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The demonstration platform for HP Labs' semantic blogging research programme

What is this research program? Sounds cool. I should look for more information.

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Just as I was admiring the scene, a young policeman standing in front of Lenin's Mausoleum waved at me and signaled at me to come over. I strolled there and he asked for my passport. Yuks, another silly passport check on dangerous Asians like me. Maybe he thinks I'm a Chechen terrorist. I handed over my passport, which he examined carefully.

"OK, fine," the blond policeman said in halting English, "but you have committed a crime."

This initially scary story turns out to be rather amusing. Lots of good stuff on this site, too.

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The problem with FOAF/ESF/whatever is that they have no data. If they catch on, this problem would be solved. But until they catch on, they're going to be a pain to use. As if the pain isn't sufficiently evident based on the fact that we refer to an XML protocol, not a web-based service…

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Jessica has posted responses from her friend Kevin, a public librarian, to my post that started a discussion about the services libraries provide. (There is also a comment here.) Most of his responses focus on how difficult it would be to implement these services because of the budgetary and time constraints libraries and their staff face. Naturally, I completely neglected this point in my original post except to say that perhaps my suggestions would work better in a for-profit business than a library. I was writing about how to better serve patrons.

And I'm not sure what he means by being "overly focused on books" or why that's a problem.

Here's what I mean. Books, though wonderful in many ways, do not have anywhere close to the monopoly on information that they used to have. People talk more, they watch TV, they read and write and play on the internet. There are now many more ways of doing what you could only do with books 50 or 100 years ago. So then, what are libraries about: frail printed bound volumes, or uniting people with information, art, and entertainment? If libraries are mostly for books, then you should expect them to continue declining in importance relative to other information sources.

Perhaps what I am trying to do here is describe a different idea of the market where libraries participate: one where people learn and exchange information. This description is certainly broader than the usual idea that a public library is some kind of sacred institution essential to the functioning of a literate democratic society. While the library may be essential, in terms of democratizing knowledge the glory days of libraries are over. And one key advantage of the internet is that it doesn't depend on the reluctant patronage of a cash-strapped government.

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Andrew considers Fred Brooks's notion of conceptual integrity in software: the importance of a consistent underlying vision. Brooks argues that this integrity can only be achieved in software when no more than two people take control of the design (and keep that design alive during development).

I agree wholeheartedly. Whenever people design together, but without a very deep shared understanding, their subtly different motivations and visions are inevitably amplified into huge, gaping dissonances during implementation. It's not too hard to get a thorough shared understanding of a solved problem: you can simply take a few people who went to similar kinds of schools and read the same textbook, and they will probably be able to build you a suspension bridge that works.

But if you are building radically novel kinds of software, the vision of what that software shall be has probably originated in one individual's head. Furthermore, even if that person is an excellent communicator, her vision is probably implictly premised on all sorts of subconscious assumptions that even she can't describe. But as you move from idea to implementation, many of those assumptions will be questioned. The right answers to those questions depend not just on intellect and facts but on intuition. Thus even if a large part of the grand vision has been communicated, a software project will suffer when parts of the implementation can't be checked against the original intuition.

This makes the case for having one person lead the design of a software product. Can you also get away with using two people? I think you can, because when two people know each other very well and respect their own and the other's strengths and weaknesses, they become very aware of the limits of their own intuitions. They can accurately guess how the other will feel about using adjacency lists vs. boundary sets to implement tree structures, or they know to ask. Over time, the shared understanding that develops between these kinds of collaborators is a unique, wonderful, and powerful thing.

Three people, however, make a group. First, it is twice as challenging for each participant to develop his personality such that it best meshes with the others. Second, the question of whether to involve the rest of the group in a given decision at least doubles in complexity. Instead of asking 'What would Bob say?' We now need to ask also 'What would Alice say?'. In between, we have to recall all sorts of information about Alice, like what her last experience with an issue like this was and whether she is in a mood today where she will passively agree to any suggestion rather than risk a confrontation. This information probably takes the place of similar information about Bob in our short-term memory.

These added scaling costs are what I think makes 3+ -person design collaboration so difficult. There are ways that we can attend to a singular collaborator that simply become too difficult with 3 or more people. Developing a meaningful shared understanding goes from being something that two mature people can excel at to something only a rare lucky few can pull off.

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Personally, I have always felt more comfortable interacting with one other person than interacting with a group. Part of my ineptitude (often manifested as shyness) with groups probably comes from growing up as the only child of a single mom. It takes me a while to get comfortable with a particular group of folks, but I can very quickly get a good reading on person. Consequently I am better in chats, dates, and interviews than parties. Consider yourself warned.

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The comment system on this blog blows. It is a nice idea in spirit to make commenting equivalent to posting on your own blog, but the execution in frassle is too complex. I think if I had a simpler, faster way to leave comments, one that didn't require you to register, I would get more comments. From the perspective of frassle, setting up a weblog for each commentor is no big deal, but to a user, "set up your weblog" begins to sound like more of a commitment than you'd want to make just to call me on some bullshit I wrote. So the project for tonight is to build a comment system that first looks like all the other vanilla comment systems on MT/Radio/whatever blogs, and second follows the frassle model as closely as possible.

Here's how I might implement it. Some of this will not make sense unless you know frassle's data model (i.e. unless you are me):

• When you want to leave a comment, you may register/login or post without registering.
• If you post without registering, frassle makes up an fa_feeds entry for you of type local_anonymous. It stores in that entry a secret key that is also sent to your browser so that you have editing privileges over that feed.
• The anonymous option gives you control over a feed as long as you use the browser that has the original cookie. If you later sign up for an account using that browser, your local_anonymous fa_feed is converted to local and the cookie is deleted.
• That anonymous cookie is also used to key into the fa_feeds table to automatically recall your name/email address/home page URL data. Posting updates these fields.

The primary goals are a simple interface and a smooth path from commentor to frassle contributor (aka comments as the gateway drug).

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Interesting basic advice.

I was reading a post by Cesar Brea who notes the coolness of the Event Share Framework (ESF) for RSS. ESF allows blog/news feeds to include data about events—start time, duration, location, and so forth—and can be easily integrated with calendaring applications. For example, you could subscribe to a calendar feed of events in your workplace and have them automatically show up on your Outlook calendar.

Cesar notes some ways to increase the value of sharable calendars:

Imagine a site called calendar.com that aggregates RSS-ESF feeds (the domain name is taken, btw, even though no live site's up). Think Google for events. Search by where you live / travel, time/ date range, keyword. Find person/ organization with events you would like to go to/ attend remotely. Subscribe and get future events and updates sent to your Outlook calendar / PDA calendar automatically. As a person trying to schedule your next cub scout pack meeting, check calendar.com to see when a good date would be based on "related groups'" calendars (e.g., other organizations in your town, like school, church, sports leagues, etc.).

The question of finding "related" calendars is interesting. Note that Cesar suggests exploiting existing physical communities for this information. Of course, with most of my friends carrying out data entry for Friendster, why not just reuse that data? Duh, because it's locked in Friendster.

Friendster, which has the social network data but only primitive communication systems, ends up being a big collector's game.* If Cesar's hypothetical calendar.com could get at that data, it could easily support a scheduling wizard that crawls your social network and suggests times for potential events based on likely interested people, or suggest attendees for an event based on their availability and interest. This is of great value for the user. It would be a good reason for Friendster to create simple APIs (subject to user control so that privacy can be controlled). In fact, if there were useful services like these, I'd happily pay Friendster to make my data available (of course, I am more of an online exhibitionist than most).

Friendster, Inc. probably doesn't believe that's a viable option because it opens up their most valuable asset—the network data of millions of users—to the competition. On the other hand, it also vastly increases the value of that data because it can be used in novel applications that Friendster, Inc. will not be able to invent and implement. Opening up but controlling an API, inviting innovation from small vendors, and then taking over the biggest markets is a good way to make money. It's the Microsoft model. Maybe Friendster should give it a shot.

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* Here's a goofy idea for a metric of the value of a social network service like friendster. Simply run a survey to determine what percentage of users have gotten laid thanks to using the service. Call this the score score. I'd imagine friendster has a pretty low score score, like .001%, but livejournal much higher, perhaps 3%.

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