I don’t know how many of you know already about this, especially those of you that don’t live in the US, but i think this is a very important subject for our tech blog.

OK! So what is Verichip? Well, Verichip was until now a tiny RDIF chip that used to be implanted in pets as a digital under skin TAG, but now Verichip has the FCC approval to be used on humans as well. Some companies in the US have already requested their employees to have the Verichip implanted and probably more will join this Big Brother style of tracking their employees.

Officially there are lots of reasonable applications for this RDIF chip but you can’t stop thinking of all the privacy issues that could come with this.

We’ll show you a video material from CNN that will explain more on this issue!

Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped posted yesterday about how the accuracy of Alexa data is really poor. The specifics of his post are really a spoof as all the “data” is made up. Philipp is in fact spoofing the Alexa methodology itself as he indicated that the data: “uses gut feeling from a selected sample group (me) as data source”. Alexa’s accuracy problems are well known.

The underlying problem is that the Alexa data is derived from users who use the Alexa toolbar. At the end of the day, the audience is just not large enough, and the dependency on a willingness to install the toolbar introduces a natural bias into the date. My own experience suggests that these problem become worse and worse as you deal with lower and lower traffic level sites. Have a site that gets 20,000 visitors per day? You are not really on the map with Alexa at that level.

Because your competitors are in the same business as you are, the bias problem no longer is a factor to worry about (because the bias will affect all the compares sites equally). For most businesses this will provide a quick way to compare the relative web site traffic levels in their industry. So the accuracy problems are real, but there is still a way to use the tool to extract useful information.

What is XML?
The technical definition of XML or Extensible Markup Language is “a document markup language for defining structured information”. But thats a little too technical, so let’s go deeper and see what that actually means.

A markup language helps your computer to know how to react and show you certain things! Let’s say you are using a word processor, you are typing your text and format it to fit your needs, but under those simple words there’s much more information than we see in the word processor, the information that tells our computer what font you want for that document, what size, color, if you have a paragraph after 57 words or not, if it’s bold or italic and so on.

As computers and developers became more and more sophisticated we needed to tell the computer more than how to show a text on our screen. It’s useful to define the type of content information.

When you define the content of your documents you are creating structured information. The structured information hes more to it than just the formating of the text on the screen. There are many types of structured information that we use every day. An address book hold information in a structured format. Each entry is defined.

One thing to note. XML, unlike HTML, isn’t really a language of tags. XML doesn’t have a set of tags or rules for use in that fashion. Rather, XML is the definition of how to create the tags in the first place.

XML Can Create Tags
Some say that XML is a meta language, or a language for building other languages. In a sense, this is true.

XML is a computer language for defining markup languages to create structured documents. You can use XML to create tags for defining your own documents or use tag languages created with XML for compatibility across the Internet.

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