April 30, 2004

Google's IPO

I am highly impressed with the business wisdom of Google's current owners in how they are structuring the IPO of their company. The technical aspect of the open auction itself is intriguing as well.

The founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin are borrowing many concepts from Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, including a strong emphasis on long-term financial performance, writing an annual letter each year, refusing to manipulate earnings, a belief that shareholders == owners, and creating a dual-class ownership structure which gives the founders and early investors greater voting rights.

The Financial Times article Auction decision puts onus on Individual Investor provides a decent summary:

At a valuation of $30bn, this would value Google at about 100 times possible 2004 earnings. This is not entirely out of line with eBay and Yahoo!, which trade respectively at 70 times and 89 times this year's forecast earnings. Yet, there are negative factors to consider.

Google's decision to adopt an unusual dual share structure - designed to give the company's founders control over long-term strategy - also needs to be taken into account. Source.

The Full Text of the Letter from Google's Founders is a must-read. This is a document that is likely to become required business school reading in the near-future:

Our intense and enduring interest was to objectively help people find information efficiently. We also believed that searching and organizing all the world?s information was an unusually important task that should be carried out by a company that is trustworthy and interested in the public good. We believe a well functioning society should have abundant, free and unbiased access to high quality information. Google therefore has a responsibility to the world. The dual-class structure helps ensure that this responsibility is met. We believe that fulfilling this responsibility will deliver increased value to our shareholders. Source.

April 29, 2004

Trackback == Annotation

James Tauber has written up an approach to blog conversations, which he intends to implement in Leonardo. He referenced Danny Ayers' interesting post about blog entries as web annotation.

I had already considered POSTing to the blog entry as the mechanism for comments and that is when it first struck me that comments and trackbacks are really the same thing. The fields that you POST would be slightly different, but the mechanism should be the same. Source.

(Technorati Ref, Topic Exchange Ref)

April 28, 2004

RDF Graph Viewer

Craig Sayers of HP Labs announced his RDF Graph Viewer. This is a basic http server in java which generates SVG data. I'd like to know if anyone has taken it for a spin.

Image Source.

April 27, 2004

WS-Simplification

Tim Bray has posted Web Services Theory and Practice in which he discusses the Rococo WS-* stack.

I think somebody needs to stand up and start waving a flag that?s labeled ?WS-Simplification? or ?Real Web Services? or something, that?s all about building applications with what?s here today and what works today: XML, HTTP, URIs, SOAP, WSDL, and that?s about it. Source.

April 26, 2004

Annozilla Sidebar

I tested out Annozilla this evening. I could not get the sidebar going using the xul installer. Luckily, I saw the "Install Annozilla Sidebar" button in the viewing options on OS X and on Linux. This convenience was not mentioned in the installation doc.

Some very general notes:

While I have always had great hopes for web annotation, it is plagued by the classic chicken-egg problem. Getting the success feedback loop going involves building communities with web annotation. Applications will have to allow someone to easily locate and communicate with fellow annotators as they burrow through their favorite information piles.

I believe that certain communities are more suitable entry points for the annotation meme: bible study groups, classic literature students making use of the Gutenberg Project, the debate team / compulsive fact-hounds, and SEC filings consumers (that would include me).

April 23, 2004

Annozilla 0.5

Last week, Annozilla 0.5 beta was released. Annozilla is a set of Mozilla or Firebird extensions that are used to interact with Amaya servers. The installation looks somewhat difficult, so I'll post some notes about Annozilla over the weekend.

This is the the Annozilla project, designed to view and create annotations associated with a web page, as defined by the W3C Annotea project. The idea is to store annotations as RDF on a server, using XPointer (or at least XPointer-like constructs) to identify the region of the document being annotated. Source

The Metaweb

Novas Pivack has updated his Metaweb Graph. He describes the convergence of standard web, semantic web, and social software technologies into the Metaweb (and beyond). This reads like Alvin Toffler barreling into Vernor Vinge's territory, although the amazing Mr. Pivack is actually the grandson of the ever-practical Peter Drucker.

As the network becomes increasingly autonomous and self-organizing we may say that the network-as-a-whole is becoming "intelligent." But it will be several steps beyond that before it finally "wakes up" -- when the various processes of the network reach that point at which the entire system truly functions as a coordinated, self-aware intelligence. This will require the formation of many higher layers of intelligence -- leading to something that functions like the cerebral cortex in humans. Source

April 22, 2004

TalkBack: Reply on My Blog

RE:
How to Make Blogging More SemWeb Friendly,
RSS Conversations,
Topics in Weblogs,
Threads of Conversation.

This particular fork got started here.

Blog-to-blog conversations are easily fragmented, with responses residing on blog discussion boards, the responder's site, and on various tracking services.

I have been thinking about how to implement a "reply on my blog" link which would enable a writer to reply using his own CMS.

Implemented with current web technology, this idea assumes that the API of the responder's blogging software can be known to the site which he is responding to. This reply would link to a script on the original site, which, after noting the action, would redirect the request to the content management system under the responder's control.

RDF for the original entry (and historical data about the conversation) would be passed to the responder's CMS in the url string. He would respond. As his CMS updates his blog, his response would be forwarded on to the cited blog (which would be expecting it), trackers, aggregators, and online communities.

Additional concepts:

• the responder would be provided with a standard blog posting page, perhaps with: a listing of links in the original post, metadata about the discussion, information about the participants, a way to view the conversation tree, etc.
  
• any metadata (such as dc:Subject and the tracking service of choice) assigned to the entry by the original blogger could carry over to the responder, who could add additional metadata. But how much metadata should accumulate?
  
• the effort to implement something like "reply on my site" would add to the culture of interoperability between sites (as TrackBack did)
  
• threading, summarization, and other forms of conversational analysis could be performed by any interested party, provided that the RDF can be obtained from each participating site
  
• organized conversation forking could be supported
  

Conversations Via Technorati

Simon Phipp has written a short analysis about the use of Technorati to track blog conversations. Several blog leaders including BoingBoing and Tim Bray have adopted this approach, using a visual bubble or html link to identify the conversation site or topic.

April 21, 2004

Organizing the Blogosphere

Seb Paquet has posted some interesting ideas about self-organizing blog directories. He cooks up a distributed solution in which GeoURLish "badges" would visibly (and semantically) designate a blogger as a member of a particular academic community.

I definitely like the badge idea. The badge should link to a local RDF file designating community afiliation, with additional data appertaining to that affiliation. Categorization schemes on the part of search engines have loosened the dependency on directories, and self-categorization is becoming the norm as web developers get accustomed to the process of generating RSS and other metadata.

Community centers, blog planets, and leading bloggers will be the primary driving force in popularizing these badges, and in organizing the category sets used in the population of blog directories. I think that developing tools for these sites to create badges and organize the harvesting of participant data is more important than tools for the blogs themselves. Early adopters will simply copy and manually modify the RDF of the leaders as it happened with FOAF.

Mr. Paquet also set up a wiki page and a TE channel to track this conversation.

April 20, 2004

Meaning in the Age of Google

Terrence Brooks provides some keen insights about Google in The nature of meaning in the age of Google. He positions Google as a "meaning aggregator":

Aggregating meaning is possible on the Internet because there are many easily accessible semantic objects to be harvested. Analysis of the aggregations can suggest patterns of high likelihood that permit applications to recommend, adapt, profile, forecast and so on.

An aggregation strategy permits Google to suggest the most likely Website to satisfy your query, Amazon.com to suggest a likely book for purchase, and governments to collect clues about terrorists. These are all examples of aggregating the meaning, taste, judgment, knowledge, etc., of a large universe of anonymous, independent agents to determine a common value.

In a similar fashion a stock market pools multiple buys and sells to find a price for an equity. Source

April 19, 2004

RSS Conversations

Reacting to Nico Macdonald's article about the future of blogging, Roland Tanglao describes how PubSub tracks RSS conversations using citation titles and urls.

Analyzing meaningful conventions such as "by way of", "has posted", "about", and "responded to" can go a long way toward bringing meaning to RSS content (without troubling writers with new markup or additional steps in the process).

The Future of Blogging

Ahead of BloggerCon II, Nico Macdonald wrote an interesting article for The Register in which he discussed blog journalism and speculated on future developments in the blogosphere. Considering the recent discussions about RSS catgegorization, blog-to-blog conversations, and using DMOZ, this struck me:

We also need to find ways to categorise posts ? to bring the kind of structure that Yahoo! brought to information on the Web ? and the seeds of this concept can be seen in Moveable Type, NewsMonster and other tools. We also need to find ways of assigning priority to posts based on who wrote them (an approach often referred to as reputation management) and where they were posted. Source.

April 17, 2004

The Fuss About GMail

Tim O'Reilly has hit a home run in his commentary about the GMail fuss (and Google in general). He makes a great point at the end about being able to download your data, a beef I have with nearly every online service I use.

April 16, 2004

FOAFed

Marc Canter complained about how AskMyNetwork mined one of his FOAF sets to pre-populate his social network. Dom Ramsey posted a great response to this compaint. He pointed out that AskMyNetwork gets its FOAF data from PLINK (both of which he operates). A YAFA is feeding a YASNS.

So what's so bad about evolution through YA* anyway?

April 15, 2004

RE: Hacking Movable Type

Seth Ladd's post about improving MT with DMOZ uris really has me thinking about cateogory sets again. The fact that the rdf representing the DMOZ tree is 51.8M (gzipped) says a lot about the need for communities to agree on standard categories for blog entries.

I can see an individual blogger subscribing to category sets published by several different communities. These categories would be used, as Seth envisions, in the MT entry interface, and represented in the rss data by dc:subject. Community aggregators such as PlanetRDF could then be pinged only with stories appertaining to its published category set (or the reverse).

Alternatives to Relational DBs

Jim Menard's Alternate Data Storage Technologies is an excellent outline which delves into what type of data store to use in an app. The when to's, when not to's, and real-world cases brought up here are especially relevant to those who might want to use RDF as an alternative to a relational db (or not).

Object Databases

• Store graph of objects
• Handle inheritance and circular references
• Generally tied to a particular OO language, though can have adaptors for other languages
• Efficiently traverse relationships
• Don't need to worry about whether an object is in memory or not
• Handling schema changes can be difficult (see discussion in In-Memory Databases below)
• Let's Use an Object Oriented Database from the WikiWikiWeb.

Source

April 13, 2004

First Impressions of Creator

Yesterday I took the early access version of Sun Java Studio Creator for a test drive. This product has all of the trappings of a visual IDE, using JSF to assemble user interfaces for web apps in the same way that desktop apps are visually put together. Db data is connected to ui elements via JDBC RowSet. All it takes is a drag and drop from a representation of the database schema - much as it is done in Visual Basic and WebObjects.

Ping ID Completes First Round

Ping ID has announced the completion of $5.8M of financing with Fidelity Ventures. Ping ID supports the Source ID project, the open source federated identiity system. By way of Marc Canter.

April 9, 2004

Time and Place

Harry Chen's Context Broker Architecture (CoBrA) provides situational awareness for a group of sensors, devices, and other information systems. The list of ontologies used by CoBrA gives you an idea of what can be reasoned by the system: device, location, context, and many more. Chen's quicktime demo shows the CoBrA rejecting facts which do not fit into its contextual state, as well as a visual representation of the RDF data involved (by way of Danny Ayers).

April 7, 2004

Relationship Theme Parks

David Weinberger posted a great reply to Clay Shirky (RE: The truth about why I hate Friendster).

April 5, 2004

BerkelyDB In Java

Sleepycat Software has released the beta version of their Berkeley DB, Java Edition.

Berkeley DB JE is a high performance, transactional storage engine written entirely in Java. Like the highly successful Berkeley DB product, Berkeley DB JE executes in the address space of the application, without the overhead of client/server communication. It stores data in the application's native format, so no runtime data translation is required. Source

The Secret Source of Google's Power

Rich Skentra has posted The Secret Source of Google's Power, a speculation / analysis of the hardware and software which drive GMail (by way of Slashdot).

April 2, 2004

Implementing Not in RDF

Norman Walsh has put up a must-read essay about implementing the semantics of "not" in RDF (by way of PlanetRDF). His "green leaves" example makes use of cwm, an RDF processor which is very easy to deal with.

April 1, 2004

RDF Language Libraries

Dave Beckett posted an excellent FAQ Answer which describes the best libraries for parsing and querying RDF.

For perl, he recommends RDF::Simple, which is somewhat easier to deal with than RDF::Core. For my perl language write-up, I will soon be posting an example which uses RDF::Simple, as well as several more which use RDF::Core (due to its support for RDF queries).