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Apparently this is the "short and sweet" version.

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Maybe this article will help me understand why RDF is so great.

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A two-year-old article on microcontent clients: programs that integrate reading, searching, sharing, and publishing all kinds of content. Looks very interesting and might offer some perspective around a project like frassle.

(Update 8/9/04): I read the article. To summarize, it argues that reading, searching, sharing, and publishing content should be integrated. I guess that's just what it seemed like from a cursory skim… well, not every article rewards a careful reading with deeper insight.

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Paul Ford's fictional take on the semantic web.

Update 4/28: I read this article, and it's the same cheerful me-too semantic web kool-aid. We'll all be living in a beautiful taxonomically-described world, and somehow we'll agree on what terminology to use. Yeah right.

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Danny Ayers on blogs as metadata. Right up frassle's alley.

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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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This 2002 interview discusses some cool ideas about emergent properties of online communities. This interaction struck as particularly prescient about the personalization tasks that frassle hopes to take on, which were more recently spelled out by Robin Good.

Dornfest. What's interesting is that Slashdot worked for me to a certain degree, and then to a certain degree it worked for me only to the extent that I was an average Slashdot reader — which I'm not. Even if I turned off everything but the highest rating posting, I still find a lot of noise to signal. What has emerged in the weblog community is that I don't have to become an average Slashdot reader, I can say, I'm kind of like Cory, and I'm kind of like Steven, and I'm kind of like Dave Winer in a certain sort of way. I'll read their things, and they'll point me to the appropriate things, including Slash articles.

So you have this wonderful after-market community. And if I decide, for example, that Dave Winer's focusing too much on politics, I may stop reading his blog, but I'll still get stories from him, via somebody else.

The result is that when I wake up in the morning, I get to see a lot of the stories that come through Slashdot or from the New York Times that are interesting to me, without having to wade through Slashdot to find them.

Johnson. That's a great point. I know people are working on creating the meta-blogs, and I feel there's an incredible opening to create that — the thing like Slashdot that sits on top of all the blogs, and is collectively filtered by all those bloggers and their readers. There are a lot of different versions of that, but I don't see one that's really solved the problem. To me, the thing that has to happen to the individual blogs is that they're still too centered around the personality of the blogger him- or herself. They're still too limited to emailing the blogger, or a crude bulletin board. What I would love to see is, one way or another, by force of personality or whatever, to have these clusters of 100 or 200 or maybe 1,000 people who offered real contributions and collectively owned the thing.

read the whole interview »

How can these writers bear to have such far-reaching, broad, prescient visions but not go and try to implement them? Isn't it a gnawing frustration, having to wait for someone else to try it and watching them bungle it up? Or is it that these visioniaries have seen how difficult, messy, and error-prone the implementation process really is, and they'd prefer just to sit in the background and have their occassional "I told you so"?

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A well written article with a pretty good analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of internet search, starting with the typical lines from librarians and proceeding to describe some of the potential of personalized search.

The way one part links to another reflects the preferences of Web users — and Google tapped into that. Google, in detecting patterns on the Web, harvested meaning from all that madness.

This points the way to one of the next big leaps for search engines: finding meaning in the way a single person searches the Web. In other words, the search engines will study the user's queries and Web habits and, over time, personalize all future searches. Right now, Google and the other search engines don't really know their users.

Unfortunately, it's hard to gain much inspiration from this article since it mostly repeats the adages of semantic web and "intelligent agents" research. In case you hadn't noticed, neither of these fields has made visible progress in search or any other realm. Where AI and explicit metadata techniques were once thought to be critical, approaches that seemed overly simplistic are closing in on the AI vision very quickly. The best example is Google, but AI/semantic web is losing out in other counts. Like right now it seems that a more feasible way of automatically figuring out schedules between people around the world is for Microsoft to achieve 100% market share with Outlook. I certainly don't look forward to that but the semantic web community doesn't seem to understand that it would take years of work by a marketing force as leviathan as Microsoft to achieve the kind of widespread consensus they require.

Not that intelligent agent research couldn't be useful at some point, but if Google wants to bank its future on knowing its users, it's own Blogger and Orkut services are much more valuable.

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Linking up the physical world to crazy new ontologies! Maybe… need to read more closely.