February 25, 2007

OpenID and Trust

Simon Willison wrote up six cool things you can build with OpenID and reiterated some of his very good ideas about a simple trust network.

A site-to-site trust network should use degrees of trust rather than simply asserting membership in a "white" or "black" list. Perhaps a set of common violations of trust - from spamming to griefing - and common traits of a trustworthy user - from contributing to helping new members - could be agreed-upon. Individual web sites would then publish data about any violations made by OpenID users.

It would be up to violation aggregators to determine if each user's behavior represents an isolated incident or an ongoing pattern. Sites would also be accumulating a reputation of their own for trustworthy reporting.

Eventually, though, I believe that all of this IDing and trusting is going to evolve into a reputation-based currency :)

April 6, 2006

Guardian Unlimited Article

An article about the semantic web was posted on Guardian Unlimited today. Spread the word, and join it up examines the top-down vs. bottom-up "debate", mentioning BBC Backstage toward the end.

Not enough useful RDF data has been left online, he [TBL] explained: "The whole value-add of the web is serendipitous re-use: when you put it out there for one person, and it gets used by who-knows-who. We want to put data out there for one purpose, then find it gets linked into all kinds of data. And that's been not happening, because we forgot 'serve useful stuff', not to mention 'make useful links'."

Source: Guardian Unlimited

May 16, 2005

Ontologies: Either Overrated or Underappreciated

Clay Shirky's Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags is definitely worth reading. The periodic table makes an excellent case for a classification system.

One aspect missing from his essay is that of the activity context of tagging. What are you doing... while tagging? Activity while tagging (bookmarking) is why del.icio.us/popular has so many references to How-To links.

So are del.icio.us tags often (implicitly) triples?

August 2, 2004

Annoyed by Spivak's Meme Propagation Test

Nova Spivak has injected a meme propagation test into the blogosphere. Call me a contrarian, but I am annoyed. For one, I don't look forward to sifting though endless instances of this nasty meme over the next few days.

Other than answering the questions below, please do not alter the information, layout or format of this post in order to preserve the integrity of the data in this experiment (this will make it easier for searchers and automated bots to find and analyze the results later). Source.

June 26, 2004

Tim Orielly on the OS Paradigm Shift

Tim O'Rielly has posted an excellent essay in which he examines the open source phenomenon using Thomas Kuhn's "paradigm shift" mental model. With excellent references (not to mention links to related O'Rielly books), Paradigm Shift covers the commoditization of software, internet collaboration, and the software as an evolving service concept.

In short, if it is sufficiently robust an innovation to qualify as a new paradigm, the open source story is far from over, and its lessons far from completely understood. Rather than thinking of open source only as a set of software licenses and associated software development practices, we do better to think of it as a field of scientific and economic inquiry, one with many historical precedents, and part of a broader social and economic story. Source

May 20, 2004

Slashdot Discusses Next Generation Web

The real utility in reading this slashdot discussion is to understand the common objections of (and answers to) semantic web doubters. It's ironic that slashdotters are not discussing the widespread use of semantic web concepts in the blogosphere!

May 5, 2004

Distributing the Load of the Semantic Web

Ben Hammersley has put together a cool egoboo tracker for authors, culling data from Amazon, Technoratti, AllConsuming, and others (by way of Cory Doctorow). It is an interesting way to re-combine information.

Unfortunately, the Auctorial Ego Tracker is somewhat slow due to the fact that it assembles the source data in real-time. But it got me thinking about the use of web resources. As real-time meaning aggregators gain in popularity, they will begin to put a much heavier load on web services as well as web servers simply hosting RDF and XML files. If open source applications and useage practices are not developed to distribute the load, the power (and necessity) of well-funded intermediary services such as Google will continue to grow.

It is not surprising that one leading discussion among bloggers concerns the inefficient and potentially overwhelming consumption of RSS feeds. William Grosso's Sunday Afternoon Thoughts on the Design of RSS Aggregators does a good job of explaining this problem and offering solutions.

Some recent approaches to addressing interaction limitations actually borrow ideas from the internet, usenet, and web build-out, including pDNS and RSS over BitTorrent. There is also an interesting discussion on www-rdf-interest about distributing RDF queries.

On a related note, I have recently been sketching out how a small web community might maintain some sort of RDF cache / router / query platform to buffer the interaction between its members and the greater semantic web.

April 23, 2004

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