Internet Alchemy

I did a bit of blog housekeeping and collated all the links to my homepages on services across the web. I’m using Wordpress’s link management feature to organise and display them in the sidebar on my blog’s homepage. With a little bit of extra effort I could also output the list as RDF using FOAF’s OnlineAccount classes and properties.

I forgot my del.icio.us password so I went to the reset password function. It showed me the email address that I had used to sign up to del.icio.us with and an option to change that address. I changed it to something else without needing to enter a password or anything. I got confirmation of the change sent to both addresses. Then, I went back to the reset password page and clicked the link for del.icio.us to send me a password reset link. It happily sent it to the new email address that I’d entered.

So what’s to stop anyone from going to del.icio.us, changing the email address to my account and then getting access to change my password? WTF? Tell me what I’m missing here?

For breakfast: three fried egg sandwiches, with cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, fried onions and mayonnaise, followed by three chocolate-chip pancakes; a five-egg omelette; three sugar-coated slices of French toast and a bowl of grits a maize-based porridge, washed down with two cups of coffee.

OMG, I’m surprised Michael Phelps doesn’t sink like a stone! I’m thinking I might have a chance in the 2012 Olympics. I have the appropriate diet but am worried that my arms are too short.

As I twittered this morning I’ve been suffering with blog writers block. I have plenty of things I could be blogging but I’m having trouble extending those ideas into decent posts. I recently moved house and I have a new (shorter) commute so I’m going to try and use those half hours to blog something, assisted by the offline features of the Wordpress iPhone application. So maybe there won’t be many links. That’s a source of discomfort for me because I started blogging back in 1999 when a weblog was a journal and commentary on great links the author had found. As a result I tend to judge blog posts by the number of new links they give me, and the opportunities for further discovery.

Tonight’s post is inspired by a conversation I had today with Michael, one of our senior Platform developers. Michael joined in response to my post a few months ago (we still have openings available hint hint) and we were talking about the recruitment process. He said a good way to judge a company is by how they interview and hire people. I thought back a bit to some of the interviews I’ve experienced on the past and found myself enthusiastically agreeing.

If you’re going for an interview I think you can tell an awful lot about a company’s attitude towards its staff. Sloppy, disorganised interviews invariably mean the company is a complete mess. Conversely regimented interviews often result in a dose of severe timeboxing.

Companies that use only a single interview clearly aren’t looking to hire a person with any character. Mediocrity is the order of the day. Similarly I suspect that those who insist on grading candidates with 30 question quizzes would be most satisfied with an automaton who never makes mistakes but can mechanise the development process as well as they’ve mechanised the recruitment process.

In short if you have a bad interview experience then you’re probably going to be very unhappy there. And companies that interview poorly end up with the employees they deserve.

(btw my plan failed – I couldn’t complete this post in the 30 minute commute and had to finish it at home!)

While clearing out some old papers and files I’ve carried around with me since I left University, I came across this poem that my friend Dominic Taylor wrote for me. It’s based on a true story, an event that occurred to me in early 1991. I thought the poem had been lost forever, so I was ecstatic when I found it.

The Terrible And Tragic Tale Of Brian The Snail

(after William McGonagall)

OooooooOOOOoooOOooooooooooH!
‘Twas in the year of nineteen hundred and ninety one
When, alack, a poor snail was undone.
Brian, for such was the name of this monoped,
Being in danger for shelter had fled.
Not being possessed of much great speed
This was for Brian no easy deed.
And so, not surprisingly, try as he might
He would have been unsuccessful in his flight,
Had he not with sharp eyes aspied
A place where with impunity he might hide.
“And where was this sanctuary?” I hear you beg;
It was in the turn up of Ian’s trouser leg.
The cause of his trouble may now be heard
Brian was menaced by a terrifying bird
Who, feeling peckish, was desiring of lunch.
(He always ate snails because they made a nice crunch).
To return to tale, and I do think we should,
Our hero the snail was not quite out of the woods.
For though Ian lumbers at a rather slow pace
For Brian to catch him it was still a hard race.
So the plucky mollusc sped across the ground
Always spurred on by the terrible sound
Of the bird screeching and screaming and flapping its wings
And threatening poor Brian with terrible things.
The snail was fast but the bird was still faster,
And Brian thought the day would end in disaster.
Then just as he was praying for Ian to wait
He was miraculously saved by interceding fate;
As luck would have it, on a stone Ian tripped,
And into his turn up Brian Snail slipped.
However, when he thought he was safe; in sight was his doom
As Ian mounted the stairs and entered his room;
For exhausted by his exertions down the lad sat
And Brian was crushed with a horrible “splat!”
The moral of this story should be easy to guess:
If you jump in Ian’s trousers you’ll end up a mess.

Dominic Taylor, Spring 1991

Wow! O’Reilly have just put up the entire archive of Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0 journal, now renamed Release 2.0. I was interviewed by Kevin Werbach back in ‘99 and was featured in the July issue on syndication (the hot new technology of the day). From page 18:

For a taste of the future, go to theweb.startshere.net. The site, created by British developer Ian Davis, looks crude and incomplete today, but it could be a template for something big: the individual portal. It’s an aggregation site composed of nothing but syndicated content feeds in open formats such as RSS. The My.Userland.Com site offers something similar called “favorite” channels, without the layout options. And the shareware Carmen’s Headline Viewer organizes syndicated hyperlinks with a standalone desktop app. Just as HTML democratized authoring, individual portals could democratize content aggregation.

Davis is also developing an open content syndication (OCS) directory specification for describing and exporting lists of content feeds to other aggregation sites.

In a world of millions of content feeds, it becomes increasingly hard to find anything. This, after all, is what made people turn to Yahoo! in the first place when the number of Websites grew beyond a manageable level. Open content syndication networks cry out for open directories.

Thankfully, efforts are underway to meet this need. One is the Netscape Open Directory (formerly NewHoo), a Yahoo!-like directory that uses a distributed network of volunteers to classify sites. Another is James Carlyle’s xmlTree, a directory of XML content resources organized using the Dewey Decimal System. xmlTree listings themselves are tagged in XML with Dublin Core RDF metadata (see Release 1.0, 5-98), for easy searching by humans or Web-based intelligent agents.

The PDF version has a black and white screenshot of my startshere site, although my recollection is that the original was in colour (I’ve lost mine somewhere). The Internet Archive has remembered it though so you can soak it up in all its glory.

My, how things have changed. startshere.net got snaffled up by a domain squatter some time later in the same black period where I lost openjava.org (sorry Kevin!) due to a mixup with email addresses resulting in me not getting the registration reminders. By then though I’d moved onto building Wapaw, the first ever search engine for WAP content. The creator of Carmen’s Headline Viewer went on to become one of the most influential people in the Web 2.0 age! (Hi Jeff!) Dave stayed Dave and went on to cement his place in history by inventing podcasting and opml. The Netscape Open Directory had a brief fling with fame and became DMoz before fading into obscurity.

I went on to form a startup called Calaba with James Carlyle where we unified his directory ideas with the mobile search engine. We dropped Dewey immediately and worked on our multidimensional classification technology. This eventually ended up being owned by BSkyB after languishing sadly with Surfkitchen for a number of years. At least it’s now being used every day on Sky Interactive. Our main competitor in that space was a tiny startup called Endeca (hi Rob and Wing!) who went on to popularise the multidimensional classification stuff as the faceted browsing we all know and love today.

Fun memories from the Golden Age of Web 1.0

Just packing a bag for tonight’s Talis party. This is our annual staff and friends event and an opportunity to let our hair down. This year especially because the theme is the 70’s in the Caribbean!! No, I’m not entirely sure what that means either. But everyone has been busy pulling together costumes by scouring ebay, charity shops and raiding parents’ wardrobes. I’m taking my camera…!

I’m finding Marc Andreessen’s new blog very entertaining. Today’s post on productivity is fun and includes a section on my favoured productivity technique, structured procrastination:

The gist of Structured Procrastination is that you should never fight the tendency to procrastinate — instead, you should use it to your advantage in order to get other things done.

Generally in the course of a day, there is something you have to do that you are not doing because you are procrastinating.

While you’re procrastinating, just do lots of other stuff instead.

Next month will mark the end of my second year at Talis. I was inspired to join by my conversations with the CEO, Dave Errington and CTO, Justin Leavesley. They both shared this strong belief that something was changing, that there was a coming wave of disruption based on increased connectivity and that Talis could be well placed to catch it. Throughout the conversations ran a refreshing vein of humility and honesty, an admission that not everything was figured out and that anyone joining could help shape Talis strategy. For me, that presented an amazing challenge that I didn’t want to miss. As a backdrop, Talis had been in the middle of huge organisational changes, moving away from 36 years of being a co-operative not-for-profit, through to a limited company and, ultimately, to being majority owned by its employees. A tough transition, but one that was necessary if Talis were to catch this next wave.

Today’s Talis is vastly different even from the Talis I joined. Just about every employee is a shareholder and Talis is paying dividends on those shares. We’ve built a great team, developed some amazing core technology and have some very cool applications in the pipeline. Without the bureacracy that enveloped the company in its former incarnation it’s become a place you can get great things done.

Last month I was flattered and honoured to be invited to join Dave and Justin as an executive director on the board of Talis Group. Justin is moving across to become Chief Strategy Officer, which very much suits his economic strategy expertise, and I’m stepping up to become CTO, responsible primarily for our platform strategy and technology. What a huge challenge and responsibility: I never thought I’d be CTO of a company older than both me and the Internet! Even though the company has been through enormous changes over the past four years we still have a lot of work to do. With my appointment to the board comes a new focus for the company on becoming a global software business, active across every domain. We’ll continue to grow in our traditional library market, while at the same time expanding the platform strategy and technology we have been working on for the past two years.

If you follow this blog then you’ll have a good idea about the direction we’re taking with our Platform. Call it the Semantic Web (upper or lowercase), Web 3.0 or the Web of Data, it’s about connecting people, businesses, machines and devices together, making it more efficient to communicate and giving us access to even more information with which to make better decisions. The whole company is working toward this vision, so it permeates all of our products, and my particular focus is on the technology needed to get there.

Part of that is ensuring that Talis continues to excel in technology. But that doesn’t mean devising better processes or selecting tools or inventing architectures. Those kinds of activities are just fiddling around the edges. The single most important factor in a successful software business is having happy, talented people

Talented people, to me, are those that can make things happen, often against the odds, through perseverance, inspiration and sheer passion. They learn from every challenge and they get better. And the best way to help them do that is to get out of their way.

If you’re not convinced, if you think you can horizontally scale the development process, go and read some of Joel Spolsky’s writings on the subject. Then read Founders at Work and try to find a startup whose success wasn’t entirely predicated on the talent of its founders.

I’m lucky that Talis already has a fantastic team of talented developers, certainly the best I’ve ever worked with. But to achieve future success we need to increase in strength, not only in the dev group, but across the whole company. We’ve got a big vision, but we haven’t got all the answers yet and we’re looking for people to come and help us figure some stuff out.

So here’s the pitch from the new CTO: if you want to face the challenge of creating something world-changing; if you like the idea of a company that controls its own destiny and is small enough for you to change it; if you never want to stop learning; then I want to hear from you.

Come and find me at XTech this week, or grab one of the other 8 Talisians that are going and get the lowdown on what it’s really like to work here. If you can’t make XTech, then email careers@talis.com and tell them I sent you

So I’ve arrived in Cannes for the W3C Tech Plenary and 1 hour in my laptop hard disk fizzled out. Which makes several things rather tricky… I think the boot info has been corrupted. I’ve fixed this before by using a bootable Linux CD but I forgot to bring it Are there any kind souls in the area who have a bootable Linux CD or can bring one? Email me at iand at internetalchemy.org or phone me on +44 7966 473239. Thanks.