What is Web 2.0? According to Wikipedia:

... the phrase "Web 2.0" hints at an improved form of the World Wide Web; and advocates suggest that technologies such as weblogs, social bookmarking, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds (and other forms of many-to-many publishing), social software, Web APIs, Web standards and online Web services imply a significant change in web usage.

A Web 2.0 website may typically feature a number of the following techniques:

• Rich Internet application techniques, optionally Ajax-based
  
• CSS
  
• Semantically valid XHTML markup and the use of Microformats
  
• Syndication and aggregation of data in RSS/Atom
  
• Clean and meaningful URLs
  
• Extensive use of folksonomies (in the form of tags or tagclouds, for example)
  
• Use of wiki software either completely or partially (where partial use may grow to become the complete platform for the site)
  
• Weblog publishing
  
• Mashups
  
• REST or XML Webservice APIs

Welcome to a new stage of evolution. We're getting more connected, whether you're ready or not.

Technorati: web 2.0, css, xhtml, social networking, folksonomies, xml, ajax

1. First create your desired image 16x16px in any image editor and save it as a gif, jpg, png, or ico file.

2. Upload it into your root folder.

3. Insert this code between your head tags.

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://example.com/myimage.gif" type="image/x-icon">
<link rel="icon" href="http://example.com/myimage.gif" type="image/x-icon">
4. Save and reload. Your icon should appear next to your address bar now!

(Source: Wikipedia)

Technorati: icon, blog, favicon

SuperBot to Explore With NASA


Credit: USC Information Sciences Insitute.
This is amazing news! A self-assembling bot. Check out the same bot self-assembling into different configurations above. 100 module bots are expected to be ready for testing in 2008.

SuperBot is a modular, multifunctional and reconfigurable robot, designed by Dr. Wei-Min Shen and his team at the Information Sciences Institute at USC.

You might say that SuperBot is really a set of individual robots that work together to move around and solve problems. Dr. Shen has been awarded more than $8 million in grants from NASA, DARPA and the NSF to continue his research, including constructing a 100 module prototype to demonstrate how SuperBot might be used in space exploration.

Dr. Shen proposes the SuperBot modules as a way to meet this goal. Each module is a "robot" in its own right, with microcontrollers, sensors, communications, power supply, three degrees of freedom and six connecting faces to dynamically connect with other modules. At launch, or when landing, SuperBot can pack itself into a minimum amount of space.

Upon arrival, SuperBot can unpack itself and take any of a wide variety of forms. For example, it might form several exploration rovers, one SuperBot capable of rolling down hill, another twisting "sidewinder-style" over level sand while another forms a SuperBot climbing robot to take on more challenging terrain.

Technorati: science, technology, space, superbot, self-assembly