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Read/Write Web
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Monday, 30 June 2003 |
I've been following all the hullaballoo about the Echo Project. Unfortunately there's been more flaming than at a dragons convention. But one of the few calm voices amongst all the hot air is Jon Udell, who today wrote a brilliant essay that got right to the heart of what RSS means.
Jon reminded us that technologies such as RSS are all about helping ordinary people "communicate more easily and more effectively". That's what web technology can achieve...although perhaps in the Echo debate we're not eating our own dogfood :-)
The challenge for web technologists in 2003 is to develop tools that enable people to write structured content for the Web. Once non-technical people can easily do this, we've taken a major step towards the Semantic Web. As Udell puts it:
"Ideally XML, not raw ASCII text, would be the stuff that was written, and refactored, and then mined to produce coherent views. We have no tools that come close to enabling that to happen.
Such tools, combining the power of XML with the flexibility of freeform text, and operating on a universal canvas, are what will really drive mainstream adoption of a two-way Web."
Dave Winer has done an awful lot of work to get us to the cusp of the two-way web. He created a weblog authoring tool and he co-invented personal publishing standards like RSS and XML-RPC. But most of all, it's Dave's ideas and his vision for a two-way web that I value. He is carrying on what Tim Berners-Lee started. As Dave wrote earlier this year:
"Like a lot of technologies people told big stories about something called hypertext, but until Tim Berners-Lee came along there really wasn't something for ordinary people to use. He pushed aside a lot of hairy technical issues, didn't even try to solve them, and cobbled together something that was brain-dead simple and incredibly ugly, and it worked and it was wonderful."
Tim Berners-Lee always wanted a read/write Web and Dave Winer has done more than most to help make this dream a reality. So I hope people lay off Dave and let him do what he does best - create solutions for real people to use.
Jon Udell is also doing a great job in elucidating what we really need in order to achieve a Semantic, two-way Web. Regular people don't want to hear lots of flap about formats and APIs. What we want are easy-to-use XML-based writing tools, and applications to manage our information and subscriptions. Now that would make Mr Safe real happy!
8:01:15 PM 
- See Also: Dave Winer | Echo | Jon Udell | Two-Way Web | Universal Canvas | XML
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Sunday, 29 June 2003 |
One thing that is definitely "funky" is the blogroll in Radio Userland. I updated my blogroll.opml file last night but - no matter what trickery I do - the changes won't publish. That is why my external links look a bit odd right now.
John Robb recently announced that Radio will soon release a new version, which is exciting news for us Radio fans. I look forward to the new features. But I also hope they address the little things, like the continuing blogroll funkiness.
Radio is a wonderful product and I like playing around with it. But there are some kinks in the publishing process which need to be ironed out, pleeeease :-)
postscript: ha ha, typically as soon as I published this I discovered how to force my blogroll to publish. In my browser, I browsed to the location of my blogroll: http://radio.weblogs.com/0105304/gems/blogroll.opml. I noticed it was still displaying the old version of my blogroll. Hmmm, so I refreshed the browser and it updated to the new version. I thought well maybe that will finally update my weblog. Nothing else had worked and I had tried everything - including deleting the blogroll.opml file from my gems folder and its reference from my homepage template, clicking 'Radio --> Publish --> Entire Website', adding the opml file back in, re-publishing, etc.
So anyway after refreshing the blogroll.opml page in my browser, I re-published this post and - lo and behold - my blogroll had finally updated on my homepage. Praise be. I can go and enjoy my Sunday now :-)
9:43:06 AM
- See Also: Radio Userland
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Saturday, 28 June 2003 |
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Tuesday, 24 June 2003 |
I admit it. I regularly check my stats at Technorati and Blogshares, plus I do some search engine checks now and then. Everyone does it. I have to say I'm not exactly setting the world on fire in terms of popularity. I'm probably a 'C List' blogger at most :-)
But I am noticing my Google popularity is increasing for the phrase "Read/Write Web". I'm now at number 2 (as of this writing) and only Dan Gillmor's weblog post titled "The Read-Write Web" is ahead of me. I haven't been officially tracking this, but I do recall I was at number 5 a week or so ago, and buried in the back pages a month ago. So I'm moving up the charts.
I also found a directory of Google API tools. I like GoogleDuel, which pits two words or phrases against each other. I discovered that "two-way web" is 6 times more popular than the phrase "read/write web". That is due to Mr Winer's influence. Also "browser/editor" is 6 times more popular than "universal canvas"...
10:59:25 PM
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Monday, 23 June 2003 |
In my recent articles I've explored the concept of the Universal Canvas, a term made popular by Microsoft when it launched .NET in 2000. But things just got interesting, with the news that Microsoft will phase out its Internet Explorer browser as a standalone product. Internet Explorer will be integrated it into Microsoft's next-generation Operating System codenamed Longhorn.
But what does that mean exactly? How will the Internet Explorer web browser be integrated into the OS and what effect will this have?
In a nutshell, it means IE components will be converted into CLR components. CLR stands for "Common Language Runtime" and it is the engine that drives the .NET platform. The CLR sits on top of the Operating System and provides developers with a set of services.
Ahmet Zorlu speculates that CLR components such as Web Services clients and P2P applications will be introduced into the browser, and current IE components such as the plug-ins and Active-X controls (e.g. Flash Player) will be converted to .NET.
Frans Bouma also thinks the CLR is where IE will end up. He says that HTML or other markup "will be rendered by components embedded in other applications, like helpviewer, blog readers and other tools. Such a component can be embedded in winforms as well, as a control."
But whoa, before we get starry-eyed for the future, let's step back for a moment and review Internet Explorer in its current form. Basically it is made up of a number of components. The two main components are called the WebBrowser control and MSHTML. I won't go into gory details, you can read Microsoft's documentation for that. Suffice to say that Internet Explorer is based on a component architecture - and what's more, as of version 4.0 this became "an integrated part of the Windows shell". Version 5.5 added lots of new functionality, including editing capability using e.g. behaviours and the "contenteditable=true" declaration. IE 6 is the latest version and it looks like we're stuck with it for a while - until Longhorn is released.
.NET is also a component-based architecture, but on a larger scale. Internet Explorer is like a small fish about to be fed to a larger fish called .NET.
This is what it comes down to - IE will become JAFWC (Just Another F*cking Windows Component). It will no longer be a standalone product that can be plugged in to any OS - it will only run on the Windows platform.
So what are the benefits of having Internet Explorer subsumed within the OS? It will have a much cleaner architecture - no more plug-ins and add-ons. And we'll finally get a decent edit control, which will enable the browser to once again be editable as Tim Berners-Lee originally intended it to be. The Universal Canvas may finally become reality, albeit in a Microsoft world.
9:29:42 PM
- See Also: Microsoft | Two-Way Web | Universal Canvas | Web Browsers
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Sunday, 22 June 2003 |
Mark Pilgrim: "I take in a lot of raw data, synthesize it, and spit it back out in ways that many people can understand."
Mark Pilgrim and Neil Deakin are two very smart web developers, but more importantly they both have the ability to document complex web technology in laymans language - so that wannabes can learn it too. This is different to technical writing, which means documenting a piece of software for its end users.
One of the best ways to learn something is to document it. The beauty of the read/write web is that it makes it easy to do this, and easy for everyone to contribute.
Revision 24/7/03: I struck out the sentence about technical writing, because tech writing as a discipline actually covers writing for both wannabes and end users - and many other types of audiences too.
12:41:28 AM
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Thursday, 19 June 2003 |
Dave Winer posts a link to a DaveNet from 2 years ago:
"If it were not possible to read my words without annotation, we'd have to invent a medium that allowed that. But in 2001 we already have such a medium, it's called the Web.
We have tools and servers and all kinds of runtimes on all kinds of operating systems.
We don't need or want another medium. So let's not screw it up.
I think that's what the writers are saying to the geeks."
Those words don't need any annotation ;-)
11:30:27 PM
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Tuesday, 17 June 2003 |
Micah Alpern asked via my Comments form: "Wasn't this term [universal canvas] first popularized by Apple with their failed OpenDoc program?" Only one way to find out and that's pay a visit to Google. I found a definition of OpenDoc, but I didn't see anything that had OpenDoc and Universal Canvas in the same sentence. Anyone know of a link?
Looking for more info, I took a ride on The Wayback Machine and travelled back to 1996 - the Apple OpenDoc website. This snippet from 1996-era Apple is a good summary of what I discovered about OpenDoc:
"You can combine features from your favorite soft-ware applications - including tools to handle text, graphics, photography, spreadsheets, video - even live data links and Internet connections - and use them in a single, simple work environment. The result: a work environment that's truly integrated."
I have to admit, it does sound similar to the universal canvas concept - in a mid-90's sort of way. OpenDoc was all about bringing different software components together into a single application. The Microsoft vision is about bringing together data from different applications, using XML - very post-2000 :-)
Also check out Apple's former product called Cyberdog - does this blurb remind you of something:
"Because Cyberdog uses OpenDoc component technology, it's completely integrated into the operating system and can be extended with other OpenDoc components."
Integrated into the OS, sounds familiar eh. On that topic, this 3-year old Macworld article also seems very prescient now. It was written by Wes George, soon after Microsoft announced its .NET strategy in 2000. Wes said this:
"The thrust of Microsoft.Net is to Vulcan mindmeld the operating system to centralized Microsoft servers by making the browser and the OS one piece of software. All access to information, services, or other applications are controlled from this "universal canvas." And the universal canvas is directly linked to Microsoft at all times."
I don't share the view that Microsoft wants to control us all via centralized servers. But still it is worth considering both the pros and cons of the "universal canvas" - particularly if it does end up integrated into the OS along with the browser.
11:37:18 PM
- See Also: Apple | Richard MacManus | Two-Way Web | Universal Canvas | Web Browsers
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Monday, 16 June 2003 |
Last night I wrote about the Universal Canvas. Today in my RSS newsreader, what should appear but a great post from Steve Gillmor on the same topic. Of course being a pro, Steve made his point way better than me. Microsoft has all the pieces, says Steve, to "create a browser-hosted read-write tool for sharing and routing information."
But the pieces are being fitted together to reveal a jigsaw puzzle that looks suspiciously like the Windows Operating System. As Steve puts it: "We'll get the long-promised Universal Canvas, but sorry folks it will have to be Windows end to end."
Steve also wrote in an earlier post that "Office is now a System, BizTalk is now a System (Jupiter) and IE is part of the Operating System."
All this talk (including from me) about the universal canvas moving away from the browser and into the Office/Operating system, is a little scary. The World Wide Web was originally meant to be a decentralized network of information where people could read and write freely, as in both free beer and free speech.
Sure the browser market has been largely controlled by Microsoft these last few years, but at least browsers run on the World Wide Web - and the Web is as universal as it gets in the digital domain. So where does it leave us if the future canvas for our browsing and creating is embedded in a "system", owned by one company, rather than on a universal network owned by no one? Is the Universal Canvas going to bypass the Web?
10:18:35 PM
- See Also: Microsoft | Richard MacManus | Two-Way Web | Universal Canvas | Web Browsers
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I've been Scobleized. Now I really am part of the blogosphere...yay :-)
9:46:32 PM
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Sunday, 15 June 2003 |
I've become very interested in the "Universal Canvas", a term popularized by Microsoft and subsequently analyzed by Jon Udell. First of all, here are two definitions of the Universal Canvas:
a) From a Microsoft White Paper dated June 2000, entitled Microsoft .NET: Realizing the Next Generation Internet:
"The universal canvas builds upon XML schema to transform the Internet from a read-only environment into a read/write platform, enabling users to interactively create, browse, edit, annotate and analyze information."
b) Jon Udell's definition, from his June 2001 article entitled The universal canvas:
"...a surface on which we view, but also create and edit, words and tables and charts and pictures."
Udell also wrote a follow-up article in August 2001. Recently he's begun to write further on the subject - describing some tools and methods to produce structured, semantic web writing. In particular see his OSCOM keynote.
But lets go back to the beginning, or at least the beginning of when the term 'Universal Canvas' started to be bandied about by Microsoft as part of its .NET push. The 2000 white paper I referred to above described how "Microsoft .NET will take computing and communications far beyond the one-way Web to a rich, collaborative, interactive environment". The web browser was seen as a key component to this vision. In 2000 the web browser was only a "glorified read-only dumb terminal", but Microsoft's goal was to provide a "unified browsing, editing and authoring environment".
However fast forward to 2003 and the web browser is less prevalant in the .NET vision. So what's the focal point for the Universal Canvas now? Well a clue or two was given in a 2002 InfoWorld interview with Microsoft exec Jeff Raikes. He explained the universal canvas means the ability to have "data structures...converge around XML". He said that it "...really revolves around getting to that data structure layer." And when it comes to data, Microsoft has a whole range of Office products that collect and record it. Plus Microsoft's Office products - for example Word and Excel - are all now XML-ized. They can all convert their data into the XML format (although some conversions are uglier than others). Add to this Microsoft's new Office product, InfoPath, which is touted as an XML-based forms tool for writing and editing. And you can see that, rather than the universal canvas being built around the web browser, it is now an Office concept...at least for Microsoft.
The universal canvas is at the heart of what the two-way web is, and what it will become. For that reason I will continue to explore the concept over the coming weeks...
9:51:50 PM
- See Also: Microsoft | Richard MacManus | Two-Way Web | Universal Canvas | Web Browsers | XML
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Thursday, 12 June 2003 |
Asterisk: "...the one thing every Web professional needs, regardless of their main job function, be that IA, Design, Development, what-have-you is adaptability. You know, the ability to wing it."
In New Zealand we have a similar concept called No. 8 Wire mentality, or "kiwi ingenuity" - based on the architypal New Zealand farmer who can invent or fix anything with a trusty piece of no. 8 gauge fencing wire!
It also reminds me of the Web's "View Source" principle. To see how a webpage was created, wanna-be developers can click on "View Source" in their web browser, copy and paste the code into their own editing environment, and modify it to create something new. In other words, adapt an existing thing to your own unique requirements.
Hmmm, back to the kiwi connection. Recently New Zealand celebrated the 50th anniversary of Sir Edmund Hillary's ascent of Mt Everest. In a tv interview this year, Hillary spoke about some characteristics that he identifies with as a person and as a New Zealander: determination, innovation, competitiveness, and being "not smooth" (in terms of suaveness). Sir Edmund's advice to young people today: learn from older people, look at what they achieved, build on that, and "do your own thing". Adapt and create.
10:51:39 PM
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Tuesday, 10 June 2003 |
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Saturday, 7 June 2003 |
Ever listen to The Velvet Underground's 9 minute live version of 'What goes on', from their 1969 Live album Volume 1? The first couple of minutes feature Lou Reed singing verse and chorus. The rest of the song is an extended instrumental and this is where it gets interesting. Each of the 4 instruments has a unique voice, but by collaborating and feeding off one another they produce a sum greater than the parts. There are two rhythm guitars counterpointing each other, an organ noodling - sometimes pushing melody, sometimes following - and a metronomic drumbeat holding it all together.
You can listen to each melodic line - isolate one of the guitars, hum along with the organ, nod your head to the drum beat, urge along with the other guitar. But the beauty, the real music in all this, is the combination - the collaboration - of these instruments, into a glorious harmony....a musical web.
That's a roundabout way of introducing a topic that caught my attention today - generalism vs specialisation, particularly in the field of web technology. I'm a web generalist - in that I don't specialise in programming, or web design, or information architecture, or website management, etc. I do all those things and more, mainly because I get bored if I try to specialise in one thing. Or as a collegue described me today - "you get things done". But still I like to think I have a particular talent for writing and analysis, which are specialist skills.
The truth is, being a web generalist is neither fashionable nor glamourous. Jeffrey Zeldman didn't get where he is today without specialising in one field of web technology (design). But I take heart in a couple of articles I found on the Web today. Ross Mayfield wote a weblog entry a few months ago on the topic of generalism vs specialisation, in response to a post by Azeem Azhar, who picked up the theme from an essay by Paul Saffo written 14 years ago.
Ross puts it nicely: "Convergence of disciplines is where real innovation and discovery occurs." ...like how I experience the Velvet Underground song I mentioned above - substitute "disciplines" for "instruments" :-)
Azeem wrote: "The specialists provide deep insight into specific issues (basically, they teach me), the generalists give a great, evolving overview of the system. They provide new ways of visualising and presenting problems. They provide the narrative. The combination works."
There is a two-way web angle to this. Weblogs in particular have made it easy and fun for individuals to write to the Web. Now collaborative tools are beginning to come into play to enhance weblogs - for example the k-collector tool makes it easy to create and share topics. This is all bringing about convergence of writing and ideas on the Web, and new and interesting things are happening because of it.
ps I knew there was a way to mention The Velvet Underground in my weblog. Hope I haven't broken any blogging rules ;-)
12:02:13 AM
- See Also: Collaboration | Music | Richard MacManus
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Thursday, 5 June 2003 |
I read with interest Jon Udell's OSCOM keynote slides. The main subject is how to write the web "in a rich way" - and by "rich" he means semantic. Udell talks about there being a lack of easy-to-use XML writing tools for the Web. Weblog tools are user-friendly and they are the killer app for web writing, but they lack the ability to create structured XML information. Content Management Systems on the other hand have become bloated with features, making it difficult for non-technical people to use them.
Udell suggests that simple doses of metadata, added consistently to common markup such as titles or class attributes, will help weblogs and CMSs alike bring semantic structure to Web writing.
I did a search around the Web on this topic. There seems to be some confusing terminology out there. Firstly regarding rich text editors - the word "rich" in these products refers to presentational markup. For example: bold, italics, underline, bullet, indent, font type. These products basically emulate what popular word-processing software does. Similarly when Macromedia talk about a Rich Internet Application, they mean a Flash-based browser application. I believe when Udell talks about writing "rich" Web content, he is talking about adding structure and meaning.
Writing to the Web is what weblogs and CMSs are all about. Being able to add metadata to Web content, without having to handcode XML or feed a CMS monster, is the holy grail for these tools. As a Davenet from 2000 stated: "...simplicity is the single biggest thing that's in the way of the Web as an easy writing environment". RSS2.0 is a good example of a simple and easy to understand XML format, which still has rich functionality. We need the same simplicity and richness in the tools we use to write to the Web.
11:42:17 PM
- See Also: Richard MacManus | Semantic Web | XML
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Monday, 2 June 2003 |
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