SWF is Searchable
Adobe SWF files that run in the flash player will now be searchable. Adobe published SWF searchability FAQ earlier this morning explaining the details of what this implies.
Web spiders will now be able to playback SWF(s) like users and cull out the data to add to their index. This announcement has two huge impacts:
- Traditionally, a big disadvantage of making flash player applications was that they were not properly visible to the search engines. This won’t be true going forward.
- By enabling search indexing via playback, a new era is going to begin. Traditionally text has been the favorite media for search engines. Hopefully this announcement heralds the good news of better rich media indexing in general. We would all like to search audio and video content based on the information they contain and not just the way they are tagged.
Congratulations to Adobe, Google and Yahoo for this new development.
Adobe Developer Week 2008
I presented this afternoon at the Adobe Developer Week 2008 — an online seminar that runs each day from March 24th through March 28th. The topic of my presentation was “Flex and Java — Tying the Knot!”. If you have come to any of my recent presentations at Flex Camp Chicago, 360 Flex Atlanta or AjaxWorld East 2008 you probably know that this is one topic that I have been speaking on frequently. In the next few months you will get to see more on this from me. My next stop is 360 Flex Milan and then Flex Camp Wall Street and The Server Side Java Symposium Europe follow.