to consult with people interested in JISC activities and to support detailed discussion on a variety of  JISC documents and to explore the possibilities for navigating related topics within those documents.

Developers can publish their apps directly to the service and the Pieceable team will create a web page that displays a fully functional copy of the app. Developers or anyone who needs to share an app can then send a link to whomever they'd like to give the demo to. "It ends up being the easiest way ever to share an iPhone app on the web," CEO Fred Potter tells me. "There's no UDID exchange, there's no worry about the 100-device limit Apple places on dev accounts - it's zero friction and hassle." Using Flash to simulate the app's functionality, Pieceable Viewer works without any code modifications on the developer's side, "It's literally a one line command to publish an existing app to the viewer service," says Potter. But Pieceable Viewer isn't Pieceable's core product. The company itself, in the same space as Mobile Roadie and AppMakr, aims to be a WordPress for mobile platforms, helping people write apps even if they don't know how to code.

Although you need Chrome for the new Google Docs pagination feature, the key here is that gDocs now supports the CSS3 pagination module!   excerpt: Today, we're doing another first for web browsers by adding a classic word processing feature-pagination, the ability to see visual pages on your screen. We're also using pagination and some of Chrome's capabilities to improve how printing works in Google Docs. Native Printing: Pagination also changes what's possible with printing in modern browsers. We've worked closely with the Chrome team to implement a recent web standard, CSS3, so we can support a feature called native printing. Before, if you wanted to print your document we'd need to first convert it into a PDF, which you would then need to open and print yourself. With native printing, you can print directly from your browser and the printed document will always exactly match what you see on your screen.

wikiWORD and SPoint get the go ahead!

excellent comparison between Amazon S3 champion, DropBox, and Rackspace champion JungleDisk.  DropBox kicks ass.  Again.  Amazing. The stages of Cloud Document / Content Management Stack: ......... Backup-restore ........... backup-restore-store .............. backup-store-share ......... sync-share-store ............. sync-share-store-collaborate   (wikiWORD-SPoint) ......... Visual Document Portfolio DropBox has moved the industry to the sync-share-store level.  Collaboration remains a mystery to most, relying on Google Docs or Zoho (Rackspace). Google Cloud Connect can match DropBox for ease and reliability at the sync-share-store level.  MS-Live/Azure/SkyDrive however fails miserably at this level. The problem with Google Collaboration is that it breaks the Native Documents when converting to the Google collaboration format.  GCC (Google Cloud Connect) does store the original Native document, but does not keep track of revisions to the native!  Advantage DropBox! DropBox however does not have collaboration. The Visual Document Portfolio model is a design that saves the Native document to a Cloud Folder, and the system provides all visual representations on demand from that Native.  A Visual representation would be PDF, SVG (fixed), HTML (flow), ePUB or an HTML5 immersive visual representation packaged as a webzine.

Great charts!  Improving efficiency and optimizing business processes continue to dominate as top content management issues.  They are the leading business drivers.  Collaboration is in the middle of the pack, but with a high level of notice and concern.  Waiting to explode i think.  Expectations for collaboration continue to outpace reality. No mention of mobility or productivity!!!!  (Doing more work with fewer people?  is that a improve efficiency equation?)  Where is Cloud-computing?

Center for Information-Development Management and DiTA

XML Template Designer - Document Layout Designer, uses XF "XEP" Rendering engine.  XML to PDF, XSLFO Designer, Document Layout, compatible with Word and Powerpoint documents and templates.

Excellent discussion and capture of the importance of Cloud-computing!   Guest author Joe Masters Emison is VP of research and development at BuildFax writes for readwriteweb: excerpt:  More and more companies are moving from traditional servers to virtual servers in the cloud, and many new service-based deployments are starting in the cloud. However, despite the overwhelming popularity of the cloud here, deployments in the cloud look a lot like deployments on traditional servers. Companies are not changing their systems architecture to take advantage of some of the unique aspects of being in the cloud. The key difference between remotely-hosted, virtualized, on-demand-by-API servers (the definition of the "cloud" for this post) and any other hardware-based deployment (e.g., dedicated, co-located, or not-on-demand-by-API virtualized servers) is that servers are software on the cloud. Software applications traditionally differ from server environments in several key ways: ..... Traditional servers require humans and hours-if not days-to launch; Software launches automatically and on demand in seconds or minutes ...... Traditional servers are physically limited-companies have a finite number available to them; Software, as a virtual/information resource, has no such physical limitation ..... Traditional servers are designed to serve many functions (often because of the above-mentioned physical limitations); Software is generally designed to serve a single function ...... Traditional servers are not designed to be discarded; Software is built around the idea that it runs ephemerally and can be terminated at any moment On the cloud, these differences can disappear.

PhantomJS gives you command-line access to the features of WebKit. According to its website: "Literally it acts like any other WebKit-based web browser, except that nothing gets displayed to the screen (thus, the term headless)." It has native support for DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, SVG, and JavaScript.

Making cloud-based file transfer service easier.  Improved FTP alternative for small and medium sized business. A ShareFile user's customers can access files on a company-branded Web portal, one of the business-friendly features that helps set the service apart from the likes of Dropbox, according to Steve Chiles, chief marketing officer at ShareFile. Users can also allow their customers to log in to the service and upload files from their own website. ShareFile comes with reporting features that allow users to see who has uploaded and downloaded files, and when they were transferred. The addition of Sync will help automate the process of uploading files, instead of having to do a lot of the upload work manually. The feature allows for both one-way and two-way synchronization of files.  The user just has to drag and drop the file they want to synchronize into a designated folder. A folder can also be configured to send content to many recipients.