I started using Flock as a web browser today. It is like Firefox with drag and drop social media capabilities. Having a widescreen monitor allows me to have more going on at one time. Fortunately my “friends” list is really small. My feeds are numerous though.
A couple years ago I used Ask Jeeves to query “what is the meaning of life?” The top entry explained the concept of “The Singularity“. Given Moore’s Law of computer capability eventually the graph approaches infinity. In other words artificial intelligence will surpass our comprehension. They recommended that one’s purpose in life should be to help program the “seed instructions” for teaching the computer how to learn in such a way that it would always be benevolent towards human kind.
To allow computer intelligence to understand “everything”, all data should be entered into the computer in a way that allows it to be easily comprehended. Google Base wants all data to be entered via a speadsheet that uses specific, predefined labels and attributes. The more boxes that are filled in properly, the more the computer can make sense of the data. Today Google Base knows that I am interested in collecting. When I fill out more boxes it will know that I collect rocks and that I especially like mud concretions from Lake Superior. It will know where pictures of my mud concretions are and may eventually know which ones I would consider selling, the price, method of payment, shipping costs, etc.
Filling out all those boxes could be a hassle though. Just suppose all that data was already on my website and that it was in a format that that Google Base could understand and suppose my website was already supplying RSS feeds that Google (or anyone) could read. This is what Blogware is doing with my data. It is a database management tool that sorts my information into categories. Did you you know you could sort what you read on a Blogware site. If you are only interested in my collections and do not want to see the dozens of family photos or read about blogging you can by bookmarking my collections URL. If you only want to see specific new information as it is published, you can via a feed reader like Bloglines or Newsgator(XML) or if you are not up to speed you can get an e-mail. Do this by clicking on create a reader account in the log in box then choose the e-mail notifications or XML RSS feeds you want. I have a reader account at Heidi Go Seek and she has a feature down the left column a ways that tells her the last time I visited her Blog.
Scoble, always being on the cutting edge, said he wanted a blog service that did OPML.(although I read Scobleizer every day I do not recall him explaining or pointing to why OPML is such a big deal) Apparently this is the next level in publishing your information in such a way that artificially intelligent robots can understand and better use your data. Dave Winer has come out with an OPML editor, validator, and a server. This stuff is too cutting edge for me to understand yet but my guess is that that is a space I will want to be in soon. I belive some people are referring to this as Web 2.0. I recommend reading Sam Walton Taught Google More About How to Dominate the Internet Than Microsoft Ever Did by Robert X. Cringely who says that Web 2.0 = Google. Bill Burnham in RSS and Google Base: Google Feeds Off The Web also gives insite as to how this might work.
Yahoo recently added Deli.cio.us to it arsenal in order to gain advantage in the search services battle.
Ellyssa Kroski has written an excellent article, The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging, which really helped me grasp how to find what I want on the web.
By using My delicious, My flicker, My 43 things, My etc., I have made a quantum leap in finding, organizing, and saving knowledge that will enhance my potential.
I have been wanting an explaination why Robert Scoble and Dave Winer are so passionate about OPML. Today I downloaded and watched Alex Barnett’s screecast called Using OPML 101.
Dave Winer is using his OPML editor to post on his WordPress blog. This stuff is over my head but I am happy to be on the bus and feel the ride is going to get interesting.
Dave Winer just announced that Ray Ozzie, in his Blog, is demonstrating Microsoft’s transparency by describing Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) for RSS and OPML.
Early on, after we had a prototype going, I met with Dave to tell him about it and perhaps get him involved. Immediately at our first meeting he spotted its potential to solve something else he had been thinking about – replicating changes among OPML lists or outlines being managed within different services or by different people. He challenged us to see if the same SSE mechanisms could be applied to OPML. As it turned out, only minor changes were required. In essence, by connecting these dots between what we’d done to extend RSS and his vision for OPML, Dave’s catalyzing a new form of decentralized collaborative outlining.
Here’s the draft spec for SSE, and here’s a FAQ that we put together. A forum where we can talk about it amongst implementers will be forthcoming.
One other important point: We’re releasing the SSE specification under a Creative Commons license – Attribution-ShareAlike. I’m very pleased that Microsoft is supporting the Creative Commons approach; you can see more about this at in the licensing section at the end of the spec.
Dave Winer turned me on to reading Adam Green in his evolving website, Darwinian Web.
Here are a few recent posts:
ARTiFactor 