Categories
Web

Breaking out all Web 2.0 week

I don’t care if the weather is hot enough to burn you when you touch metal, I have to get out for some walks or go mad. And if I continue going mad, like I have been, I’ll chase you all away and then what value will I be?

Catarina from Flickr just announced a beta test for Yahoo’s new My Web 2.0. This follows on iTunes podcasting and Microsoft’s RSS — we’re busting out microformats and social networks all over.

There is an interesting twist to Yahoo’s My Web 2.0: your search results can be impacted by those who are in your community list. I’m still not sure about how this works, but if anyone wants to try this out with me, send me an email and I’ll send you an invite. Or you if you want, you can invite me. My Yahoo email address is p2psmoke.

I can see issues with search results being impacted by your community, and the fact that doesn’t this narrow our world vision rather than broaden it. But I’ve been critical of all this Web 2.0 technology all week, and this isn’t done, so I’m not doing it.

Categories
Web Writing

Dusting off the poet

It’s been a long time since I’ve indulged in any poetry at the site. Been a long time since I’ve haunted poets.org to look for just the right verse to suit a picture or a mood.

This week, I oiled my inner poet and set it on its creaky way only to find out that poets.org has undergone a rather significant reorganization. Faced with ‘new’ and wondering if there was anything in there for the inner geek as well as the inner poet, I explored about.

One new feature, or at least, new to me, is many of the poems now is have a topic association. For instance, if a poem is related to aging, other poems related to this topic are listed in the sidebar. This goes beyond groupings of poem by poet, period, and era. It definitely goes beyond keyword searches. It’s given me much thought, and new ideas, in my own continuing search for the case-insensitive semantic web.

The site also has a listening booth, though perhaps it already had this and I didn’t notice. Anyway, the listening book contains readings by poets and readings about poets, including my favorite Dylan Thomas.

Having satisfied the geek, at least for the moment, I returned to the poet, though poet is inaccurate and even a conceit, because I can barely walk and talk at the same time, much less rhyme. If, though, code is poetry, then I wield a mean curly bracket with the best of them. As for loops, you should see me loop–sexiest thing since fishnet stockings.

Returning to my poet, I accessed the improved search engine and searched on the keyword “words”; finding not one but two really great poems from contemporary poets among those returned. Since I’ve been remiss in letting my inner poet out for a walk, I’ll publish both.

Sorry, no photos to accompany the works. The weather continues in the 90s and heavily humid, and I have had no desire to sweat and puddle my way through new venues (though I must break out of my cave tomorrow morning before I bite the cat from cabin fever).

A Quick One Before I Go by David Lehman

There comes a time in every man’s life

when he thinks: I have never had a single

original thought in my life

including this one & therefore I shall

eliminate all ideas from my poems

which shall consist of cats, rice, rain

baseball cards, fire escapes, hanging plants

red brick houses where I shall give up booze

and organized religion even if it means

despair is a logical possibility that can’t

be disproved I shall concentrate on the five

senses and what they half perceive and half

create, the green street signs with white

letters on them the body next to mine

asleep while I think these thoughts

that I want to eliminate like nostalgia

0 was there ever a man who felt as I do

like a pronoun out of step with all the other

floating signifiers no things but in words

an orange T-shirt a lime green awning

How can you not love a poem that has a line like o was there ever a man who felt as I do like a pronoun out of step with all the other floating signifiers? This poem should be required reading for everyone who has found the truth. Then it should be required for everyone who thinks they have lost it.

All She Wrote by Harryette Mullen

Forgive me, I’m no good at this. I can’t write back. I never read your letter.

I can’t say I got your note. I haven’t had the strength to open the envelope.

The mail stacks up by the door. Your hand’s illegible. Your postcards were

defaced. Wash your wet hair? Any document you meant to send has yet to

reach me. The untied parcel service never delivered. I regret to say I’m

unable to reply to your unexpressed desires. I didn’t get the book you sent.

By the way, my computer was stolen. Now I’m unable to process words. I

suffer from aphasia. I’ve just returned from Kenya and Korea. Didn’t you

get a card from me yet? What can I tell you? I forgot what I was going to

say. I still can’t find a pen that works and then I broke my pencil. You know

how scarce paper is these days. I admit I haven’t been recycling. I never

have time to read the Times. I’m out of shopping bags to put the old news

in. I didn’t get to the market. I meant to clip the coupons. I haven’t read

the mail yet. I can’t get out the door to work, so I called in sick. I went to

bed with writer’s cramp. If I couldn’t get back to writing, I thought I’d catch

up on my reading. Then Oprah came on with a fabulous author plugging

her best selling book.

Another brilliant line and somewhat, oddly sad: I regret to say I’m unable to reply to your unexpressed desires. But now I have a highly original way of apologizing for unanswered email. What is your excuse?

Categories
Web

Have I mentioned

how much I love brilliantly executed satire?

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Web 1.0! Please do not let the excitement go to your heads so much that you piss your pants. Or if you, do it in someone else’s garage.

Categories
Technology Web

The whole thing

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The Architecture of the World Wide Web, First Edition was just issued as a W3C recommendation. I love that title – it reminds me of Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life”, volume one.

Interesting bit about URIs in the document. To address the ‘resource as something on the web’ as compared to ‘resource as something that can be discussed on the web’ issue, the document describes a resource thusly:

By design a URI identifies one resource. We do not limit the scope of what might be a resource. The term “resource” is used in a general sense for whatever might be identified by a URI. It is conventional on the hypertext Web to describe Web pages, images, product catalogs, etc. as “resources”. The distinguishing characteristic of these resources is that all of their essential characteristics can be conveyed in a message. We identify this set as “information resources”.

This document is an example of an information resource. It consists of words and punctuation symbols and graphics and other artifacts that can be encoded, with varying degrees of fidelity, into a sequence of bits. There is nothing about the essential information content of this document that cannot in principle be transfered in a representation.

However, our use of the term resource is intentionally more broad. Other things, such as cars and dogs (and, if you’ve printed this document on physical sheets of paper, the artifact that you are holding in your hand), are resources too. They are not information resources, however, because their essence is not information. Although it is possible to describe a great many things about a car or a dog in a sequence of bits, the sum of those things will invariably be an approximation of the essential character of the resource.

The document then gets into URI collision:

By design, a URI identifies one resource. Using the same URI to directly identify different resources produces a URI collision. Collision often imposes a cost in communication due to the effort required to resolve ambiguities.

Suppose, for example, that one organization makes use of a URI to refer to the movie The Sting, and another organization uses the same URI to refer to a discussion forum about The Sting. To a third party, aware of both organizations, this collision creates confusion about what the URI identifies, undermining the value of the URI. If one wanted to talk about the creation date of the resource identified by the URI, for instance, it would not be clear whether this meant “when the movie was created” or “when the discussion forum about the movie was created.”

Social and technical solutions have been devised to help avoid URI collision. However, the success or failure of these different approaches depends on the extent to which there is consensus in the Internet community on abiding by the defining specifications.

Categories
Web Writing

A True Title

I am enjoying the comments and suggestions about the book title in the last post, and have directed my editor to have a look. In the meantime, for a bit of fun, I’ve come up with several titles that I’d really like to use for the book:

Internet for people who have been screwed online and are now out for revenge.

Internet for those who invested in the dot-com bubble a few years back, and now want to know why they’re holding worthless pieces of paper.

Internet for those with money…what did you say your name and email address was again?

Internet for people who have a more intimate relationship with an email spammer then their own significant other because they at least get the spammer’s email through all the filters.

Internet for people who are scared by their kids knowledge of the Internet.

Internet for people who are scared by their kids knowledge about sex they gained on the Internet.

Internet for those who want to talk about work online.

Internet for those who are looking for a new job online.

Internet for those seeking a warm, caring relationship online, but will settle for a quick roll in the hay. Or picture of same.

Internet for the paranoid and…wait! Wait! What was that?

Internet for the remaining Howard Dean supporters…all two of you.

Internet for Mom, Dad, and don’t tell them about my weblog.

Internet for the censored, spied on, and imprisoned, because the truth will not always set you free.

Internet for the pundits, because you will inherit the Web.

Internet for the meek, because you will inherit the bill.

Internet for people who will not stop clicking on email attachments and whose machines are now a festering bed of evil, with monitors levitating above the desk, and spinning in circles.