Thursday, September 18, 2003

Syncato If Jon Udell, Sam Ruby, Phil Windley, and many more people find it cool, I say chances are Kimbro Staken's Syncato might become the chic way to make a structured blog in a not-so-distant future. [via Alf Eaton] What do you think? []  links to this post    3:39:32 PM   Aggregator woes For quite a while I've had the lingering suspicion that the Radio Userland built-in news aggregator eats older items. Other Radio bloggers reading this? I'd like to know if you've had the same experience. I've been trying out SharpReader for a while, in parallel. I find that many items show up in it that are swallowed down by the Radiogator before I can see them. I conclude that I miss a considerable number of items by relying on Radio. This in itself is reason enough to switch, as I do not want to miss any of the items in some of those feeds. The Userland aggregator presents new items in reverse chronological order, so its output pretty much looks like a blog (check out the edu_rss aggregator to see what I mean). To read what it has picked up for you, you simply scroll down until you reach the end or a post you've already seen. By contrast, SharpReader is in the class of so-called "three-pane aggregators", in which you need at least one click to view each item, and sometimes two. All I can say for now is that it's a different experience; I'll let Andrew Grumet et al. tell you more about it while I continue getting used to it. This post also appears on channel syndication What do you think? []  links to this post    3:19:32 PM   Beauty and the Web Paul Ford's "Processing on Processing" is a delightful ramble on building what might be called "the Elegant Web". It contains this amusing piece of dialogue about the currently emerging difficulties in defining and deploying the Semantic Web (which Marc will undoubtedly appreciate): [...] But a serious problem sometimes arises when a community that is heavily invested in a set of ideas and practices (in this case, the knowledge representation research community) defines the standard: they solve problems most people don't care about; they build general systems that incorporate decades of research and anticipate hundreds of complex problems no one else knows exists. There's nothing wrong with this, but it leads to strange dialogues between the standards-makers and the wider world. In the case of the Semantic Web, the dialogue is like this: World: I'd love to make my web site smarter, link things together more intelligently. Semantic Web Research Community: Sure! You need a generalized framework for ontology development. World: Okay. That'll help me link things together more easily? SWRC: Even better, it will lead to a giant throbbing robot world-brain that arranges dentist's appointments for you! Just read the Scientific American article. World: Will that be a lot of work? SWRC: No. But even if it is, we will blame you for being too stupid to understand why you need it. World: Huh. I guess so. But I don't understand why I need it, exactly. SWRC: That is because you are too stupid. It's fine, we have your best interests in mind. World: I don't want to nag, but while I read a book on set theory, how about those fancy links? SWRC: Well, if you insist, and can't wait, there's always XLink. World: Aha. That looks handy...except, oh, there's no easily available implementation. And I'm not really sure what it's supposed to do. SWRC: That is because you are lazy and stupid. World: Ah well. Do you think I should apply for grants for the development of my little web site Ftrain.com? Just enough for a monthly unlimited Metrocard would be a help. SWRC: We will have all the grants! Be gone with your bachelor's degree from a second-tier private liberal arts college! And where is your RSS feed? World: Sorry. SWRC: Slacker! Bring me more graduate students, I am hungry! Ford is engaged in a lonely quest to represent his whole site (over a million words, and loads of links) in structured XML chunks, so that it could be browsed in many different ways, and the piece touches upon that. Very interesting. [found via Read/Write Web] This post also appears on channel semantic_web What do you think? []  links to this post    1:44:36 PM   Wiki missions and content What should be done when pages on two separate wikis deal with the same topic? Productive wiki overlap proposes a sensible solution: Every wiki has a mission. Keep the mission in mind when writing the entry. (The related Topic Competition page is also of interest.) This post also appears on channel wiki What do you think? []  links to this post    11:32:39 AM   Come to think of it, I believe there's an unhealthy dependence on representation efficiency in Aaron's proposal. For instance, compressed classical music generally takes up less space than rock music. This translates into less bandwidth and storage use per hour of music played, and classical artists would end up getting fewer votes per hour of music played. There would actually be an incentive in making your music hard to compress! (and what happens to poor John Cage's 4:33?) I'm assuming here that listening time is a fair metric for artist compensation. Does that make sense? What do you think? []  links to this post    9:09:00 AM

Copyleft 2006 Sebastien Paquet. Last update: 4/22/2006; 12:10:14 PM. This theme is based on the SoundWaves (blue) Manila theme.

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