March 29th, 2006
Calendars are not interesting because they show us a grid of dates with things happening. Calendars are interesting because more then our inbox, more then our todo lists, more then ourcontacts, more then our phones, they know things about us. They fundamentally intersect the social and the geophysical. If I’m attending an event (say in Austin) you have a powerful hint about when and where I am to a degree inaccessible to other facets of my digital support system.
All of which is an overblown way of saying 30Boxes are smart, and seem to be the only people doing calendaring that seem to get calendars, or the next rev. of the social web for that matter.
December 12th, 2005
So the Yahoo acquisition of del.icio.us hit every tech blog on the planet this weekend, and hardly needs more rehashing. But a couple of ideas I haven’t seen elsewhere from one of my mailing lists.
It was pointed out that
[Yahoo] recently hired all the IBM people that worked at the WebFountain project.
And that the del.icio.us database of tagged website would be an awfully juicy source of data to start analyzing. Yahoo is the obvious player to build post-search interfaces, browsable and discoverable like Yahoo of old, but this time built to Web-scale.
Meanwhile is anyone watching the Flock’s future? What with its APIs to Yahoo’s Flickr, Yahoo’s del.icio.us, and integrated editor for all those new MT blogs. Just a thought.
May 21st, 2005
Nothing quite like spending an afternoon sketching out database schemas for lists of heterogeneous, extensible objects to give you that familiar, sinking feeling of re-inventing RDF…badly. And nothing quite like surveying the state of RDF for scripting languages to convince you to grimly knuckle down to your schemas.
If I were a Semantic Web booster, looking for a project to hack on/fund, I’d pour some resources into making a replacement for ActiveRecord.rb to make it simple to build Ruby on Rails apps with a triple store back end. Catch the wave of hype/buzz, appeal to a community consisting of some of the savviest, most cutting edge web developers, and maybe pick up a few hints along the way about making tools developer friendly. Done well, it would be a very compelling alternative to LAMP(R). Call it R-Cubed, or maybe Triple-R.
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