March 30, 2007

Digg, Please Listen to What Jack Has to Say

Jack has explained why Digg should not be performing updates with GET requests on http://digg.com/invitefrom/someunfortunatedigguser.

March 25, 2007

Mind Map Interchange

Eric Blue is looking for a standard format for mind maps:

In an upcoming post I'm going to go into a little more detail on what this format should look like, and what technology would be the best fit (XML, JSON, RDF, N3?). In the meantime, I'm eager to hear some feedback:

* Is the need for a new standard an accurate observation?

* What needs to take place in order to make this vision happen?

* Who needs to adopt this format first, and what will be the major motivators to make progress in this area?

Source: The Need for a Common Mind Map File Format

I would suggest checking out discussions concerning the intersection of topic maps and the semweb:
W3C: A Survey of RDF/Topic Maps Interoperability Proposals and Living with topic maps and RDF.

Also, I would delve into the approaches for internal representation and storage used by Mindraider and Pragmatron.

March 10, 2007

What is Open?

Henry Story, Danny Ayers and Shelley Powers wrote some astute criticisms of Tim O'Reilly's write-up on freebase.

Why do Tim O'Reilly, Cory Doctorow, and others continue to mis-cast a means to agree on how to communicate as a centrally-controlled system? I'm half-joking here, but is this all some sort of gesture to the postmodern concept that language itself is a form of oppression?

Less humorous is how the concepts of openness and control are thrown about as loaded language to promote a technology or service. To say that one technology is about control, while another is about openness is total bunk - what really matters are the intentions of the designers and the implementers, and, above all, the outcomes.

March 6, 2007

Scribd, more than just a pdf viewer in flash

Scribd is a document sharing community done right. The pdf "viewer" in flash idea truly rocks, but equally amazing is the clean simplicity with which Scribd organizes their social community, traffic analytics, and other things.

The irony of viewing pdf inside of flash is palpable, except that it looks like Scribd is using Flashpaper to do this.

Flash is becoming the everything viewer, for better or for worse.