Ajit posts on AJAX and mobile, and where he sees opportunities for it:

"Specifically, it solves the following problems in the mobile context.

a) The problem of market fragmentation

b) Porting woes (specific to downloading applications like those built on J2ME)

c) Application distribution without ‘walls’"

This may be the case; but it strikes me that comparing the reality of J2ME as deployed today to the promise of any future technology (whether it be Flash, AJAX, Python or whatever) isn't valid. There will be implementation differences in browsers supplied by multiple vendors; there will be differences in how they render components. There will be bugs, problems, misinterpretations of specs, shoddy implementations: all the things which have led J2ME to the state it is in today.

AJAX is interesting, but principally because it lets browsers do things that proper applications have been able to do for years. There's definitely value in this but as I notes at dConstruct last year, isn't it a bit strange that what excites folks about AJAX is the prospect of using it to produce application-like interfaces - when these interfaces are themselves based on metaphors that we've been working with for 20+ years now? Surely there's an opportunity here to do something new?

IMHO mobile AJAX will have its biggest impact on Macromedia: effectively it could be a more open way of letting all those web development guys get producing mobile applications, and as such it's directly competing with Flash.

Via Jude, this has apparently *not* been photoshopped...

There's an MP3 of my talk at the dConstruct Web 2.0 event online, available here. Download it and experience me from the comfort of your living room or workplace.

Why good dancers are attractive: "It was Charles Darwin who first suggested dance was part of courtship rituals, something confirmed in nightclubs every weekend."

Heh. I'm not drunkenly lurching around the floor, I'm CONFIRMING DARWIN.

stevenberlinjohnson.com:: "It was simply a sign of something that was probably obvious already: there's nothing cool any more about having an iPod. That's not to say it isn't an incredible product. It's just hard to defend the cool factor when the President apparently has two of them..."

Actually, I'd argue that it's when things stop being cool that they start getting interesting. For me, this was the case with mobile phones: when they were something special that yuppies lugged around with them in the 80s: boring. When everyone you knew had one: interesting.

Ditto microprocessors, puzzles, and the internet.