{ 2002.07.27 } August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web, fiction, and fun and readable. (What's more, a much better what it's all about for RDF and the Semantic Web than anything I've linked to in the past few weeks. This is the Summer of Edutainment.)
{ 07.26 } NetNewsWire Lite (Mac OS X RSS reader) has already replaced a good chunk of my www browsing. I've exported my current subscriptions here [OPML]. Let me know if you know any good feeds, or post your own subscription list.
{ } Me and Miss Mandible, by Donald Barthelme [thanks Es].
{ } There's another line on the London underground called the Masochuticon. It's on the maps, inked in bright radio; the frequency of its colour is to the colour-range we see as visible light is to the slow rumbles whales bellow across the ocean. Its stops are at anyone who has ever thought of it, and it leads where any of those people go.
{ 07.25 } Overmorgen writeup of WorldView 2002, notes from the World Future Society Annual Conference.
{ } This augmented reality demo (thanks Dorian) is astounding. What looks like a window is actually a live video feed of what would be seen through it, augmented with 3d shapes drawn on with a stylus. Imagine this with eye-glasses.
(And talking of glasses and augmented reality: How about if scattered around were the equivalent of blue-screens, except they were filled with Java code, and your glasses had a JVM built in which would run the code with the output pasted over the real-life code? A newspaper article could end with a code snippet that would make a network connection to fetch live replies to a conversation thread; another piece of code could draw a keyboard and interpret the movement of your fingers and send the message back to the server. Why wait for mass-production of intelligent paper when a single instance per person of smart-client eye-glasses with OCR would do?)
{ } HRH Prince James of Wales, twin brother of Prince William [via Bifurcated Rivets].
{ } There's a quite splendid new Upsideclown today: "If one were to look for a single convincing piece of evidence that things were not all they could be, perhaps the fact would stand out that, with her boyfriend's penis in her mouth and new pants bought only yesterday cinching her waist, her uppermost concern is the inevitable stippling of her knees as a result of the coarse fibres of the living room carpet. She tries to move herself gently toward the comparative safety of the fake sheepskin rug, but nothing doing".
Dan sucks, in Fellatious.
Also. Don't forget the Upsideclown Party on Saturday (you'll be more than welcome), and the Best Of book, Whelk, which is on sale now.
{ 07.24 } What an epileptic fit feels like, posted live on Barbelith [via Webfroot]. Remarkable.
{ } The Semantic Web In Breadth. A far better introduction to RDF than I did yesterday, and to the various technologies (including Ontologies) that'll lead to the Semantic Web, than I've seen anywhere else.
{ } Many game design theory links. Looks to be some good digging there.
{ } Question: What's the word meaning a self-describing word? [Update: Autological [via haddock].]
{ 07.23 } Have a quick look at Dirk. It's the opposite extreme from the www in a way. On the web, there are pages and pages are linked together by unidirectional embedded hyperlinks of a single flavour (that is, there's only one type of link: you click on it, it takes you to another page). Dirk is based around the idea of ultra-simple objects which are connection in both directions by nonembedded links that have information (that is, if you follow a link you can follow it back, and the link has a piece of text starting "because..." attached to it). Two extremes of hypertext. What they share is the concept of connections. Nodes and arcs. To-object, from-object and connection.
This is where RDF comes in, as a way of explaining this kind of information. The (very good) RDF Primer explains these three portions like this: "the part that identifies the thing the statement is about is called the subject. The part that identifies the property or characteristic of the subject that the statement specifies is called the predicate, and the part that identifies the value of that property is called the object" (I've edited that down slightly). It's good terminology.
Now RDF has a number of advantages. First, it can be written down in XML (it doesn't need to be) so there are already standard tools to query it and make it. Secondly, it's machine readable. Thirdly, it represents structures we're familiar with (the web, databases, metadata) and consistent ways. Fourthly (and here's the good bit), all of the subject, object and predicate can be URIs. That is, they can reference another location on the www.
More about that last property. Imagine you want to say that the property "written-by" of this webpage is "Matt Webb". Instead of just using the text "written-by" as the predicate, you can pull in Dublin Core into RDF (Dublin Core is a metadata standard, and by "pull in" we're taking advantage of XML namespaces meaning your document can inherit standards other people have written) and reference the standard Dublin Core [or DC] "creator" predicate instead. And instead of just saying "Matt Webb" you could use the URI "mailto:matt@interconnected.org" which uniquely identifies me online. Why is this good? It's good because machines can then identify the sameness of the DC "creator" attribute, and the sameness of me as the creator. Semantic Web, here we come.
But you don't have to just use RDF for Dublin Core metadata (page titles, subjects, creator data mainly). RDF is extensible in other ways too. Friend Of A Friend [or FOAF] is a way of fleshing out that URI we used earlier to identify a person. What's more, part of FOAF lets you specify who your friends are, and as part of that point to where their publicly accessible FOAF file is. These aren't hard to make -- in fact, here's a simple Javascript app to make your own file: FOAF-a-matic.
Why do I suddenly mention all of this? It's because I see:
...and if the creators of these tools had easy access to simple RDF tools, we could be boosting up the lower-common denominator of weblogs to a point where they comprise a lush substrate on which to build fascinating and useful tools to explore and filter the www. And this is in exactly the same way that the architecture of the www with URIs in the first place even allowed things like hyperlinks, and weblogs, to occur.
The best start I've seen is Movable Type's TrackBack which embeds RDF on the page to start linking weblog posts together. But it's still only a start. I'd like to see a grand conversation between the authors of publishing tools pinning down the properties weblogs need to fulfil their potential, and then building these in invisibly for the user. Because weblogs have yet to expand as much as they will, and when they do their course will be hard to change. The future has to be built now, in this microcosm, in this monobloc.
{ } NetNewsWire Lite: Free Mac OS X native RSS desktop aggregator and reader. Fast, clean, good UI. Recommended.
{ } Stewart hypothesises the isomorphism of all games: "Use this system as an intermediary for allowing two people to play two different games against one another (i.e., Warcraft v Roller Coaster Tycoon or Civilization v Quake), while expressing the strategy of their play in one space into an entirely different system/structure". (All of which reminds me of the Glass Bead Game for some reason.)
{ } Recommended by reader Ole Andersen (thanks!), the Catholic Encylopedia's large article on The Reformation should flesh out my understanding of the political situation surrounding Luther's 95 Theses: "[The Reformation is] the usual term for the religious movement which made its appearance in Western Europe in the sixteenth century, and which, while ostensibly aiming at an internal renewal of the Church, really led to a great revolt against it".
{ } Mac System 1.0 [via Dither].
{ 07.22 } Martin Luther's 95 Theses, against the Church, hammered to the door of a church. Courageous. But: A less broad attack than I assumed they were. And I wonder what the environment in which these were written was like? Were there others, less articulate, with less of a sense for the dramatic saying the same thing?