Lawrence Lessig on US Presidential candidate Howard Dean's blogging efforts:
"Neutrality aside, though, Governor Dean has earned a special respect. Of course there are issues on which I would disagree with anyone. But I have been struck in reading these posts, and the passion they inspired. They revive a feeling I had as a kid ó that ideas could matter, and that there could be people who would make them matter."
(emphasis and font colour mine)
I'm from New Zealand, so I haven't been following American politics. But that last sentence struck a chord with me, because it's a universal concept. Ideas do matter.
One of the Web's great strengths is it allows ideas to flow freely, because it is a Two-Way communications medium. Television is just one-way, books are one-way, newspapers are one-way. The Web allows ideas to be more than dead words on a page or flickering images on a screen. On the Web, an idea can travel across thousands of nodes on the Internet and take on a life of its own. The Web makes ideas come alive!
Not unrelated, Adam Bosworth has just started a blog. He used to work at Microsoft, where he played a key role in the development of Internet Explorer. So it's great to be able to read his ideas on how the web browser should evolve. He has a concept of a "web service browser", which he defines as:
"...a browser that can access information published as XML messages by services, let the user interact in a rich and graceful way with this information or these services, but can run well in terms of interaction whether the user is online or offline. "
I will be keenly following Adam Bosworth's weblog as he explores this fascinating idea. There have already been some interesting comments from readers. I'm looking forward to what Scoble has to say ;-)
As for my own much more humble contribution to the Web of Ideas, I've started to note down some thoughts for an ideas/topics web application. I'm currently investigating XTM Topic Maps. I'll talk more about this later...
The problem with blogging is it's easy to get distracted by ideas you can't do anything about. My previous post illustrates this. In it I railed against Microsoft for wanting to build its own proprietory platform for Web applications. I wrote about it because I'm concerned about the future of the World Wide Web, in particular the Web browser.
But I've come to this conclusion: there's nothing I can do to influence Microsoft's ideas, or Google's ideas, or anyone else's ideas. Why should I worry my geeky little head about something I have little or no control over? Why not do something positive with my time and build my own ideas for the Web.
I look around and I see lots of people designing and building new stuff for the Web. Today Don Park came up with a possible micro-content solution called "Blog Brix". Marc Canter is developing "Laszlo Blogging Widgets" (amongst other things). Paulo and Matt are busy preparing for the public release of k-collector. Elwyn Jenkins is defining and promoting nano publishing. Simon Carstensen is building a browser-based RSS Aggregator. So is Mark Fletcher with his Bloglines service. Lots and lots of people are building new things. As a certain Australian cricket commentator would say: "It's all happening!"
Robert Scoble responded to the comments I posted on his weblog (which I copied from my own weblog post below) and what he said was an apt conclusion to our blogging discussion:
"Richard, problem is, how do we build on the web? Design by committee is not gonna take us there."
That could mean a number of things and he may've been referring to the W3C. But a positive spin on it is: hey, go out and create things yourself!
In a totally separate conversation, one of my programmer colleagues said today (I'm paraphrasing): "As a programmer I'll be able to look back on my life and and say 'this is what I've built'". It's not just programmers who can relate to that. My strengths are in design, writing, analysis. So those are the areas I'll focus on when I build for the Web.
Just to be artsy, I'll finish with a lyric from my Uncle Elvis Costello. The song is called Shipbuilding:
"It's all we're skilled in
We will be shipbuilding
With all the will in the world
Diving for dear life
When we could be diving for pearls"
Robert Scoble has written a couple of posts recently about Microsoft products being a platform:
1. Robert quoting Kevin Warbach: "The Internet companies that have thrived while AOL faltered -- Microsoft, Amazon.com, eBay, Google -- have two things in commons. They are deeply technology-driven, but they see technology not as an end in itself but as a platform."
And a day later...
2. "Well, the Web is what the Web is. I can see tons of places that Amazon could be tons better, if the platform underneath was better. But, yeah, the Web is awesome. So was the Model T, in its time."
The implication clearly is that the Web is past its prime and should be sent to the glue factory like a spent racehorse. To which I reply, well maybe the Web has some deficiencies as a platform for 2003-era Internet applications. But the Web still has one thing going for it which beats everything - it's FREE. Yes the World Wide Web is FREE, as in both speech and beer. That's gotta count for something, right?
update
Robert responds: "It certainly does! The Model T was the first affordable car, too. But, can we move beyond that?"
Sure but can't we build on the platform we already have - the Web - rather than create new ones? No one company - not Microsoft, not Google - owns the Web. The Web is decentralized and it operates on a few basic open standards - URI's, HTTP and HTML. The Web is more like a road than a car. Not that I want to resurrect the "Information Superhighway" metaphor from the 90's! But my point is the Web is the de-facto platform, built on a few universal protocols. Let's build on what is already free and usable.
Right, I'll get off my soapbox now...
A lot of people are getting pretty excited about "social software". Bloggers like Joi Ito and Marc Canter are writing with gusto about social software. I'm hearing lots of trendy new acronyms and phrases - FOAF, MetaBlogs, "reputation systems", "web of trust", "moblogging", "micro-content", etc etc. It's all getting to be a blur. But these are heady times and everyone is out there hunting that White Whale, the Semantic Web.
I'm going to add my own trendy phrase to the mix: Web of Ideas.
Yes I know, "Web of Ideas" isn't a particularly original phrase. When I googled it, I found a number of old newspaper articles and school assignments that used it. But still I want to use it myself, because it succinctly states what I have always believed the World Wide Web is all about: dissemination of ideas.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, a 19th century American writer, once said: "The ideas in every man's mind make him what he is." We're lucky to live in the 21st century. We have Web technologies such as weblogs and RSS to help us discover, create and share ideas.
I'll write more about the Web of Ideas later. For now (it's getting late and I'm starting to ramble), I want to point to an interesting development at Erik Benson's weblog. Erik is developing an idea database. Hey, good idea Erik ;-)
Tim O'Reilly writes in Dan Gillmor's comments: "Simplicity and extensibility should not be orthogonal. And any technology that sets them up as opposed, instead of complements, has clearly done something wrong."
Note: orthogonal means "independent or well separated".
Tim O'Reilly is talking about RSS2.0 (simple) and RSS1.0 (extensible). Lately I've been thinking and reading about weblog topics. There seems to be the same issues of simplicity vs extensibility in this space too, although nowhere near as much mud-flinging.
XTM stands for XML Topic Maps. For a general introduction, check out the Cover Pages:
"A topic map is a kind of index or information overlay which can be constructed separate from a set of resources, identifying instances of subjects and relationships within the set of resources."
The key things to note are that topic maps are separate from the actual content and they are used to organise content into topics or categories. Although XTM was created only in 2001, topic mapping dates back to 1993 and has its roots in SGML. Right there is a giveaway that this spec is a complex beast. SGML is like the queen ant of XML (to borrow Scoble's ant metaphor) and it has given birth to many XML ants.
The XTM spec is a bulky insect, weighing in at 100 pages long. But being heavy gives it the advantage of extensibility. Using XTM, you can define not only topics but also associations, occurances, characteristics, hierarchies, mergers - the list goes on.
XTM even has a fancy term for creating a topic: reification. The spec defines this as:
"The act of creating a topic. When anything is reified it becomes the subject of the topic thus created; to reify something is therefore to create a topic of which that thing is the subject."
Riiiiiight. Now I understand why they used Shakespeare as an example topic in the spec :-) But it also illustrates that XTM has a lot of scope and you can define topics for Africa.
Compare this to the ENT specification. ENT stands for Easy News Topics and it was built as an add-on to RSS2.0. The authors, Matt Mower and Paulo Valdemarin, make a point of emphasizing the simplicity of ENT:
"ENT is intended to be a very simple standard for describing how topic information can be introduced into an RSS2.0 news feed."
ENT is a lightweight ant, weighing in at only 8 pages. It has only two main concepts: the "topic" and the "cloud", which is like a map of topics. ENT necessarily doesn't have the same extensibility, or breadth of functionality, that XTM has. But, here's the kicker. ENT can reference XTM. ENT topics can be linked to an XTM topic map (as well as RDF), via a URI within a cloud. Whoa, lotta acronyms in that last sentence. But the point is, using ENT along with XTM means you get both simplicity and extensibility.
And all this can be done in RSS2.0, and no doubt in RSS1.0 and Atom too. Tim O'Reilly is right, simplicity and extensibility don't have to be orthogonal. You can have your cake and eat it too. That is, as long as the ants don't eat it first ;-)
I'm not usually one to quote long passages of other people's writing, but I can't resist quoting Scoble's post today about ants. In Robert's vision, the ants represent Microsoft employees and the bees are third-party developers like Marc Canter. I love it when people use literary devices, such as metaphor, in a technical or business context. It encourages new ideas and makes us see things in a new light. It also reminds us not to take ourselves too seriously :-) Now, take it away Scoble:
"I started having a dream that I was in an ant hill, and it was raining honey from above. The ants were harvesting the honey, and storing it away to use on future expansion projects.
The ants couldn't see where the honey was coming from, but they knew it was "raining" regularly, so they were able to plan. Then I had a vision of the honey dripping from a bee hive up on a tree branch that was overhead of the ant hill.
What are the bee hives? Third party developers. In my vision, Marc was a bee. I was an ant. Now, in Marc's post, he says that the ants figured out where the bee hives were, and they killed all the bees.
My vision is that it's far better for the ants to leave the bees alone. Why?
Ever see an ant colony try to develop its own honey?"
The subject of topics for weblogs is getting some traction in the blogosphere. There are some promising apps for topics, including k-collector and Topic Exchange. Recently I wrote a post, in response to one by Clay Shirky, to say that weblog posts should be organized by topics in the blogosphere rather than organized by author. Clay Shirky pointed back to me and some interesting discussion came out of that.
One thing I'm not convinced there is a need for is a "reputation system". Marc Canter linked to a post by Bill Kearney, who had some interesting things to say about syndicating topics (btw Marc also got it spot on when he advised Bill to stick to the topic and lay off the personal abuse of Dave Winer). Bill says this about preventing "pollution" of topic spaces:
"Here we run into the need for some sort of reputation system. One that seeks to differentiate the valuable material from those just trying to incorrectly grab attention."
I don't think ideas should be judged based on who is the author. This is the point I was making in response to Clay's post mentioned above. Sure I want to be able to subscribe to individual authors that I enjoy reading and who I value as an authority. But when it comes to subscribing to topics that I'm interested in, I don't wish to pre-judge what people may contribute on a topic. The best ideas sometimes come out of left field.
The Web is fundamentally a free space. That's the beauty of weblogs, these tools make it easy for anyone to publish on the Web. If everyone has a right to write, then everyone has a right to be read. Even if they're wrong :-)
Don Park reckons that weblogs and websites will converge within the next 2 years time:
"People [will] take it for granted that webpages can be edited using their browser. People will also take it for granted that any webpages can be subscribed to with a single-click. Web browsers will be changed to support all this and more like highlighting of changes."
Don is basically talking about browser/editors, which Tim Berners-Lee has always promoted and which is one of my pet topics. The W3C has one of the few WYSIWYG browser/editors around, called Amaya. But in order to write and edit content using Amaya, you need to publish with the HTTP PUT method which most web hosts won't support.
I'd love to see a mainstream web browser/editor on the Web. But as I talked about in yesterday's post, it looks like "Smart Clients" are about to usurp the browser in terms of providing interactive functionality. Smart Clients may be where all the writing/editing action is in 2 years time.
Jon Udell is exploring ways to write semantic content for the Web, which in the short term means XHTML. Microsoft is leaning towards Office tools for that type of writing - e.g. InfoPath and the next version of Word. I'd be surprised if Microsoft changed tack and moved XML writing functionality into the browser (which will be embedded in the OS in future).
So Don, I share your enthusiasm for a true web browser/editor. But I don't think it's even a glint in the milkman's eye for Microsoft.
Robert Scoble: "...at Microsoft we call Internet apps that aren't in the browser 'Smart Clients'".
The web browser is at a crossroads. Microsoft announced in 2003 that it would not release any further "standalone" versions of Internet Explorer - instead it will be embedded in the Operating System (codenamed Longhorn). But along with obsoleting the web browser as a standalone product, Microsoft is also transforming its definition of a web browser.
IE will no longer be used as a central application from which to run other web applications. Applications will increasingly be non-browser, they will be "Smart Clients" requiring separate installation on a user's PC or other Internet-able device.
The other day I came across a new RSS Aggregator product that is currently in beta, called Lucmo. It is unusual for an RSS Aggregator because it is a browser-based application. Most other products of its kind are software apps that require installation on your PC - eg NetNewsWire and Feedreader.
Lucmo decided to build a browser-based application for these reasons:
"We believe that there are significant benefits to a centralized model. Users will not have to install any software. We can build collaborative filtering more easily. Like webmail, users can access it anywhere without sitting in front of their own computer."
The first and third reasons - no installation and access anywhere - are standard and powerful benefits of the browser-based model. But it's the second reason that interests me most. Lucmo believes that they can achieve "collaborative filtering" more easily in the browser than in a standalone app. Lucmo are hunting the Great White, the Semantic Web. The Lucmo blog explains:
"The killer feature, though, will be the implementation of what you might call a reverse bayesian filter: the user's interests are determined by analyzing every incoming news bit and at the other end recently changed weblogs are aggregated and feeds that comply with the user's interest are suggested. Next step is the implementation of watches: the user creates a watch by specifying a list of keywords, which are then used to filter either news bits from subscribed feeds or all recently changed weblogs."
Simon Carstensen, one of the Lucmo developers, has further information on his weblog. From what I understand, Lucmo aims to personalise RSS feeds by 1) guessing a user's interests and delivering matching feeds to her; and 2) allowing the user to manually specify her interests (what Lucmo calls a "watch") and the system automatically collects and delivers feeds that match those interests. This level of automation is what will drive the Semantic Web to reality. But it's interesting that Lucmo plans to do this in the browser...rather than a 'Smart Client'.
Are Microsoft selling the web browser short? The browser is still a powerful tool that, as Lucmo will hopefully demonstrate, is a more than capable platform for personalised, automated Web applications.
No Microsoft aren't selling the browser short - but they are sweeping it under the carpet. You see Microsoft is in a privileged position. It doesn't need to build its web applications for the browser anymore, it can tack them onto its OS or otherwise add it into one of its ubiquitous software packages (e.g. Microsoft Office).
Let's return to the 3 reasons Lucmo has for building its app in the browser rather than as a standalone product, and see how Microsoft's non-browser Smart Clients compare:
1) Users don't have to install a new piece of software. Microsoft's Smart Clients won't have to be installed either. They'll be pre-installed, either in the OS or as part of a package like Office. The user doesn't need to worry about installing something new, it's all part of the Microsoft experience.
2) Collaborative filtering. Microsoft has the best of both worlds. Smart Clients will have the increased functionality of a desktop app, while at the same time they can 'hook into' the browser (conveniently sitting on the same OS) in order to network with the World Wide Web. Smart Clients may even share some of their components with IE.
3) Access anywhere. The browser still holds the advantage here, because it (mostly) adheres to universal Web standards. But Microsoft has such a large worldwide market share of desktops, that access from anywhere is an attainable goal for them.
In summary, Smart Clients (non-browser Internet applications) will have most if not all of the functionality enjoyed by browser-based applications. At least they will for Microsoft - because their Smart Clients won't need to be installed, they will have access to browser components on the OS, and they may even have universal access due to Microsoft's market position. Independent companies and individuals will have to work harder to get their Smart Clients installed on user desktops.
Meanwhile maybe Lucmo can prove that there is life in the browser-based model of web applications. I've already signed up and will be following its development with interest.
News today that Userland CEO John Robb has left the company. Dave Winer says about Userland's future direction:
"We're going to try to do something fun, unique, and powerful with UserLand's position in the weblog and content tools market, and we're going to try to include the community in the business, i.e. people will make money."
Sounds fascinating. Best of luck to the staff at Userland. I like the Radio Userland product and its community of users - lots of forward motion! I'm keen to see what strategy Userland pursues, in order to keep pace with the likes of Six Apart and Blogger/Google. People are already offering their support.
Regarding John Robb, interesting to note that his Radio weblog is no longer on the air. Here's a link to someone who appears to have recorded John Robb's last post (I couldn't help being curious about it). This is the tantalizing last sentence:
"There is a huge amount of forward motion in the weblog world from organizations that will pay real money (this answers Scoble's question) ;->
Onward!"
Onward indeed. Look forward to positive news ahead for both Userland and John Robb.
