Too Much Information

This is a great TED talk from Tim Berners-Lee who created the internet. Here he talks about Linked Data and the importance of sharing and linking data.

Just as with his first break-through, the hyperlink, he realises that its the links that make things useful. To take this on step further the linking is how we embed mean into web documents. The same applied with data. Data by itself is not as useful as data linked to other data and this linkage is meaningful.

Linking was only half the story and Tim doesn’t talk about the importance of standardising the data format, which by the way he also underestimated with HTML and why web developers have had a nightmare with different web browsers interpretation of HTML. Data formats is the less exciting half of the equation but is going to be just as critical. Especially with numbers like dates, currencies, measurements (and their metrics) etc. I’m thinking (hoping, praying) that we’ve learnt our leasons from HTML and people know when and how to draw up a standard for data formats before this thing explodes.

I’ve been inspired by a great lecture, The Web that Wasn’t by Alex Wright, which traces the history of precursor ideas and thinking that ether lead to the web or where ideas much greater than the Internet is right now.

Here are some of the ideas that were missed out on and I believe are sill possible with internet technology today: Read more…

So I just discovered that Leopard comes with a version of Ruby on Rails (RoR) pre-installed. The only problem is its a bit dated but there is a command-line one-liner to update it all no sweat with RubyGem (the Ruby package manager):
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I just stumbled across the SIMILE project form the famous MIT and, as the screen cast above proves, they have some hot stuff to play with both online for your website and software extensions for FireFox and Thunderbird. This is almost enough to switch back to Thunderbird from the tired old, doggy Mail (Mac)!

I was looking at the PHP5 (no this is not about PHP) Reflection API and came across a post talking about the “Dynamic Proxy” design pattern. As I didn’t know what it was about I did a quick search and found that the design pattern had a US Patent on it! I was disgusted and appalled that design patterns could be patented. This is like putting a patent on a certain English sentence grammar.

Obviously the guys at the US Patent office don’t understand what they are allowing to happen. Imagine if 90% of all programming was patented, which can be done fairly easily, it would completely retard innovation and an sort of progress. Fortunately is this impossible to enforce in closed source code software but Open Source [OS] is another story. This could be the biggest legal threat to OS so far. Large companies who have the budget, could have teams that sift thought their OS competition looking for patent infringements and shutting them down. An ugly thought which would gain them only hatred from the developer community. Lets hope that’s enough of a disincentive…

Pictured (from left): Tobias aka klipstein (München), Norman aka matsuri (Berlin), Victoria & Nikolai aka nonken (Amsterdam) and Wolfram aka mccain (München) [note: aka’s are IRC names
Yesterday I meet some Dojo developers in Berlin for the dojo.beer() which was announced on the Dojo website last week. It was a sunny day and we hit one of Berlins many beaches next to the Spree.
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I just completed another site called ‘Picture Your Rights‘ for the Dutch NGO Loesje whose international HQ is now in Berlin. Its a Photo & Slogan completion about Human Rights and anyone can upload a picture or post a slogan. There will be 4 rounds each with a different theme.
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I have got to get the lyrics!

I’ve been kicking the idea of a central way to manage accounts on many social networking apps for a while now. I think it starts to go beyond just managing social-network accounts because what your really doing is managing identity.

Some are saying that 2008 is the time for this sort of “killer app”. Google have also started to chip away at the problem offering a way to update your status in many places at once.
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This is a great little video that explains what RSS is about. I’m always looking for these sorts of things to help people with the “tricky” stuff about the web.

(by the way you can subscribe to this site if you like :)