BurningbirdRecovered from the Wayback Machine.
The Practical RDF Book should roll off the publication lines this week, and I’m re-awakening this weblog to provide support for it.
Besides – there’s a lot of good stuff happening with RDF lately. Time to start playing again.
The weather was clear and hot during the trip, and the van had an air conditioner that either didn’t work well, or worked too well. The first day I wasn’t too tired and I thought about just driving straight through – 30+ hours – but I was concerned about hitting animals during the night.
The highlights of the trip were the ground squirrel colony, all of Wyoming, and my arrival in Missouri. The lowlights were the fact that I was allergic to the lotion the Park Hyatt provided, everything was at summer rates, and I passed too many accidents trying to make it through on I70 in Kansas City. And the spammers when I got home, of course.
I entered Wyoming at sunset, and the deep amber/red/purple light brought out all the nuances of the painted cliffs – astonishingly beautiful. I itched to stop and try to take a photo that captured the colors, but I remembered that supposedly I see myself as a writer, and perhaps it’s time to refocus more on writing, and a little less on photography. I was sorely tempted, though, when passing the plains, where literally the antelope were playing, just like in the song. Wyoming is at its most beautiful at times of great subtlety, at that first morning light, and that last evening ray.
Kansas was Kansas and hot and crowded with people heading home from the holidays. This combined with constuction delays slowed my travel and I didn’t enter Missouri until quite late. I really dislike driving I70 at night – the road’s bad and the truckers are worse – but last night was worth it because the car lights brought out the fireflies. The hills and the rocks and meadows by the side of the road were alive with fireflies, each adding their bit of glitter to countryside left gray and subdued.
If one wants to write fantasy, one should live in Missouri because I saw the dance of the pixies last night. Pixies, gnomes, and other creatures of the twilight live in these hills. I swear it.
When I got home I checked my email and when I saw that there were 15000+ emails, I knew we’d been hit by spammers. I thought at first it might have something to do with the hacker contest, because of the nature of the spam, but I think it’s your usual scum of the earth spammer. I was rather proud that I managed to handle the problem all by my little lonesome, including clean up the outgoing queue, my incoming email, and deal with the technology that led to this problem. Now, who said women can’t handle techie stuff?
Once I install new email software, the problem should be fixed, and I’ll be ready for the next server challenge.
I did do a lot of thinking on this trip, about some new things I want to do, about writing, Echo, RDF, and so on. I want to try something with RDF and Echo, but I’m not going to say what it is because if I do, someone with more time than me will do it first. I’m selfish enough to want to try this idea on my own, first, without someone else grabbing it before I have a chance. I guess this doesn’t make me a great team player.
I have an article of two for O’Reilly on RDF I need to finish, some legal paperwork to file and various other odds and ends. And I have a new domain – forpoets.org. I plan on dividing this into:
linux.forpoets.org
weblogging.forpoets.org
internet.forpoets.org
markup.forpoets.org
rdf.forpoets.org
And so on. I’m hoping that if this works out, perhaps there will be a book or two in this concept. Or not, and I do it just for fun. I am really strongly motivated to get in and start the RDF for Poets articles – before someone else grabs these and does them first.
Writing and technology aside, I’ll always have time for photos, but I want to make them less of a focus. And I want to start expanding the types of photos I take – something besides “photos for picture postcards”. However, there was a rest area in Colorado that I did take a longer break at, and grabbed a few pictures. You know me and water and reflections.
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
I’m off to walk around favorite places today, but first an update on what was Echo and now looks to become Necho by default.
I tried to catch up on the wiki, but a couple of days on the road has put me hopelessly out of touch on this project. However, there seems to be a move towards a new name, a syndication format, and an API. I don’t like the new name – Necho for Not Echo. I’m indifferent to the syndication format, and there seems to be a couple of variations on the API. Still digging through this info.
Danny praises me for creating an RDFOWL vocabulary of N/Echo. I wish I could take credit for this, Danny, but someone else wrote these vocabularies – or demonstrated using existing vocabularies for the second example.
My biggest concern with this effort is not that the name will stay at Necho, or that the syndication feed and API won’t work. My biggest concern is that there is a small core of controlled data forming the current effort, while a lot of other people are slamming stuff together for ‘extensions’.
The first draft of the data model for N/Echo was a great version 1.0, but we should be looking at version 2.0, which accounts for things like categories and threads – the information that is the semantically rich aspect of a weblog entry. After all, there is little to be learned about recording that this entry was published on this date by this person. Where’s the category, or topology associated with the entry? How do we record that my previous entry was about traveling, San Francisco, photographs, the fact that dogs are no longer allowed on dog beach? How do we record that this item links to a post by Danny, and references a wiki, and that I’m sending a trackback ping?
We can record the N/Echo data in RDF/XML, but it’s really not going to extend the semantic richness of what is fairly simple data: entry by person on this date and with this link and of this type.
We can forgo all that boring data model stuff and just go to the extensions to the XML – but for what? The syndication feed? The API? And do we all agree on what we mean by category?
The core effort will be a success, of that I have no doubt. And that’s a good start. However, this core effort is surrounded by chaos, and that troubles me.
Regardless, good job to the people who work so hard, and seemingly do not sleep. Or eat. Or make love to their significant others, and play with the kiddies and poochies. And I know you all love me, which means you must not hate me, even if my interests do diverge at this point from the majority of the people forming the XML and creating them RESTful APIs.
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
The weblogging model and effort seems to be focusing at this point on a Roadmap, with a call to signify support of same.
What does this mean for you?
It could replace RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0, providing a completely neutral syndication feed format.
It could replace all existing weblog APIs.
It could form the basis for weblog tool interoperability.
It could be used to coordinate weblog data with other data, such as data defined within RDF or topic maps.
In other words, if you’re a weblogger, and the main tools get behind this initiative, you will be impacted.
I still am not comfortable with using a wiki for this effort because I feel it puts a gate in the way for people who are not used to wikis participating – making comments in weblogs aside. And I wish that there was more involvement on the part of non-technicians. But I commend the effort of the people who were involved in this, and this effort. It is more than past time to bury the politics, the differences, and validate this loosely joined Weblogging Consortium in formalizing this new data model and associated formats.
I vote to call it Pubs. What do you think?
Update
I guess a consensus was reached and the name’s going to be Echo. Better than Pie, but I still think it’s not going to age well. I can hear it in the future, “Why echo? What does it mean?” But then, I wanted Pubs, so this could be chalked up to sour grapes.
BTW, if you blinked the initiative is heading to completion with a roadmap, a name, a strategy, and backers beginning to step up from all the major weblogging and other weblog-based tools. Me thinks, though, this is going to get rocky before the initiative hits the pavement, when implementation begins to happen.
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
I just sent my last edit of the proofs to Simon for the Practical RDF book, which means I’m finished with the writing. Put a fork into me my babies and call me done!
Well, I still have to set up the book support site when it publishes, but the next time I see the writing is when that sexy baby falls into my hands, soft sides cool and sleek to the touch, come hither birdie on the front with legs that go all the way up!
Just in case you’re wondering what I’m talking about, it’s he’yah:
Now, go forth and buy. Send that puppy’s sales numbers through the roof! Buy till it hurts, babies!
Other good news is that I actually managed to setup the nameserver for the new site and it works, as you should be able to see over the next day or two with the domain yasd.com. Next up is moving my sites and this weblog, but first I want to finish that Linux for Poets: what’s in a name, for the co-op members. And maybe I’ll have more pics for you later. And maybe even some other writing.
Sometimes all you need to perk up is to accomplish something. I feel so good, why I’m going to go clean the bathrooms. And then I’m going to go for a nice lo-o-o-o-ng walk. This will give you plenty of time to go out to Amazon, and reserve your advance copy.