BurningbirdWeb technology
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A discussion about the Semantic Web is taking place at Bloggers Unlimited. My hope is that this conversation brings together the techies and the non-techies, and it seems like it is. At least a little bit.
More voices would be welcome — all views are welcome. This is a friendly thread. Honest.
As for my part, I’m talking at the discussion thread, and I’m continuing the RDF Poetry Finder essays. We’ll see how it goes.
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Long time no talk about RSS. I’m overdue.
Thanks to a pointer from Sam, I read The article Why Blogs haven’t stormed the business world. According to it, the reason why more weblogs aren’t in use today is because it’s too difficult to move content from one tool to another:
The greatest problem, however, is not the limitations of the front end of this software, but rather what goes on behind the curtain, so to speak. As bloggers add content to their sites, the programs update and store HTML pages in a collection of directories spread throughout a Web site. Each tool has its own directory structure, its own names for the archives it compiles of past postings, its own method of updating each page.
That way lies trouble. While the actual pages in a blog may be simple HTML, the sum total of elements in a blog is a giant heap of files and folders understood only by the tool a blogger is using at present. What would happen if you were to switch tools tomorrow? With even the simplest blogs, many users would be daunted by the need to move files, change directories, get the new tools to hook up with the old. In short, each new tool would break your current blog. There simply is no portability under the current structure.
What an idiot.
I’ve spent the last few years helping organizations integrate from products as diverse as Peoplesoft, Oracle Financials, Blue Martini, and Vignette. Compared to this, transforming the content from something such as Radio or Blogger to Moveable Type is a piece of cake. What’s difficult for the individual who has no programming expertise is nothing to a junior programming with a little time, and a good, not great, knowledge of Perl or Python or Java or half a dozen other languages. Not only that, but any weblogging tool worth anything has developed export and import procedures between their products and others.
How many people have ported their pages from one weblogging tool to another? The key is an import mechanism, not a format.
According to the author, if all the tools would just agree to use RSS as the import/export mechanism, all of our problems would be solved:
In fact, the answer may be at hand. The RSS protocol, mentioned above, is used to tell reader programs where to find a blog. Why not use the same technology to tell blog software how to pick up the entire contents of a blog and integrate or repurpose those contents? In effect, the XML standard for structured Web data could be used as a uniform way to transform each tool’s blog into another’s, in order to hand off control. Not only would this avoid a knowledge disaster in the long term, but it would encourage blog sharing and collaboration in the near term.
What XML standard? XML itself isn’t a standard, but at least there is only one consistent implementation of it. RSS consists of multiple specifications, some of which are controlled by one company, and another of which is controlled by a bunch of people through a Yahoo news group. And, as we saw recently, what should be a simple, hierarchical syndication/aggregation format is the focus of numerous techno wars, which doesn’t make sense because it’s nothing more than a simple, brain dead data model.
Well, it is until we start mucking around with it. Trying to use it for everything and anything, as if we have to justify the time we’ve spent talking about it, working with it, tweaking it.
Hello RSS people! When will you be done?
I think what annoyed me the most about the article, not just the fact that now we’re going to have yet again another round of tweaks and talks and nasty asides on “RSS as intra-blog transformation meta-language”, is the author’s statement:
I’ll leave it to the experts to iron-out the specifics. At some point, the community of coders will have to realize that adding more and more features to blogs won’t fix the problem of organizing and disseminating all the content piling up in the unfinished basement below. This problem should be addressed before the blog becomes the blob.
Clueless. Absolutely and completely clueless.
There! That satisfied my RSS weblogging need for at least another few months.
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Hosting Matters as a virtual host sucks little wormy, sour green apples. I’ve had nothing but trouble all week with my server (Clio). I keep hearing about slashdot, or this or that, but what it all boils down to, is there are over 500 virtual sites hosted on my machine alone.
This is too damn many.
I know this is a cheap service, but I’ve had inexpensive hosting before without these problems.
I’m paid up until May 1st. At that time, I may not even maintain a web site any more. I’ve had web sites since 1996, 1995 if you count a tilde site (~) I had at a local Portland ISP. I have five domains coming up for renewal this month. Maybe I should just let the whole damn thing go to dark.
Next time I read something like World of Ends, and hear all the glorious extoling of an Internet that isn’t owned, and which anyone can use, I’m going to print the thing out, shred it, and send it to the authors along with interesting and detailed instructions on exactly what they can do with the paper.
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Clay Shirky took what is basically an informal, distributed, totally loose system we’re all calling LazyWeb (because, well, we tend to like catchy terms), and formalizing the hell out of it.
He writes at O’Reilly:
However, the coordination costs of the LazyWeb as a whole are very high, and they will grow as more people try it. More people can describe features than write software, just as more people can characterize bugs than fix them. Unlike debugging, however, a LazyWeb description does not necessarily have a target application or a target group of developers. This creates significant interface problems, since maximal LazyWeb awareness would have every developer reading every description, an obvious impossibility. (Shades of Brook’s Law.)
I think the concept of LazyWeb is good, but formalizing and even centralizing it is just following the same old patterns established back when Tim Berners-Lee was a pup trying to figure out how to impress his college professors.
The LazyWeb works within weblogging not because it’s promoted by a few elite technologists, or centralized to one feed; but because we have the ability to disseminate requests and solutions at an incredible pace. This is true distributed, peer-to-peer technology and social structure in action.
We use a combination of links and popularity (Daypop), sticky strand technology (comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks), and even syndication (RSS) to connect idea creators and idea suppliers.
Ben’s idea of posting a LazyWeb request to his weblog is what works — putting a procedure into place and giving it a position within social strategies, doesn’t.
(P.S. Too bad O’Reilly doesn’t implement Trackback, so we could let Clay know we’re talking about him, and what we have to say.)
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Dorothea linked to a power house web site tonight: Women in Linux. You all should print this out on pretty paper, put a bow on it and give it to the Alpha Man in your life.
Seriously, though, Dorothea, I’m finding that this straight forward, honest, and out in the open approach just isn’t effective. I mean, I dabbled a bit with the book, Unix Power Tools, and I still can’t convince people that I know how to turn a computer on, much less work with Unix.
In my experience, every time a woman gets involved in Linux User Groups, or tries to work with Unix in the office, some guy’s going to come along and throw some esoteric stuff at her, making her feel inadequate. And then the dude will walk away, triumphant in the knowledge that he’s prevented women from accessing the secrets of Unix yet again.
So I came up with a plan — a way for women to learn Unix without guys knowing. I told my plan to one of the industry’s leading technologists, and we called the plan Operation X, for the fact that women have two X chromosomes, while men only have one.
Except that when the plan was released, Steve released it as OS X.
And the story goes…
I called on Steve at his home one morning and I started talking to him about the problems women have with learning Unix. I described the put-downs, the deliberate and exclusionary geek talk, the difficulty entering a room full of men and being the only woman present. I could tell Steve was sympathetic, but also distracted. When I pointed this out to him, he apologized, and I asked him what was up.
“Well, Shelley, the point is that Apple isn’t doing that great at the moment. We keep losing business market share to He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, and the geeks think the Mac is a frivolous operating system that’s far too pretty and friendly and helpful to be taken seriously.”
“Wow, Steve. I didn’t know things were that rough.”
“Yeah. I’m down to my last few billion.”
“Bummer.”
“Yeah. Bummer”
Then I had this epiphany! Excited, I turned to Steve and said, “Steve! I have a great idea!”
“Shelley, I’m sorry but I’ve told you before — I’m not going to incorporate RDF/XML into AppleScript.”
“No Steve, not that idea. A new one!”
“What is it?”
“Well, you say you want to attract geeks, right?”
“Right”
“But I imagine you don’t want to go with Linux or something like that cuz that’ll scare the corporate types, right?”
“You got that right. I can imagine going into Citicorp with Linux of all things.”
“Sure, sure. I know what you’re saying Steve. But what if you hid the Unix?”
Steve was puzzled. I could tell. Most people couldn’t, but I could tell.
“Come again?”
“Well, Steve, you use Unix for the base of a new operating system, but you put the old, familiar, less intimidating Mac stuff on top to hide it. With this, you can sell the OS to the corporate types — see no geeky Unix hacker shit — but still attract geeks because underneath all that puff lies a Real Operating System.”
As I was talking I could see Steve warming up to the idea. He said, “That’s a great idea! Shelley, that’s an incredible idea!”
He started pacing about, gesturing excitedly with his hands.
“We could develop new, flashier graphics — call it ‘clouds’, or ‘glitter’, or something with marketing clout like that. And we could incorporate bits of open source in with our commercial stuff and the uber-geeks would get off our butts about proprietary hardware.”
Steve rambled on for a while, fleshing the idea out. Finally, he started to wind down, and turned to me sheepishly.
“Shelley, you really saved my butt, but you came to me for help and I haven’t helped you at all.”
“But Steve you have”, I answered. “Once the new operating system hits the street women will be able to learn Unix, finally, without men knowing about it.”
“How come?”
“Here’s the scenario: a woman is working away in the Terminal, typing ‘nix command after ‘nix command, but then a guy comes up and asks what they’re doing. The woman quickly collapses the terminal, hiding what they’re doing, and shows the guy their drawing, or graphic, or letter, or whatever they’re working on. Non-threatening stuff.”
Steve’s quick, because he responded with, “Learning Unix with stealth technology. I like it!”
So we hashed it around, coming up with the name and all. Later, as he was seeing me out, I happened to notice a laptop computer by the door and asked Steve what it was.
“Oh, it’s a new computer case we’re working on. It hasn’t been painted yet because we’re trying different types of paint to see which works the best.”
“I don’t know, Steve. I kind of like the bare metal look myself.”
And there you have it. The truth behind OS X.
Really, really.