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  • Meta Group predictions about RSS

    I have been catching up on news from META Group, and found an Analyst Insights on RSS, dated 4 June 2003: Rich Site Summary “Reloaded” as Really Simple Syndication. Bad title and too short analysis, but some interesting predictions:

    By mid-2004, we believe RSS familiarity among developers will result in most enterprise content management and portal vendors announcing support of RSS, and e-mail clients and Web browsers will natively support RSS subscription management by 2005.

    I think they’re right.

    I wonder when META Group starts offering RSS-feeds?

  • Blogger meetup

    It’s time for the next International Blog Meetup Day. In Copenhagen, the meetup will take place at Prop’s Coffee Shop, Bl�gardsgade 5, on Wednesday, July 16 at 19.00. I plan to go.

  • The Citizen’s Intelligence Agency

    MIT’s Open Government Information Awareness suite of software tools acts as a framework for US citizens to construct and analyze a comprehensive database on our government. Modeled on recent government programs designed to consolidate information on individuals into massive databases, our system does the opposite, allowing you to scrutinize those in government. Citizens are able to explore data, track events, find patterns, and build risk profiles, all in an effort to encourage and motivate action. We like to think of it as a Citizen’s Intelligence Agency, giving people similar tools and technologies to those held by their government.

    CNN reports.

    Message when visiting: Due to heavy traffic, many features are unavaliable. check back soon.

  • Blogging Vox

    If you’re in London on 14 July, I know what you want to do: Attand the Voxpolitics Seminar: BLOG RULE, where James et al asks Can Weblogs Change Politics?. To answer this question, they’ve invited Steven Clift, Stephen Pollard, Pernille Rudlin, and Tom Watson MP.

    I’d really like to be there, but can’t make it over to London. If anyone cares, here’s my take on the question: Can Weblogs Change Politics?

    Blogs don’t change politics, people do. Mkay? 😉

    Having said that, I must hurry and say that I think blogs are hugely important to e-democracy at large. In fact they’re so important that I refer to a third generation e-democracy, which consists of blogs and what follows.

    The first generation e-democracy was stuff like Minnesota e-Democracy. The second generation was when we saw projects like the Kalix R�dslag and occurance of e-democracy companies to run stuff like that.

    The third generation e-democracy is distinct from the previous generations by demonstrating a much more loosely-coupled democratic practice.

    Tara Sue Grubb got famous when she ran for congress by running a blog, and since then we have seen more and more politicians blogging. In Denmark, we have (at least) Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, our former prime minister, and Morten Helveg Petersen, MP. (Danes: Send me more links and I’ll make a directory of Danish blogging politicians). Although there are some positive things to say about politicians as bloggers, this is not where I see the real news. To get to that, a bit more on the blogging phenomenon.

    A blog is a simple CMS for publishing on the web. But the commodified, more advanced blogging tools are also publishing a lot of XML and web service stuff, and sending a number of messages around in cyberspace in cool new ways. For example, when I in my blog use a city name, I can check a button and have the blog tool go and find a map of the city and post it as illustration to the blog entry. I can get the blog to fetch a few related news, a book recommendation, and much more. Some of the XML that flows around also end up in a number of repositories and databases. We have seen many innovative services, such as Technorati.

    Enter the Blogosphere: the emerging Media Ecosystem: “Bloggers and Journalists form a blogging biosphere that has become an ecosystem in its own right”.

    Basically, we are getting new possibilities for a new kind of communication online, which we could call C2C, Community-to-Community, and related P2C (person-to-community), etc. For example, when I post a blog entry, I can set “trackback autodiscovery” on, and have the blog tool send a message to blogs I talk about, thus making my voice “heard” all over the place.

    We have only seen the beginning here. A few predictions/trends:

    • Moblogging, i.e., blogging from wherever you might be, via mobile phone or handheld device. We will see an increase in location-aware systems.
    • Community blogs, like LA Blogs, but much more than just directories.

    The Emergent Democracy Paper by Joi Ito is bringing in the concept of emergence to the democracy domain. Well done, Ito-san.

  • Stepping stones

    There’s an interesting article in Enterprise Architect: Three Stepping-Stones to Strategic Architecture by Chris Barlow.

    Barlow wants us to define a series of stepping-stones that “both pay for themselves with near-term business impact and lead you toward your enterprise architecture vision”. Hmmmkey. How? We must make each stepping-stone a “stable business platform”, that is, a “series of completed IT and business-process projects where you can pause and reassess the next stepping-stone”. OK, stable and completed. Good. But how? Patterns? Principles? Practices? (hey, three P’s!)

    Barlow suggests three stepping-stones:

    1. Get to basic architecture. A basic architecture is one that supports the current business processes and is characterized by very few duplicate applications, has separation between transactional and archival data, and has a consolidated infrastructure. Also associated with it is an architecture development and management council that defines application, data, and infrastructure standards and checks for compliance against these standards. You know you have a basic architecture in place if you don’t have three e-mail systems, two financial reporting systems, some Unix desktops, some NT desktops, and 15 different company Web sites, all of which look different.

    2. Get to streamlined architecture. A streamlined architecture is one where the business processes and corresponding applications and infrastructure have been tuned such that there are no redundant steps and no choke points that degrade performance. Pick one or two business areas to tune business processes. … Consider an example of trade-offs: do I build a single, consolidated database where all data is in one place and managing and updating data requires doing it in one place? Or do I build a tiered database where the different levels can be optimized for different business needs? …do I use an off-the-shelf enterprise architecture framework? Or do I need to build proprietary connections between applications?

    3. Get to strategic architecture. A strategic architecture is one where your architecture is truly your competitive differentiator. At this point you have examined your application portfolio, differentiated between value-add and nonvalue-add applications/systems, outsourced nonvalue-add applications/systems, streamlined the rest, and defined a portfolio of new investments that will deliver new capabilities and help the business move the needle to value-added differentiators.

    Basic, Streamlined, Strategic. Sure, why not. Good point. It sure sticks to the keep it simple principle.
    Illustration from Three Stepping-Stones to Strategic Architecture. See article for larger version

  • John goes west

    I’m planning a US-trip, which will take me (via Chicago) to Utah, Washington and Oregon. Part work, part holiday.

    I’ll first go to Salt Lake City, Utah, to work for a few days with Phil Windley and to meet David Fletcher.

    From Utah it’s on to see some friends. First in Seattle, Washington to see Nancy White. From there on to Portland, Oregon to see John D. Smith.

    I found some pictures from someone who went to these (and more) places. I’m not sure I’m going to pick this route:
    Desolate place

    I’ve never heard the word desolate before John told me about the landscape between/in Utah-Oregon … now I know what it means. Maybe I should fly, not drive: I read BurningBird’s story (a roadblog?).

  • Principles and practices in web architecture

    An update of the W3C Working Draft on Architecture of the World Wide Web was released last week. It’s recommended reading, and worth a longer quote:

    The important points of this document are categorized as follows:

    Constraint
    An architectural constraint is a restriction in behavior or interaction within the system. Constraints may be imposed for technical, policy, or other reasons.

    Design Choice
    In the design of the Web, some design choices, like the names of the <p> and <li> elements in HTML, or the choice of the colon character in URIs, are somewhat arbitrary; if <par>, <elt>, or * had been chosen instead, the large-scale result would, most likely, have been the same. Other design choices are more fundamental; these are the focus of this document.

    Good practice
    Good practice — by software developers, content authors, site managers, users, and specification writers — increases the value of the Web.

    Principle
    An architectural principle is a fundamental law that applies to a large number of situations and variables. Architectural principles include “separation of concerns”, “generic interface”, “self-descriptive syntax,” “visible semantics,” “network effect” (Metcalfe’s Law), and Amdahl’s Law: “The speed of a system is determined by its slowest component.”

    Property
    Architectural properties include both the functional properties achieved by the system, such as accessibility and global scope, and non-functional properties, such as relative ease of evolution, reusability of components, efficiency, and dynamic extensibility.

    This is good. As co-author Tim Bray says, “this is far from finished”, but it’s good to see progress.

    When we talk about the internet, “keep it simple” is a classic architectural principle (section 3.5 in IETF RFC 1958) which we should remind ourselves of more often. It’s nice to see simplicity in practice in the W3C draft. The XHTML document uses simple markup like <p class=”principle”> and <p class=”practice”> for codifying the principles and best practices. That is all Jon Udell needs to wrap up a cool XPath search experiment for visualising the principles and best practices. Nice work, Jon.

    I want to do something similar in our national enterprise architecture framework. Part of the framework programme is to establish guidelines and a so-called Reference Profile (e-GIF).

    Maybe we should use simple but meaningful markup when we publish our documents. I’ll try and adapt the five W3C point classes (<p class=”principle”>Interoperability</p> etc). Maybe we could invent some more classes. Say, if we chose to include RSS, a basic, simple markup system could be something like:

    <p class=”migrateFrom”>RSS 0.91</p>
    <p class=”use”>RSS 2.0</p>
    <p class=”use”>RSS 1.0</p>

    With a style sheet, class=use could be coloured green, class=migrateFrom yellow, and so on. With XPath and stuff we can get all the XML we want, of course.

    The class attributes should be standardised. Maybe we should create a namespace for enterprise architecture and/or interoperability frameworks? Would anyone be interested in such? Or, would we reinvent the wheel? I’m sure there is a lot done already here, but there so little sharing. It’s time to change this!

    Who’s with me?

  • It’s not rocket science, guys

    The other day I said: “RSS is a melting pot of innovative thinking”. Alan replies: “Pretty soon it could be just a melted pot” with reference to the recent RSS-mess that Jon calls “this most tumultuous of the many tumultuous moments”.

    When all is said and done, which seems to be not exactly around the corner, but a definite possibility (it’s not rocket science, guys), I hope that we will have a good XML-based standard format for simple syndication and event notification (blog updates, news, etc.).

  • RSS on the move

    RSS is a melting pot of innovative thinking. Jon Udell: “RSS is in no way broken”. Tim Bray talks Mr. Safe into RSS, and gives a bit of background. Jorgen Thelin updates his RSS 2.0 Schema (which should be submitted to ISB).

    Perhaps the best news is The EchoProject. It’s goal is to build an open system to syndicate, archive, and edit weblogs. Sam Ruby, who runs the initiative uses a wiki as an open forum for agreeing on a new weblog format (Echo) that is:

    • 100% vendor neutral,
    • implemented by everybody,
    • freely extensible by anybody, and
    • cleanly and thoroughly specified.

    Sam has a lot of supporters. I’d sign the list too if I knew how to do so.

  • SOAP

    World Wide Web Consortium Issues SOAP Version 1.2 as a W3C Recommendation:

    “Web services make good on the promise of interoperable applications only when the technical foundations are shared, robust, and achieve expected performance,” explained Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director.

    So, now we just need the remaining 742 elements in the web service stack to become “real” standards, then we’re talking.