O'Reilly News & Commentary

Analysis 2009: Energy Sector Faces Volatile Year

By Kurt Cagle
January 8, 2009

Here in Victoria, my corner gas station has a liter of regular unleaded gas for CAN$0.80, about US$3.00 a gallon. Six months ago, a similar liter cost nearly $1.50, more than $6 a gallon when factoring in the dramatic...

Analysis 2009: Syndication forms the backbone of the Writable Web

By Kurt Cagle
January 8, 2009

The syndication model has long been a major facet of the way that the web works, but for the most part its been a largely single direction notification mechanism - you publish content, this updates a syndication queue, then...

Analysis 2009: Semantics continues to not be RDF, but enrichment, classification and taxonomy

By Kurt Cagle
January 7, 2009

Within the realm of computational semantics, there is still a fairly broad disconnect between triple pair semantics, the use of RDF (or turtle notation) to create atomic assertions, and the realm of semantics as reflected on the web. I...

Analysis 2009: Internet Explorer Fades, Firefox Stays the Course, Google Chrome Surges

By Kurt Cagle
January 7, 2009

Poor IE. Like the late comedian Rodney Dangerfield, it seems to have a hard time getting much respect these days. Within Microsoft it has long been the unwanted stepchild - ignored when Microsoft shifted gears towards server-side technologies in...

Analysis 2009

By Kurt Cagle
January 6, 2009

Understanding the art of prognostication is not that dissimilar to understanding weaving. Few things ever occur out of the blue - they just hadn't emerged out of the background noise just yet, and as such when they do appear, you...

Analysis 2009: The Financial Crisis Hits IT Hard

By Kurt Cagle
January 6, 2009

The recession that started in January 2008 looks to be four phased. The first phase, The housing collapse, actually started in August 2007. The financial meltdown hit in September 2008, and likely will continue through to March 2009 or...

Analysis 2009: Government Gets Into the Software Business

By Kurt Cagle
January 6, 2009

The incoming Obama administration has, even before taking office formally, pledged between $650 and $800 billion dollars worth of public works initiatives, a massive shift away from the laissez faire approach of the outgoing Bush administration. Of that, it...

Analysis 2009: The End of Traditional Publishing

By Kurt Cagle
January 6, 2009

For publishing, 2009 is shaping up to be truly ugly. The publishing industry has faced a number of factors that, individually, provided quite a challenge, but collectively they may end up likely significantly altering the industry profoundly over the...

Analysis 2009: Carbon Markets Heat Up, but so does the Weather

By Kurt Cagle
January 6, 2009

Another area where the rise and fall of oil will have a big impact is going to be on climate change amelioration efforts. Reducing carbon emissions is a considerably more hot button issue politically when the price of gasoline...

Analysis 2009: IT Departments Disappear into the Cloud

By Kurt Cagle
January 6, 2009

While other IT sectors may be struggling, one area that will likely be quite hot will be in the cloud computing/hosted services market. This particular market has been the subject of a great deal of hype over the last...

Analysis 2009: Application Services come into their own

By Kurt Cagle
January 6, 2009

As cloud computing goes, so do two complementary technologies - application services, and web services. It's easier to split these into two distinct sections, though it should be kept in mind that they are simply different manifestations of an...

Analysis 2009: The Web Services Era Begins in Earnest

By Kurt Cagle
January 6, 2009

(Warning, this gets technical). This may seem a rather odd statement - after all, "web services" in the traditional SOA sense have been around for the last decade, give or take a few years. I believe, however, that while...

Analysis 2009: XForms and XML-enabled clients gain traction with XQuery databases

By Kurt Cagle
January 6, 2009

I'm beginning to despair about XForms, which is perhaps a good sign. XForms is perhaps the oldest of the W3C technologies that has yet to either die completely or really dramatically take off, and for all that it has...

Analysis 2009: Some thoughts for a New Era

By Kurt Cagle
January 6, 2009

This particular look forward is definitely longer than what I have written in years past, and for those of you who have managed to wade through the admittedly voluminous text I both admire your fortitude. This has been a hard...

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