Temporally Relevant2010-03-10T12:57:07ZJeremieCopyright 2010, JeremieSPHPBLOGWikimat - A Novel Wiki-based Format The first and obvious instinct is to "just use a wiki" and I was heading down that path, but I started having concerns that a single group mindset may form around that wiki, or that the administration itself could play too important of a role. Not only were there these long term organizational concerns, but scale was also troubling me, I don't want to be dealing with one monster database and a huge volume of changes.
The next thought, a much more distributed and decentralized approach, would be to use microformats. This would allow any page anywhere to openly contribute and a bot to do some type of automation and together form their own kind of consensus. I usually love everything about this model, but I also really like the instant gratification of having a wiki, and sometimes microformats tend to focus on individual contributions whereas wikis foster communities.
The answer I arrived at was really quite simple, combine the two, a wikimat :) Just use some simple recognizable keywords that people can plug into any wiki anywhere on the web. Based on that I've come up with these guidelines for a wikimat, which is just a wiki page with some common patterns like:
- First, any wikimat page must be easily identifiable, for instance by putting a unique tag or code word in the title/name/url of the page. - Second, within the wiki's human editable area there should be another unique word to know where software can start looking. - Third, the markup used by the wikimat (if any) should be as minimal and compatible across all wikis as possible, bold, lists, breaks, etc. - Finally, any wiki that gets used to support a wikimat should be listed or identified in some common area for that wikimat (to ease discovery).
It may not make sense what I'm talking about yet, so I'll use an example (perhaps a little US-centric), renewable energy and communities: Lots of individuals and growing numbers of communities are experimenting with renewable energy, but there is very little coordination or structured exchange of success/failures/lessons/etc. A simple renewable-energy wikimat might define keywords for the common types, wind, solar, geo, bio, etc. Then also a bunch of important attribute keywords like funding, start date, status, homepage, people served, and so on. After there's some basic dictionary of these code words, and one important primary unique keyword to identify the wikimat itself (say "Renewmat"), any community can use any existing wiki and start sharing a semi structured experience with the world.
In the example above, a simple renewable energy project wikimat page might be:
Name: Indian Creek Nature Center Date: Saturday, October 7, 2006 Community: Cedar Rapids, IA, US Org: Iowa Renewable Energy Association Type: PV Description: The Nature Center's buildings are a model of efficiency and use a photovoltaic system to produce 40% of their electricity. ...
Then either someone has listed wiki.example.org as one of the sites that has Renewmats to some central place, or web search/bot can discover these automatically. Then third party tools can collect, aggregate, and process the semi-structured information.
Of course, I have a specific wikimat I will be proposing (to the grub-dev list) soon relating to grub and crawling :)
]]>http://www.jeremie.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry071214-2028142007-12-15T00:00:00Z2007-12-15T00:00:00ZNobody will beat Google, but Everybody will: Atlas - Internet Search Infrastructurebusy :)
Here's the summary of Atlas, join the mailing list to partake in the discussion and help evolve the idea:
Atlas - Internet Search Infrastructure
This is a brief overview of a large vision: enabling search to become a part of the Internet's infrastructure. Building on Atlas as an open protocol, search can become a fully distributed and interoperable world-wide community. All of the participants can interact openly and in any role where they believe they can add value to the network.
A search engine can be constructed from many entities serving different roles instead of one monolithic system. These entities are exchanging aggregate information, or knowledge, and can decide with whom they want to work with. To design this working economy based on knowledge, there must be balance between these various entities. Each actor must have incentive to act both for their own benefit and for the benefit of the whole, and enough information to make and validate those decisions. Reputations and relationships are the essential fabric of Atlas, just as they are in a real-world free market.
There are three primary roles within Atlas:
Factory - Responsible to the content. Collector - Responsible to the keyword. Broker - Responsible to the searcher.
Each of these actors must interact with the others to complete any search request. Any two roles could be performed by a single entity (whereas if all three are performed by one entity, the result would be a traditional, monolithic search engine).
A Factory is akin to a crawler in today's search engines. An Atlas Factory must fetch and process the content as intelligently as possible, performing analysis (such as Natural Language Processing) and normalizing it into distinct units. A Factory shares its highly refined and processed output with one or more Collectors based on who they believe is best utilizing it.
A Collector absorbs and indexes output from one or more Factories, with one primary goal: ranking. An Atlas Collector must provide the most intelligent ranking and relationship analysis possible. A Collector has to compete for the output of a Factory, as well as compete to provide the best ranking quality for Brokers.
A Broker must provide a searcher with the best possible results. It does so by combining diverse ranking results from Collectors and also by retrieving content from the original Factories. This last step, a Broker interacting with a Factory, is critical to maintaining a balanced ecosystem. All Factories must be aware of and approve how their results are being used and by whom.
Reputation and reward is bi-directional between all parties (Factory-Collector, Collector-Broker, and Broker-Factory). Each entity may choose to interact on principle (free, Commons), attribution (results provided by), or commercially (as a paid service), the Atlas protocol is purely a facilitator and does not restrict how the relationships between any entities are formed. In considering these motives for the various entities, it's likely that the free-based networks will tend to become more specialized, commercial ones will compete on quality, and attribution based networks will mature in both directions.
This simple yet powerful division of roles, responsibilities, and relationships will result in a distributed economic foundation for an Internet Search Infrastructure. The wire protocol and further definition of the interactions between these entities is openly evolving, anyone interested is welcomed to join the discussions and see the initial proposals at http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/atlas-l over the coming weeks.
Thanks, looking forward to a radically different search ecosystem in the coming years :)
]]>http://www.jeremie.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry070705-1517312007-07-05T00:00:00Z2007-07-05T00:00:00ZThe Meaning Economy Why is it then that our current most modern Meaning Economy is a text box dictatorship? Why in such an advanced civilization have we become Knowledge Peasants whom are so easily placated by the black magic of our Goovernor? Am I the only one wondering why these commercial boxes own such an important social function: what everything means?
We're safe because it's a free world marketplace on the Net, and anyone can compete if something goes wrong, right? Not quite, 'compete' itself tells you why, the competition will just be another commercial box, how else do you pay for all those servers and bandwidth it takes? I'm glad you asked!
Open open open! Open source, open distributed grids, open algorithms, open rankings, open networks of people cooperating to provide resources. The future of search is in open cooperation (and competition) based on a Meaning Economy, create meaning, exchange meaning, serve meaning.
My vision begins with an open protocol, allowing independent networks of search functions (crawling, indexing, ranking, serving, etc) to peer and interop. All relationships between these networks are always fully transparent and openly published. Networks exchange knowledge between them, each adding new meaning to the information, each of them responsible for the reputations of their participants and peers. This is the very foundation of a Meaning Economy.
Tomorrow now has a meaning that we can all help build.]]>http://www.jeremie.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry070328-0000422007-03-28T00:00:00Z2007-03-28T00:00:00ZSpring Cleaning
The picture was an important depiction of how I used this space, begrudgingly and out of my element. I don't expect that to change, I may blog (a little), but I'm hardly a blogger.]]>http://www.jeremie.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry070326-2206112007-03-27T00:00:00Z2007-03-27T00:00:00ZIt's time for Internet Radio 2.0all of thesecomplaints about Internet Radio dying. My acid reflux isn't due to the fee hikes, it's the short-sightedness of everyone bitching about them.
Folks, we're ON THE INTERNET here. What happens when a network goes down? You route around it. If the big music licensing conglomerates can't understand the market, route around them. This could be the best thing to ever happen to Internet Radio, and music in general, a new marketplace and new systems will form in the wake of the dying beast(s). A fallen tree may support more life than a living one.
Independent and forward-thinking artists have an enormous opportunity now to get in front of listeners. Online stations have a chance to become next generation leaders, to provide rich new music, and most importantly to engage the listeners with them in their battle to find new sources of content.
Please, people, stand up and do the right thing, MOVE ON.]]>http://www.jeremie.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry070309-1256132007-03-09T00:00:00Z2007-03-09T00:00:00ZInformation wants to be foundchanging the rules.
It's been a deep (and quiet) interest of mine for some time now, I'm looking forward to contributing to building a new open platform :)]]>http://www.jeremie.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry070104-0228502007-01-04T00:00:00Z2007-01-04T00:00:00ZWhat does the R mean in VRM?Doc does, and think highly of his VRM initiative. It's something I've always had an interest in, and wondered why with all the technology and disruptive effect of the net, why it feels like this area has gotten notably worse, not better.
The question I ask myself about VRM though is what does the Relationship mean? Many of the situations that have been proposed for VRM to play a role are Vendor (am I the only person to call them VenDUHs in conversations?) selection systems, where you establish a new relationship or transaction. I agree that's important as well, but what I often find more personally frustrating is the after-the-fact relationship. Examples are: * tracking/shipping and order status * rewards account status * support/warrantee options * transaction history * upgrades, patches * relevant product/service announcements
I'd like to manage the relationships I have with my existing Vendors on existing services/products better. I know this is part of Doc's vision as well since I've heard him speak about it, but I don't want VRM to come across as being overly focused on the selection part of the relationship.
One of my pet projects relating to this has been trying to formulate a simple set of customary guidelines for a Venduh to provide a "Secure Feed" for your account. Nothing fancy, just SSL+RSS/Atom and specific to your account. The idea is to simply have a better form of official messaging from a service/product provider to each customer (email is slum, barf). It's been an hour here or there over the last few months, but if there's interest I'll noodle it some more and post something to start that conversation. ]]>http://www.jeremie.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry061211-1601162006-12-11T00:00:00Z2006-12-11T00:00:00Z1,000 Small Decisions Very few people ever get the opportunity to make a big decision that changes the world, but I think that everyone has the opportunity, every day, to make a series of correct small decisions that will ultimately deeply impact our future together. 1,000 is just a number, but it just means not a few, and not an unreachable amount. Just small decisions, holding the door, greeting a stranger, taking the scenic route, saying your sorry, all of them can create new opportunities to make more important steps on this journey. Make the right 1000 small decisions, and you can change the world in a huge way.
It's right there, within everyone's reach.]]>http://www.jeremie.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry061205-2142082006-12-06T00:00:00Z2006-12-06T00:00:00Z58.2KB/s, life in a bytestreamYES.com that we launched last week. It's only the beginning of the really rocking blend of social chat and broadcast that we're stewing up in the YES Labs, I just love using technology to help people connect :)
So I ventured up to BarCamp Milwaukee last weekend with Jerry and had a simply great time, am already looking forward to the BarCamp Madison that was mentioned coming up in Jan/Feb.
Quick note on cycloud, the most important feedback and realization was: "this is really really cool, but what's it useful for?", and folks, I may have discovered something it's actually useful for. Give me some time to see if it pans out, could be a breakthrough, could be a buzzkill, I should know soon :)
A couple of other pet projects I've been working on that I hope to publish/open soon:
* PDF Imprinting web service: submit a link to a pdf (which will get cached) and a custom footer, and it'll instantly gen it for you and return a link * Tag a Day: super simple toy to submit a tag word for your day, and it makes a cloud of everyones, just for fun! * Blog+Microformats: A unified simplified JS bookmarklet/link for prompting and creating or injecting any microformat into your blog post, fully open source/social service, just in the ideation stage * Secure Feeds: Define a set of guidelines and vision for how web RSS/Atom feeds could be secured for use in more important ways
This phrase resonated with me recently (out of the blue): The Future Remembered. One of the ways I often like to make decisions is to think hard about every possible future outcome, play everything out as far and in as much detail as I can. Often this leaves an impression like memories, but of the future. What I enjoy most is to then decide towards the most unpredictable path, if I can "remember" it then why would I want to experience it again? I don't like to re-watch movies either :)
]]>http://www.jeremie.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry061003-1852552006-10-03T00:00:00Z2006-10-03T00:00:00ZWeb Search Experiment: cycloud.comcycloud.com after a very rapid two week (part-time) development process. I set some very high goals and am quite happy with my accomplishments in such a short amount of time.
What is it? Well, besides being a very fun and potentially useful experiment in web search technology, it was also a goal to launch it with a business model behind it. Uniquely I believe, the entire business model is to produce an ebook that documents everything and sell it at a low cost (and comes with extra perks). So not only did I have to do the search experiment, I had to author and publish a book and dabble with ecommerce to get it all connected, pfew.
It's far from perfect, but I must say, it came together nicely for such little investment. I'm also really excited about how interesting the results of the clouds it generates are already even with the simple systems, perhaps as the approach improves in quality it will yield a whole new class of web search engines!
For now, it's all a big web experiment, smell the cheese? :)]]>http://www.jeremie.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry060901-0246012006-09-01T00:00:00Z2006-09-01T00:00:00Z
