The World Wide Web Consortium announced yesterday that it has formally adopted the next version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0)  as an official recommendatio. This is a big step towards eWCAG 2 becoming a web standard. The creation of the WCAG 2.0 specification has been a long and arduous process, but the W3C promised to show a result by the end of this year. And so they have.

11 December 2008 — Today W3C announces a new standard that will help Web designers and developers create sites that better meet the needs of users with disabilities and older users. Drawing on extensive experience and community feedback, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 improve upon W3C’s groundbreaking initial standard for accessible Web content. [source:W3C  press release]

The W3C hails WCAG 2.0 as the “Standard that Defines Accessibility for Next Generation Web“. the impact of WCAG 2.0 is big, on websites that need to conform to accessibility standards like governement and educaion websites, and for quality frameworks such as the Dutch Web Guidelines -where I work. W3C has listed a number of documents in their press release explaining the impact on various aspects such as design and changes from WCAG 1.0.

W3C validators need your money!

In other W3C news, Molly Holzschlag -the well known and respected web standards guru- posted a call for community support for the much used W3C validator services. Apparently, the W3C’s validator services cost so much in infrastructure and bandwidth, tha this is too much of a strain on the W3C budget. So they launched the Validator Donation and Sponsorship Campaign. Molly explains:

It works like this:

• Donor: A donor is anyone interested in donating money to the cause. A micropayment of 1.00 USD if the validator “saves your day” can be very helpful!
• Sponsor: A sponsor is a company or organization that donates to the W3C
• Community Fundraising: There are two badges available at the W3C that link to the fundraising page. If you support the validator, encourage others by placing a badge on your site and blogging about the topic
• Time Not Money: If you cannot or do not wish to donate money, your time is as or even more valuable. There are opportunities to help the W3C maintain and grow validation services.

So if you’re a regular user of the validator services, please help out and show your support!

Change.gov

Centraal in de transitie staat de website change.gov. Op deze website staat de agenda van de nieuwe president, en nodigt hij iedereen uit mee te denken en te werken aan de grote veranderingen in het land. Zo nodigt hij iedereen uit vragen te stellen aan het nieuwe team dat het land gaat besturen. En iedereen kan weer op die vragen reageren.
Zo ontstaat een nieuwe en vooral open dynamiek bij het opstellen van het politieke programma van een nieuwe regering. Dus geen campagne leuzen meer, geen loze beloftes, en ook geen onderhandelingen achter gesloten deuren.
Maar open betekent ook dat het open staat voor uitersten. En dat geldt zeker als Internet ingezet wordt.

Polarisatie

Ik ben nu Obama’s boek “the audacity of hope” aan het lezen. Daarin beschrijft hij hoe de Amerikaanse politiek de laatste decennia (sinds Reagan, eigenlijk) vooral aan het polariseren is. Als je geen Republikein bent, ben je Democraat. Ben je niet voor, dan ben je tegen. Misschien is dat een gevolg van een twee partijen stelsel, maar ik denk dat het marketing denken er ook een grote invloed op heeft.
In zijn boek zet Obama zich daar tegen af. Hij is Democraat, maar ziet ook veel waarde in Republikeinse standpunten en argumenten.
En nu laat hij het volk dus meepraten over de veranderagenda. Met als gevolg dat mensen -vanuit de gepolariseerde politiek- lastige vragen stellen om vooral tegen te zijn. En dat voorstanders die lastige vragen verwijderen.
Mijn punt is dat hieruit blijkt dat open niet hetzelfde is als anders of zelfs als verandering. Open weerspiegelt het nu, en geeft alles en iedereen de mogelijkheid op het podium te klimmen.

Open data

Naast die belangrijke les over open overheid past Obama er nog meer toe. Zo is alle inhoud op change.gov vrijgegeven onder een Creative Commons licentie, waardoor het mogelijk en legaal is die inhoud te hergebruiken. Zo kan je nu bijvoorbeeld de veranderingen op die site volgen. En meer toepassingen zullen wel snel volgen.

Change.gov draait overigens op Expression Engine, een CMS waar ik ook wat ervaring mee heb. Het is geen open source software, maar is wel van de makers van Code Igniter, een open source PHP franework. EE is gebruikersvriendelijk, en volgt de webstandaarden.

Obama volgt een strategie van openheid, iets wat politiek gezien een verademing is. Ik vraag me echter af of die strategie in het sterk gepolariseerde Amerika voldoende bijdraagt aan de daadwerkijke verandering. Openheid legt ook de verschillen bloot. Maar het geeft ook de veranderingsgezinde mensen de instrumenten en het podium om mee te denken en te werken aan een betere toekomst. Ik volg de ontwikkelingen met grote interesse!

p.s. Deze blogpost is geheel op de iPhone geschreven, later zijn de links en koppen toegevoegd. FYI

Basically, it comes down to synching with the cloud. All I want to do is push the calendar data in the MobileMe calendar to my omputer at home. That’s simple, you might think. But, iCal has found some ‘inconsistant data’ and is refusing to recieve the data from the cloud.
So I set and reset everything, cleared my local calendars, everything. Nothing works. Apple’s Geniusses (no sarcasm intended here) tell me now that the only way to solve the problem is to send my corrupted data to the cloud, overwriting my good data, thereby resetting the connection, and then synch my bad data back to my computer, thereby restoring my connection.

Ouch.

So much for gathering your vital data in the cloud.

There are internationally recognized agreements for creating web sites, known as 125 quality requirements standards warrants a significantly better website. The Netherlands government has assembled these international standards in a quality model called the Web Guidelines. This quality model comprises 125 quality requirements for the benefit of better websites.
The Webguidelines aren’t new, they have been around for four years now. Before dec. 1 2008 however, only corporate websites of the national government were forced to conform to the guidelines. This changed drastically: from now on, any new government site needs to conform, and by the end of 2010, all existing sites need to conform as well.

This means that we have two years to make the entire Dutch government’s Internet presence accessible. It is a powerful signal about the importance of accessibility, as well as a huge challenge to implement.

It seems I have my work cut out for me.

In fact, it was back in 1983 that Stein and DiFranco, at the time working as an ad writer and a studio engineer respectively, learned about a nationwide remix contest called “Hey Mr. DJ Play That Beat Down by Law Switch the Licks Mastermix Contest” sponsored by Tommy Boy Records. Goal was to remix G.L.O.B.E. & Whiz Kid’s “Play That Beat Mr. DJ”. A panel including Afrika Bambaataa, Arthur Baker, and Shep Pettibone awarded it first prize after one listen, and the remix gained even more airplay than the original. Their mix was called “Lesson One: The Payoff Mix,” a track that sprinkled the usual funk breakbeats with a parade of samples from feature films and cartoons, including all manner of pop-culture references.

Steinski & Double Dee created more Lesson tracks, with the fourth Lesson track only preformed live once. I learned about the duo from the  Solid Steel podcast, the Coldcut and Ninja Tunes recordlabel affiliated radio station slash podcast station. In podcast ep 81 SolidSteel features an interview from 2002 with the duo, in which they talk to us about their experiences in the Way Back Days, at the start of modern hip-hop.

They later became great inspirators for artists like DJ Shadow, Cut Chemist, the DJ Food collective, some of the worlds very best turntablists. A few months ago my brother and I went to the The Hard Sell show by DJ Shadow & Cut Chemist. There they performed a whole show remixing 45rpm records live on 4 decks, using only guitar pedals to create loops. The result was both very impressive and creative. It’s a mix of skill and creativity you don’t see all that often in hip-hop music nowadays. Take a look at this video of them performing here:

The intersting thing about this (original?) subculture of hip-hop is the basic premisi that you can deconstruct and creatively recombine any creative expression into something new. Originality doesn’t necessarily stem from creating something new from scratch (no pun intended). And this basic premisis is at the core of the hip-hop culture, which makes it one of the biggest influences on modern day media and creativity inductry.

I’m definately not a big hip-hop fan -I lean more towards the turnablism part then towards the slap-yo-bitch-an-look-at-my-bling-bling style R&B that is branded as hip-hop nowadays. But remixing creative expressions is what the modern internet is mostly about. Not just musical samples, but your personal thoughts and ideas (using twitter, for example), text, film, just about anything and everything can be recombined into something fundamentally new. The whole copyright movement doesn’t realise this -yet, but the Creative Commons does, and supports and promotes use of existing creative work for other uses.

So, Steinski and Double Dee show me that remixing is what is is all about.

Róisín Murphy (by Dennis Stempher)

Yesterday we went to a concert of Róisín Murphy in Amsterdam’s Heineken Music Hall. Róisín is the former Moloko singer. We saw her before twice: once as part of Moloko, and once as part of a Groove Armada concert. Both times she brought great energy and a tight performance to the stage, so our expectations and hopes were high.

The show started a bit slow and tame, like she didn’t really feel like performing but was doing so anyway. Still, her voice is flawless, her band is incredible, and her background singers are awesome, so even then it was still a good concert. Not great tho.

Intermission

Then there was an awkward intermission, about a half hour into the show. This took over 5 minutes, during which some bits and pieces of music were played, and the band gathered to discuss -apparently. Because after the interlude she came back with a vengeance.

She left the commercial easy listening tunes for what they were, and played some of her new tracks. With a new energy, a new vibe, and an apparent love to perform them, she found the way into the hearts and ears of the crowd. Everybody on stage seemed to like this response to an experimental set, and they showed their appreciation by adding more and more energy and drama to the sounds and performance.

Dress up Diva

At one stage Róisín even dressed up in two intertwined inflatable dummies. Her stage dresses are stuff of legend already, as she changes clothes about 10 times during a show, one outfit even more extravagant then the other.

I was thinking that Stephen Fry should write a musical starring ms. Murphy. That would be cool

All in all an entertaining and a wee bit experimental show. We thoroughly enjoyed it

Heroes

I would like to write a bit about Heroes. And as much as I am a fan of the sci-fi drama series, I’d like to write a bit about my own heroes. People who inspire me, and who teach me something about myself. Since I’m easily inspired, and know very little about myself, I have many heroes. But some are extra special, and they deserve some sugar from me on this blog. Especially since they’re family.

This may sound like a huge cliché, but both my parents are my heroes. But it veers away from the cliché dogma because they are not my heroes because they are my parents. In fact, I feel that they left their parenthood behind, and moved on to become my heroes.

Head and heart

My mother used to work hard as president of a non-profit amateur writers guild, promoting and developing writing skills for amateurs. Since she studied organizational sciences with a major in the art sector, she felt intellectually at home. Her board of directors however showed a degree of amateurism too, and she was forced to quit. Being close to the age of 50, and at a time of recession, she had a very hard time getting a new and challenging job.

Then something happened that turned her whole life around. She met a sailor.

You have to understand that my parents have split up over 20 years ago, so my mother meeting someone is a good thing. This man was building his own sailing boat all by himself, and he introduced my mother to the wide open and free world of sailing. And she was hooked. Hook, line and sinker. She went to the College of Seafarers and learnt how to navigate, take apart a diesel engine, calculate depth based on the composition of the water, and interpret the weather. All these things were so new to her, but she relished in the education it brought her. And it opened a whole new avenue in which to daydream about making long trips to faraway places.

And then the boat was sold.

Mom

This was a blessing, because now they could find a new ship to buy, and use the leftover money to travel. They went to England, France, Belgium and even Turkey to look for a new vessal, but they eventually found their dream boat in the United States of America. The Magnet was anchored in Wilmington. California. West-coast USA. On the ‘wrong’ side of the continent.

So they decided to travel from Wilmington (just below LA) to Baha California, MX, and from there across the Pacific Ocean to the Marquesas Islands, Bora Bora, Tonga, Fiji, New Caledonia and onwards to Australia. Just the two of them, on a 50 ft sailboat, across the Pacific. Having the greatest adventures, going to the most beautiful places in the world, meeting new people, making new friends. Living life to the fullest.

That’s my mom. I’m so proud of her living her dream! That’s why she is my hero.

You can find her blog at www.reismeemetdemagnet.info.

Stolen heart

My dad is a retired college professor who had a student that went to Ghana, West Africa to learn about orphanages there. This student was so taken by the needy children that she decided to start her own project to create a children’s home. My dad thought this a worthy cause to support, and did his best to raise money for the Wa Yiri Children’s Home, in Wa, Upper West Region, Ghana.

He became more and more involved, raising funds, providing everyone information about the children, even helping out in selecting who would be accepted in the Wa Yiri home, and more painfully, who wouldn’t.

SO it didn’t really come as a surprise when he told me he was going to Ghana to help with the final selection and attend the opening of the Wa Yiri Children’s Home.

He went there, and left his heart with the little children.

That was 2004. In February 2005 he went back to Ghana to look into the opportunities for him to start new projects to raise funds and volunteers, together with the locals and Ghanian governement, to help out the needy children in the Upper West Region of Ghana.

So far he started an AIDS hospice where women and children come to get love and care and die in peace (or, with the arrival of Anti-Retroviral-Treatments, get them into the medication programme and send them back into society). This project has recieved a lot of media attention in Ghana, including a meeting with Ghana’s Second Lady, who praised the project and donated sacks of food.

He also started providing medical treatments in the outlying villages, where people are too poor to go to the hospital. He’s no MD, but he has trained nurses and medical students and other volunteers to help him out.

He started several other projects as well, such as a street children project that generates some of its own income, an education project for illiterate children, and a shelter home for street children.

He’s now realising his Big Dream by building a complex of buildings that will house all the projects in one place: the Child Support Ghana Residence. The Child Support Children’s Home (formerly the Wa Yiri project), is finished now, and the kids now live there. The AIDS Hospice is nearing completion.

My dad felt he could still be relevant in society, but also found that at home, the relevance was limited. So he followed his heart and went to Wa, Ghana. He’s found his calling, and follows it through to the limit. And that is why he is also my hero.

You can follow his work on the Child Support Ghana Foundation website, or on his personal weblog Under African Skies.

Oh, and I help him out by being the secretary of the two Dutch Foundations that support his projects.

A family of Heroes

You might think ’so, what is it like to have a family of heroes?’. For me, there’s two sides of that coi

On the one side I’m immensely proud of what they’re doing. It shows to me that it is never too late to find a new dream and to follow it. The possibilities are endless. And you don’t need to win the lottery first to be able to live your dream.

Also, it provides me with some great new experiences as I visit them in some of the less travelled places in the world. I’ve been to Ghana in 2006, and visited my mom in Fiji this september. SO they’re a perfect excuse to travel far

The most double feeling is that they both feel that they can go out into the world because me and my brother have turned out fine and are independant enough to make do on our own. I’m glad that they did and do, but by doing so, they stopped being my parents and became something else.

You see, they’re literally not there when you might need them. Oh, I get lots of love and support, that’s not a problem. But being a parent is also about providing the safe haven, the homebase, providing well-meant but unasked advise, being there at major and minor events in your life, basically being part of your life. And all those things I provide for them, from a distance.

Is this a problem? No. I love them more for doing what they do, and they’re right when they think and say that my brother and I are independant, strong people who can deal with what life throws at us. But having heroes as parents isn’t all good.

Let me explain to you my personal position.

First came the Web 2.0

The term Web 2.0 was first coined at the 2004 Web 2.0 Conference by Tim O’Reilly, defining it as

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. (This is what I’ve elsewhere called “harnessing collective intelligence.”) (source)

However, the term ‘Web 2.0′ has started to live a life of its own, becoming a hyped term. Web 2.0 means you have to spell your URL badly like flickr or tubmlr or toddlr or whatevr. It means you have to have users who generate content for your site. And that the users have the ability to connect, making it a social, sometimes collaborative network. Also, the site has to start with a beta period for invited people only -with users having to beg for invites everywhere- followed by a long open-to-everyone public beta. In fact, there’s a big chance most web 2.0 ventures will never ever make it out of the beta stages.

And then there is the Web 3.0

And now the Next Best Thing Since Sliced Bread has been announced, and it’s called the Web 3.0.  The term is sketchy, as you can see in the Wikipedia definition:

Web 3.0 is one of the terms used to describe the evolutionary stage of the Web that follows Web 2.0. Given that technical and social possibilities identified in this latter term are yet to be fully realised the nature of defining Web 3.0 is highly speculative. In general it refers to aspects of the internet which, though potentially possible, are not technically or practically feasible at this time.

When people refer to the Web 3.0, they usually think of things like the Semantic Web, and artificial intelligence. Some others coined the Mobile Web as the next big step in internet evolution, but that movement seems to have evolved away.

So, what is my problem with these terms? I’ll tell you. To me, this all is the fullfillment of the promise of the Web 1.0.

A (very brief) lesson in Web History

When Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web back in the days he created a means to access the data stored in the CERN archives. In fact, he tells us:

“I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and — ta-da! — the World Wide Web.”

Up untill that time, almost all our information was structured to be read by humans, to be distributed on paper. The archives were full of papers, research documents, notes, excerpts, etc. (Note that our current information-products vocabulary still uses terms from the hardcopy-only day and age: papers, documents…). What Sir Berners-Lee did however, was add a unique factor to it: the hyperlink.

The promise of hypertext

Lets grab the Wikipedia entry for the ‘hyperlink’, and look at its history:

The term “hyperlink” was coined in 1965 (or possibly 1964) by Ted Nelson at the start of Project Xanadu. Nelson had been inspired by “As We May Think,” a popular essay by Vannevar Bush. In the essay, Bush described a microfilm-based machine (the Memex) in which one could link any two pages of information into a “trail” of related information, and then scroll back and forth among pages in a trail as if they were on a single microfilm reel. The closest contemporary analogy would be to build a list of bookmarks to topically related Web pages and then allow the user to scroll forward and backward through the list.

In a series of books and articles published from 1964 through 1980, Nelson transposed Bush’s concept of automated cross-referencing into the computer context, made it applicable to specific text strings rather than whole pages, generalized it from a local desk-sized machine to a theoretical worldwide computer network, and advocated the creation of such a network. Meanwhile, working independently, a team led by Douglas Engelbart (with Jeff Rulifson as chief programmer) was the first to implement the hyperlink concept for scrolling within a single document (1966), and soon after for connecting between paragraphs within separate documents (1968).

The very first thing I notice is that the first mention of the hyperlink is way back in 1965 (or ‘64). So this isn’t a completely new concept at all, and that its use and experiments with early hyperlinks basically describe the modern world wide web.

The second thing that strikes me is that its purpose is to link data in a cognitive manner, based on the way we humans think. So basically it allows us to relate information (stored anywhere on the network), based on our own logic.

Following these conclusions, by adding hypertext to the World Wide Web, he created a means to access any piece of data or information stored on any machine connected to the network. Note the absence of the terms ‘pages’, ‘documents’ and ’sites’ in this last sentence.

User generated content

The very first modern webbrowser (WorldWideWeb, running on the NeXTSTEP system) was a browser and an editor all in one. In fact, the web was meant to be editable by users. What use would having access to all this information be if you couldn’t enrich it with human cognitive logic, linking data and making sure that all other users can connect to the same network of links and data nodes you created? Exactly. Not much.

So the promise of the Web 1.0 was that it’d allow users to generate and enrich content, stored anywhere on the world wide network, using their own human logic to connect the nodes. Does that sound familiar at all?

This is where the masses intervened, and when it all went downhill.

The decline of the web

The CERN wasn’t the only organisation conected to the internet who was interested in Berner-Lee’s application. There were serval other research facilities, defence organisations and universities who wanted to use the same technology to publish their own archives and data. Hang on -publishing it? Isn’t publishing it the old fashioned way of distributing hardcopy works? Exactly, and that’s where it all goes wrong. People started developing the World Wide Web as a publication platform, not to provide access to data, but to publish it. And publishing it means that you create a storefront, and try to attract customers to your store in order to get them to access your products (for free or payment).

So, you got sites, with documents which were little less then digitised versions of their hadcopy originals. The promise of hypertext was reduced to a means to navigate the potential user through the store and to access the product catalogs, not the actual content itself.

And from that point on, the web became a mass collection of sites and documents and pages. Because hypertext was so ill used, the need for search engines became apparent, with webcrawler and altavista and some other early pioneers paving the way for the Google’s and Yahoo’s and Livesearch companies of today.

But the web 1.0 was never designed to be like that.

So, Web 2.0/3.0, it’s all the same: web 1.0!

And you can see it in the way Web 2.0 is used now. Yes, web 2.0 is a revolution. But it is in the way we use the web itself. We finally embraced part of its potential, what it was designed to do in the first place.

It’s like we pushed the car around for a few years, and only just found out what the silly metal keys in the egnition are for.

And Web 3.0, the Semantic Web isn’t Tim Berners-Lee’s pet project for nothing. The World Wide Web was designed to link data all across the network.

Fundamentally, no new technology has been applied to fulfill the Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 promises. The Web, as designed years ago, still functions as then. It’s just that we now discovered how to use it properly. We finally let go of the rather silly notion that the World Wide Web is a mass library of books, and that you need to browse through the catalogs to get the book you need. And that information isn’t connected unless we, human beings, connect it using our own logic, the same way our brain connects the dots.

We’ve finally learnt to appreciate and realise the promise of the Web 1.0.

And that is why I’m against the Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 crap. So next time you think it’s good to tell everyone that your idea is very ‘web 2.0′, please forgive me for scratching profusely and making vomiting noises in the back…

Watchmen is an upcoming 2009 American film that adapts Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ 1986 comic book limited series Watchmen. Directed by Zack Snyder, the film adaptation stars Patrick Wilson, Jackie Earle Haley, Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Matthew Goode, Stephen McHattie and Carla Gugino. Set in an alternate 1985, the film follows a group of former vigilantes as war begins to break out between the United States and the Soviet Union. The film began shooting in Vancouver in September 2007 for release on March 6, 2009. Like his previous film 300, Snyder closely modeled his storyboards on the comic, but unlike 300, he chose not to shoot all of Watchmen using chroma key and opted for more sets.

(source: wikipedia)

Trailer video is after the break.
Click here to view the embedded video.