Stephen Downes

So there's all kinds of stuff in reaction to Opera Unite. In this lead item (language warning) Chris Messina offers a detailed analysis, with numerous links, of Unite. Marc Canter says, accurately, "we must focus on the benefits to openness, why owning your data is better and easier."

I've been doing a lot of background reading today, mostly catch-up. I read a report from opera analyst Lawrence Eng detailing more about Unite. To better understand, I worked my way through Opera's Widget documentation and built a demo app for myself. I also read through the W3C's Widgets Landscape document, a good and pretty accessible overview of major initiatives. I also looked at the W3C widget requirement. Some related work: the Webkit open sourc eproject. Also the ongoing HTML 5 specification, which will include client side data storage.