The buzz on the web today is all about Mozilla’s new experiment, dubbed Prism. At first, I was thinking, ”
Hey - this is just like Adobe AIR, minus the flash, but it’s probably open source.” I think competition for AIR is healthy, and while Adobe is usually a benevolent monopoly, it’d be nice to be able fall back on some open source web-to-desktop software. Why did I think this? The Prism site compares itself to Silverlight and AIR:

Unlike Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, we’re not building a proprietary platform to replace the web. We think the web is a powerful and open platform for this sort of innovation, so our goal is to identify and facilitate the development of enhancements that bring the advantages of desktop apps to the web platform.

Then I read the rest of the article.

Essentially, Prism looks like an extra nice way to bookmark sites you use on the web. It’s like Firefox minus Chrome. “LabRats,” the author of the announcement responds to the critique of an AIR fan in a way that confirms my disappointment:

…we don’t do anything to close the web platform. We simply provide you with a dedicated window to an application running on that platform. It’s the same as if you had opened a new window in Firefox and loaded the application there, but without the browser chrome to get in your way.

Leave it up to Web 2.0 to hype up something product that actually offers less than it’s predecessor.

I’ve always had a real hard time with certain advertising phrases. Some people have a knack for reducing the English language to meaningless dribble. Take for instance the following formerly meaningful terms:

• World Famous
• Homemade
• Natural
• Best

Today I was on a quest for liquid refreshment. We’re not usually soda drinkers, but some friends had extra, so I pulled out the bottle of 7up they brought over.

News flash: 7up is “natural“.

What the crap. I’m sorry, but you’ve got to be joking me. Since when is high fructose corn syrup natural?! A few gems from wikipedia reveal how naturally fresh this drink really is.

High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is a form of corn syrup which has undergone enzymatic processing in order to increase its fructose content.

The production process of HFCS was developed separately by Japanese and American researchers in the 1970s.

High-fructose corn syrup is produced by processing corn starch to yield glucose, and then processing the glucose to produce a syrup that contains fructose. First, cornstarch is treated with alpha-amylase to produce shorter chains of sugars called oligosaccharides. Then, an enzyme called glucoamylase breaks the sugar chains…

Okay, enough. Hm… about at the part when it starts talking about Japanese researchers is where my dreams of little boys and girls picking fresh fruit from some alpine vegetation are crushed by a bucket of enzymes in a processing facility somewhere in Tokyo.

I guess if Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream is “Homemade”, then 7up is natural as pine nuts. Geez, people.

An interesting read at dlib.org that cuts through the buzz regarding folksonomies. Seems like a really nice take on how tagging gets really screwy when people come at indexing from different cultural, academic and even linguistic backgrounds.

I’m not sure where I stand on the issue, but here’s the most critical argument leveled at folksonomies:

Folksonomists are confusing cataloging structure with personal opinions and subsequent social bookmarking. These are not the same thing, and they need to be separated.

Case in point, how would you tag an article about the war in Iraq?