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Friday, April 19, 2002 |
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Mark Shuttleworth's wild ride
For years I've been using Thawte digital IDs to sign my email messages-- they're still free, even though Thawte is now part of VeriSign. Thawte's founder, Mark Shuttleworth, was the person who first got me interested in client certs, back when he was the maintainer of Sioux (an early Apache-SSL which Mark souped up with a built-in Python interpreter), and was setting himself up as a one-man global certificate authority. VeriSign's acquisition of Thawte produced a tidy sum, and next week Mark's going to spend a chunk of it on a ride into space.
It seems not everyone in Mark's homeland, South Africa, is rooting for Mark. For what it's worth, when I finally got to meet Mark in person -- on a panel at an Internet security conference a few months before the Thawte/VeriSign deal was struck -- he was the same thoughtful, passionate, and deeply competent person I knew from email. Nobody has worked harder, or done more, to make strong crypto and PKI infrastructure widespread and useful.
Have a great ride, Mark. Enjoy the view!
9:23:45 PM 
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Steven Denning on organizational storytelling
Julian Elve points to a Line56 article about a forthcoming book by Steven Denning on Organizational Storytelling (sample first chapter, in PDF). Here is a sample of his argument:
What if narrative and story were not trivial but actually very important? What if narrative is still the instrument by which we all as adults come to make sense of what is happening both in our private lives and in the serious world of organizations and business and government? What if the idea that we have somehow put the natural language of narrative aside or behind us when we grow up, because narrative is the province of children and primitive peoples, is pervasive but mistaken? What if we learn what is going on in the world through the infinite variety of narratives, finding out who did what to whom, or surmising what happened in the past, or what could be or should be done in future? What if story is the very bloodstream of our culture? What if story is the tool by which virtually everything that is of interest to us is communicated?
If all this were true, then storytelling would be a primary mode of business communication, and storytelling tools would be as strategic a technology as transaction-processing monitors and web-services protocol stacks.
5:13:44 PM
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Radio, XML, and the semantic web
How I do I know the semantic web will happen? Because it's what people want. We've had a taste of what happens when structured data is reflected back to us in useful ways on the web. We can organize our lives, buy stuff, and learn things, in ways we dreamed of a decade ago but didn't imagine we'd live to see.
We create vastly more data, in less structured form, every day as we live, work, and communicate. We're only now in the early stages of looping that data back through the web to achieve similar benefits. So of course Radio isn't the endgame. Radio, like the broader movement it's part of, empowers people, not just IT and media organizations, to create these information loops. My point is exactly that Radio's appropriate use of XML makes this possible. It puts XML's power into the hands of users without clobbering them over the head with XML's advanced features and complexity. It helps us get to critical mass. Nothing puzzling about that. Nothing more important, either.
11:35:20 AM
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Using XML appropriately
Reactions to Eating the XML dogfood (in email) suggest I should restate my point. I do think the core XML standards are coming along nicely. No-one anticipates more than me the imminent merger of SQL and XML data management disciplines. OpenLink's Virtuoso, which I explored recently, is an inspiring example of what that kind of hybrid will be. What I believe Sean McGrath is saying about XML is simply: use technology appropriately.
Last year I went to the XML DevCon in NYC and came home rather depressed about the exclusive focus on web-services protocols. Nobody was talking about, or showing, XML-enabled applications that ordinary people could see, touch, understand, and profitably use.
Where is the viral app that does for the end user, by means of XML, what the browser did for the end user by means of HTML? Where are the XML-enabled tools for writing, for personal-information management, for knowledge capture and refinement? [Report from XML DevCon 2001]
Radio is not the endgame by any stretch of the imagination, but it begins to answer some of these questions. Sticking to a minimal subset of XML is part of what makes that possible. This does not mean that DTDs, XML Schema, namespaces, XPath, and XSLT don't matter. They are hugely important. Classically, we have had exquisite control over a relatively small amount of highly structured data (i.e., by means of SQL), and almost no control over vast amounts of semi-structured and unstructured data. It's tantalizing to think we'll have some control over the messages, reports, essays, and other documents that hold the majority of the world's data. It's precisely because this prospect is so exciting that we need to strike the right balance between control and freedom. McGrath is not saying that XML tagging is worthless. There will be a semantic web, and it will require (and reward) a certain level of discipline. But people won't be able to inhabit that semantic web if the XML taxes they must pay are too high. Like everything else, it's finally just about common sense.
10:08:57 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Jon Udell.
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