Laith Zraikat

A new acronym is picking up. I can't believe this is happening again, but its good this time, because this new acronym goes to prove that the first one was not solid.

I guess since there are AJAX specialists, then we'll expect to see AHAH specialists. But I doubt any of them will have the guts to say it in a conversation ... "I'm an AHAH! specialist" ... the other guy will go "What? what did I do?"

Although many complex CMS's have been developed over the years- each applying its own methodology for creating content- none has been powerful and easy enough at the same time. This gap has finally been filled by the concept of Weblogs.

The power of the Weblogs stems from the sheer simplicity it provides, opening the door to millions of people to create content and publish online. Finally, blogs have become an essential part of any web site, and in most cases are themselves standalone web sites. Soon, saying "web site" will almost always mean "Blog". And having a web site will be like having an email address.

The fact that we have made it easy for people to throw more and more content online, a gap has naturally formed between the traditional search engines with their smart bots probing the web and their ability to keep up with the new content being created every second. Not only in terms of quantity, but in terms of making sense of all that content.

In the old days, a smart bot if given an random 100 web pages to comprehend, and has a success rate of 50% will be deemed very successful because in those days, the 50% that is comprehensible by the bot is the actual important content, while the other 50% most likely includes more garbage and un-important material.

Why? In those days, only corporates, businesses, institutions, and web savvy individuals were able to create and publish content. Publishing content was part of an organized development process, which made sure the content was properly formatted and optimized for search engine indexing, and -in a lot of cases- was actively being submitted to more than one major search engine.

Managing knowledge is very different from managing content, simply because content management (the production and management of raw text and other media) is one element of knowledge management (the organization and presentation of content based on understanding and verifying it).

The answer to some parts of the puzzle has come in the form of tagging, which has changed the way we organize content in two ways: The first is by replacing the concept of categorization which has been a limiting factor in almost all content management systems, because no one topic is limited to one or two or even ten categories. The second is by being a purely human activity, which meant better accuracy in determining the full scope of topics and meanings addressed by any piece of content. So we can safely say that after being tagged, content can start to be called "knowledge".

Other parts of the puzzle are still waiting to be answered, like the issue of quality and validity; What determines if this or that content is useful and of good quality? Of course you Google the topic first, then skim through a few articles and decide. But this is an opportunity for the extremely competitive multi-billion dollar search engine industry that will not be left unaddressed.

I believe we will see more and more innovations that will greatly enhance the presentation of content and our ability to consume and make use of it. This will open the door for smaller and more specialized sites/engines which cover a specific topic, organizing and presenting relevant information in a way that is geared towards a specific audience. If you look closely, this is already happening.

We are seeking to hire a web and graphic designer to take charge of Jeeran's creative department. The candidate is expected to possess the following qualities:
Leadership, self-learning, creativity, ambition, design vision.

For more details, view: Jeeran Careers section

Jad Madi raised a topic that I'm sure all designers and developers think about regularly during their career: Who is better, developers or designers?

In my years of experience, I put on many hats: graphic/web design, development, architecture and analysis, management, even painted some walls while we were building our new offices. In each I felt that my work was not just very important, but essential to the success of the company. And that's the truth.

In a team, every member is an essential component that plays a unique role in pushing the ship toward its destination.

Having done both design and development, and now that I have to supervise our development team, I don't get to do as much hands-on development as I would like to, so I get to look at both fields from an unbiased point of view. I see them both as essential and in-separable, for two simple reasons:

1. A great application has to be developed by someone who has the great programming skill and can produce an error/bug free experience for the user. Someone who can "design" his application with performance, security, scalability, in mind and compose the code in a way which is comprehendible to other developers on the team.
   
   
2. This great application will be worth exactly "zero" if nobody can figure out how to use it, so it needs a very good designer who can "develop" an intuitive user experience. The user experience is the only single factor which can determine the success or failure of an application. If people can't use it, they won't buy it, and the company can’t pay the bills. Simple.

Now, can you imagine one without the other?

When it comes to producing software, both designers and developers have to be "designers and developers". Designing and producing high quality, bug free code is an art, and developing the user experience involves much more than just designing the interface.

This issue will always haunt us wherever we go on the Internet. It has always existed in chat rooms, discussion boards, instant messaging, ...etc and will only grow with the growth of the social Internet. So are we trying to solve a problem which isn't solvable?

I think there are two groups of people who will keep abusing blogging and any other technology that comes along to help people speak out and communicate:

One group are the flat out imposters who are out to slander someone or some entity or spread rumors in favor of a private agenda or to soothe their sick minds. But since "the truth is out there" and thanks to technologies coming out every day to help you find it, those people will by nature be eliminated from the blogosphere because they won't have any serious readership.

The second group are people with a truly just cause, but hide their identity in fear of persecution by their governments, families, or even employers. Those will continue to write what's on their mind and will develop a significant following.

While I prefer that everyone reveal their identities when they Blog, I understand that there are those in other countries who will be in great danger if they do. Some things if said on the streets of Amman might mean nothing more than an expression of opinion, where in some other Arab country, might warrant an arrest or a prison term.

Last month I wrote about an idea for implementing a web engine which will help Blog readers to determine the quality of a blogger. Validity and reliability being two integral traits of a quality blogger, I think such a universal engine can help in solving "some" of the problems introduced with anonymous blogging.

However, I still believe that the problem will resolve itself by people who are smart enough to recognize a bull**** blog, or at least do some research before taking any piece of information as fact.

The hype is still on. "A.J.A.X." Frameworks are being developed to help programmers develop web applications that do not refresh. There's a lot of talk about doing it, but not enough about why it needs to be done. Do we really want to develop such applications on such a wide scale? Are users actually requesting that?

I personally refuse to believe that users dislike the page refresh nature of the internet and are more interested in seeing applications that don’t refresh between requests.

I believe Internet users care more about innovative applications, page loading speed, ease of use, and an error free experience. Whether the page refreshes after clicking a button or not becomes trivial if the application sucks, or if it takes too long to send back a request, or even worse, if you get an error. One could also argue that Internet users are now so used to seeing the page refresh that it doesn’t bother as many of them as it used to.

As a developer I do advocate the use of asynchronous callbacks (or Remote Scripting) when it is absolutely "needed" in "some" parts of your application, and when it improves the user experience without adding unnecessary confusion for the user or the developer.

Due to the disconnected nature web applications, complexities will arise for developers when this problem is amplified in an environment using remote scripting for the following reasons:

• You can’t easily debug JavaScript. Take it from me, it is a nightmare to develop.
• You can't log errors that occur on the user side without writing separate routines to send back error details to your server "asynchronously".
• Special routines have to be written to enable the application to break down gracefully in case of an error without scaring the user while still informing her of the error.
• Different browser standards for implementing remote scripting.

Finally, take Microsoft for example, they did not use remote scripting in their MSN Web Messenger. It could have used less refreshes, but I guess MS are aware of the complexities involved, and they wanted to keep their application as error free and as compatible with all browsers as possible.

"When an Angel Smiles"

It turns your night into day,
It takes your misery away.

Feels like a breeze, a gentle spray,
Turns to green what was once grey.

You pick up a pen to write an essay,
About an un-dying love you wish to convey.

By then you know what's on the way,
You know what's going to happen today.

Because there's nothing left to do or say,
For her to take your heart away.

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