Internet Alchemy

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

We launched a major refresh of our website yesterday, one that makes it pretty clear that, as well as the existing business, the platform is very important to us now and in the future. If you peruse the platform pages you’ll hopefully come to realise that we’re talking about something that’s pure technology and completely domain agnostic. The platform is designed to be useful to anyone who wants to deal with web scale information storage and analysis.

In parallel we’re opening up access to the platform for early adopters to experiment and learn. We’re also hoping that their activities and feedback will help us learn how to make the platform even more useful and compelling. We still have a few slots left for semweb developers.

So if you’re interested in joining in drop me a line… um actually, don’t do that. Instead, drop Danny a line. Yes, I’m pleased to say that Danny Ayers is joining Talis to lead our platform developer community. He’s going to be in charge of seeding and nurturing the community and making sure they’re successful with their applications and projects. Don’t worry though: I’m sure he’ll still be blogging on every subject under the sun, from owl to cats! In fact, I want Danny to carry on doing what he’s best at: connecting people. Hopefully some of those people will want to use the Talis Platform, and then it’s up to the rest of the team to ensure that we’re providing the best possible experience for developers.

I’m hugely excited that Danny is joining us and the bonus is: free holidays in Italy!

Norman Walsh has some words to say about RDF in RSS on his new weblog:

My problem is that "almost RDF" formats are a pain in the ass, just like all the other "almost" formats you’ve ever encountered. Yes, the transformation to RDF is easy with XSLT, but it’s still an extra step.

From my perspective, the added complexity of RDF in RSS seems pretty minor and the payoff is less irritation for me. I call that a win. But I’m prepared to believe my perspective is a bit skewed.

It’s worth checking out how Norman runs his weblog since it includes all kinds of juicy docbook, rdf and xslt goodness.

Danny Hillis, founder of Thinking Machines, writes about Richard Feynman, and how he became involved with Thinking Machines’ Connection Machine. If you’ev ever seen the Feynman lectures, or luckier still attended one in person, you’ll know what a fantastic talent Feynman’s had for explaining some of the most complex physics around:

We tried to take advantage of Richard’s talent for clarity by getting him to critique the technical presentations that we made in our product introductions. Before the commercial announcement of the Connection Machine CM-1 and all of our future products, Richard would give a sentence-by-sentence critique of the planned presentation. “Don’t say `reflected acoustic wave.’ Say echo.” Or, “Forget all that `local minima’ stuff. Just say there’s a bubble caught in the crystal and you have to shake it out.” Nothing made him angrier than making something simple sound complicated.

Edgar Codd, who formulated the rules decribing the normalised forms of relational databases died last week. Thousands of developers use the results of his excellent thinking every day without realising it. It’s not an understatement to say he made a phenomenal contribution to computer science.[good obituary]

Having worked for Sony, I have a lot of respect for Nobuyuki Idei. In this interview (the first of three) he covers a lot of ground: how he’d like to buy Palm or Symbian, why Nokia
don’t understand the mobile business and his vision for micropayments for music.

My dream is to supply music to kids in a way where they don’t have to feel guilty.

This is completely unjustified and unprofessional:

Now, Kevin [Burton] is not one of my favorite people. I’ve had repeated run-ins with him that have convinced me that he’s the most dangerous kind of idiot: the stupidity made coherent kind.

FWIW, I haven’t met Kevin, but we’ve had many long debates via email. I don’t agree with him a lot of the time, but I do respect him and his opinions.

I just came across this hilarious account of Jakob Nielson spamming thousands of people before he became an Internet celebrity. Found via Sean B. Palmer’s intriguing new weblog.

ESR has given another interview in which he talks about what drives open source developers and how dispersed groups of developers can produce reliable code that works.

One of the most powerful features of the open-source model is its capacity to hold down global complexity. The structure of work and communication in the hacker community is decentralized and distributed. Also, many different groups of people are working on many different software modules, each of which is relatively small and simple, and all of which have to be compatible in the end. That’s a good way to write software.

Rasmus Lerdorf, one of the long time PHP hackers has a rather unusual request for his wife to be, to thank her for her seemingly infinite patience.