Linking is a Good Thing

Twenty years ago, Oxford University graduate Tim Berners-Lee wrote a memo to his boss while he was working at CERN. This memo was an information management proposal for a distributed hypertext system that we now know of as the World Wide Web. Note the major feature that he describes which was not video blogging nor banner ads nor even online chat. The major feature in this proposal was hypertext or "human-readable information linked together in an unconstrained way."

This past February, the same visionary gave a presentation at the annual TED Conference where he was still advocating for more or less the same thing. This time, instead of web pages linking to each other, the data that feeds web pages should also be available online and link to each other. This is what is called Linked Data.



Linked Data is collectively intelligent. Individuals contribute relationship information when they link. This relationship information aggregates into fantastic models of our world. Models that help researchers, journalists, and ordinary folk span problem domains in order to solve new and ever increasingly complex challenges.

But there are barriers in the adoption of Linked Data whose measure of success and effectiveness will depend directly on its ubiquity. One big problem is that many organizations value their data and quite naturally wish to protect it. Propriety and intellectual capital are profound cultural barriers to linked data that I, for one, do not understand how to overcome. I think that it's going to be a little more of a challenge than simply to ask you to stop it.

Here is another, even bigger, cultural problem to Linked Data. In our current web society where page rank is the coin of the realm, nobody wants to provide links anymore. Linking is passé. When you link out to another site, you contribute to their page rank. If you compete with that site, then that diminishes your page rank. It's some weird mind-share zero sum game. It's the new variation on the tragedy of the commons all over again. You're so protective of your own page rank that you dare not provide outbound links. Thus, the original, fundamental, collectively intelligent value of the World Wide Web is tragically subverted by individual or organizational greed. This mindset has gotten so bad that many sites automatically flag your content as spam if it includes a link in it. I link a lot in my posts so I can tell you from first hand experience that many prejudiced people will dismiss you as a spammer if you provide a link, even if you are linking to something that you have no official relationship with.

Once again, this noble visionary has provided a map to a more intelligent world but we are going to have to revisit our current values in order to completely embrace the gifts that he has given us.

The Whuffie Factor

I just ran across this great talk at last year's Web 2.0 conference by Tara Hunt on a knowledge management blog that I frequently visit.

She talks about how the leveraging of the feeling of reciprocity and social capital and the nurturing of a gift economy in the design of your product or web site's user experience is the most efficacious way to promote your message. She calls it The Whuffie Factor which is a term inspired from a book written by Cory Doctorow called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

She also contrasts this approach to traditional PR and shows how The Whuffie Factor is a logical extension to the prosumer approach of establishing authentic conversations.


The Whuffie Factor: The 5 Keys for Maxing Social Capital and Winning with Online Communities (Tara Hunt) from Steffan Antonas on Vimeo.

The Next Crop of Web Startups

I recently attended Start - A Conference for Entrepreneurs held at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco.

The conference was sold out and no wonder. Luminaries from Twitter and WordPress were there. Founders from 43 Folders, 500 Hats, and Wesabe had some great advice for young, budding entrepreneurs. You can read more about my take on the speakers here. It's the attendees that I want to point your attention to now. I met an Information Architect, a .NET consultant (rare amongst this tribe as Microsoft doesn't have a good hold on the web startup world), a marketing VP for the next killer in box app, an engineer for a social networking site devoted to reading books, and the CEO for a web site devoted to young children.

It's all about finding a niche and filling it. For a phenomena as highly democratic as the web, that means finding a market with an unfulfilled need and filling it. These people are passionate about what they want to do but it's a kind of passion that is all about sensitivity and listening to the market.

If what you are doing isn't working, then throw it away and start over. I don't mean give up. Be persistent but be persistent about what counts which is not the script you're currently working on. One of the attendees called it failing fast. Don't clutch on to your current attempt. If you do and if it's not right, then you'll burn out trying to make it work. Instead, keep looking for new ways until you find the one that works. Everything changes over time so, eventually, what works will stop working.

Flexibility, sensitivity, and agility are the keys to sustainable success. That was the message of this conference and that is my message when it comes to developing software which is my passion.

Facebook Joining the Open Source Bandwagon

It is expected that predominant social networking web site Facebook will soon announce the re-release of its platform as open source. Competitive pressure is credited as the reason behind this move as competing web sites are already positioning to get behind another open source platform for exchanging social information. This is driven by a larger trend in which content providers leverage Metcalfe's law by transforming themselves into content platform providers.

The Human Hive Mind

No, this isn't a blog about the borg. Recently, I ran across an article or two on how products such as delver and twine use social networking APIs and semantic web standards to make search results more intelligent. The idea here is that you pick friends based on what you have in common with them. In which case, it stands to reason that what they think as relevant is a reasonable determinant for what you think is relevant.

This is an offshoot on what is more commonly known as collective intelligence. I first ran across this on the web with the google search engine which capitalizes on the science of predictive markets to provide those miraculously relevant search results at the top of the screen. Books such as the Cluetrain Manifesto and Wikinomics predict and expound on the power and inevitability of collective intelligence and the web, where physical proximity has no affect on cost, as a most excellent way of catalyzing collective intelligence.

April 28 Update: I ran across an article recently called Gin, Television, and Social Surplus that presented a different and interesting take on collective intelligence. The author based this on a speech that he gave at a recent conference on Web 2.0 technology and cultural impact. His upshot it this. One place to go looking for collective intelligence is to siphon off a little bit of the enormous amount of time that people spend watching television.

Blogging Considered Harmful

As a blogger, I feel compelled to blog about this NY Times front page article on the health perils of blogging. Apparently, some high profile bloggers have recently suffered heart attacks. Without benefit of any kind of scientific or statistical research, the piece attempts to paint a world where bloggers and smokers share the same fate.

I blog as a hobby and not for pay so I am not exactly an expert on this subject. One of the reasons why I do not attempt to blog for pay is precisely what the article addresses. There is little to no money in it. To make a living off of it does require long hours.

It's not unlike the economics of food production. The person who picks the crop and the person who rings up the purchase makes the least amount of money. It's the people in between who stand to earn (or lose) the most for their bottom line. The blogger is like that person working in the fields. It's the content aggregator or publisher who stands to make (or lose) the most amount of cash in that world.

There is a book entitled Wikinomics that I consider as the sequel to The Cluetrain Manifesto. I'm sure that you have heard the phrase "content is king." These books make the case that the new content that is king is user supplied. This world is not about the cult of personality which is why blogging alone is a very hard way to get rich.

Cell Phones and the World Wide Wireless Web

I recently ran across an article on the Ten Most Disruptive Technology Combinations which included the combination of cell phones and wireless internet access as the number one combination. The article mentions how this convergence blurs the lines between work and play and that is forcing telecom monopolies to open up their networks.

Within the past year, I upgraded my cell phone which included an Internet package. I thought that I would cancel the package pretty soon but I am still willing to pay $20 per month per phone for the privilege of unlimited web and email. I must admit that this is a compelling technology.

So, compelling that I added a mobile edition to my online publication about what affects that technology and the media have on culture.

Authoring web pages for mobile devices is sort of a Back to the Future experience for me. It's all about a small download to a device with limited interactive capabilities. The version of HTML is hyper modern but there are a lot of elements that you cannot or should not use including script, tables, and images. You should also limit links to the navigation within your site.

Summer Update: I have started a new technology company which also includes a mobile edition.

Metcalfe's Law

A friend of mine recently emailed me this announcement with the comment "use this with idea and get rich." Although the announcement of an iPhone SDK is new, this is not a new trend. Companies such as Facebook, Google, and Yahoo have all signed up to a degree to the following model.

• Technology company reinvents itself as a technology platform company.
• Productizes its application tier with a public facing API.
• Markets to developers encouraging them to consume their API and "get rich."
• Takes advantage of subsequent buzz to build brand.

It's Metcalfe's Law all over again which is actually just a variation on the simple market forces of supply and demand. Leveraging developers to increase demand of the data that you supply is a straightforward way to increase the value of your services.

Say a Little Prayer for the Semantic Web

Earlier, I had blogged about SPARQL. The feedback I got was along the lines of asking why I was bothering about that since RDF never really took off. Well, it is true that adoption of RDF is pretty weak. I guess that means the semantic web is not really ready for the main stream yet.

Too bad, really, because the problem that RDF was invented to solve is both interesting and compelling. It is the problem of context sensitive search. Wouldn't it be nice if you could write a search query that differentiates between Huckabee the politician, the store chain, or the movie? Maybe this problem isn't serious enough to bother with the trouble of authoring anything as onerous as an RDF document because google is already doing some special parsing tricks to provide some pre-canned context sensitivity. For example, if you google movie: Huckabee, then you see only movie reviews with the word Huckabee in them. That's not exactly what was wanted but it is closer. You can do similar stuff with define: and stocks: but this is not a complete solution to the problem of context sensitive search. In the world of google these are called search operators.

But perhaps it is still premature to declare RDF as dead. The CEO for the Reuters news agency has talked up RDF in a recent interview. They have even introduced a cool tool for generating RDF from textual content. There's nothing like a cool tool to generate traction in the world of protocol adoption. However, this tool still has a little ways to go before it is going to be of much use. I pointed the tool at another blog entry of mine (Data Access Strategies), just to see what it would do.

What it generated could do little more than identify the following from the article as industry terms; web application server, web application development framework, ruby utilities, django utilities, rapid web application development, business application software development, operational systems, and web application developer frameworks. Not very intelligent, eh? It did correctly identify Martin Fowler as a person but incorrectly identified VB.NET as a company. To give you a basis for comparison, I went to the bother of authoring an RDF of that article myself. That document won't do you much good unless you are comfortable with RDF or have an RDF editor. As I hinted at before, RDF is kind of complicated. Here is a picture of what that RDF looks like when viewed as a resource graph.



Here is a PDF of the graphical version generated by RDF Gravity.

Here's hoping that Reuters continues to work on making this tool better. There is also a recently published extension to the very popular RSS format that allows you to add more context sensitive tags to your site maps. Here's hoping that takes off too.

The Blurring of Advert and Content

I recently ran across an article on how to write better headlines. Yea, I thought, I'll improve my blog by writing better blog titles. So, I read the article.

Basically, the gist of that article is this. Make a big, explicit promise in your headline to attract more readers. There are variations on this theme like phrasing the headline like a how to get something desirable or avoid something undesirable. Other suggestions include using popular keywords and using numbered lists, all in the service of attracting readers by promising something for nothing.

I recognized this advice as techniques used in effective advertising. I realized that, to the writer of this article that I read, all professional blogs are advertisements cleverly disguised as content.

I remember seeing this billboard back in the 80's. It was mostly blank with the following words. Advertising, because without it, you wouldn't know. The trend to blur the distinction between content and advertising has continued to escalate ever since.

Why? Well, back in the 80's people generally tended to view content as desirable and advertising as a necessary evil for getting content for free or almost free. So, you get to watch your favorite TV program but at a cost of having to watch the commercials or you get to read news over the web but at a cost of having a banner ad display along with it. I believe that when content and advertising is framed separately, people get annoyed at it and learn techniques for avoiding the advertising. TiVo or popup blocker, anyone?

The advertisers don't want to be avoided. They paid good money for mind share. So the media channels, wanting more advertising money, work out ways to blur the distinction between the desired content and the annoying advert. Ergo, product placement or, apparently, blogs (gulp).

Some blogs. Not all blogs. I still believe in the blog as opinion piece rather than puff piece. Opinion pieces are what you will see here. Pieces that share my observations, hopefully in a way that invites you to think about what's important to you. That is why I have a blog titled What Does it Mean to be of Service instead of How to Beat the Repairman at His Own Scam.

Of course, if the advert was desirable, then the blurring of advert with content would not be so annoying. Perhaps that is the promise of targeted advertising. The cost might be the loss of privacy as your consumer patterns would get shared like your email address does amongst the spammers.

What do you believe? Should advert and content be separate? Is convergence with targeted advertising OK? Should your consumer patterns be considered private knowledge or public domain?