Category: Netlife

Ben Hammersley is talking about his dog, Pico. As an introduction to the semantic web. Triples all around; Pico is a boy. Subject, verb, and object. And the URI, the unique identifier. And namespaces, that makes up a defined language for defining what we talk about. DC.creator and such.

Ooh, getting techie now, having shown real code on the screen. On to RDF and RDQL. Semantic queries, much more advanced than Google. Find me everyone in this room who likes Abba. Google can’t do that. Semantic web can. And Ben’s grandmom can (huh?).

Cory Doctorow is talking about making a living out of wat you love to do. Cory as had a life-long dream of being a scifi writer, and recently realised this dream whern publishing Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

Can creative people make money on the net? Cory talks about how difficult history has shown it is for creative people to make money off new technologies, because they’ve been screwed by the tech industry and big media.

We’re loosing our freedoms in the copyright war. Intellectual property rigts vs. academic freedom. The freedom to copy a CD. And so on.

The solution is compulsary licences that ensures that money your pay goes to the artists.

Tim O’Reilly is the last speaker today. Tim talks about the paradigm shift towards open source.

A change in world view that calls everythng you knwo into question. The last paradigm shift in computing was the PC paradigm shift. There, a key development was the coming of commodity hardware based on an open architecture (“IBM-compatible PCs”). Another important feature of the PC paradigm shift was that software was decoupled from hardware, creating not one, but two (overlapping) industries.

The open source paradigm shift is happening now as part of the wider internet paradigm shift. We’re seeing commodity software with an open architecture, and information applications decoupled from both hardware and software.

The main characteristics, the three C’s:
– Commodisation
– Customisation
– Collaboration

What are the business models? All over. Linux as the BIOS of the internet OS. Many possible new “Intel Inside” possible, such as J2EE. But mainly, the new business models are about services. Both various professional services, but also services to the end users. UUnet, BIND, etc are relevant models. Offer a core service, but also offer “add-on” service, like BIND who could have done domain registrations, or Apache web hosts offering web hotels.

“Jeff, you’re pissing in the well” (Tim to Jeff Bezos of Amazon when they filed for a patent on one-click shopping)

One ring to rule them all OR small pices loosely joined?

We’ve just heard Marc’s Voice live, singing H�ndel. Logical introduction to broadband mechanics and Longhorn and open source.

Tools ain’t what they used to be, Marc says. Productivity software. Unified digital lifestyle. Chanting about communities. It all great. But: It’s really hard to get shit to work together.
Introducing WebOutliner, the ultimate tools for bringing communities and people together.

It’s all done using OPML with a social software wrapper around it. Hey, it’s all very cool, BUT, is OPML an open standard? As far as I know, it’s a Dave Winer standard. OPML is not real qualified XML, that’s the real problem.

First after lunch is Jason Fried of 37signals. Jason is a usability designer. He’s talking about theh importance of putting things in context and perspective. How big is small?

Setting expectations. “Now what? What happens next?” Some nice examples of how good designers are thinking about the user situation. Like Amazon’s buttons with short explanations.

Contingency design. Things go wrong. Oh, they do. Design your error messages, especially the crisis points. Preventative and First Aid. Hall of shame, OMG, what shamefull examples, like Network Solutions’ AskJeeves natural language thing, that’s soooo stuupid.

Dan Gillmor is last before lunch. A journalist, one of the best out there, Dan talks about how the web is chang�ng the way we consume news.

The aftermathh after September 11, 2001, showed how media in the digital age really works. Then came warblogging. More recently, Trent Lott, a politician brought down by bloggers. Columbia’s explosion, where bloggers brought the real story.

Journalism becomes a conversation, or maybe a seminar. My readers know more than I do, is what journalists have to accept (it’s always been a fact, but a denied such).

Tools and toys are coming up constantly. We don’t have to wait until Gulfwar 8, there’s a lot out there now.

Hollywood and governments want the internet to be like a TV with pay-per-view access. Three scenarios: Total control. Total anarchy. New melding of the forms, big journalism and little journalism living together side by side. Thhird choice preferred. Agree.

John D Smith from CPsquare pointed me to this wonderful quote:

“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice there is.”

Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra, on receiving an honorary doctorate from Montclair University, East Rutherford, New Jersey, quoted in USA Today, May 24, 1996

  
I have been having fun with the Geo::Sketch MapLocations Movable Type Plugin. It allows me to present maps showing places I mention in my entries. Copenhagen. Baghdad. See? The plugin scans a given entry for the presence of any of 212 major city names throughout the world and then will automatically render a simple map for each one it encounters.

I’d also love to use the GeoSketch plugin for the effectful geographic animations as provided by the Geo::Sketch SOAP interface, some javascripting, and some twisted HTTP “Expires” headers. The latter gives me problems.

LazyWeb, Geo::Sketch should be hooked up with the Global Place-Name Geocodes from the GeoServe web service, which would enable map-making from all over the world.

Another idea for the lazyweb: Over at the Interactivetools.com Forum, I asked Can htmlArea help us do million dollar markup? htmlArea is a WYSIWYG editor replacement for any textarea field, that is, a handy little tool that can be used to enable WYSIWYG-editing in all kind of applications, such as MovableType. I suggested a couple of additions to htmlArea, all inspired by Mark Pilgrim and recent debates. Should the developers at interactivetools.com decide to take up this challenge, I will consider using htmlArea in my blog. I’d really like to have a good WYSIWYG-editor that is also good “behind the screen”, and helps me produce all this million dollar markup rather than all the crappy code such tools normally creates.

Tools like htmlArea only works in Microsoft Explorer, but cross-browser support is not just a dream. htmlArea will soon have support for Mozilla 1.3. Others will follow, I’m sure. As far as Mozilla is concerned, there is already Composite, which only just doesn’t want to work in my Mozilla.

There is much more to making good content than having a nice wysiwyg-editor, however. Benjamin Trott made a very exciting announcement on the last day of last year, namely that MovableType will soon have some new and cool features for Simple and Powerful Text Formatting: We envision Text Formatting options as complete, encapsulated formatters, handling both the formatting of structured text and any desired typographical details (smart quotes, etc).
Joy.

Meanwhile, Phil Ringnalda offers a Five dollar bookmarklet in response to PapaScott‘s cry for help: What I need is a million dollar authoring app so I can keep track of all those million dollar tags I can use.

Is it just me, or is there a million dollar pattern for an authoring application forming here? Who will ever need Office?