Internet Alchemy

There’s a thread running on the rdf-dev list at the moment
about an Elevator Pitch for the
Semantic Web. Two good contributions so far from Dan Brickley:

it’s all about making Web-accessible data easier to automate by agreeing explicit names
for meaningful relationships between things we describe in the
Web. Some real world examples: “is a critical review of…”,
“works for the organisation whose home page is”, “wrote the document
available at”, “is pictured in the image available at”, “recorded by
the dodgy rock band whose corporate home page is…” (much handwaving
appropriate at this stage, indicative of invisible nodes and arcs being
represented in confined elevator space…). The Web is about links; the
Semantic Web is about the relationships implicit in those links

and from Andy Powell:

The Web is (primarily) about human-readable Web pages and the links
between them - but where the linkage is very simple and generic (”this
page is related to that page”). The Semantic Web is (primarily) about
making machine-readable statements about all kinds of things (Web pages,
organisations, people, concepts, products, etc.) and the links between
them - and where explicit names are agreed for the relationships between
things. For example, “this person works for that organisation”, “this
organisation has a home page at”, “this person is author of the page at”,
“this person’s phone number is”, “this person is pictured in the image
at”, “this organisation sells that product”, “this products costs that
amount for that person”, etc.

Dave Winer has started work on developing RSS 0.93, an incremental
update from RSS 0.92. The main driving force for this has been the requirement to add a publication date
to each item, something that has been possible in RSS 1.0 since December last year.
It’s sad to see the wheel being reinvented again: if Dave used Dublin Core for his RSS extensions
then people wouldn’t have to write parsers for the new date element. If they’re parsing
RSS 1.0 then they’ll already be set up to expect <dc:date> elements.

An interesting article at C|Net about the upcoming mobile portal shakeout

I’ve been reading the AutoDesk Files, the gathered documents from AutoDesk’s early years.
Fascinating reading, and it’s nice to know that things never change:

The game has changed. In 1977 this business was fun–the sellers
and buyers were hotshot techies like ourselves, everybody spoke the
same language and knew what was going on, and technical excellence was
recognised and rewarded. Today, the microcomputer industry is run by middle
manager types who know far more about P/L statements than they do RAM
organization. They are the people who determine whether you succeed or fail, and
their evaluations are seldom based on technical qualities. Hence, the first
thing any venture in this field has to be is businesslike.

GeoNotes is a system for
annotating physical locations. When you move into that area the annotations can be pushed
to your wireless device. Virtual graffiti?

Steve Champeon has written the first of a series of
articles on the
history of JavaScript:

Disdain for a language that apparently required no skill to use, lacked an
IDE and a reliable cross-platform debugger, and could only be tested in
the context of the actual browser in which the page will be viewed,
combined with a few highly publicized security flaws and several books
aimed at non-programmers, caused many to write off JavaScript as a
“simple” language for beginners and overshadowed its amazing potential.

How the Blogger Deal Happened, by Dan Bricklin of Trellix.

How the Trellix Deal Happened, by Evan Williams of Blogger.

Why Netscape 4 has such a poor CSS1 implementation
[via camworld]

I had a great idea yesterday for spamming Google. Why would I want to spam Google? Well, I
don’t but that doesn’t stop me thinking about how it could be done. Google works on the
citation principle - if many sites link to me then I must have a good site so I should appear higher
in the rankings. [Aside: Google's flaw is that it assumes every citation is a good one which means that
all those 'Microsoft Sucks' links end up boosting Microsoft's site in the rankings]. My idea is to
create a script that outputs a slew of random but sensible html with some fake content
and links, perhaps using Wordnet to include as many relevant keywords as possible. The
links would be to subdomains of the domain the script is hosted in. It’s possible to set up a wildcard
host record in a DNS server so news.thegreatgooglespam.com and football.thegreatgooglespam.com both point
to the same server and the same script. The script can detect which subdomain the request is for and serves
up appropriate content related to the subdomain name which of course could even contain multiple keywords
separated by dots. What we have now are essentially an infinite number of domains, each with unique content,
each citing one another as good sites. I guess Google might catch on fairly quickly but if the script and
server configuration was distributed widely enough across enough domains then they’ll have a fair amount
of work on their hands separating the signal from the noise. The key to the script is making the random html
generation different enough on different subdomains, otherwise it’ll be easy to spot the fake sites. Pointless
I know but the it annoys me that the pagerank algorithm is so damn effective!

The WAP User Agent List is offline temporarily. I want to bring it back, but I want to take this
opportunity to make some changes that will make it even more useful. My current plans
are to break the list down by hardware manufacturer (Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola etc) and
software manufacturer (Openwave, Nokia, Microsoft etc) and also to record gateway information.
Then I want to take the header information that has been collected and use that to start
profiling the different devices properly, i.e. what content types they accept, what
character sets they support. Then I’d like to add physical information to that, screen height
and width, types of input device, cache sizes etc. This isn’t going to be easy which is why I
want to ask your opinions about how this should be done and what types of information
you’d like to see. Once the project is underway the data will be made freely available in a
variety of xml formats. Please use the comments box on the agent list page
to share your thoughts.