2003

Whenever I read about the Semantic Web, I am reminded of Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick. One of my favourite chapters of Moby Dick is chapter 42: The Whiteness of the Whale. Here’s an excerpt: “Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not but occasionally awaken in any man’s soul … Read more

Dave Winer says there are 2 ways to approach XML: “…people who think of XML as a programming space, and people who think of it as a literary space.” The first group “love XML for its technical intricacy”. The literary people however “use XML because it is a convenient way to move info between apps”. … Read more

I have moved to a new domain name. Please update your records: New weblog address: http://www.readwriteweb.com New RSS feed: http://www.readwriteweb.com/rss.xml ps the reason I am re-posting this, and my XML as Literature story below, is that my PC crashed tonight and I lost some of my recent posts. Not to mention MS Outlook data and other … Read more

Excellent, I now have Radio Userland’s Trackback enabled. There have been some interesting suggestions for other new Radio features too, so hopefully some of those ideas will get implemented soon. I especially like the idea of modular templates, suggested by John Robb. Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)

Lawrence Lessig on US Presidential candidate Howard Dean’s blogging efforts: “Neutrality aside, though, Governor Dean has earned a special respect. Of course there are issues on which I would disagree with anyone. But I have been struck in reading these posts, and the passion they inspired. They revive a feeling I had as a kid … Read more

The problem with blogging is it’s easy to get distracted by ideas you can’t do anything about. My previous post illustrates this. In it I railed against Microsoft for wanting to build its own proprietory platform for Web applications. I wrote about it because I’m concerned about the future of the World Wide Web, in particular the Web browser. But … Read more

Robert Scoble has written a couple of posts recently about Microsoft products being a platform: 1. Robert quoting Kevin Warbach: “The Internet companies that have thrived while AOL faltered — Microsoft, Amazon.com, eBay, Google — have two things in commons. They are deeply technology-driven, but they see technology not as an end in itself but … Read more

A lot of people are getting pretty excited about “social software”. Bloggers like Joi Ito and Marc Canter are writing with gusto about social software. I’m hearing lots of trendy new acronyms and phrases – FOAF, MetaBlogs, Reputation systems, “web of trust”, “moblogging”, “micro-content”, etc etc. It’s all getting to be a blur. But these are heady times … Read more

Tim O’Reilly writes in Dan Gillmor’s comments: “Simplicity and extensibility should not be orthogonal. And any technology that sets them up as opposed, instead of complements, has clearly done something wrong.” Note: orthogonal means “independent or well separated”. Tim O’Reilly is talking about RSS2.0 (simple) and RSS1.0 (extensible). Lately I’ve been thinking and reading about weblog topics. There … Read more

I’m not usually one to quote long passages of other people’s writing, but I can’t resist quoting Scoble’s post today about ants. In Robert’s vision, the ants represent Microsoft employees and the bees are third-party developers like Marc Canter. I love it when people use literary devices, such as metaphor, in a technical or business context. It encourages … Read more

The subject of topics for weblogs is getting some traction in the blogosphere. There are some promising apps for topics, including k-collector and Topic Exchange. Recently I wrote a post, in response to one by Clay Shirky, to say that weblog posts should be organized by topics in the blogosphere rather than organized by author. Clay Shirky pointed back to … Read more

Don Park reckons that weblogs and websites will converge within the next 2 years time: “People [will] take it for granted that webpages can be edited using their browser. People will also take it for granted that any webpages can be subscribed to with a single-click. Web browsers will be changed to support all this … Read more

Robert Scoble: “…at Microsoft we call Internet apps that aren’t in the browser ‘Smart Clients’”. The web browser is at a crossroads. Microsoft announced in 2003 that it would not release any further “standalone” versions of Internet Explorer – instead it will be embedded in the Operating System (codenamed Longhorn). But along with obsoleting the web browser as … Read more

News today that Userland CEO John Robb has left the company. Dave Winer says about Userland’s future direction: “We’re going to try to do something fun, unique, and powerful with UserLand’s position in the weblog and content tools market, and we’re going to try to include the community in the business, i.e. people will make money.” Sounds … Read more

Couple of interesting comments to my last post. Harvey Kirkpatrick from itopik wrote: “I would argue that all the efforts are complementary and can be automated by some and humanified by others. We are choosing to humanify a bit the process hoping to be a bit more intelligent in our organization as Yahoo was in … Read more