Libby Miller has an excellent piece on strategies for combining foaf and geo with RDFical. Plan B: Combining foaf, RDFical and geo, and maybe RSS 1.0…
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How was this photo fo a someone holding a nuclear fuel rod taken? 1. tiny, very brave photographer sitting inside containment chamber? 2. vanity mirror on other side of containment chamber? 3. deluxe double aspect containment chamber with windows on both sides? 4. fake containment chamber for publicity shots?
Doc Searls reverses the idea of taking print journals and doing them as weblogs. Amazon has done pretty well out of using the web to shift a rain forest of dead trees, maybe there’s something in this. “I’m predicting that within a year there will be print journals that start on the Web, harnessing blog energy, putting the blog posting, vetting & editing process to work, and running it through to publication with ink on paper.” Jeff Jarvis loves The Week, the readers digest of newspers. I’d probably subscribe to a weekly roundup of the best of Weblogs in print format.
0xDECAFBAD has a very nice example of RSS 2.0 and RSS-Data alongside. If you use schemas with RSS, you get eveything that RSS-Data provides and more to the point, you make the data structure definitions optional. The only downside as far as I can see is that with RSS-Data the structural definitions are inline. Surely, however, since schemas are in XML themselves they can be inline – rather like CSS being inline or referenced?
Jeremy Allaire is having some interesting ideas about RSS. I like his idea of RSS-Data, but isn’t the idea of a generic aggregator separate? Rich metadata in RSS isn’t happening at the moment, the spec is there but the tools to create and read the content aren’t: 1. there are no end user tools to create modules (why not allow people to build their own forms, where each form field is an RSS tag in a namespace that is their email address by defaut?) 2. there are no aggregators that read extended metadata (there are no aggregators that filter by a MoveableType category, for example). Both these issues are as much to do with UI as data modelling. RSS module builders could use a web forms that build forms approach, (the ‘metacrap’ syndrome would be a problem but there are hundreds of person-years work that have already gone into this…
Current RSS readers are more or less similar, differentiated on interface features rather than core functionality, and sold, where applicable as software tools. Over time these features will surely be a commodity and any business model around RSS aggregation will be based upon the value add on top of aggregation. My guess is that this value-add is in efficient searching, categorizing and personalizing rather than discovery and display. Categorization and personalization can be done by adding metadata to existing feeds (the tokenization process of search could arguably be considered metadata a tokenized content tag would allow local searching). This can be entirely independent of the tool used to view RSS, providing that RSS readers can read this metadata. The time is probably about right to start looking at this from the various initiatives such as FOAF and RSS topics that are out there and building features based upon them into…
Nick Bradbury’sFeedDemon is very nice. The 3 pane interface is clearly the way to go for RSS reading. What’s really interesting about FeedDemon however, is that it is basically an RSS enhanced browser rather than a separate app. admittedly the distinction is blurred, but seeing FeedDemon does lead me to believe that RSS features could become standard, collapsible components of a browser. When the joint Moreover/Blogger tool Newsblogger launched, it had a similar 3 pane view, but was definitely an online app. Blogger then decided to make it function through an Explorer bar in IE, which is more similar to the path that FeedDemon is going down. There are four types of aggregator: online (Bloglines); separate app (Newzcrawler, Newsmonster, Amphetadesk; Netnewswire); enhanced browser (FeedDemon); and enhanced email app (Newsgator). Until now, I was convinced that the online approach was best, but I’m not so sure.
Fred Wilson: “I think the telecomm market isn’t falling apart, it is just rebuilding itself in horizontal layers ala the technology industry.” Surely something big is up in telecom, the distinction between voice and data is disappearing but their business models are entirely different. By-and-large, data is flat fee and voice is duration and distance, all you can eat vs. a la carte. Will the telco’s throw an RIAA fit if, for example, too many people subscribe to a VOIP service in the US and use it from another country – its got to hurt them at some point.
Could trackbacks be enabled by simply adding an argument t=y (trackback equals yes) to any permalink? If this were the case and you wanted to use trackback to post a remote comment about something, you could select the trackback link and then use a bookmarklet to blog the post and trackback at the same time. In order to stop browser referals from showing weblog referer urls would have to have a similar parameter, say ?dt=y (display trackback equals yes) as part of the permalink. A script would check for qualified referrals. (A trackback to a permalink that also could track to another site would be called as ‘permalink?dt=y&t=y’) e.g. https://www.davidgalbraith.org/archives/000486.html#000486?t=y
Joi Ito wonders what Amazon’s A9 search engine will look like. My guess is that it may build upon some of the price aggregation technology that they bought with their 1998 acquisition of Junglee. Junglee was pretty good then, and the basic technology requirement for this type of aggregation hasn’t changed much.
Doc points out that there are five bloggers born every minute. I guess if bloggers outnumber suckers five to one, they can’t all be bad. Keeping up with tracking blogs growing at this rate sounds like a daunting task, however, I suspect it is easier than it at first seems. The popularity as measured by the number of inbound links tends to follow a power law distribution. Perhaps the measure of how prolific a weblog is also follows a power law. Our analysis at Moreover tended to show that the majority of weblogs are not updated even once a week. The two standard metrics for information retrieval are relevance and retrieval, i.e. what percentage of all the good stuff you get back. In tracking weblogs popularity and prolificacy are the equivalent of relevance and retrieval. I’d love to see Dave Sifry’s indispensable Technorati include a blog popularity and freshness rank….