Internet Alchemy

What is Conclave? Good question, it’s hard to label since it’s not like anything I’ve seen before. It’s a wiki married with topic maps with a dash of weblog in there somewhere. Each page is a topic that forms typed associations with other pages and categories. For example, a page might have a creator relation with a user page, or a organise relation with a category page.

It’s the brainchild of Guy Murphy, a very smart person I had the pleasure and privilege of working with at Calaba. Keep watching, because I think Conclave has a lot of potential and will probably change the way we think about wikis and their ilk.

Jeffrey Zeldman speaks with the voice of reason:

My hope is that W3C will change the name of XHTML 2 to indicate that it is a different (and alternative) markup language, not a dead end for the XHTML we currently know and use.

Is it just me that thinks Java support in web browsers has had its day?

Opera 7.0b2 for Windows, English (US) version

Choose one option:

* With Java 12.6 MB

* Without Java 3.2 MB

David Galbraith is cooking something up with blogrolls and bios: So here is the deal, if you email me a blogroll entry in this format I will add you to my blogroll.

Limited Liability Partnerships are a new type of business entity in the UK – they are classed as partnerships for tax reasons, but the partners can limit their liability. In contrast to a limited company the LLP doesn’t have directors, share capital or articles of association. They sound like they offer a lot of flexibility and, if this guy is to be believed, then they open up a whole new type of organisation: the Open Corporate Partnership:

The first innovative use of the LLP relates to the fact that any stakeholder, whether investor, supplier, customer, management or staff may if he wishes subscribe to the Member Agreement (rather than signing supplier Terms and Conditions, Contract of Employment etc etc).

i.e. a true “partnership” Enterprise Model is now possible wherein all stakeholders are Members, exchanging Economic Value and sharing Risk and Reward within the scope and terms of the Member Agreement.

Secondly, and revolutionary in its effects, is the fact that the proportional “shares”/ partnership interests (e.g. one half, three tenths, seven millionths) constitute an entirely new form of “Open” Capital which is infinitely divisible, infinitely flexible and grows with the growth of the Enterprise.

It looks like an interesting way to structure a new start-up.

More on LLCs: Companies House guidance, Act of Parliament, factsheet.

The Register:A Dublin-based start-up is to offer software to mobile operators that will enable mobile phone users to create and maintain Weblogs or “blogs” using only their phones.

This is something I’ve been ruminating on for a few weeks and finally found time to write up: RDF Templates.

The idea comes from a simple desire: what if there was a way to apply XSLT to an RDF document to produce an (X)HTML page? You can’t do it in the general case because there are many, many ways to serialize an RDF graph and not all of them provide the nice tree structure that XSLT requires to operate.

So, I started thinking about how you could have an analog of XSLT that worked with RDF graphs. RDF Templates is what I came up with. It consists of a pattern language which works like XPath and a set of elements that work like XSLT.

It took me a long time to come up with a consistent mental model of what the templates should be doing to the graph but I think I’ve managed to create something that in that spot between being easy to use and complex to learn. This is a very very early draft of the spec and I’m looking for feedback. I’m also writing a Perl implementation to try out the ideas and I’m looking to share notes with anyone who wants to build implementations in other languages.

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Back in November I put out a plea for aggregators to stop polling for discontinued scraped RSS channels. I coupled this with an Apache redirection to a custom RSS channel containing a single item with a discontinued message. The url of the item in the RSS channel was timestamped so that it always looked like a new item to the offending aggregators. My intention was to get the attention of the aggregator users who could then get their sysadmins to remove the channels (I’d tried and failed to contact them, most being inside .edu domains).

Well, it looked like it worked – and pretty quickly too. I haven’t had a hit on any of the discontinued channels since the day I made the change.

I haven’t been following the various discussions about allowing comments on weblogs (see BurningBird for some thoughts on this) but I’ve decided, yet again, that it’s time to ditch them in favour of something better. I’ve never been a user of bulletin boards and refreshing a page constantly in the hope that someone replies to your comment doesn’t sound like my idea of fun. However, I am a big user of mailing lists and subscribe to about 10 core lists and up to a dozen others on the periphery of my interests. I’ve even been subscribed to some for over seven years (an early posting by me to the robots list). I set up a sporadic mailing list for this weblog a couple of years ago so I’m planning on putting that back in service. So, the new comment scheme will be a combination of trackback and mailing list. Use trackback when you’ve got something to say on your own website and the mailing list when you want to discuss a particular posting in more depth. The other benefit for me (and maybe for you??) is that removal of the Moveable Type comments system finally allows me to expunge the last of the JavaScript on this site.

David Galbraith makes some insightful predictions for 2003…