A really fascinating, thought-provoking essay.

A sitcom works better on TV than in a newspaper, but a 10,000 word investigative piece about a civic issue works better in a newspaper.<p>

When it arrived the web seemed to fill all of those niches at once. The web was surprisingly good at emulating a TV, a newspaper, a book, or a radio. Which meant that people expected it to answer the questions of each medium, and with the promise of advertising revenue as incentive, web developers set out to provide those answers. As a result, people in the newspaper industry saw the web as a newspaper. People in TV saw the web as TV, and people in book publishing saw it as a weird kind of potential book. But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It's its own thing. And like other media it has a question that it answers better than any other.

One wrinkle: the web is increasingly being used via mobile. He thinks that's different from the non-mobile-screen web. Does that change the question? (Thanks @nomster for the link.)

One of the greatest strengths of the web is that the the ease of linking allows innovative new apps to succeed without asking anyone else's permission - but up until now that hasn't applied to integrations between web apps. Web Intents is an emerging <a href="http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/web-intents/raw-file/tip/spec/Overview.html" target="_blank">W3C specification</a> inspired by Android's Intents system that aims to solve the problems of communications.</p>
<p>Here are some <a href="http://bleeding-edge-tlv.appspot.com/#12" target="_blank">slides that explain the main concepts</a> from a pervious talk.

Fabulous idea. Android Intents is a great concept.

“The thing that made Apple successful was betting against the web,” [venture capital investor Roger McNamee] said on stage at Mashable Connect Friday.</p><p>

While Google adopted the cultural norms of open source software by making its mobile operating system free and commoditizing content, Apple changed the game by keeping a closed system, focusing on brands and enabling paid apps.</p><p>

Apple differentiated web content for a price. By doing so, McNamee believes, it created a fundamentally different model than succeeded on the wired web.</p><p>

“Most of all what Apple did was they charged $400 to $1,000 for the hardware that was necessary to get a differentiated user experience on data that 100% of their customers could get for free off a desktop device,” he said. “Every Apple customer has consciously voted with $400 to $1,000 against the world wide web.”

McNamee argues that people will start using apps rather than the mobile web as such on mobile, because they can get to niche users more easily.

The momentum has been shifting for a while, but now the trend is emphatic. People now spend <a href="http://blog.flurry.com/bid/80241/Mobile-App-Usage-Further-Dominates-Web-Spurred-by-Facebook">more time in mobile apps</a> than they do online. There are more than 500m Android and iOS devices on the market, and giant countries like China and Indonesia are only just getting started in their smartphone and tablet push. Global mobile 3G subscribers are growing at <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/69309864/KPCB-Internet-Trends-2011">over 35 percent,</a> year on year, and there’s a lot more room to move – there are 5.6 billion mobile subscribers on our fair planet. Even in <a href="http://singularityhub.com/2011/08/16/80-android-phone-sells-like-hotcakes-in-kenya-the-world-next/">developing countries</a>, <a href="http://www.intomobile.com/2012/04/22/baidu-launch-160-smartphone-running-their-own-custom-android-rom/">cheap smartphones</a> will soon rush into the market. And who here doesn’t think tablet sales are going to go gangbusters pretty much <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/27/us-apple-china-idUSBRE83Q07320120427">everywhere</a>?

Mobile is the present, and the future.

That's a Mashable "forever", so bring salt. However:

Google has a confession to make: It does not understand you. If you ask it “the 10 deepest lakes in the U.S,” it will give you a very good result based on the keywords in the phrase and sites with significant authority on those words and even word groupings, but Google Fellow and SVP Amit Singhal says Google doesn’t understand the question. “We cross our fingers and hope someone on the web has written about these things or topics.”

The future of Google Search, though, could be a very different story. In an extensive conversation, Singhal, who has been in the search field for 20 years, outlined a developing vision for search that takes it beyond mere words and into the world of entities, attributes and the relationship between those entities. In other words, Google’s future search engine will not only understand your lake question but know a lake is a body of water and tell you the depth, surface areas, temperatures and even salinities for each lake.

Sounds very like the semantic web that Tim Berners-Lee imagined so long ago but is still waiting to happen.

Recent <a href="http://dev.chromium.org/spdy">SPDY</a> news comes from some big brands: Twitter, Mozilla, Amazon, Apache, Google.

Twitter has adopted it. SPDY ("speedy") aims to be a method to reduce latency for web pages.

Nifty.

Oh dear:

How the poor debtors still sell their daughters, How in the drought men still grow fat « Code and Culture: At Unfogged there’s a review (and a very funny comments thread) pointing out that the following sentence contains six factual claims all of which are incorrect:

Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages.

Many of the reviews offer similarly "alternative" views of other parts of history.

"The Classic Web is beginning to look like a kludge. Mostly because it was. Slowly, fitfully, three-steps-forward-two-steps-back, the tech community is finally refining it into something more secure, streamlined, and powerful. The last time something like this happened was when AJAX support hit modern browsers. Non-techies don’t realize it, but it was that innovation which ushered in Flickr, Google Maps, and the whole Web 2.0 boom. I expect HTML5 — greatly aided by the little-known back-end iterations I’ve tried to itemize above — to have a similar effect on the web and everything we do there."

Score 5: insightful.

"Native apps have the advantage of a richer experience right now.  But the water level is rising and every time I think I've seen it all on the open web someone goes and ports freaking DOOM to HTML. Yes, JavaScript, HTML and CSS is a mess and it's hard, but it won't always be. As browsers get smarter native apps will introduce new interaction models, hardware accesses and new features. Those will get folded into HTML 9, then HTML 10 and the cycle will continue. I agree with Dave Winer that the real win is linking. That's the one thing that the Web brings that apps have yet to replicate."

This, after he describes how he's addicted to a game app that requires no linking nor connects to the web. Not sure that really helps his argument.

"The homepage of the projects database has a new look. There is a list of our latest projects and the most recently published project documents, including new business cases. You can search by sector and keyword, or by finding a country on the world map.
When you view a project, instead of just seeing the title and description, you now see a colourful pie chart showing the project budget by sector. Hover over each sector with your mouse to see the latest budget for that sector. This is an excellent way of illustrating how DFID-funded projects can target a variety of priorities."

What's not visible is the number of very smart people who are working in the background to get more and more government websites not just up to date, but to incorporate some future vision.

From December 2010, and also relevant to the discussion about Android previously on this site: "Currently, Android devices provide the following (in addition to standard info) in the User-Agent: 'Android', a version number, a device name, a specific build, Webkit version info, and 'Mobile'. For example, Froyo on a Nexus One has the following User Agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2.1; en-us; Nexus One Build/FRG83) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1

"The 'Mobile' string in the User Agent indicates that this device would prefer a version of the website optimized for Mobile (small form factor devices), if available."

No mention of spoofing iOS or the iPhone there at all.

IFTT - If This Then That - is a Yahoo Pipes-like project for sticking together web apps into ad-hoc programs. What's popular? Facebook, weather alerts and Twitter, just now.

"Bootstrap is a toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart development of webapps and sites. It includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more."<br />
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Er.. thanks.

The strange case of how an oven couldn't be bought because the confirmation calls kept not coming through to her iPhone. Stranger than it looks at first glance.

Because CSS can be a pain: "GridCalc is a easy to use grid calculator. Just enter the desired width of your page and an aproximate range for your column and gutter width and the calculator will give you all the possible combinations within the limits you entered."<br />
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Don't say we never do anything for you. (Via @katybairstow.) 

"The Prediction API provides pattern-matching and machine learning capabilities. Given a set of data examples to train against, you can create applications that can perform the following tasks:• Given a user's past viewing habits, predict what other movies or products a user might like.• Categorize emails as spam or non-spam.• Analyze posted comments about your product to determine whether they have a positive or negative tone.• Guess how much a user might spend on a given day, given his spending history."<br />
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Intriguing.