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This excerpt is from Web 2.0 Architectures. This fascinating book puts substance behind Web 2.0. Using several high-profile Web 2.0 companies as examples, authors Duane Nickull, Dion Hinchcliffe, and James Governor have distilled the core patterns of Web 2.0 coupled with an abstract model and reference architecture. The result is a base of knowledge that developers, business people, futurists, and entrepreneurs can understand and use as a source of ideas and inspiration.
Table of Contents
"Web 1.0 was about connecting computers and making technology more efficient for computers. Web 2.0 is about connecting people and making technology efficient for people."
So, what actually changed between the emergence of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0? In this chapter, we'll compare Web 1.0 companies and technologies with Web 2.0 companies and technologies to begin developing the design patterns that distinguish them. We use the term "Web 1.0" to refer to the Web as it was understood in the period of around 1995–2000, though obviously it's not a simple matter of dates. To help us get started, Figure 3.1, "Tim's list of Web 1.0 versus Web 2.0 examples" shows again the list of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 examples that Tim O'Reilly and others compiled during an initial brainstorming session to get a "feel" for what Web 2.0 was.
It's important to note that some of the Web 1.0 companies included in Figure 3.1, "Tim's list of Web 1.0 versus Web 2.0 examples" have evolved substantially since Tim made his original comparison. For the latest information, definitely visit each company's website. Tim's choosing them as examples actually speaks to their success in that earlier age.
Although several of the companies we use as examples in this chapter are large enterprises or corporations, the patterns themselves don't apply only to enterprises. In fact, the value of patterns is that you can remove them from an enterprise context and reuse them in other applications. For example, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a pattern of exposing capabilities to potential end users. Whether the SOA pattern is used by online gamers to access the states of each other's joysticks or by large enterprises to reach into their customer relationship management (CRM) systems and provide users of their websites with rich interactive experiences, the core pattern is the same when abstracted to a high enough level. In both cases, a service offers some functionality or capability that another entity consumes.
Before we compare these two companies, we must point out that DoubleClick has vastly enhanced its platform since it was formed; so much so, in fact, that Google acquired DoubleClick in 2007 to further broaden its media advertising ambitions.[32] Therefore, instead of specifically illustrating DoubleClick's original ad model, we'll illustrate the generic pattern of banner ad impression sales that many online advertising companies used in the late 1990s.
Watch for illustrations of the following patterns in this discussion:
Software as a Service (SaaS)
Rich User Experience
Semantic Web Grounding
Asynchronous Particle Update
You can find more information on these patterns in Chapter 7, Specific Patterns of Web 2.0.
Banner ad placement originally operated on a simplistic model whereby advertisers purchased banner ads in lots (typically of 1,000 or more), and the banners were then placed on websites. The placement of these banner ads was often billed based solely on impressions, regardless of whether anyone actually clicked on the banners. This online advertising model clearly had room for improvement.
Initially, one of the main issues facing advertisers was the lack of any guarantee that the ads were effective; however, this problem was mitigated by the use of tracking software and new business models that charged based on the number of click-throughs. Another issue concerned the fact that some larger companies offering such services asked webmasters to place code in their sites and then served up ads whenever someone issued a request for a page containing that code. It was therefore quite possible that ads aimed at golfers, for example, might appear on fishing or other websites not concerned with golf. The placement pattern looked a lot like Figure 3.2, "Basic pattern of banner ad placement".
In contrast, Google AdSense is a paid ad service that serves contextually specific ads on web pages and tracks the number of clicks on each ad by visitors to those pages. This form of ad delivery uses a simple yet effective pattern of contextual targeting. Rather than just advertising blindly, AdSense attempts to quantify the context of a user's experience based on a keyword score within the web pages containing the ads. AdSense then cross-references the keywords with a list of potential target ads that might be of interest to the user of that web resource. As a result, visitors to a web page on golfing will typically see golf-related advertisements rather than completely random content. AdSense also lets web page owners filter out competitors' ads. For example, a golf club manufacturer could block competing companies' ads from being displayed on its website. This is a highly useful pattern for preventing competitors from targeting a website owner's customers. Figure 3.3, "Contextual serving of ads based on user profile patterns" shows an example of this pattern.
Also attracting website owners to AdSense is the fact that ad revenues are split between Google and the website owner. Other banner ad companies also use this revenue model, but AdSense users have a better chance of increasing their revenues because the ads on their sites are contextually specialized for their audiences, so users are more likely to click on them. Given the fact that net revenue from a website must be calculated once the costs of hosting are subtracted, it makes more business sense to go with a contextual pattern such as that offered by AdSense than with a non-contextual pattern.
Serving contextually specific information based on a single site visit is only one aspect of how online advertising is changing. With the evolution of the Internet and some underlying technologies, the science of targeted advertising is reaching new heights. Dr. Usama Fayyad, chief data officer and senior vice president of Research & Strategic Data Solutions at Yahoo!, stated in the March 2007 issue of Business 2.0 magazine, "I know more about your intent than any 1,000 keywords you could type."[33] He knows this because of his Yahoo! research into the click-stream consciousness of web users. Dr. Fayyad is an actual rocket scientist who worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory before moving to Yahoo! to manage the roughly 12 terabytes of user data—more than the entire content of the Library of Congress—that Yahoo! collects every day.
Yahoo! tracks user behavior with a multitude of technologies, including cookies, user account activity, bounce rates, and searches. The major search engine vendors have acquired the ability to build comprehensive user profiles based not just on contextual information from a single web page, but on many aspects of a user's behavior. For instance, Yahoo! and Google have created services that consumers can use to help them build successful businesses and/or websites. Along those lines, Yahoo!'s acquisition of Overture let people target search terms based on available inventory. Overture's tools can tell an advertiser how many people search for a specific term in a given month, as well as suggesting similar terms.
Another trend in Web 2.0 advertising is the move away from traditional graphic banner ads and toward text and video media. Bandwidth-light text has an advantage thanks in part to the increasing use of cell phones as people's primary devices for connecting to the Internet. Jupiter Research reported a trend of growth in all three categories (text, graphical banners, and video), implying either that there are more advertisers or that advertisers are continuing to pull financial resources away from traditional media such as television, magazines, and newspapers.[34] This phenomenon must be somewhat scary to the incumbent media giants, especially when coupled with the recent history of small upstart Internet companies becoming the largest media sources within just a few years (YouTube and MySpace are good examples).
A third trend concerns the delivery of ever more targeted content. Engaging users in a context in which they're open to an ad's content requires walking a narrow line. Many bloggers make a few dollars a month on Google AdWords, but some deliver a more immersive experience, even using text ads within RSS feeds and carrying ads into their readers' aggregators. This can be effective, but if consumers are bombarded with ads, the entire mechanism starts to void itself out, as the human mind starts to filter out too-frequent advertisements.
Web 2.0 hasn't done much about the pressing question of how society will continue to react to ads that are often perceived as intrusive and unwelcome. We're referring to one of the most hated words since the dawn of the Internet: spam.
Email spam is probably the most despised form of advertising on the Web. Despite numerous mechanisms (such as spam filters and legislation) to control it, spam is still rampant. Like spam, banner ads also permeate many corners of the Internet and are common on many web pages. Do banner ads drive people away or do they provide value? Users have expressed time and again that sites that are uncluttered with commercial messages are more attractive. Google was widely heralded as setting a new model for search engines with a simple, noncommercial interface, although web historians could point out that Alta Vista was just as clean in its lack of commercialism. Consumers and users flocked to Google.com when it launched: it provided information they wanted without bombarding them with advertising. Similar models have evolved from companies such as Flickr (discussed in the next section), although the old-world ways of commercial ads still permeate much of the Internet landscape (even to pervasive levels within newer presences such as YouTube and MySpace).
Some have even organized communities to fight advertising. The most notable is Adbusters, an organization based in Vancouver, Canada. Adbusters is a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators, and entrepreneurs who want a new social activism movement piggybacked on the information age. Their goal is simple: anarchy. Their aim is to topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we'll live in the 21st century. In a similar vein, Canadian film producer Jill Sharpe released a documentary called Culture Jam,[35] a stab back at our mainstream media and advertising agencies. "Culture jamming" is a form of public activism that is generally in opposition to commercialism.[36]
Despite these challenges, Google AdSense delivers a service that many people use and serves ad content that can be mashed into most websites. Google has provided many other value ad services that make it easy for anyone to become an advertiser and get some value for her budget. Google's stock price continues to rise as a reflection of its perceived strength and dominant position in the new advertising industry.
Ofoto began life as an online photography service based in Berkeley, California. The service provided three basic features:
It let people upload JPEG images so that others could view them by simply visiting the website.
It let people create photo albums and share them online with friends.
It enabled users to purchase prints online. This feature was supposed to be the foundation for Ofoto's business model, which was based on the premise that people would want traditional, printed photographs.
Ofoto later added a 35mm online film processing service and an online frame store, as well as some other services, but its core pattern still embraced a core model of static publishing. In May 2001, Eastman Kodak purchased Ofoto, and the Ofoto Web Service was rebranded in 2005 as the Kodak EasyShare Gallery.
Flickr is another photo-sharing platform, but it was built with the online community in mind, rather than the idea of selling prints. Flickr made it simple for people to tag or comment on each other's images, and for developers to incorporate Flickr into their own applications. Flickr is properly a community platform and is justifiably seen as one of the exemplars of the Web 2.0 movement. The site's design and even the dropped e in the company name are now firmly established in Web 2.0's vernacular.
This comparison involves the following patterns:
Software as a Service (SaaS)
Rich User Experience
The Synchronized Web
Collaborative Tagging
Declarative Living and Tag Gardening
Persistent Rights Management
You can find more information on these patterns in Chapter 7, Specific Patterns of Web 2.0.
Flickr is often used as an information source for other Web 2.0 platforms or mechanisms. It offers simple application programming interfaces (APIs) for accessing its content, enabling third parties to present images in new contexts and to access and use Flickr's services in their own mashups or other applications. Bloggers commonly use it as an online photo repository that they can easily connect to their own sites, but the APIs offer much more opportunity than that. Programmers can create applications that can perform almost any function available on the Flickr website. The list of possible operations is vast and covers most of the normal graphical user interface's capabilities.
Flickr also lets developers choose which tools they want to use to access its services. It supports a REST-like interface, the XML Remote Procedure Call (XML-RPC), and SOAP (and responses in all three of those), plus JSON and PHP. For more, see http://www.flickr.com/services/api/.
Developers can easily repurpose Flickr's core content in mashups, thanks to its open architecture and collaborative nature. A mashup combines information or computing resources from multiple services into a single new application. Often, in the resulting view two or more applications appear to be working together. A classic example of a mashup would be to overlay Google Maps with Craigslist housing/rental listings or listings of items for sale in the displayed region.
Flickr's API and support for mashups are part of a larger goal: encouraging collaboration on the site, drawing in more users who can then make each others' content more valuable. Flickr's value lies partly in its large catalog of photos, but also in the metadata users provide to help themselves navigate that huge collection.
When owners originally upload their digital assets to Flickr, they can use keyword tags to categorize their work. In theory, they do this to make it easier to search for and locate digital photos. However, having users tag their photos themselves only starts to solve search problems. A single view of keywords won't work reliably, because people think independently and are likely to assign different keywords to the same images. Allowing other people to provide their own tags builds a much richer and more useful indexing system, often called a folksonomy.
A folksonomy (as opposed to a top-down taxonomy) is built over time via contributions by multiple humans or agents interacting with a resource. Those humans or agents apply tags—natural-language words or phrases—that they feel accurately label what the resource represents. The tags are then available for others to view, sharing clues about the resource. The theory behind folksonomies is that because they include a large number of perspectives, the resulting set of tags will align with most people's views of the resources in question.[37] The tags may even be in disparate languages, making them globally useful.
Consider an example. Say you upload a photo of an automobile and tag it as such. Even though a human would understand that someone looking for "automobile" might find photos tagged with "car" to be relevant, if the system used only a simple form of text matching someone searching for "vehicle," "car," or "transportation" might not find your image. This is because a comparison of the string of characters in "automobile" and a search string such as "car" won't produce a positive match. By letting others add their own tags to resources, Flickr increases the number of tags for each photo and thereby increases the likelihood that searchers will find what they're looking for. In addition to tagging your "automobile" photo with related words such as "vehicle," "car," or "transportation," viewers might also use tags that are tangentially relevant (perhaps you thought the automobile was the core subject of the photo, but someone else might notice the nice "sunset" in the background and use that tag).
With this in mind, how would you tag the photo in Figure 3.4, "How would you tag this photo?"?
We might tag the photo in Figure 3.4, "How would you tag this photo?" with the following keywords: "mountain," "bike," "Duane," "Nickull," "1996," "dual," and "slalom." With Flickr, others can tag the photo with additional meaningful keywords, such as "cycling," "competition," "race," "bicycle," and "off-road," making subsequent searches more fruitful. Semantic tagging may require more thought, but as a general rule, the more minds there are adding more tags, the better the folksonomy will turn out.
Flickr has also built an interface that lets people visiting the site see the most popular tags. This is implemented as a tag cloud, an example of which appears in Figure 3.5, "Flickr tag cloud, from ".
Figure 3.5. Flickr tag cloud, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/
The tag cloud illustrates the value of a bidirectional visibility relationship between resources and tags. If you're viewing a resource, you can find the tags with which the resource has been tagged. The more times a tag has been applied to a resource, the larger it appears in the tag cloud. You can also click on a tag to see what other assets are tagged with the same term.
Another advancement Flickr offers is the ability to categorize photos into sets, or groups of photos that fall under the same metadata categories or headings. Flickr's sets represent a form of categorical metadata rather than a physical hierarchy. Sets can contain an infinite number of photos and may exist in the absence of any photos. Photos can exist independently of any sets; they don't have to be members of a set yet can be members of any number of sets. These sets demonstrate capabilities far beyond those of traditional photo albums, given that each digital photo can belong to multiple sets, one set, or no sets. In the physical world, this can't happen without making multiple copies of the photos.
Both Akamai and BitTorrent address the challenge of distributing large volumes of information across huge networks, striving to minimize bandwidth consumption and delays that users might notice. Their approaches to solving these problems, however, are very different.
This comparison discusses the following patterns:
Service-Oriented Architecture
Software as a Service
The Synchronized Web
You can find more information on these patterns in Chapter 7, Specific Patterns of Web 2.0.
Akamai and BitTorrent both avoid the issue of a single host trying to supply bandwidth-intensive content to a potentially global audience. A single server starts to slow down as it reaches its maximum capability, and the network in the immediate vicinity of the host server is affected because it's handling a higher amount of traffic.
Again, the incumbent in this case (Akamai) has significantly changed its mechanics and infrastructure since the date of the original brainstorming session when the comparison of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 was made (as depicted in Figure 3.1, "Tim's list of Web 1.0 versus Web 2.0 examples"). Accordingly, understanding the patterns and advantages of each system is a good idea for budding Web 2.0 entrepreneurs. You shouldn't view Akamai as antiquated. It is performing tremendously well financially, far outstripping many of the Web 2.0 companies mentioned in this book. It's been one of NASDAQ's top-performing stocks, reporting 47% growth and revenues of $636 million in 2007. With 26,000 servers, Akamai is also a huge Internet infrastructure asset.
Akamai's original approach was to sell customers a distributed content-caching service. Its aim was simply to resolve bandwidth issues, and it solved that problem very well. If a customer like CNN News decided to host a video of a newscast, the content on the CNN server would be pulled through the Akamai network. The centrally located CNN server bank would modify the URIs of the video and other bandwidth-intensive content by morphing them to URLs of resources that were easier for the client making the request to access, often because they were hosted in physically closer locations. The client's browser would load the HTML template, which would tell it to hit the Akamai network for the additional resources it required to complete the content-rendering process. At the time of this writing, end users do not see any indication of Akamai.com being used (although streaming videos do require modification of URLs).
Figure 3.6, "Overview of Akamai core pattern (courtesy of Akamai)" shows Akamai's core architecture (as analyzed when used in Figure 3.1, "Tim's list of Web 1.0 versus Web 2.0 examples").
Pulling richer media (the larger files) from a system closer to the end user improves the user experience because it results in faster-loading content and streams that are more reliable and less susceptible to changes in routing or bandwidth capabilities between the source and target. Note that the Akamai EdgeComputing infrastructure is federated worldwide and users can pull files as required. Although Akamai is best known for handling HTML, graphics, and video content, it also offers accelerators for business applications such as WebSphere and SAP and has a new suite to accelerate AJAX applications.
BitTorrent is also a technology for distributing large amounts of data widely, without the original distributor incurring all the costs associated with hardware, hosting, and bandwidth resources. However, as illustrated in Figure 3.7, "BitTorrent's pattern of P2P distribution", it uses a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture quite different from Akamai's. Instead of the distributor alone servicing each recipient, in BitTorrent the recipients also supply data to newer recipients, significantly reducing the cost and burden on any one source, providing redundancy against system problems, and reducing dependence on the original distributor. This encompasses the concept of a "web of participation," often touted as one of the key changes in Web 2.0.
BitTorrent enables this pattern by getting its users to download and install a client application that acts as a peer node to regulate upstream and downstream caching of content. The viral-like propagation of files provides newer clients with several places from which they can retrieve files, making their download experiences smoother and faster than if they all downloaded from a single web server. Each person participates in such a way that the costs of keeping the network up and running are shared, mitigating bottlenecks in network traffic. It's a classic architecture of participation and so qualifies for Web 2.0 status, even if BitTorrent is not strictly a "web app."
The BitTorrent protocol is open to anyone who wants to implement it. Using the protocol, each connected peer should be able to prepare, request, and transmit files over the network. To use the BitTorrent protocol to share a file, the owner of the file must first create a "torrent" file. The usual convention is to append .torrent to the end of the filename. Every *.torrent file must specify the URL of the tracker via an "announce" element. The file also contains an "info" section that contains a (suggested) name for the file, its length, and its metadata. BitTorrent clients use the Secure Hashing Algorithm-1 (SHA-1) to make declarations that let any client detect whether the file is intact and complete.
Decentralization has always been a hallmark of the Internet, appearing in many different guises that come (and sometimes go) in waves. Architecturally, this pattern represents a great way to guard against points of failure or slowdowns, as it is both self-scaling and self-healing.[38] A very elegant architectural trait of peer to peer in particular is that the more people there are interested in a file, the more it will propagate, resulting in more copies being available for download to help meet the demand.
By the time the first Web 2.0 conversations started, the first incarnations of MP3.com and Napster were both effectively history. Neither of them was particularly well liked by the music industry, for reasons that feed into Web 2.0 but aren't critical to the comparison between them. Their business stories share a common thread of major shift in the way music is distributed, but the way they went about actually transferring music files was very different, mirroring the Akamai/BitTorrent story in many ways.
Some of the technical patterns illustrated by this comparison are:
Service-Oriented Architecture
Software as a Service
The Synchronized Web
Collaborative Tagging
Declarative Living and Tag Gardening
Persistent Rights Management
You can find more information on these patterns in Chapter 7, Specific Patterns of Web 2.0.
The music industry has historically been composed of three main groups: those who create music (writing, recording, or producing it); those who consume it; and those who are part of the conventional recording and music distribution industry, who sit in the middle (see Figure 3.8, "Conventional music industry model").
Historically, music publishing and distribution has been done via physical media, from 78s to CDs. If you abstract the pattern of this entire process, you can easily see that the storage of music on physical media is grossly inefficient (see Figure 3.9, "Distribution pattern for audio content").
Figure 3.10, "The electronic music distribution pattern" contains two "Digital Signal" points in the sequence. The persistence to some form of physical storage medium is unnecessary for people who are capable of working directly with the digital signal. If you're providing a digital signal at the source, the signal can travel from the source to its ultimate target in this digital form, and the media is consumed as a digital signal, why would it make sense to use a non-digital storage medium (such as CD, vinyl, or tape) as an intermediate step? The shift to digital MP3 files has made the middle steps unnecessary. Figure 3.10, "The electronic music distribution pattern" depicts a simpler model that has many advantages, except to those whose business models depend on physical distribution.
For instance, this new pattern is better for the environment, because it does not involve turning petroleum products into records and CDs, or transporting physical goods thousands of miles. It satisfies people's cravings for instant gratification, and it lets consumers store the music on physical media if they want, by burning CDs or recording digital audio tapes.
The old model also had one massive stumbling block: it arguably suppressed a large percentage of artists. For a conventional record company to sign a new artist, it must make a substantial investment in that artist. This covers costs associated with such things as recording the music, building the die for pressing it into physical media, and printing CD case covers, as well as the costs associated with manufacturing and distributing the media. The initial costs are substantial: even an artist who perhaps produces only 250,000 CDs may cost a record company $500,000 to sign initially. This doesn't include the costs of promoting the artist or making music videos. Estimates vary significantly, but it's our opinion that as a result, the conventional industry signs only one out of every 10,000 artists or so. If a higher percentage were signed, it might dilute each artist's visibility and ability to perform. After all, there are only so many venues and only so many people willing to go to live shows.
An industry size issue compounds this problem. If the global market were flooded with product, each artist could expect to capture a certain portion of that market. For argument's sake, let's assume that each artist garners 1,000 CD sales on average. Increasing the total number of artists would cause each artist's share of the market to decrease. For the companies managing the physical inventory, it's counterproductive to have too much product available in the marketplace. As more products came to market, the dilution factor would impact sales of existing music to the point where it might jeopardize the record company's ability to recoup its initial investment in each artist.
Love's Manifesto, a speech given by Courtney Love during a music conference, illuminates several of the problems inherent in the music industry today and is a brilliant exposé of what is wrong with the industry as a whole (pun intended) and the realities faced by artists. You can read the speech online at http://www.indie-music.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=820.
Producers and online distributors of digital music benefit from two major cost reductions. In addition to not having to deal with physical inventory and all its costs, they also offload the cost of recording music onto the artists, minimizing some of the risk associated with distributing the work of previously unsigned bands. These companies often adopt a more "hands off" approach. Unlike conventional record companies, online MP3 retailers can easily acquire huge libraries of thousands of new, previously unsigned artists. They don't need to censor whose music they can publish based on their perceptions of the marketplace, because adding tracks to their labels poses minimal risk. (They do still face some of the same legal issues as their conventional predecessors, though—notably, those associated with copyright.)
This approach also has significant benefits for many artists. Instead of having to convince a record company that they'll sell enough music to make the initial outlay worthwhile, new independent artists can go directly to the market and build their own followings, demonstrating to record companies why they're worth signing. AFI, for example, was the first MySpace band to receive more than 500,000 listens in one day. Self-promotion and building up their own followings allows clever artists to avoid record companies while still achieving some success.
In this model, artists become responsible for creating their own music. Once they have content, they may publish their music via companies such as Napster and MP3.com. Imagine a fictional company called OurCo. OurCo can assimilate the best of both the old and the new distribution models and act as a private label distribution engine, as depicted in Figure 3.11, "The best of the old and the new distribution models".
When analyzing P2P infrastructures, we must recognize the sophistication of the current file-sharing infrastructures. The concepts of a web of participation and collaboration form the backbone of how resources flow and stream in Web 2.0. Napster is a prime example of how P2P networks can become popular in a short time and—in stark contrast to MP3.com—can embrace the concepts of participation and collaboration among users.
MP3.com, started because its founder realized that many people were searching for "mp3," was originally launched as a website where members could share their MP3 files with each other.
The original MP3.com ceased to operate at the end of 2003. CNET now operates the domain name, supplying artist information and other metadata regarding audio files.
The first iteration of MP3.com featured charts defined by genre and geographical area, as well as statistical data for artists indicating which of their songs were more popular. Artists could subscribe to a free account, a Gold account, or a Platinum account, each providing additional features and stats. Though there was no charge for downloading music from MP3.com, people did have to sign up with an email address, and online advertisements were commonplace across the site. Although MP3.com hosted songs from known artists, the vast majority of the playlist comprised songs by unsigned or independent musicians and producers. Eventually MP3.com launched "Pay for Play," which was a major upset to the established music industry. The idea was that each artist would receive payments based on the number of listens or downloads from the MP3.com site.
The original technical model that MP3.com employed was a typical client/server pattern using a set of centralized servers, as shown in Figure 3.13, "Typical client/server architecture model".
MP3.com engineers eventually changed to a new model (perhaps due to scalability issues) that used a set of federated servers acting as proxies for the main server. This variation of the original architectural pattern—depicted in Figure 3.14, "Load-balanced client/server pattern with proxies" using load balancing and clusters of servers—was a great way to distribute resources and balance loads, but it still burdened MP3.com with the expense of hosting files. (Note that in a P2P system, clients are referred to as "nodes," as they are no longer mere receivers of content: each node in a P2P network is capable of acting as both client and server.)
In Figure 3.14, "Load-balanced client/server pattern with proxies", all nodes first communicate with the load balancing server to find out where to resolve or retrieve the resources they require. The load balancing server replies with the information based on its knowledge of which proxies are in a position to serve the requested resources. Based on that information, each node makes a direct request to the appropriate node. This pattern is common in many web architectures today.
Napster took a different path. Rather than maintaining the overhead of a direct client/server infrastructure, Napster revolutionized the industry by introducing the concept of a shared, decentralized P2P architecture. It worked quite differently from the typical client/server model but was very similar conceptually to the BitTorrent model. One key central component remained: keeping lists of all of the peers for easy searching. This component not only created scalability issues, but also exposed the company to the legal liability that ultimately did it in.
Napster also introduced a pattern of "Opting Out, Not Opting In." As soon as you downloaded and installed the Napster client software, you became, by default, part of a massive P2P network of music file sharers. Unless you specifically opted out, you remained part of the network. This allowed Napster to grow at an exponential rate. It also landed several Napster users in legal trouble, as they did not fully understand the consequences of installing the software.
P2P architectures can generally be classified into two main types. The first is a pure P2P architecture where each node acts as a client and a server. There is no central server or DNS-type node to coordinate traffic, and all traffic is routed based on each node's knowledge of other nodes and the protocols used. BitTorrent, for example, can operate in this mode. This type of network architecture (also referred to as an ad hoc architecture) works when nodes are configured to act as both servers and clients. It is similar conceptually to how mobile radios work, except that it uses a point-to-point cast rather than a broadcast communication protocol. Figure 3.15, "Ad hoc P2P network" depicts this type of network.
In this pure-play P2P network, no central authority determines or orchestrates the actions of the other nodes. By comparison, a centrally orchestrated P2P network includes a central authority that takes care of orchestration and essentially acts as a traffic cop, as shown in Figure 3.16, "Centrally orchestrated P2P network".
The control node in Figure 3.16, "Centrally orchestrated P2P network" keeps track of the status and libraries of each peer node to help orchestrate where other nodes can find the information they seek. Peers themselves store the information and can act as both clients and servers. Each node is responsible for updating the central authority regarding its status and resources.
Napster itself was a sort of hybrid P2P system, allowing direct P2P traffic and maintaining some control over resources to facilitate resource location. Figure 3.17, "Conceptual view of Napster's mostly P2P architecture" shows the classic Napster architecture.
Napster central directories tracked the titles of content in each P2P node. When users signed up for and downloaded Napster, they ended up with the P2P node software running on their own machines. This software pushed information to the Napster domain. Each node searching for content first communicated with the IP Sprayer/Redirector via the Napster domain. The IP Sprayer/Redirector maintained knowledge of the state of the entire network via the directory servers and redirected nodes to nodes that were able to fulfill its requests. Napster, and other companies such as LimeWire, are based on hybrid P2P patterns because they also allow direct node-to-node ad hoc connections for some types of communication.
Both Napster and MP3.com, despite now being defunct, revolutionized the music industry. MySpace.com has since added a new dimension into the mix: social networking. Social networking layered on top of the music distribution model continues to evolve, creating new opportunities for musicians and fans.
A disruptive technology can do more than cost a business money. Sometimes the disruption extends so deep that the virtues of the business's past become problems, and techniques that would previously have been vices suddenly become virtues. The emergence of Wikipedia and its overshadowing of the Encyclopedia Britannica is one case where the rules changed decisively in favor of an upstart challenger.
The collaborative encyclopedia approach ushered in by Wikipedia capitalizes on several Web 2.0 patterns:
Software as a Service
Rich User Experience
The Synchronized Web
Collaborative Tagging
You can find more information on these patterns in Chapter 7, Specific Patterns of Web 2.0.
The Encyclopedia Britannica was originally published in 1768 as a three-volume set, emerging from the intellectual churn of Edinburgh. It grew quickly, reaching 21 volumes by 1801, and over the next two centuries, it solidified its reputation as a comprehensive reference to the world. Producing the printed tomes was a complex and expensive enterprise, requiring editors to judge how long to leave an edition in print, how much to change between editions, what new material to cover, and who should cover it.
The possibility of an electronic edition was in many ways a relief at first. The Encyclopedia Britannica took huge strides during the computer revolution to survive a changing world. In the mid-1990s, the static book publisher tried bundling an Encyclopedia Britannica CD with some PCs. That experiment was short-lived, as it soon became obvious that any publishing effort in the new digital age had to be dynamic. The company then migrated its entire encyclopedia set to the Web, where it was free of many of the edition-by-edition obstacles to updating that had limited its print and CD editions.
Although this was a daring move, and Britannica continues to sell its content online, the model behind the encyclopedia's creation now faced a major challenge from newcomer Wikipedia. Whereas Encyclopedia Britannica had relied upon experts and editors to create its entries, Wikipedia threw the doors open to anyone who wanted to contribute. While it seemed obvious to many that an encyclopedia created by volunteers—many of them non-experts, many of them anonymous, and some of them actually out to cause trouble—just had to be a terrible idea, Wikipedia has thrived nonetheless. Even Wikipedia's founders didn't quite know what they were getting into—Wikipedia was originally supposed to feed into a much more formal, peer-reviewed Nupedia.
In Wikipedia, rather than one authority (typically a committee of scholars) centrally defining all subjects and content, people all over the world who are interested in a certain topic can collaborate asynchronously to create a living, breathing work. Wikipedia combines the collaborative aspects of wiki sites (websites that let visitors add, remove, edit, and change content) with the presentation of authoritative content built on rich hyperlinks between subjects to facilitate ultra-fast cross-references of facts and claims.
Wikipedia does have editors, but everyone is welcome to edit. Volunteers emerge over time, editing and re-editing articles that interest them. Consistency and quality improve as more people participate, though the content isn't always perfect when first published. Anonymous visitors often make edits to correct typos or other minor errors. Defending the site against vandals (or just people with agendas) can be a challenge, especially on controversial topics, but so far the site seems to have held up. Wikipedia's openness allows it to cover nearly anything, which has created some complications as editors deleted pages they didn't consider worthy of inclusion. It's always a conversation.
The shift from a top-down editorial approach to a bottom-up approach is a painful reversal for people who expect only expert advice when they look up something—and perhaps an even harder reversal for people who've built their careers on being experts or editors. Businesses facing this kind of competition need to study whether their business models are sustainable, and whether it is possible to incorporate the bottom-up approach into their own work.
The term blog is short for weblog, a personal log (or diary) that is published on the Internet. In many cases, blogs are what personal websites were initially meant to be. Many early website gurus preached the idea that online content should always be fresh and new to keep traffic coming back. That concept holds just as true now as it did then—the content has just shifted form.
Many blogs embrace a variety of the core patterns discussed in Chapter 7, Specific Patterns of Web 2.0, such as:
Collaborative Tagging
Declarative Living and Tag Gardening
Software as a Service
Asynchronous Particle Update (the pattern behind AJAX)
The Synchronized Web
Structured Information (Microformats)
Static personal websites were, like most websites, intended to be sources of information about specific subjects. The goal of a website was to pass information from its steward to its consumers. Some consumers might visit certain websites (personal or otherwise) only once to retrieve the information they sought; however, certain groups of users might wish to visit again to receive updated information.
In some ways, active blogs are simply personal websites that are regularly updated, though most blog platforms support features that illustrate different patterns of use. Because there are no hard rules for how frequently either a blog or a personal website should be updated, nor is it possible to classify either in a general sense, it is probably not possible to identify clear differences as patterns. However, here are a few key points that differentiate blogs:
Blogs are built from posts—often short posts—which are usually displayed in reverse chronological order (newest first) on an organizing front page. Many blogs also support some kind of archive for older posts.
Personal websites and blogs are both published in HTML. Blog publishing, however, usually uses a slightly different model from traditional HTML website publishing. Most blog platforms don't require authors to write HTML, letting them simply enter text for the blog in an online form. Blog hosting generally allows users to know less about their infrastructure than classic HTML publishing. Blogs' ease of use makes them attractive to Internet users who want a web presence but have not yet bothered to learn about HTML, scripts, HTTP, FTP, and other technologies.
Blogs often include some aspects of social networking. Mechanisms such as a blogroll (a list of other blogs to which the blog owner wishes to link from his blog) create mini-communities of like-minded individuals. A blogroll is a great example of the Declarative Living pattern documented in Chapter 7, Specific Patterns of Web 2.0. Comment threads can also help create small communities around websites.
Blogs support mechanisms for publishing information that can be retrieved via multiple patterns (like Search and Retrieve, Push, or Direct Request). Instead of readers having to request the page via HTTP GETs, they can subscribe to feeds (including Atom and RSS) to receive new posts in a different form and on a schedule more convenient to them.
Standard blog software (e.g., Blogger or WordPress) has evolved well beyond simple tools for presenting posts. The software allows readers to add their own content, tag content, create blogrolls, and host discussion forums. Some blog management software lets readers register to receive notifications when there are updates to various sections of a blog. The syndication functionality of RSS (or Atom) has become a core element of many blogs. Many blogs are updated on a daily basis, yet readers might not want to have to reload the blog page over and over until a new post is made (most blog authors do not post exact schedules listing the times their blogs are updated). It is much more efficient if the reader can register interest and then receive a notification whenever new content is published. RSS also describes the content so that readers can decide whether they want to view the actual blog.
Blogs are also moving away from pure text and graphics. All kinds of blog mutations are cropping up, including mobile blogs (known as moblogs), video blogs, and even group blogs.
Developers are adding tools that emphasize patterns of social interactions surrounding blogs. MyBlogLog.com has software that uses an AJAX widget to place the details of readers of a blog on the blog page itself so that you can see who else has been reading a specific blog. Figure 3.18, "Screenshot of MyBlogLog.com blog widget" shows the latest readers of the Technoracle blog at the time of this writing.[39]
Most blog software also offers the ability to socially network with like-minded bloggers by adding them to your blogroll. Having your blog appear on other people's blogrolls helps to elevate your blog's status in search engines, as well as in blog directories such as Technorati that track blog popularity. It also makes a statement about your personality and your stance on a variety of subjects. Figure 3.19, "Example of a blogroll from Technoracle.blogspot.com" shows an example of a blogroll.
A blogroll is a good example of the Declarative Living and Tag Gardening pattern, as the list of fellow bloggers in some ways tags the person who posts it. By making a statement regarding whose blogs they encourage their readers to read, blog owners are declaring something about themselves. Blog readers can learn more about blog writers by looking at who they have on their blogrolls. For example, in Figure 3.19, "Example of a blogroll from Technoracle.blogspot.com", knowing that John Lydon is in fact Johnny Rotten, the singer for the Sex Pistols, may imply to a reader that the owner of Technoracle has a somewhat disruptive personality and will try to speak the truth, even if it's unpopular.
Blogs lowered the technical barrier for getting a personal presence on the Internet, making it much easier for many more people to join the conversation. Blogs have also changed the patterns of dissemination of information. Rather than simply reading a news story on a particular topic, interested readers can also find related blogs and find out what the average person thinks about that topic. Blogs represent a new kind of media and offer an alternative source for people who want more than news headlines.
More recently, blogs have evolved beyond their basic form. Blogs have become one of many components in social networking systems like MySpace and Facebook: one component in pages people use to connect with others, not merely to present their own ideas. Going in a different direction, Twitter has stripped blogging down to a 140-character minimalist approach, encouraging people to post tiny bits of information on a regular basis and providing tools for following people's feeds.
Even in the early days of the Web, developers looked for ways to combine information from multiple sites. Back then, this meant screen scraping—writing code to dig through loosely structured HTML and extract the vital pieces—which was often a troublesome process. As Web 2.0 emerged, more and more of that information became available through web services, which presented it in a much more structured and more readily usable form.
These two types of content grabbing illustrate the following patterns:
Service-Oriented Architecture
Collaborative Tagging
You can find more information on these patterns in Chapter 7, Specific Patterns of Web 2.0.
In the earliest days of the Web, screen scraping often meant capturing information from the text-based interfaces of terminal applications to repurpose them for use in web applications, but the same technology was quickly turned to websites themselves. HTML is, after all, a text-based format, if a loosely (or even chaotically, sometimes) structured one. Web services, on the other hand, are protocols and standards from various standards bodies that can be used to programmatically allow access to resources in a predictable way. XML made the web services revolution when it made it easy to create structured, labeled, and portable data.
There is no specific standardized definition of web services that explains the exact set of protocols and specifications that make up the stack, but there is a set that is generally accepted. It's important to examine the web services architecture document from the W3C to get a feel for what is meant by "web services." When this book refers to "web services," it doesn't specifically mean SOAP over HTTP, although this is one popular implementation. RESTful services available via the Web are just as relevant.
One major difference between the two types of interactions is intent. Most owners of resources that have been screen-scraped did not intend to allow their content to be repurposed. Many were, of course, probably open to others using their resources; otherwise, they probably wouldn't have posted the content on the Internet. However, designing resources for automated consumption, rather than human consumption, requires planning ahead and implementing a different, or even parallel, infrastructure.
A classic example of the shift from screen scraping to services is Amazon.com. Amazon provides a tremendous amount of information about books in a reasonably structured (though sometimes changing) HTML format. It even contains a key piece of information, the Amazon sales rank, that isn't available anywhere else. As a result, many developers have written programs that scrape the Amazon site.
Rather than fighting this trend, Amazon realized that it had an opportunity. Its network of Amazon Associates (people and companies that help Amazon sell goods in exchange for a commission) could use the information that others were scraping from the site. Amazon set out to build services to make it easier for its associates to get to this information—the beginning of a process that has led Amazon to offer a variety of web services that go far beyond its product information.
Most web services work falls under the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) pattern described in Chapter 7, Specific Patterns of Web 2.0. SOA itself doesn't depend on the web services family of technologies and standards, nor is it limited to the enterprise realm where SOA is most ubiquitous. Web services are built on a set of standards and technologies that support programmatic sharing of information. These usually include XML as a foundation, though JSON has proven popular lately for lightweight sharing. Many web services are built using SOAP and the Web Services Description Language (WSDL), though others take a RESTful approach. Additional useful specifications include the SOAP processing model,[40] the XML Infoset[41] (the abstract model behind XML), and the OASIS Reference Model for SOA (the abstract model behind services deployed across multiple domains of ownership).
While web services and SOA are often thought of as technologies used inside of enterprises, rather than publicly on the Internet, the reality is that there is a wide spectrum of uses in both public and private environments. Open public services are typically simpler, while services used internally or for more specific purposes than information broadcast and consumption often support a richer set of capabilities. Web services now include protocol support for expressing policies, reliable messaging features, secure messaging, a security context, domains of trust, and several other key features. Web services have also spawned an industry for protocols and architectural models that make use of services such as Business Process Management (BPM), composite services, and service aggregation. The broader variety of web services standards has been documented in many other books, including Web Services Architecture and Its Specifications by Luis Felipe Cabrera and Chris Kurt (Microsoft Press).
As the Web evolved from the playground of hobbyists to the domain commercial users, the difficulty of maintaining sites capable of displaying massive amounts of information escalated rapidly. Content management systems (CMSs) such as Vignette leaped into the gap to help companies manage their sites. While CMSs remain a common component of websites today, the model they use is often one of outward publication: a specific author or organization creates content, and that content is then published to readers (who may be able comment on it). Wikis take a different approach, using the same system to both create and publish information and thereby allowing readers to become writers and editors.
The patterns illustrated in this discussion focus on collaboration:
Collaborative Tagging
You can find more information on these patterns in Chapter 7, Specific Patterns of Web 2.0.
Publishing is often a unilateral action whereby content is made available and further modifications to the content are minimal. Those who consume the content participate only as readers.
Wikis may look like ordinary websites presenting content, but the presence of an edit button indicates a fundamental change. Users can modify the content by providing comments (much like blog comments), use the content to create new works based on the content (mashups), and, in some cases, create specialized versions of the original content. Their participation gives the content wider relevancy, because collective intelligence generally provides a more balanced result than the input of one or two minds.
The phrases "web of participation" and "harnessing collective intelligence" are often used to explain Web 2.0. Imagine you owned a software company and you had user manuals for your software. If you employed a static publishing methodology, you would write the manuals and publish them based on a series of presumptions about, for example, the level of technical knowledge of your users and their semantic interpretations of certain terms (i.e., you assume they will interpret the terms the same way you did when you wrote the manuals).
A different way to publish the help manuals would be to use some form of website—not necessarily a wiki, but something enabling feedback—that lets people make posts on subjects pertaining to your software in your online user manuals. Trusting users to apply their intelligence and participate in creating a better set of software manuals can be a very useful way to build manuals full of information and other text you might never have written yourself. The collective knowledge of your experienced software users can be instrumental in helping new users of your software. For an example of this pattern in use, visit http://livedocs.adobe.com and see how Adobe Systems trusts its users to contribute to published software manuals.
Directories are built by small groups of experts to help people find information they want. Tagging lets people create their own classifications.
The following patterns are illustrated in this discussion:
Collaborative Tagging
Declarative Living and Tag Gardening
Semantic Web Grounding
Rich User Experience
You can find more information on these patterns in Chapter 7, Specific Patterns of Web 2.0.
Directory structures create hierarchies of resource descriptions to help users navigate to the information they seek. The terms used to divide the hierarchy create a taxonomy of subjects (metadata keywords) that searchers can use as guideposts to find what they're looking for. Library card catalogs are the classic example, though taxonomies come in many forms. Within a book, tables of contents and especially indexes often describe taxonomies.
Navigation mechanisms within websites also often describe taxonomies, with layers of menus and links in the place of tables of contents and a full-text search option in place of an index. These resources can help users within a site, but users' larger problem on the Web has often been one of finding the site they want to visit. As the number of sites grew exponentially in the early days of the Web, the availability of an incredible amount of information was often obscured by the difficulty of finding what you wanted. The scramble for domain names turned into a gold rush and advertisers rushed to include websites in their contact information—but many people arrived on the Web looking for information on a particular subject, not a particular advertiser.
The answer, at least at the beginning, was directories. Directory creators developed taxonomic classification systems for websites, helping users find their way to roughly the right place. Online directories usually started with a classification system with around 8 to 12 top-level subjects. Each subject was further classified until the directory browser got to a level where most of the content was very specialized. The Yahoo! directory was probably the most used directory in the late 1990s, looking much like Figure 3.20, "The Yahoo! directory". (You can still find it at http://dir.yahoo.com.)
Each category, of course, has further subcategories. Clicking on "Regional," for example, provided users with the screen in Figure 3.21, "Subcategories under the Regional category".
Similarly, clicking on "Countries" in the subcategory listing shown in Figure 3.21, "Subcategories under the Regional category" yielded an alphabetical list of countries, which could be further decomposed into province/state, city, community, and so on, until you reached a very small subset of specific results.
Directories have numerous problems. First and foremost, it is very difficult for a small group—even a small group of directory specialists—to develop terms and structures that readers will consistently understand. Additionally, there is the challenge of placing information in the directory. When web resource owners add pages to the Yahoo! directory, they navigate to the nodes where they think the pages belong and then add their resources from there. However, other people won't necessarily go to the same place when looking for that content.
Say, for example, you had a rental car company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Would you navigate to the node under Regional→Countries→Canada→Provinces→British Columbia→Cities→Vancouver, and then add your content? Or would you instead add it under Recreation & Sports→Travel→Transportation→Commuting, or perhaps Business & Economy→Shopping and Services→Automotive→Rentals? Taxonomists have solved this problem by creating polyhierarchies, where an item can be classified under more than one node in the tree. However, many Internet directories are still implemented as monohierarchies, where only one node can be used to classify any specific object. While polyhierarchies are more flexible, they can also be confusing to implement.
Another problem concerns terminology. Although terms such as "vehicles for hire" and "automobiles for lease" are equally relevant regarding your rental car company, users searching for these terms will not be led to your website. Adding non-English-speaking users to the mix presents a whole new crop of problems. Taxonomists can solve these problems too, using synonyms and other tools. It just requires an ever-greater investment in taxonomy development and infrastructure.
Hierarchical taxonomies are far from the only approach to helping users find data, however. More and more users simply perform searches. Searches work well for textual content but often turn up false matches and don't apply easily to pictures and multimedia. As was demonstrated in our earlier discussion of Flickr, tagging offers a much more flexible approach—one that grows along with a library of content.
Sites such as Slashdot.org have implemented this type of functionality to let readers place semantic tags alongside content. Figure 3.22, "Screenshot from Slashdot.org showing user tags (the tags appear in the oval)" shows an example of the tagging beta on a typical Slashdot.org web page. The tags appear just below the article.
The most effective tagging systems are those created by lots of people who want to make it easier for themselves (rather than others) to find information. This might seem counterintuitive, but if a large number of people apply their own terms to a few items, reinforcing classification patterns emerge more rapidly than they do if a few people try to categorize a large number of items in the hopes of helping other people find them. For those who want to extract and build on folksonomies selfish tagging can be tremendously useful, because people are often willing to share their knowledge about things in return for an immediate search benefit to them.
Delicious, which acts as a gigantic bookmark store, expects its users to create tags for their own searching convenience. As items prove popular, the number of tags for those items grows and they become easier to find. It may also be useful for the content creators to provide an initial set of tags that operate primarily as seed tags—that is, a way of encouraging other users to add their own tags.
Tim's examples illustrate the foundations of Web 2.0, but that isn't the end of the conversation. Another way to look at these concepts is through a meme (pronounced "meem") map. A meme map is an abstract artifact for showing concepts and their relationships. These maps are, by convention, ambiguous. For example, if two concepts are connected via a line, you can't readily determine what type of relationship exists between them in tightly defined ontological terms. Figure 3.23, "Meme map for Web 2.0" depicts the meme map for Web 2.0, as shown on the O'Reilly Radar website.
This map shows a lot of concepts and suggests that there are "aspects" and "patterns" of Web 2.0, but it doesn't offer a single definition of Web 2.0. The logic captured in the meme map is less than absolute, yet it declares some of the core concepts inherent in Web 2.0. This meme map, along with the Web 2.0 examples discussed earlier in the chapter, was part of the conversation that yielded the patterns outlined in Chapter 7, Specific Patterns of Web 2.0. Concepts such as "Trust your users" are primary tenets of the Participation-Collaboration and Collaborative Tagging patterns. "Software that gets better the more people use it" is a key property of the Collaborative Tagging pattern (a.k.a. folksonomy). "Software above the level of a single device" is also represented with the Software as a Service and Mashup patterns.
Figure 3.24, "Reductionist view of Web 2.0" shows a reductionist view of Web 2.0. Reductionism holds that complex things can always be reduced to simpler, more fundamental things, and that the whole is nothing more than the sum of those simpler parts. The Web 2.0 meme map, by contrast, is a largely holistic analysis. Holism, the opposite of reductionism, says that the properties of any given system cannot be described as the mere sum of its parts.
In a small but important way, this division captures an essential aspect of the debates that surround Web 2.0 and the next generation of the Web in general: there is one set of thinkers who are attempting to explain what's happening on the Web by exploring the fundamental precepts, and another set who seek to explain in terms of the things we're actually seeing happen on the Web (online software as a service, self-organizing communities, Wikipedia, BitTorrent, Salesforce, Amazon Web Services, etc.). Neither view is complete, of course, though combining them could help.
In the next part of the book, we'll delve deeper into detail, some of it more technical, and try to distill core patterns that will be applicable in a range of scenarios.
[37] Flickr's tagging is effective, but it represents only one style of folksonomy: a narrow folksonomy. For more information on different styles of folksonomy, see http://www.personalinfocloud.com/2005/02/explaining_and_.html.
[38] Cloud computing, in which developers trust their programs to run as services on others' hardware, may seem like a return to centralization ("All those programs run on Amazon S3 and EC2...."). The story is more complicated than that, however, as cloud computing providers have the opportunity to give their customers the illusion of centralization and the easy configuration that comes with it, while supporting a decentralized infrastructure underneath.
This excerpt is from Web 2.0 Architectures. This fascinating book puts substance behind Web 2.0. Using several high-profile Web 2.0 companies as examples, authors Duane Nickull, Dion Hinchcliffe, and James Governor have distilled the core patterns of Web 2.0 coupled with an abstract model and reference architecture. The result is a base of knowledge that developers, business people, futurists, and entrepreneurs can understand and use as a source of ideas and inspiration.
Copyright © 2009 O'Reilly Media, Inc.


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Home List of Titles Hubble Space Telescope Medium Deep Survey II: deconvolution of wide-field camera field galaxy images in the 13(h)+43-degrees field
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/43380
- Title
- Hubble Space Telescope Medium Deep Survey II: deconvolution of wide-field camera field galaxy images in the 13(h)+43-degrees field
- Author(s)
- Windhorst, Rogier A.; Schmidtke, Paul C.; Pascarelle, Sebastian M.; Gordon, J. M.; Griffiths, Richard; Ratnatunga, Kavan U.; Neuschaefer, Lyman W.; Ellis, Richard S.; Gilmore, Gerard F.; Glazebrook, Karl; Green, Richard F.; Huchra, John P.; Illingworth, Garth D.; Koo, David C.; Tyson, J. Anthony
- Abstract
- We present isophotal profiles of six faint field galaxies from some of the first deep images taken for the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Medium Deep Survey (MDS). These have redshifts in the range z=0.126-0.401. The images were taken with the Wide Field Camera (WFC) in 'parallel mode' and deconvolved with the Lucy method using as the point-spread function nearby stars in the image stack. The WFC deconvolutions have a dynamic range of 16-20 dB (4-5 mag) and an effective resolution ≲0″.2 (FWHM). The multiorbit HST images allow us to trace the morphology, light profiles, and color gradients of faint field galaxies down to V≃22-23 mag at sub-kpc resolution, since the redshift range covered is z=0.1-0.4. The goals of the MDS are to study the sub-kpc scale morphology, light profiles, and color gradients for a larger sample of faint field galaxies down to V≃23 mag, and to trace the fraction of early to late-type galaxies as function of cosmic time. In this paper we study the brighter MDS galaxies in the 13h+43° MDS field in detail, and investigate to what extent model fits with pure exponential disks or a1/4 bulges are justified at V≲22 mag. Four of the six field galaxies have light profiles that indicate (small) inner bulges following r1/4 laws down to 0″.2 resolution, plus a dominant surrounding exponential disk with little or no color gradients. Two occur in a group at z=0.401, two are barred spiral galaxies at z=0.179 and z=0.302, and two are rather subluminous (and edge-on) disk galaxies at z=0.126 and z=0.179. Our deep MDS images can detect galaxies down to V, I≲25-26 mag, and demonstrate the impressive potential of HST - even with its pre-refurbished optics - to resolve morphological details in galaxies at cosmologically significant distances (V≲23 mag). Since the median redshift of these galaxies is ≲0.4, the HST resolution allows us to study sub-kpc size scales at the galaxy, which cannot be done with stable images over wide fields from the best ground-based sites.
- Publication type
- Journal article
- Source
- Astronomical Journal, Vol. 107, no. 3 (Mar 1994), pp. 930-945
- Publication year
- 1994
- Keyword(s)
- Faint galaxies; GHZ; Radio galaxy
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- 0004-6256
- Publisher URL
- Peer reviewed

subset: commoncrawl


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Ohio Northern University's NCPA Business Plan Team finishes in the top 10 in national competition
The Ohio Northern University Raabe College of Pharmacy student chapter of the National Community Pharmacists Association (NCPA) Business Plan Team was selected as one of the top 10 teams in the nation for its business plan, "Hygeia Specialty Pharmacy," in the 11th annual Good Neighbor Pharmacy NCPA Pruitt-Schutte Student Business Plan Competition.
ONU competed against 42 schools and colleges of pharmacy and, with its top-10 showing, has been invited to present a poster of its business plan at the 116th Annual Convention and Trade Exposition in Austin, Texas, in October. The ONU team consists of Jennifer Provost (team captain), a sixth-year pharmacy major from Indianapolis, Ind., Erica Tolle, a sixth-year pharmacy major from Springfield, Ohio, and Paul Westervelt, a sixth-year pharmacy major from Westerville, Ohio. Dee Dee Myers, pharmacy and laboratory instructor, served as the advisor.
The goal of the competition is to motivate pharmacy students to create a business model for buying an existing independent community pharmacy or opening a new pharmacy. Through this competition, NCPA is better able to prepare tomorrow's pharmacy entrepreneurs for successful futures. The Business Plan Competition is the first national competition of its kind in the pharmacy profession and honors two great champions of independent community pharmacy: the late Neil Pruitt Sr. and the late H. Joseph Schutte. The competition is supported by Good Neighbor Pharmacy, Pharmacists Mutual Companies and the NCPA Foundation.
The remaining finalists in the top 10 were Midwestern University College of Pharmacy-Glendale; Roseman University of Health Sciences College of Pharmacy; University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy; University of Oklahoma College of Pharmacy - OKC Campus; University of the Pacific - Thomas J. Long School of Pharmacy; University of Arkansas Medical Sciences College of Pharmacy: University of California San Francisco School of Pharmacy: University of Oklahoma College of Pharmacy at Tulsa: and the University of Washington School of Pharmacy. Submissions were judged by a panel of 50 NCPA members and Good Neighbor Pharmacy business coaching consultants.
All participating schools receive a plaque commemorating their participation in the competition. Each year, competing schools receive an engraved plate to add to their plaque, and teams placing in the top 10 receive a special plate acknowledging this distinction. For more information about the Business Plan Competition, please visit NCPA's website.
The National Community Pharmacists Association (NCPA®) represents the interests of America's community pharmacists, including the owners of more than 23,000 independent community pharmacies. Together they represent an $88.7 billion health care marketplace, dispense nearly 40 percent of all retail prescriptions, and employ more than 300,000 individuals, including more than 62,000 pharmacists. To learn more, go to www.ncpanet.org, visit facebook.com
Photo id: Dee Dee Myers (advisor), Erica Tolle, Paul Westervelt, Jennifer Provost (captain)


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Hello mamas,
This is my first post, so please forgive me if I breach protocol. I am posting this in a couple different topics because it seems relevant to more than one… hope that's ok! This is a long one, so get ready…
I am here to seek encouragement and support while I continue to struggle to increase my milk supply so that I can exclusively breastfeed my son, who is now 7 weeks old.
My son was born on a Friday, and it was 3 days later that I was advised to start supplementing him, and I've had to supplement him ever since. He was a bit jaundiced and lost nearly a full pound in those first 3 days of life, which is why I was advised to start supplementing him.
I always knew I wanted to breastfeed! But I was completely ignorant about breastfeeding, and I had the wrong attitude about breastfeeding: an attitude that basically said, 'How hard can it be? If cave women could breastfeed, so can I.' So I skipped all the breastfeeding information in my pregnancy books, assuming there would be no problems. Looking back, this was the first of many mistakes I would eventually make, leading up to the supplementation vicious cycle that I am currently battling.
I knew a few things. I knew, for example, that it was important to get the baby on the breast immediately. I also had heard babies need a 'big mouthful' when feeding. I figured anything beyond that would be intuitive. So I made sure to get Aidan on my breast within minutes of his birth, and it appeared that all was well. His lips were on my breast, and his jaw was moving, so I figured he was getting all the nourishment he needed. When people in the hospital asked me how my baby was latching on, I answered emphatically, "It looks good to me!" And when the hospital's lactation consultant asked me if I needed a consultation, I declined it, thinking that I had everything under control.
We left the hospital thinking everything was in good order. Aidan breastfed somewhat frequently during those first couple days. However, looking back now I wonder if his latch was off. I just assumed that it was fine. But when we went to the doctor three days after his birth, I was shocked when he had lost almost a pound, and of course the doctor was concerned as well. I didn't know that some of that weight loss could have been due to the fact that I had received a lot of IV fluids during my labor (as I was induced and needed penicillin, etc.). I also didn't know that it's a good idea to check baby's weight right before leaving the hospital and to gauge the baby's weight loss according to that number, rather than the number immediately following the baby's birth.
As it was, we panicked over his weight loss. I assumed that it was due to a flaw in my body - an inability to produce the milk that my baby needed to thrive. I had heard that it would take a few days for my milk to come in, so I waited for that to happen, but it never seemed to arrive like I'd expected. And we had to drive 35 min. (1 way) to the ped for the next three days to keep checking Aidan's weight.
We saw a lactation consultant the day following Aidan's first ped appointment. The consultation began by weighing Aidan, followed by a breastfeeding session, and a follow-up weighing. Aidan's weight hadn't changed after nursing, so it was determined that he wasn't taking in any milk while he nursed. It occurred to me at that moment that it was possible he hadn't taken in any milk AT ALL since he was born, and I felt horrible. I thought I'd unknowingly starved my child. And all my emotions were compounded by whacky postpartum hormones and what I now realize were the baby blues. The LC recommended supplementation until my mature milk came in, and we were eager to comply. I wanted to stuff my kid so full of milk that he'd be on the verge of bursting – our little milk tick.
Luckily, we had a source of donor milk. A close, trusted friend who was also lactating offered to pump for us, and we will be forever grateful. (To this day Aidan has consumed very little formula, despite all the supplementation, thanks to her generous gift.) We jolted home and began to stuff our kid with milk.
The ped and LC had showed us how to use the SNS, but after only a few tries, we abandoned the SNS for the less-awkward bottle. I also gave into the temptation to allow my sweet husband to feed Aidan at night a few times, while I rested, not knowing that this choice also jeopardized my precious milk supply. Again, neither of us knew better.
That first week of life, we had to drive Aidan 30 miles to his ped's office 3 times. All three of us were exhausted and highly stressed. I realize now that all the stress during those first postpartum weeks also probably paid a toll on my supply, but at the time I thought I was doing what was best for my child.
On Tuesday, 4 days after Aidan was born, I attended my first LLL meeting (recommended by my ped). I'll never forget slowly walking up to the meeting room door, wondering what I was getting myself into, scared to go anywhere without my sweet husband. I was depressed, worried, and SORE from a very difficult labor. I entered the room, and to my surprise, there was a circle of women in various phases of motherhood, several with their breasts out and comfortably nursing babies of all ages. I was warmly greeted, and instantly felt more at ease, but I was so envious that breastfeeding appeared to come so naturally to all these women, when it was proving to be very challenging for me.
I shared my story with the other mothers, who were extremely supportive. They validated my fears but also encouraged me to stick with breastfeeding. They couldn't believe I was out and about, or had even showered for that matter, 4 days postpartum.
When Aidan woke up, I took him out of his carrier and began nursing him in "public" for the first time. It wasn't long before he was wailing, absolutely irate about what I now realize was probably an inability in that moment for my milk to let down, coupled with an ineffective latch. (Of course, I thought I just didn't have any milk for him. I didn't even know what a let down was at that point.)
I was only slightly embarrassed by Aidan's screams as the other mothers were very understanding. I mostly felt bad for the older children who looked a little concerned by my distressed baby. The LLL leaders just stood by my side and watched me try to nurse for a while. One of them assured me that I had milk – indeed she could see it. At the time I just didn't believe it would be enough for him…there were only drops.
The other leader made a suggestion that I try sandwiching my breast in alignment with Aidan's mouth (as I had been holding my breast perpendicular to his mouth). With this slight adjustment, Aidan latched on, his wails immediately ceased, and he started nursing contentedly. I started to cry. Bawl, really. And again, all the other mothers were extremely supportive, saying they'd been in my shoes, which was hard to believe watching them nurse their babies so nonchalantly. Yet, I felt inspired by them to keep trying. And I knew that I was hooked to LLL from that day forward.
When it was time to leave, the other mothers gave me more encouragement, and the LLL leader allowed me to stay behind about 35 minutes longer to feed Aidan after everybody left. The other leader loaned me The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, which I took home and placed my shelf to remain unopened for a couple weeks. This was another mistake.
That first week of Aidan's life, we boarded the supplementation train and have had trouble getting off ever since. So traumatized by his weight loss, all we wanted to do was feed and feed and feed him to make up the difference. Our ped recommended the SNS, which we attempted to use for the first couple of weeks, but it became so awkward at night and when we were out of the house that we eventually resorted to bottles. I was completely exhausted from the cycle of readying the SNS, feeding Aidan, holding him until he fell asleep, preparing the pumping bottles, pumping, then cleaning up. Usually by the time the cycle was complete, it was time to start it all over again, and I often hadn't had a chance to sleep or eat or bathe. Thus, we resorted to bottles so that my husband could share in the burden of helping me to get my milk supply up. This was yet another mistake.
Some nights my husband would bottle feed Aidan while I pumped, thinking that there wasn't much difference in the stimulation to my supply. Wrong again.
Once Aidan became accustomed to bottles, he began to resist the breast. At the time I thought he was resisting the breast because I didn't have enough milk for him, which was probably true to a point, but his resistance was also probably due to his preference for the fast flow of the bottle. My already compromised milk supply was then further compromised. I knew that bottle preference (or "nipple confusion") was a risk with bottle feeding, but I was so exhausted and traumatized from his weight loss that I was willing to take the risk at the time.
To be continued....


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heres a short link
wean slowly with love.
heres a short link
wean slowly with love.
Here is a link on weaning techniques.
Mom to Lainey (11-8-06)
Thanks everyone for the words, advice and links.
I am very sad we have to stop but I'm happy I could give him the 6 months!
Jake: Born 11/15/07
6lbs 5oz ~ 19inch and 3/4's long
I'm so sorry to hear you're not feeling well and I do hope that your medications will help with that.
I would suggest dropping a session every couple of weeks or week. If you need to move quicker, you could drop a feeding every 3-4 days (matching your own comfort level). This will give your body long enough to "gear down" milk production. Going slowly will be much easier on you AND your baby. As Andrea mentioned, it's best to wean as gradually as you can and with love.
Here's some info on weaning:
Thank you and thanks for the advice!
You all are the best!
Jake: Born 11/15/07
6lbs 5oz ~ 19inch and 3/4's long


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Menopause is a time of transition, a crossing from one state to another. The key in all transitions is to find safe passage across what can be rough waters. From the point of view of traditional Chinese medicine, a key year in this transition lies in the 48-49 year range. When confronted with menopausal or peri-menopausal symptoms, there are three main paths that a woman can take:
▪ Conservative. This views menopause as a natural transition where treatment should be minimal. In my practice, women who choose this path use classical homeopathy and perhaps some nutritional and dietary therapy to manage symptoms.
▪ Energy Imbalance Perspective. This point of view reflects the understanding of Chinese medicine (TCM). From the point of TCM, hot flashes and other menopausal symptoms arise out of an energy imbalance that can easily occur at mid-life. The energy of the kidneys, which create cooling vital fluids, declines at menopause, and thus fall out of balance with the fire energy of the body. The water-fire balance tips in favor of heat and leads to hot flashes. In addition, when women stop menstruating, they may load extra toxicity which formerly was excreted through menstruation. If the body does not find a new balance, illness may develop. Women who choose the energy balance path can use herbal therapy to replenish their lost vital essence, and often hold this balance through the transition and beyond. They may or may not use classical homeopathy along with this approach.
▪ Hormonal Imbalance perspective. This is viewpoint of a segment of western doctors, particularly those involved in anti-aging medicine, and has been popularized by Suzanne Somers. In this view, the decline of hormones in mid-life leads to symptoms. To manage the symptoms, this view advocates replenishing the lost hormones with bio-identical hormones. The agreement among all doctors who work at the forefront of this field is that estradiol (estrogen) should not be taken orally. Doctors mainly prescribe transdermal (applied to skin) application for both estradiol and progesterone replacement, although many advocate taking the progesterone orally if there is insomnia. Within this group of doctors, there are many individual variations, but two main groups you should be aware of:
⁃ -Cyclers: This sub-group, whose chief proponent is Susie Wiley, maintains that women should take hormones in a way that mimics the hormonal rhythms of a younger, menstruating women. In this method of hormone replacement, the first half of the cycle is an estrogen phase and the second half is a progesterone phase. When hormones are cycled in this way it will promote a menstrual period. The Wiley Protocol is the most extreme of the cycler group, because it advocates returning a woman to the higher hormonal levels of a young woman, attempting to exactly mimic the rhythm of young adulthood.
-Non-cyclers: This group usually gives static (i.e. the same dose each day) daily doses of hormones. If a diagnosis of "estrogen dominant" is given, then there will be a daily dose of progesterone alone. Other situations may call for giving both estradiol and progesterone. Some doctors always give a combination of estradiol and progesterone each day.
In reference, to the above three approaches, here is the approach of my practice:
1) If I had to choose only one therapy from the above three, I would choose classical homeopathy. The reason is that this treatment is so deep that it can manage most health problems. With a good homeopathic prescription, a woman feels better than using either Chinese herbal medicine or bio-identical hormone replacement alone, or together. I find that using bio-identical hormone replacement can be limited in cases where the health of the woman is not that good.
2) Treating with classical homeopathy and then supplementing with Chinese herbals to fine-tune and build the vital essence of the body is an excellent way to proceed.
3) Using all three approaches together. This has slowly been evolving into my treatment of choice. First I like to begin with classical homeopathy and see how things balance out. From there, if signs of deficiency exist, I will restore the balance with herbals. I find that then adding in bio-identical hormones optimizes how a woman feels, allowing her to move into a new and higher state of well-being.
4) Although I recognize arguments for both Cyclers and Non-Cyclers, my prescribing sides more with the Cyclers. Before prescribing a cycling regimen, though, a woman needs to be OK with the likelihood of menstruating beyond normal menopausal age. If you give bio-identical estrogen in the first half of the cycle, followed by progesterone in the second half, a woman will build up a uterine lining (assuming she has a uterus). When the progesterone is stopped at the end of the cycle, bleeding will occur. All doctors using bio-identical replacement therapy agree that taking some bio-identical hormones is healthier than not, even when given in a low-dose static way. I agree, however, with the Cyclers who argue that a static dose of hormones tends to "clog" the receptors, inhibiting them from regenerating.
5) Although I have seen no evidence, either in practice or in the literature, that bio-identical hormone replacement promotes cancer or any other disease, I have seen evidence that giving too much of either estradiol or progesterone can create toxicity. Thus, I do not want to say that bio-identical hormone replacement is without risks. It is important to tune in to how you feel when you start taking bio-identical hormones. If you do not feel better, you either need to change the regimen or stop them. When bio-identical hormone replacement works, this is reflected both in measurements (e.g. the Digimeridian I use) and in how you feel.
The above is a brief summary of an evolving field. Use it as general guidelines, asking questions to find answers that suit your individual needs and outlook. Trust that, for those in the know, there are profound interventions that can make the menopausal years healthy and joyful.


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New Student
Applicants interested in enrolling at BYU-Idaho may apply at besmart.com. The ecclesiastical endorsement portion of the new student admission application is found at http://endorsement.byu.edu. Note: The applicant's portion of the endorsement must be submitted before their ecclesiastical leader will be able to submit the endorsement.
Continuing Student
The Continuing Ecclesiastical Endorsement process requires all current students to complete a continuing endorsement each year during the first semester of their assigned track while at BYU-Idaho.
|Assigned Track
|Semester to Complete Continuing Endorsement
|Fall Semester
|Winter Semester
|Spring Semester
|Semester first enrolled
At the beginning of each semester, the university notifies students who need to complete a continuing endorsement, placing a hold on their registration account until the endorsement is completed.
Click here to complete the online Continuing Ecclesiastical Endorsement
Once students complete the online portion of the continuing endorsement, they are eligible for an endorsement interview with their campus bishop. The purpose of this meeting is to foster communication between students and ecclesiastical leaders. It provides bishops an opportunity to review each student's understanding and commitment of the Honor Code. After a successful interview, the bishop may approve his portion of the online endorsement which will release the hold on the student's registration account.


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May 25, 2012
Kindergartner Finds Greater Yellow Underwing Moth on North CampusThis past weekend the Museum hosted the 26th annual Bug Fair. Over the course of 72 hours, more than 10,000 people visited us. These lucky visitors got to see, do, and taste many things. At Curator of Entomology Brian Brown's table, visitors were able to see the world's smallest fly from Thailand (oh and it just happens to be a brand new species in the genus Euryplatea). On our insect stage, they could meet Western Exterminator's bed bug sniffing dogs. If people were hungry, they could head outside and taste some insectuous delights including Orthopteran Orzo, a la Bug Chef David George Gordon, or wax worm salad prepared by entomophagy expert Dave Gracer. If they were interested in hunting bugs rather than eating them, we also held bug hunts out in the Erica J. Glazer Family Home Garden.
Posted by Lila Higgins at 7:52 PM | 2 COMMENTS


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'Intruding fool'October 26,2013
One of the ways that corruption manifests itself in the play "Hamlet" is in the multiple instances of spying and subterfuge that grow out of the atmosphere of suspicion and fear.
Now it turns out the United States has been tapping into the cellphone of Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany and one of our closest allies. Previously, the French and Brazilian governments had protested U.S. surveillance of their communications. Like old Polonius, we have hidden behind the curtain to listen in. Let us hope we don't meet his fate.
The revelations of Edward Snowden have continued to highlight the overreach of the U.S. security apparatus, which has developed technology able to sift through millions of communications, including those of American citizens. When Snowden first began to release his information through the selective use of several newspapers, the public was unsure whether to be outraged by his violation of government secrecy or by the content of his revelations.
It was alarming that the government felt it had a right to spy indiscriminately on American citizens and to lie about it. But these constitutional violations did not generate a groundswell of outrage. Most people probably think they are not important enough to come to the attention of the National Security Agency and its telecommunications watchdogs. And they are probably right. Thus, for many people the violation of rights enacted by the NSA remained a mostly abstract violation. President Obama did not disavow it, though he insisted that he would put safeguards in place.
Spying on Angela Merkel is something else. It puts in stark relief the nature of surveillance. It violates the sphere of privacy that we all assume belongs to each of us.
But more than a personal violation, spying directly on allied leaders in such a personal way remains a stupidly self-defeating exercise in espionage. What kind of defense does Obama have? That everyone is doing it? That we didn't think we would be caught? That he didn't know it was happening?
In fact, everyone is probably doing it in some sense. We can assume the intelligence services of all the leading states, friend and foe, are using every tool at hand to acquire the information they need to secure a diplomatic and economic advantage. But as there are rules of war, there are rules of diplomacy, the violation of which sows discord among friends.
The United States needs all the friends it can get. It has several high-stakes initiatives on the table that could transform the affairs of nations. These include the burgeoning rapprochement with Iran, the effort to settle the war in Syria and the Israeli-Palestinian talks. We need to keep our allies on our side, well-informed and supportive.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has been critical of the Obama administration's expansive surveillance program and has taken steps to rein it in. The latest revelations about spying on Merkel ought to give new impetus to his effort.
Remember what happened to Polonius. He had hidden behind the arras in the chamber of Hamlet's mother in order to listen in when an angry Hamlet came to speak with her. Hamlet was compiling evidence that his mother's new husband, the king, had murdered Hamlet's father. As Hamlet railed against his mother, he heard Polonius behind the arras. "How now? A rat?" he said, drawing his sword. He thrust his sword through the arras, thinking he would kill the king. But when he pulled the curtain back and saw whom he had killed, he said, "Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!"
We are the intruding fool, driven by fear of what we don't know. Germany is not likely to draw a sword on us, but its trust in us and willingness to support us in our complex diplomatic initiatives have been compromised. The same goes for France, Brazil and, presumably, others. Maybe Snowden has done Obama a favor, providing him a justification for putting needed bounds on an out-of-control surveillance program.MORE IN EditorialsProtesters converged on a bank in Montpelier early this week to show their solidarity with the... Full StoryPhil Scott will take office next month after winning with a margin of 51.11 percent to 43. Full StoryIdeologues and partisans work from the outcome backward. Full Story
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I know sweet n low and equal need to be kept away or at least used sparingly(sp).
How about splend (suraclose) and acesulfame potassium?
I am asking because dh picked up some lipton to go tea (getting tired of water all day every day) and it does not have aspartame(sp) but the other two and wanted to know?


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City police seek home invadersBy Josh OGorman
STAFF WRITER | February 04,2013Rutland City Police are searching for at least four assailants who broke into an apartment and pistol whipped the occupants.
Shortly after 4 p.m. Saturday, Rutland City Police received a 911 call stating two men were fighting near 110 Maple St. Upon arrival, police said they interviewed two men and a woman who said at least four, and possibly five, people kicked in the back door to the apartment and used the threat of pepper spray to gain access to the apartment.
One of the assailants found the female resident in her bedroom and threatened her with what she described as a silver pistol, and when one of the male residents attempted to protect her, the assailants attacked him, according to police. The assailants demanded drugs and money before fleeing the apartment to an unknown location, police said.
Police said one of the male victims sustained serious injuries and was taken by ambulance to Rutland Regional Medical Center. The other male victim declined to be taken by ambulance and was driven to RRMC by a private party.
I would characterize it as an anomaly, Rutland City Police Sgt. John Sly said of the incident. We dont have many home invasions and its uncommon to have roving groups of people like this breaking into residences.
It is not known what, if anything, was taken, but the victims were able to identify two of the assailants as people they knew personally, police said.
The assailants remained at large Sunday night.
@rutlandherald.comMORE IN This Just InBARRE TOWN Firefighters faced a collection of adverse conditions as a house on Granitville Road... Full StoryWILLISTON Police are asking for help identifying the man who tried to steal roughly $800 worth ... Full StoryNEWBURY Police said somebody stole booze and change from a Welch Road residence. Full Story
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