Tech Week In Review: Common Tag, Firefox 3.5, Palm Pre, and More…

Common Tag, Finally

Common Tag is an open tagging format developed to make content easier to find and interact with. From the website:

People use tags to organize, share and discover content on the Web. However, in the absence of a common tagging format, the benefits of tagging have been limited. Individual things like New York City are often represented by multiple tags (like “nyc”, “new_york_city”, and “newyork”), making it difficult to organize related content; and it isn’t always clear what a particular tag represents—does the tag “jaguar” represent the animal, the car company, or the operating system?

As we move towards a semantic web, standardizing how we categorize, sort, and find information is extremely important. Some major companies have already jumped on the Common Tags bandwagon, including: AdaptiveBlue, DERI (NUI Galway), Faviki, Freebase, Yahoo!, Zemanta, and Zigtag. (via RWW)

Firefox 3.5 Makes Videos Interactive

This new, somewhat stable, beta of Firefox boasts a built-in media player based on the open-source video formats Ogg Vorbis and Theora. It also supports HTML5, which means you can actually interact with links and other elements inside the videos. Flash sort of allows this already but, as Erick points out on TechCrunch, this type of interaction with flash requires that the entire page is done in Flash or a proprietary overlay is used. Watch the full demo video.

The Twitpocalypse is Upon Us!

According to these guys, Twitter will experience a catastrophic and epic FAIL once the unique identifier for each tweet exceeds 2,147,483,647. It’s supposed to be similar to the Y2K bug, but we all saw how that turned out. Totally anti-climactic. Major point to note here is that this will only effect 3rd party clients. So, even if you believe everything they say is true (which I don’t) you’ll still be able to access Twitter via the website. Another point is that most Twitter apps are still beta-level software and the developers have probably already researched this potential flaw. I wouldn’t worry about it. Just keep your apps up to date. (via Mashable)

Palm Pre vs. Apple iPhone

The new Palm Pre dropped on June 6th and just about every store that carried the device sold out. Shortly after it’s release, there was controversy about the Palm being recognized as an actual iPod in iTunes. Reviews of the Palm Pre seem mostly positive, but it remains to be seen how well it will do given that Apple just cut the price of the iPhone 3G to $99 and is dropping the iPhone 3G S on June 19th. (via Bwana and Mashable)

Mashable > TechCrunch

According to the Silicon Alley Insider, Mashable has surpassed TechCrunch as the number one tech blog on the net. Of course, this seems to be based solely on traffic so we definitely have to take it with a grain of salt. On the other hand, Mashable has been doing a really awesome job at consistently creating solid content.