Thursday, July 11, 2002

Poul Anderson. "I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated." [Jake's Radio 'Blog] 11:10:22 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

More on liveTopics. I gave an initial pitch of some of my ideas today.  Not a pitch that I would like to give to an objective audience but, then, this is only my second day off the job!! I was trying to show how liveTopics and blogPlex fit together. liveTopics really started life as a bootstrap technology for the blogPlex.  blogPlexing depends upon being able to extract meaningful information from what people say on their weblogs.  Until such time as technologies like Cyc or Summarizer (see Share in the sidebar) can deliver the goods I needed something else.  Hence liveTopics was born to allow you to annotate your posts with descriptive concepts.  From a very simple original concept it has taken on a life of its own which is kind of cool. There are two steps on the way to blogPlex that I think are worth sharing.  The first is topicRolling which I have discussed in another recent post.  Briefly topicRolling allows you to publish your topics & subscribe to the topics used by others.  This allows a group of people to develop a shared conceptual vocabulary or BlogSpeak. The second is the super-blog.  This was really Jack Foster Mancilla's idea.  This is an extension of the Blog Topic Table of Contents (TTOC) idea which will be familiar if you click through any of the topic links on my page (or click here).   At the moment the TTOC is an individual affair, however pretty soon I am to provide the ability for a group of people to create a super-blog together. In the same way that the TTOC now lists each of an individuals posts under a topic, the super-blog will list the posts of every member creating a way to see what each member of the group has posted regarding specific concepts.  This makes topicRolling very important.  We will also need tools to support the merging and grouping of topics into topicThemes. My view at the moment is rather than embarking on a massive project to create some kind of control language or standardized vocabulary that we allow Darwinian pressures to select topics.  As has been written elsewhere people will gravitate towards "good" topics and abandon the bad (and there will be tools to help the losers graciously migrate).   The pressure will come from the other users of the plex, in order to be listed you have to use the right topics. I can imagine situations where two similar topics will grow equal in size.  Thats okay.  Clever software can work out that they are synonymous by examing their associations with other topics.  And the use of topicThemes will help to prevent unnecessary isolation. And then we reach the blogPlex itself.  At the moment I envisage this as a service subscribed to many blogs or klogs.  Using the data in each along with the topical metadata to create profiles of bloggers and kloggers. The value of the profiles is that they will allow the blogPlex service to match up bloggers who are writing about similar concepts - who are not already linking to each other.  This is a key point because it is this that enables new communities to form.   [Curiouser and curiouser!] 10:48:28 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

The Tao of Topic Maps. The TAO of Topic Maps. The TAO of Topic Maps introduces topic maps, “a new ISO standard for describing knowledge structures and associating them with information resources.” [Ron Lusk: Ron's K-Logs] » Wow cool.  More reading for tomorrow!   [Curiouser and curiouser!] 10:32:37 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

One thing I like about the new XML Web Services Developer Center is the fact that most [but not quite all] have decent, bookmarkable URLs, now if they can just break the long running MSDN tradiation of breaking all the links every month, I'll be really happy. [Simon Fell] 10:29:39 AM    trackback []     Articulate []