Nodalities

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30 March 2007

mashup* again in April

I enjoyed last month's mashup* event in London, and blogged it at the time.

A programme and sign-up page for the next gathering on 24 April are now available, so if you want to learn more about Identity and mix with some interesting people, get yourself registered.

Technorati Tags: Identity 2.0, mashup*, Talis

Posted by Paul Miller at 01:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

27 March 2007

Freebase invitations

I have a couple of Freebase invitations left, on offer to deserving homes...

Technorati Tags: Freebase, Metaweb, Semantic Web, Talis, Web 2.0, Web 3.0

Posted by Paul Miller at 08:26 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

26 March 2007

Twittering incessantly about... twitter

It is perhaps unsurprising that the mainstream media gets excited by the quirkier manifestations of the new Web, and none has been quirkier or more written about for a long time than Odeo successor Twitter.

Today, in a clear sign of ... something , a whole column devoted to Twitter even makes the front page of the Financial Times, right under the masthead and next to the picture of Tony Blair and Javier Solana.

So what is it? Very simply, a web-based service which lets members post short (140 characters, so even shorter than an SMS) updates on their movements. Members build up groups of 'friends' and 'followers', who opt to receive these updates as they are published. Updates are created and consumed on mobile phones, via many standard computer instant messaging clients such as Adium, via the (often painfully slow) twitter website, and within bespoke applications like Twitterrific.

Malcolm Landon was, I think, the first person in our office to start Twittering, although others have since been drawn in... and out again.

Yes, the critics have a point in that the vast majority of the content is a seemingly irrelevant stream of drivel. I am often to be found “drinking coffee” or equivalent, and Twitterers globally seem to spend an inordinate amount of time walking dogs, but I have also experienced first hand the way in which it can help you find something you need (thanks, Tom Raftery!), get prompt responses from inside big and often lumbering organisations (thanks, Jeff Barr!), or simply keep abreast of happenings amongst our increasingly global network of acquaintances.

Twitter is free and carries no visible advertising, so how will it ever cover costs or make money? And if it's some sort of freemium play or an attempt to build a community before selling to the highest bidder, is there the same community investment and loyalty to an ability to type 140 characters as there has been in photo sharing and other, richer, community sites?

We shall see...

Technorati Tags: Financial Times, FT, Participation, twitter, Talis

Posted by Paul Miller at 11:31 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Roll those sleeves up, and get on with the Web 2.0 hard slog

Crosslink Capital's Peter Rip is one of those tech-aware money men with an often insightful take on the sector in which we operate, shared through his EarlyStage VC blog. It's one of a small group of sites offering up the snippets that tend to form the basis of the 'fyi' posts that fly around inside Talis from time to time.

Peter's post from 19 March, detail aside [the graphs were later supplemented by a post on 21 March], offered a concise expression of something I've more-or-less been saying to presentation audiences since last Autumn/Fall (or Spring, if you're in the southern hemisphere!), so it's nice to see his interpretation bearing out the instincts of myself and my colleagues;

“Much of the 'easy' innovation seems to have been wrung out of the Web 2.0 wave. Web 2.0 was cheap - thanks to open source, simple - thanks to RSS/REST, and distinctive - thanks to AJAX and Flash. It helped more than a little the Google has continued to entice us all with the abundant profits in Internet advertising.

Now the hard work begins, again. The next wave of innovation isn't going to be as easy. The hard problems in the WWW are no longer usability or ease of everyday content creation. These problems are solved. Digital cameras, SixApart, WordPress, and digital video cameras showed us how ease it could be. Now the hard part is moving from Web-as-Digital-Printing-Press to true Web-as-Platform. To make the Web a platform there has to a level of of content and services interoperability that really doesn't exist today.

The Web today still resembles MS-DOS more than MS-Windows. Every website is an island, an island that knows nothing about any other website. This is no different than the world before the Windows Clipboard. All 640KB of memory was available to whatever application was running. The point of integration was the User. As it is today. Ask anyone who uses a SaaS application.”

Isn't it lucky, then, that this is exactly the space in which we are active? :-)

Technorati Tags: Platforms, crosslink capital, Talis, Talis Platform, Web 2.0, Web 3.0

Posted by Paul Miller at 09:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

23 March 2007

Toward the Web of Data

All around us, data-rich applications are moving out of the enterprise and into the (network) cloud. As they move from intranet to internet, expectations as to the manner in which dispersed and disparate data should be available for use and reuse are evolving rapidly, and challenging the previously robust models of database design that have served the traditional enterprise so well for many years.

Let us explore some of these changes in technology and in expectation, and propose a solution more suited to manipulating heterogeneous data spread throughout the cloud; a solution engineered from the outset to fulfil the requirements of that amalgam of ‘Web 2.0’ approaches and ‘Semantic Web’ technologies popularly labelled ‘Web 3.0’.

Let us reach toward the prospect of realising the world wide database, built upon Semantic Web principles and well-established web protocols, and incorporating the same massively scalable, partitioned and decentralised architecture as the web itself. Let us support distributed manipulation of structured, unstructured and binary data, served up via an open source semantic web server that allows existing content and databases to be woven into the emerging web of data with ease.

History is littered with examples in which the previously innovative and differentiating become commoditised. For a short time, Thomas Edison’s companies monopolised the supply of long-lasting incandescent light bulbs - and electricity - before their competitors caught up and moved competition to a new level. In the automobile industry we see repeated examples in which high-end differentiators such as power steering, airbags, or satellite navigation progress from concept through high-end to mainstream, and the same pattern can be seen in the rapidly changing mobile phone environment with increasing penetration for cameras, music players, and now navigation systems. With each advance, financial and technical barriers fall and innovation and competition move to a new level, built upon now commoditised foundations.

On the internet, there is significant interest in providing the 'platform' foundations upon which the next wave of innovation will be built. We continue to see computer operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS and the various flavours of Unix subsume and mediate the complex interactions between hardware, software, and user, offering increasingly rich yet intelligible hooks to which developers can pin their own applications. The operating system is an increasingly capable platform, and it is one that succeeds in binding developers and users around it in a complex yet largely self-sustaining ecosystem of mutual benefit. A level down, hardware providers such as Intel work harder to bind customers to their platform by building additional capabilities such as digital rights management (DRM) or graphics processing into their hardware. A level up, and increasingly squeezed as the operating system seeks differentiation by ‘bundling’ applications and capabilities previously provided by others within the surrounding development ecosystem, sit applications developers. In an attempt to increase their value proposition, and to bind their customers increasingly tightly, these companies too are making a play to be recognised as platform providers within their particular vertical market. Oracle, Salesforce, and similar companies are prime examples of this trend, and it remains to be seen how successful their efforts will prove in the longer term. Apple could also be considered to seek a platform position in the media space; the marketing and (relative) affordability of their iPod range of devices is focussed upon binding consumers ever more tightly to the far more lucrative iTunes store, and recent announcements see this store extending its reach into the living room, onto the mobile phone, and beyond.

Above the level of such network fundamentals as TCP/IP, we have yet to see the emergence of a truly generic platform on the internet. Providers of vertical applications increasingly describe their technologies as platforms, whilst remaining focussed upon the needs of the market segment (finance, libraries, customer management, etc) from which they emerged. However, if the picture painted so long ago by Tim Berners-Lee and others of a Semantic Web is to be realised and put to work in underpinning the next generation of b2b, b2c, c2b and c2c applications then a new platform is required; a pragmatic platform engineered to facilitate timely, robust and relevant interactions with semantically rich data, densely interconnected yet physically distributed throughout the cloud and subject to diverse models of ownership and control.

Work around the Talis Platform effectively and demonstrably bridges the divide between the rigorous ontological approaches of the Semantic Web and the free-form exuberance associated with the cream of Web 2.0 to offer a means by which the best of both worlds can be brought together in delivering a means by which data may be manipulated and consumed flexibly, reliably, and powerfully. Internet-strength generic approaches and components are combined with the capability for vertical market specialisation, with existing community standards and specifications employed to ease adoption, engagement, and ongoing development.

The history of the web is littered with examples of great ideas, poorly executed or never adopted sufficiently to ensure the emergence of a sustainable community. There is a fundamental - and increasingly significant - difference between that which new technologies make possible and that of which those same technologies are capable once their adoption passes some critical point on the curve.

Take-up of web-based behaviours continues to grow apace, as high speed and always-on connections to the internet become ever-more ubiquitous and affordable. Users of these connections behave very differently online, taking advantage of an effectively instantaneous availability of distant resources to blur the boundaries between resources on their own computer and those remote to them. In turn, we see the sites to which these users flock themselves changing, adapting to the ways in which evolving behaviour fundamentally alters interactions between a site, its users, and their broader community of interested peers. These social interactions, so closely aligned with the current enthusiasm for ‘Web 2.0’, are part of a significant shift in the web and the behaviour of those using it; we are seeing a quite unprecedented move from often passive consumption toward active engagement and participation. This participation is manifest in many forms, including the explosion of blogs, the popularity of Wikipedia, MySpace’s position high in the global rankings for web sites, and the value placed in customer reviews of items on Amazon.

Whilst these trends continue to be significant, and point toward an online experience in which participation - if you wish it - could become as easy as consumption, the current generation of participative services face difficulty reconciling the competing needs of a user desire to use and reuse their content - and even their clickstream - in diverse scenarios of relevance to themselves, and a business imperative to monetise that engagement, often by constraining the ways in which outputs from one application might meaningfully be enmeshed with outputs from another (potentially competing) service. The user might wish to offer a single ‘wish list’, capable of fulfilment via either Amazon or Barnes & Noble, but how does such an apparently reasonable desire fit with the current business model and infrastructure of either retailer?

Increasingly, we are coming to recognise the value of online communities. This value is not new, but recent technological and practical advances have made it far easier for those communities to form, and to grow. The purchase of expensive web properties such as YouTube and MySpace have largely been about seeking ownership of a community rather than any technology upon which they may depend. Although they would certainly appear to be reaping dividends at present, such purchases are inherently risky; web-based communities may form with remarkable rapidity, but they are equally capable of dissolving - or moving elsewhere - just as fast.

At the moment, sites for which data are fundamental (whether participatively assembled or procured from some third party provider) face a difficult challenge. As has been remarked previously, the cost of initiating a technology start up has fallen dramatically, largely because of the rise of commodity hardware, the widespread availability of network bandwidth, and the quality of open source software upon which to build. No such trend can really be observed for the data upon which so many of these sites depend, and (with some exceptions) the APIs that provide access to much of the value locked within these applications still tend toward the superficial. As such, companies are required to invest significantly, either in procuring content with which to seed their service, or in covering their ongoing costs whilst a community of use gradually grows around them, seeded by early adopters who see the potential and are not dissuaded by an early paucity of content. By lowering barriers to the controlled sharing of data, and by underpinning alternative business models in which it need not be necessary to restrict reuse to the degree we often see in current applications, we recognise that value is shifting, that costs need to be driven out of the mundane work of gathering, exposing, orchestrating and moving data, and that new opportunities present themselves, both for meeting a user’s desire for data portability and a company’s desire to meet their costs and make a profit.

As Google CEO Eric Schmidt is reported to have said at the 2006 Web 2.0 Summit,

“The more we can, for example, let users move their data around, never trap the data of an end-user, let them move it if they don't like us, the better.”

It is important to note that most of the necessary technology and standards already exist. The issue is primarily one of adoption, and of disruption to existing modes of operation, allied with the capability to assemble the pieces in such a way as to facilitate accelerated deployment.

Moving beyond partisanship to the Semantic Web, Web 2.0, or any of the other labels currently prevalent within the technology space, our work on the Talis Platform adopts a pragmatic approach to providing a robust and cost-effective set of infrastructure services upon which a wide range of applications may be built, both within and across vertical market segments.

Today, it is difficult for applications to fully realise the potential of structured data distributed across the wider web, yet if we are to approach the opportunities presented by the Semantic Web - the Data Web - these obstacles must be overcome, and that promise must move from the world’s research laboratories to the web sites that we all frequent on a daily basis. There are numerous reasons for these difficulties, but they might principally be considered as;

• diverse data structures
• scalability
• performance issues, given the lack of access to common indexes
• the absence of an effective means of uniquely and reliably addressing specific searches or their results
• a restrictive attitude to data sharing.

Fundamentally, rapid and complex interactions with data remain the preserve of the database; a carefully constructed and heavily optimised application that depends for its success upon the generation of indices far in advance of any query being submitted. A search through a large database for a single piece of information does not, in fact, mean the software examining each record in turn until those matching the query are found. Instead, pre-computed indices that have been generated in order to allow the rapid narrowing of a search are queried, and a significantly smaller set of records is then selected for closer examination in answering the query. Similarly, in searching for a street address in London, the searcher does not move from house to house, linearly. Instead, they consult the index of an A to Z guide, find the page on which the street is mapped, then find the grid square within that page. Upon arrival in the physical street, the searcher is unlikely to start at one end of the street and continue to the end, checking every house until they reach the address they seek. Rather, prior intelligence is applied to work out roughly how far along the street a particular number - 100, say - is likely to fall. The searcher moves rapidly to the approximate area, and then examines houses more carefully in order first to validate their guestimate and second to locate the exact property they seek.

Databases work very well, but they continue to rely upon this pre-computation of indices and, as such, they tend to require both detailed prior knowledge of any structure to the data they hold and reasonably tight control over the movement and evolution of the data. When individual records change, indices need to be updated or recalculated. In large databases, where more than one index is involved in some complex intersecting query, even the physical location of individual records and indices becomes highly significant, as those minuscule delays required to pass information from one part of a network to another rapidly add up. For these reasons, and more, the effective database has remained very much outside the network cloud. Web based applications certainly query databases, but those queries are passed - in their entirety - to databases that discover an answer and then report it back out onto the web. All of the internal processes that turn a query into a result take place offline, and this reality of modern database design ensures that interaction with data - as envisaged in the Semantic Web - is currently incapable of taking place within the cloud at scale whilst retaining acceptable rates of performance.

Consider, instead, a notional ‘database’ running inside the cloud. This database is agnostic as to data provenance, format and structure, and is exposed via a set of discoverable web services in such a way that any third party is able both to declare their own data table and to expose it to others for query and other manipulation. The name of each table is uniquely and universally addressable and each item within the table - each data record - is itself a logical refinement of that address. Now anyone can create a table which has pointers to data in any other public table, and those pointers create a web of intermeshed data. Any table can be queried if you have the appropriate permissions. Sets of tables can be combined in a union query or turned into a materialised aggregation or view. There is a special web of data query which, if given a dataset, will retrieve other records by following the web of data pointers. In this way you can navigate around the web of data from record to record much like you can between documents by following hyperlinks on today’s web. As well as offering access to the original data, it becomes feasible to offer direct access to the aggregations, and for those aggregations to evolve as the underlying data upon which they are based changes. Permission to query or otherwise use tables you do not own is based on the sharing permission of those tables and may require a subscription or contract with the data owner, or the data may be under an open data license or otherwise free to use.

Now consider that individual items in these notional database tables can in fact be structured data like XML or RDF, semi-structured like HTML, or binary like a JPEG image. This means the database can operate as a file system with the ability to add metadata to its contents. The database is optimised for extremely rapid query and data mining rather than for update transaction processing. Queries can be fired into the database as simple REST URLs by pasting them into a browser and the data is returned as RSS or JSON for easy integration into a third party application’s interface.

Existing applications and databases can be connected into this world wide database via a ‘semantic web server’, allowing data in a legacy system to be made available as part of the wider web of data. The world wide database has the concept of fully managed tables (the W2DB has the master data and handles updates) or partially managed (where the W2DB is synchronised with the external master system) or a remote system which can only support certain query modes.

The Talis Platform supports the creation of domain-specific data platforms on top on this core W2DB. Once available, the data can then be orchestrated with domain specific web services to create powerful applications very simply; so simply, indeed, that website owners and bloggers can build applications as well as professional software developers.

The Talis Platform is a domain-neutral technology base for building distributed information services. Groups of these services can be combined to form vertically specialised platforms such as that already being demonstrated in the library domain. Instances of the Platform services may be deployed privately to provide for the needs of some niche application, or exposed publicly for leveraging in an open and global context.

Contrast the generic Talis Platform - a horizontal Information Platform - with its domain-specific variants as vertical Application Platforms. The former may be thought of as an Information Grid providing abstracted facilities for storing, distributing and coordinating large quantities of information, whereas the latter brings the additional complexity - and opportunity - of domain knowledge in the form of specific data structures, business logic, etc.

The Talis Platform is intended from the outset to be modular, scalable, and extensible. Each core component is exposed via a set of documented APIs suitable for communicating with other Platform services, or enmeshing within some third party application independent of all other areas of the Platform.

To be continued...

Technorati Tags: open data, Participation, Platforms, Semantic Web, Talis, Talis Platform, W3C, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, web services, web2con

Posted by Paul Miller at 11:34 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Nova Spivack talks with Talis about Web 3.0 and more

In our latest Talking with Talis podcast, I talk with Radar Networks' Founder and CEO, Nova Spivack.

Radar Networks is a stealth-mode Bay Area technology startup closely associated with the pragmatic implementation of the Semantic Web popularly referred to as 'Web 3.0.' During our conversation, we cover some of Nova's background before exploring his views on the Semantic Web, the way in which it is currently perceived, and the opportunity for companies such as his to deliver its potential in the mainstream Web of today.

Listen Now | Download MP3 [56 mins, 39 Mb]

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

• Active RDF
• Amazon
• Atom
• Danny Ayers
• Vannevar Bush, and his ground-breaking article from 1945
• Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organises (CALO)
• DARPA
• Ian Davis
• Developer.com
• Dice
• Digg
• Stephen Downes on the Semantic Web, and my response
• Earthweb
• Flickr
• Gamelan
• Garlik
• Kingsley Idehen
• Jena
• Joost
• Kowari
• Ray Kurzweil
• Leapfrog Ventures
• Metaweb
• Microformats
• Minding the Planet, and a post entitled 'How the WebOS evolves?'
• Ted Nelson
• OWL
• Radar Networks
• RealTravel
• Resource Description Framework (RDF)
• RDF Site Summary (RSS)
• Peter Rip
• Slashdot
• SPARQL
• SRI
• Talis
• Thinking Machines
• Kristinn Thórisson
• Tucana
• Vulcan Capital
• Zepheira

This conversation was conducted over Skype on Thursday 22 March 2007, recorded with Ecamm Network's Call Recorder for Skype, and edited in Garageband.

Technorati Tags: Nova Spivack, Participation, Platforms, Podcasting, Radar Networks, RDF, Semantic Web, Standards, SWEO, Talis, Talis Platform, Talking with Talis, W3C, Web 2.0, Web 3.0

Posted by Paul Miller at 02:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

22 March 2007

Will the Semantic Web fail ?

I've been a long-time reader of Stephen Downes' OLDaily, but had never really noticed his Half an Hour site. I'm therefore grateful to my colleague, Nad, for bringing a recent post from that site to my attention. Stephen subsequently linked to the post himself, from the 21 March OLDaily, as Slashdot sat up and took notice;

“Maybe I should have given it a different title - but sheesh, someone has to say it. Here is the central idea: 'The Semantic Web will never work because it depends on businesses working together, on them cooperating.' Readers might not like the examples that were top-of-mind last night (or my peeved state about Yahoo killing my Flickr account) but readers of this newsletter have over the last seven years seen an unending list of examples.”
(my emphasis)

Stephen's premise, then, is that the commercial sector's natural tendencies to compete, to differentiate, and to shaft the competition make them incapable of co-operating on getting the pieces in place for a Semantic Web such as that envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee et al in that oft-cited Scientific American piece.

Stephen writes;

“The Semantic Web will never work because it depends on businesses working together, on them cooperating.

We are talking about the most conservative bunch of people in the world, people who believe in greed and cut-throat business ethics. People who would steal one another's property if it weren't nailed down. People like, well, Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch.

And they're all going to play nice and create one seamless Semantic Web that will work between companies - competing entities choreographic their responses so they can work together to grant you a seamless experience?

Not a chance.”

What a balanced view of the commercial sector... :-)

It gets worse;

“The future is not in the Semantic Web (or in Java, or in enterprise computing - all for the same reason). Careers based on that premise will founder. Because the people saying all the semantic-webbish things - speak the same language, standardize your work, orchestrate the services - are the people who will shut down the pipes, change the standards, and look out for their own interests (at the expense of yours).

I don't trust any of them. Not even as far as I could throw them. Because I know they'd sell me down the river in a minute, if it meant one iota of business advantage. You know this too.”

Leaving aside, for a moment, the fact that even proto-members of the evil commercial sector made a perfectly adequate job of (eventually) agreeing such things as voltage, current, power grids, communications network frequencies and more, I have a little more faith than Stephen appears to in a market's ability to innovate effectively, to compete forcefully, and to recognise the point at which the previously differentiating becomes commodity; the point at which being different stops being an asset and starts being a liability.

To be fair, some of the more idealistic components of that early semantic web vision are a long way from the reality being built on the ground by the likes of Radar Networks, Metaweb, ourselves here at Talis, Garlik, Segala and more. The 'one true ontology', if it ever received serious consideration, is nowhere to be seen, and the modern reality is one based upon pragmatism, sound and scalable technology for manipulating data, and a recognition that very different value propositions must be made and managed within and between participating organisations.

Rather than setting out to engineer Utopia, those active today in deploying the technologies of the semantic web are working with what they find, and assisting existing applications to open up, to become truly enmeshed within the architecture of the web, and to add value by leveraging resources from across a range of repositories.

Yahoo!/Flickr with their username silliness, and Google with its api realignment, are not the semantic web, but nor did they claim to be. A broader set of trends, such as the rise of utility computing and increased recognition of the value of open data (whether personal clickstream, the output of scholarly publishing, state-funded geospatial data, or whatever) fall squarely within the realm of taking the semantic web mainstream. These are as important - if not more so - as W3C's efforts around RDF, OWL etc. However unfortunate the label, perhaps the current enthusiasm (from the outside, predominantly) for calling this intersection of Web 2.0 exuberance and Semantic Web science 'Web 3.0' has some differentiating value.

The current generation of Web 2.0 darlings might have a tendency to lock their data down, merely exposing it via their own widgets, blog plugins, and other sticky applets. The current generation of Semantic Web discourse, too, may have a tendency to be overly exact, purist, and disconnected from the realities of actual implementation outside the laboratory. Both of these (exaggerated) 'facts' are shifting, though. There is a recognition, for example, as Eric Schmidt has been amongst those saying, that data must be more freely exchanged;

“The more we can, for example, let users move their data around, never trap the data of an end-user, let them move it if they don't like us, the better.”

There is no reason whatsoever for interconnecting Webs of Data to be beyond our short-term reach. There is no reason for fiercely competing companies not to recognise the value in gaining access to low-level data and functions that also benefit their competitors; and for all of them to simply move the competition to a new level, based upon the latest iteration in commoditisation of the data with which they previously differentiated. This doesn't require some grand and magnanimous multi-party agreement. It simply requires early adopters (Metaweb's Freebase being one good example, but there will be more) to get out and to do it. None of the incumbent services that they challenge present insurmountable switching costs to their users, and they will simply face a business decision as to whether they adapt... or become irrelevant.

Why not come and talk to us? See what can be done, and help progress to the next stage in the journey. All-encompassing Semantic Web? No. Pragmatic and useful unlocking of the Web of Data? Oh yes.

CC-licensed pic by Stuart Yeates.

Technorati Tags: Participation, Platforms, Garlik, Radar Networks, Segala, Semantic Web, slashdot, Stephen Downes, Talis, Talis Platform, Web 3.0

Posted by Paul Miller at 05:01 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Tara Hunt talks with Talis about nurturing Communities online

In our latest Talking with Talis podcast, I talk with Tara Hunt from the Citizen Agency. We cover some of the issues raised in her presentation to the recent Future of Web Apps conference in London, and explore how - and why - organisations are setting about 'building' communities of passionate and engaged users.

Listen Now | Download MP3 [51 mins, 35 Mb]

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

• Citizen Space
• Community 2.0 conference
• Coworking
• Flock
• The Hat Factory
• Magnolia
• Chris Messina
• Brad Neuberg on Coworking
• Plazes
• Revolution OS documentary
• Riya
• Scrapblog
• SpreadFirefox.com
• Threadless
• Twitter

This conversation was conducted as a SkypeOut call to a US telephone on Wednesday 21 March 2007, recorded with Ecamm Network's Call Recorder for Skype, and edited in Garageband.

Technorati Tags: Cluetrain, FOWALondon07, FOWALondon2007, Participation, Podcasting, Citizen Agency, Tara Hunt, Talis, Talking with Talis, TDN

Posted by Paul Miller at 12:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

21 March 2007

Sun takes their Grid offering to the next level

All the (deserved) fuss around Amazon's utility computing offerings rather took the limelight away from Sun. It was therefore interesting to spend part of this evening's encounter with the UK motorway network listening to a Sun Microsystems podcast on the latest iteration of their Sun Grid, and the forthcoming apis that will allow developers to call upon it at will.

Technorati Tags: Amazon, API, AWS, Grid, Sun, Talis, Talis Platform

Posted by Paul Miller at 10:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

20 March 2007

Putting attention to work

I've blogged about 'attention' several times here, on Panlibus, and elsewhere, stressing more than once the critical importance both of freeing our attention data (cf the Attention Trust), and of finding ways to put that clickstream - that Database of Intentions - to work.

Sam Sethi posted to Vecosys today, drawing my attention (no pun intended) to an attention-related group of which I had been unaware; the APML working group.

As their website states;

“APML will allow users to export and use their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows them to export their reading lists from Feed Readers.

The idea is to boil down all forms of Attention Data – including Browser History, OPML, Attention.XML, Email etc – to a portable file format containing a description of ranked user interests.”

...

“The APML Workgroup is tasked with converting the current specification into an agreed standard. We invite all the players in or around the 'Attention Economy' to join us in realizing APML.”

I don't know - yet - if APML is the answer, but I do know that there is space for a straightforward means of capturing and expressing the ways in which I allocate my attention... and associating this with my intention at the time. Capturing the clickstream is a start, but the real value comes as we gain the ability to associate the resources on which I spend time with the context in which I was operating, and to differentiate my (probably) quite different behaviours as I search for work-related resources, family holidays and birthday presents.

It's one thing to be able to export my purchasing history from Amazon and share it with Borders. It's something else entirely - and something profoundly more empowering - to be able to aggregate my behaviour across a range of applications and to make meaningful use of that knowledge in improving my experience of those applications and of others as yet unvisited.

Given an aggregate view onto the combined usage of a set of services by myself and others, how might we mine that dataset in order to build something better? How much do we need to know, from how many people, over how long a period, to deliver something fundamentally different?

Of course, I very much doubt that the vast majority of users will wish to be bothered with logging their own attention. How might we, instead, make it straightforward for one of those users to request that a site in which they have invested their attention share relevant data with a competitor? How might the company of which I am an employee, the council to which I am a (council) tax payer, or the institution at which I am a student gain appropriate access to that data, and use it to enrich my experience and the experiences of my peers?

Is APML a step along that path? I look forward to finding out.

Today's CC-licensed image from Flickr is by the hollabackbackers, with a link far less obtuse than our usual!

Technorati Tags: attention, AttentionTrust, APML, Talis, Talis Platform, Vecosys, Web 3.0

Posted by Paul Miller at 10:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Google gets the Euro-evangelism bug

My colleague Lee Cox draws my attention to a piece in this morning's Bookseller briefing, citing a longer piece in today's Financial Times. Reading both, I'd hopefully have got there in the end, but thanks to Lee for short-circuiting the process!

To quote Andy Bounds and Richard Waters' piece in the FT,

“Google is seeking to hire a network of lobbyists in capitals across Europe as it tries to shape debate over pressing internet policy issues, from copyright to online privacy.

Google this month advertised for recruits in at least 10 capitals with a passion for 'the expansion of a free and open internet'.”

Now there's a good idea! The AAP and their litigious friends will doubtless bemoan this opportunity for further eroding their right to fleece everyone in sight, blah, blah, blah, but to my mind Google's evangelism effort in this space is to be welcomed. Yes, they're a commercial organisation. Yes, of course they want to generate a profit. Yes, of course we'd be completely insane to 'give' everything to any one organisation; Google, Microsoft, or anyone else.

But as an exercise in bringing the complex set of interrelated issues to policy makers' attention? As an opportunity to challenge some of the frankly insane interpretations of copyright and ownership with which we're meant to live, it's a good thing. Tied into broader discussions of 'Open Data', and linked to noises from Google such as Eric Schmidt's statement to last year's Web 2.0 Summit, I have no problem with them being near the front of the charge in this area.

Open Data ('open' needn't always mean 'free'), available to Google, Talis, Microsoft, Amazon, and whoever else has the wherewithal to aggregate, orchestrate and add value? It's a great opportunity. Google can build businesses that attempt to monetise the aggregate. So can others. Google stands to gain from opening access to data, as it gives them so much more to work with. It's also a huge risk for them (and others), as they have to innovate so much harder, and make the data do so much more, in order to differentiate their own offering from that of anyone else accessing the same pool.

I very much look forward to seeing where this one goes, and to engaging with Google's evangelising in this space.

Technorati Tags: Bookseller, Financial Times, Google, Government, open data, FT, Talis

Posted by Paul Miller at 11:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

19 March 2007

Danny Ayers talks with Talis about the Semantic Web

In our latest Talking with Talis podcast, I talk with Semantic Web developer and evangelist, Danny Ayers. We discuss the Semantic Web and the notion of Linked Data, before touching briefly upon Metaweb's Freebase, which had just been released at the time.

Listen Now | Download MP3 [52 mins, 36 Mb]

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

• Disco Semantic Web browser
• Last.fm
• Longwell
• Metaweb
• Cory Doctorow on Metacrap
• Musicbrainz
• OpenID
• PICS
• Semantic Mediawiki
• Semantic Web
• Semantic Web layercake diagram
• Semantic Wikipedia
• SWEO
• SWEO Community Projects
• Wikipedia
• Yahoo! Pipes

This conversation was conducted by telephone on Wednesday 14 March 2007, edited in Audacity, and tidied up with Levelator.

Technorati Tags: Podcasting, Danny Ayers, Semantic Web, SWEO, Talis, Talking with Talis

Posted by Paul Miller at 09:24 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Web content labelling in the mainstream media

Paul Walsh over at Segala draws my attention to a nice piece in today's Guardian newspaper here in the UK. Paul and I spoke for a podcast towards the end of last year, which covers much of the same ground.

Incidentally, I spotted a piece in the Business section of yesterday's Independent that seemed related. The piece is focussed on the bickering between Viacom and Google, but hidden amongst the legal petulance and scarily humungous damages being sought, there lurked mention of something called the “Automated Content Access Protocol.” Quoting from the article (which may or may not be ironic!);

“Bloggers and websites increasingly use newspaper articles to attract users, provoke debate and sell advertising on their sites. 'This is a big issue,' says Larry Kilman of the World Association of Newspapers. 'If a company like Google is using content and selling advertisements around it, that is of concern to many newspapers and publishers.' The association, with partners including the global news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP), Macmillan Publishers and Independent News & Media (parent group of The Independent on Sunday), is working to create an international protocol to regulate online use of newspaper content.

The Automated Content Access Protocol (Acap) would let owners of published content communicate permission information automatically in a form recognised by internet search engines. This would allow legitimate online users to comply easily and quickly with copyright law. Lawyers say such an international standard would be immensely useful. But making it work requires absolute clarity about what is protected by copyright and how it can be enforced.”

...

“British law allows quoting of newspaper articles for criticism or review, but does not permit republication of entire articles. 'There is an urban myth that you can quote 400 words for free,' says Mr Toner, 'but no law says that.' Mr Forbes explains: 'Where websites republish so that readers do not have to go to the original newspaper in order to read the whole article, that is infringement.'”

As Paul said in email over the weekend,

“isn't this just duplicating the Creative Commons Licences”

Well, maybe. But it also appears to be asserting a different set of permissions, and for a very different (though not necessarily wrong) purpose. It would be interesting to see the extent to which some of Paul's work around content labels could be leveraged to support this use case before ACAP run off and invent yet another solution...

Technorati Tags: ACAP, copyright, Segala, Talis

Posted by Paul Miller at 11:09 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

14 March 2007

Mapping the Enterprise 2.0 meme

In another of those 'meme maps' that seem so popular these days, Dan Farber draws my attention to Stephen Danelutti's visualisation of the evolving Enterprise 2.0 space.

As Dan notes,

“It's a good place to get the discussion started on the obvious trends impacting business models, the workplace, customer engagement and technology. Turning the discussion into a day-to-day, steady embrace of enterprise 2.0 concepts and strategic initiatives that cascade through an organization is the challenge.”
(my emphasis)

That, surely, is the trick. Not to criticise Stephen's diagram specifically, but so many of the terms that we use in shaping discussion of this space are either no-brainers (which intelligent organisation today wouldn't aspire to 'transparency'?) or so broad that they cover a multitude of possible meanings.

Agreeing the broad directions and the high level concepts is an important start. But, as with the broader Web 2.0 space and emerging interest around 'Web 3.0', the devil is in the detail and the proof is in the implementation.

Technorati Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Talis, Web 2.0, Web 3.0

Posted by Paul Miller at 10:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The mantra of entrenched industries, says O'Reilly...

It's not often that I post something to both Nodalities and Panlibus, but this short post from Tim O'Reilly resonated (in different ways) with things I've been thinking about recently in each space.

As he writes, himself quoting O'Reilly Media's CIO,

“The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.”

So true, on so many levels. And so bad...

Technorati Tags: Talis, Tim OReilly

Posted by Paul Miller at 10:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Open Data 2007... again

Last week, I wrote about the Open Data 2007 event in New York. This took place yesterday, and Alex Iskold has a nice write-up over on Read/Write Web.

Technorati Tags: attention, AttentionTrust, open data, Talis, Talis Community Licence, Talis Community License

Posted by Paul Miller at 03:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

13 March 2007

The truth about 'free' ?

via Jeff Barr's blog - “Free: a Tactic, not a Business Model”, by Anne Zelenka.

Thoughts?

Technorati Tags: Talis

Posted by Paul Miller at 08:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Web 3.0 ?

Having read the title, many of you are doubtless scrabbling desperately for your keyboard or mouse, intent on moving rapidly away from this latest vacuous piece of opportunistic marketing fluff, but please stay your hand a moment as there may actually be something to this 'Web 3.0' meme despite the unfortunate name.

Only a few short years ago, things were so much simpler. There was The Web. Full stop. There was far too much brochureware. There were a growing number of relatively crude transactional sites such as Amazon. There were a slew of 'family web sites', put up by those with only a cursory grasp of FrontPage. The Web was, pretty much, a one way flow of information from 'out there' trickling slowly down the 56k modem to our computers, with the occasional squirting of the odd packet the other way when we wanted to buy the first Harry Potter book.

Off to one side, and almost totally invisible unless you went looking, was the notion of something richer, in which the structure, context and meaning behind web resources was put to work in delivering a Semantic Web. The idea seemed good, but few in the mainstream held out much hope of seeing it progress beyond the labs in which its minutiae were endlessly debated.

Finally, though, some of the potential laid out all those years ago is beginning to coalesce into tangible applications sufficiently concrete to attract real money, real investors, and real business cases alongside the denizens of the ivory towers and the serial perambulators of the conference circuit. How well the two groups co-exist in this shared space remains to be seen. I'd suggest, though, that if they're sufficiently open minded, both have much to learn from the other.

As John Borland reported of Zepheira's Eric Miller in yesterday's Technology Review piece;

“Five years before, he'd agreed to lead a diverse group of researchers working on a project called the Semantic Web, which seeks to give computers the ability--the seeming intelligence--to understand content on the World Wide Web. At the time, he'd made a list of goals, a copy of which he now held in his hand. If he'd achieved those goals, his part of the job was done.

Taking stock on the beach, he crossed off items one by one. The Semantic Web initiative's basic standards were in place; big companies were involved; startups were merging or being purchased; analysts and national and international newspapers, not just technical publications, were writing about the project. Only a single item remained: taking the technology mainstream. Maybe it was time to make this happen himself, he thought. Time to move into the business world at last.”
(my emphasis)

There's also a lot to learn from the unashamedly flamboyant marketing and technological pragmatism of those lumped under another of those vague, frustrating, but often effective terms; Web 2.0. And, as Tim O'Reilly wrote at the weekend,

“In short, it sounds like the bottom-up approach to Web 2.0 and the current thinking on the Semantic Web are growing closer together every day.”

I couldn't agree more, and it's good to see Tim endorsing a belief upon which we are pinning the long-term evolution of our business!

Borland continues;

“The Semantic Web community's grandest visions, of data-surfing computer servants that automatically reason their way through problems, have yet to be fulfilled. But the basic technologies that Miller shepherded through research labs and standards committees are joining the everyday Web. They can be found everywhere--on entertainment and travel sites, in business and scientific databases--and are forming the core of what some promoters call a nascent 'Web 3.0.'”

Joost, that attention-grabbing latest venture from the founders of Skype? Stuffed full of RDF. Also, as Borland highlights in his piece,

“An intriguing, if stealthy, company called Metaweb Technologies, spun out of Applied Minds by parallel-computing pioneer Danny Hillis, is promising to 'extract ordered knowledge out of the information chaos that is the current Internet,' according to its website. Hillis has previously written about a 'Knowledge Web' with data-organization characteristics similar to those that Berners-Lee champions, but he has not yet said whether Metaweb will be based on Semantic Web standards.”

News of Metaweb's Freebase has been oft-reported over the past few days, including a Markoff piece in the New York Times on 9 March, Dan Farber covering it for ZDNet.com and Mike Arrington for TechCrunch the same day, and Tim O'Reilly getting in early on 8 March and following through on the 10th.

Freebase is an interesting implementation of some of the more useful bits of Semantic Webbiness; and it's something I really believed Amazon are/were about to do. It's such an obvious next step from S3, EC2 and SQS. Maybe they still will. Maybe they were never going to and I'm getting ahead of myself.

Markoff's piece in the New York Times ends;

“All of the information in Freebase will be available under a license that makes it freely shareable, Mr. Hillis said. In the future, he said, the company plans to create a business by organizing proprietary information in a similar fashion.”

That, surely, is the important piece; and not just to generate revenue! So much of the data with which our corporations are awash, whether we subscribe to Open Data principles or not, is not necessarily something we wish to just dump into the pool. Instead, surely we want the ability to place it in some defined - and visible - store of our own, undertake operations on that finite store in ways that merely extend that which we'd traditionally do inside the enterprise, and then make conscious decisions as to the ways in which it is introduced to (and consumes from) the flow?

I don't (necessarily) want 'my' data only to exist in isolation or in the common pot. I need to be able to form and dissolve all sorts of ad hoc groupings at will, and to have the ability to grant various levels of access inside and outside my own organisation. As we move forward, the capabilities of the technologies deployed by ourselves, by Metaweb, or by Radar Networks make those sorts of requirements feasible. The World Wide Database, the Data Web, need not be a one-size-fits-all bucket, but global views across the rich detail of its facets should certainly be offered.

We stand at a point - as mainstream media coverage and running code both demonstrate - beyond which it is finally possible to unlock all of the structured data we do such a good job of hiding away, offering it up to be exploited within a range of applications spread throughout the cloud and often (if we permit it) outside our control.

Watch this space, and related blogs such as Nova Spivack's Minding the Planet, for more on how data - and the ways in which we store, manipulate, control, own and expose it - is shaping the next leap forwards on the web, atop Tim Berners-Lee's foundations and the Web 2.0 shift from passive consumption to active participation. It'll be fun... :-)

As to whether 'Web 3.0' is the best name for this evolution? I'll reserve judgement, for now, and direct you to John Markoff's much-cited piece in the New York Times last November. What do you think?

'How the WebOS Evolves?' image by Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, described in more detail here.

Technorati Tags: AWS, EC2, eric miller, Nova Spivack, open data, SQS, Radar Networks, RDF, S3, Semantic Web, Talis, Talis Community Licence, Talis Community License, Talis Platform, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, web services

Posted by Paul Miller at 03:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

12 March 2007

Technology Review and the other Miller

Looking at MIT's Technology Review today, it was great to see a 'Web 3.0'-ish piece on another of those pesky Millers; Eric.

For someone our age, it feels as if I've known Eric for ever. A quick bit of arithmetic, however, contracts 'forever' to a rather more manageable decade or so, as we met in a bar in Canterbury in April 1996.

From there, it was a fascinating journey past kangaroos, the tasting of New York wine in Washington hotel rooms (thank you, Diane Hillmann), the odd data model or two, and a memorable escape from RDF into the Cretan interior.

Eric stayed focussed on data models and semantics, whilst I diverted from the detail for a while.

Clearly it's time for a podcast, to catch up and map out the next decade. Who knows where we'll go next?

Technorati Tags: eric miller, Zepheira, Semantic Web, Talis, Talking with Talis, Web 3.0

Posted by Paul Miller at 10:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Simon Wardley and Koby Amedume of Fotango talk with Talis about commoditising IT, open source, and Zimki

In our latest Talking with Talis podcast I talk with Fotango's Chief Operating Officer, Simon Wardley, and Chief Marketing Officer, Koby Amedume.

We discuss Fotango's take on the commodification of IT, a topic brought to the attention of many by Nick Carr in his 2003 Harvard Business Review piece and the more recent book of similar name. We also touch upon the realities of running a company that releases so much under open source licenses, illustrating the discussion with reference to Fotango's latest offering, Zimki;

“Zimki is everything you love about developing web applications plus a whole lot more. Create, build and deploy web apps quickly, cheaply and without having to worry about administrative overheads like setting up servers, buying hardware or web space.”

The conversation concludes with the announcement of the Zimki Business Application Competition, and it's £10,000 prize for the most compelling new application built on Zimki.

Listen Now | Download MP3 [37 mins, 25 Mb]

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

• Fotango
• Zimki
• IT Doesn't Matter, by Nick Carr
• Web 2.0 company name generator
• eTech 2007
• OSCon 2007
• Web 2.0 Expo

This conversation was conducted by telephone on Thursday 8 March 2007, edited in Audacity, and tidied up with Levelator.

Technorati Tags: Fotango, FOWALondon07, FOWALondon2007, Open Source, Talis, Talking with Talis, zimki

Posted by Paul Miller at 06:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

6 March 2007

Future of Web Apps - presentations and podcasts now online

The conference site has been updated with slides and mp3s. Check it out.

Technorati Tags: FOWALondon07, FOWALondon2007, Talis

Posted by Paul Miller at 07:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Open Data 2007

The Attention Trust has come a long way since I sat in their launch session at the 2005 Web 2.0 Conference, and followed up the interest I felt there by recording one of our earliest podcasts with their Executive Director at the time, Ed Batista.

Indeed, Google CEO Eric Schmidt's words at the 2006 Web 2.0 Summit could have been lifted right out of an Attention Trust manifesto;

“The more we can, for example, let users move their data around, never trap the data of an end-user, let them move it if they don't like us, the better.”

As you might expect with an organisation that's working to encourage responsible use and reuse of an individual's click stream, the Attention Trust has turned it's attention to the same Open Data topic that we're addressing here at Talis with our work on the Talis Community Licence, our agitation, and a growing number of our actions.

Quoting from a blog post on the Attention Trust site,

“It is so easy to get excited about the latest Web 2.0 online media applications that we often lose sight of the fact that underneath all of these innovations is a fundamentally different kind of operating system, one based on open data as opposed to closed proprietary content. If I had to sum it up in a sentence:

Open Data is to media what Open Source is to technology.”

Exactly. The post continues;

“On Tuesday March 13, more than sixty inventors, investors and interpreters of online media will gather to discuss Open Data.”

That sounds interesting. We see Open Data cropping up more and more; in O'Reilly events; as a long-running theme at XTech (where I'm speaking on the topic this year); in media campaigns to 'Free Our Data'; and elsewhere. With some like-minded colleagues, we have an 'open data' panel proposal with W3C for this year's Web conference, and should hear whether or not that's been accepted any day now.

The locks placed upon the flow of data have long seemed unfair. Now it's moved beyond 'fair' or 'unfair', and those same controls on data are beginning to present significant barriers to innovation, and to the delivery of the integrated and intelligent applications toward which so many of us strive.

Closed Data. Closed minds. Proprietary silos. Stagnation.

The ways of the past are a dead end, and the time has come to take a new path. It will be interesting to see whether or not the luminaries gathered “high above the congestion of locals and tourists on the city streets” in the Reuters building have the vision, the bravery and the will to blaze that trail.

Technorati Tags: attention, AttentionTrust, open data, Podcasting, Talis, Talis Community Licence, Talis Community License, Talis Platform, Talking with Talis, Web 2.0

Posted by Paul Miller at 10:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack