Internet Alchemy

Alex Bosworth on why Search engine APIs are failing:

Talking to Google engineers, I was informed that Google thinks of their 3rd party API program as a complete failure and only a couple people have made anything vaguely useful from it. The reason why is they have no real committment to making these programs work. For example their terms and conditions are so draconian and laden with legalese there is no motive for developers to work with them.

Missed this the first time round. Dan Connolly’s XMLisation of Turtle:

For example

<#pat> <#child>  <#al>, <#chaz>, <#mo> ;
        <#age>    24 ;
        <#eyecolor> "blue" .

becomes…

  <thing ref="#pat">
   <rel ref="#child">
     <thing ref="#al"/>
     <thing ref="#chaz"/>
     <thing ref="#mo"/>
   </rel>
   <rel ref="#age"><val int="24"/></rel>
   <rel ref="#eyecolor"><str>blue</str></rel>
  </thing>

The BBC has a prototype tagging system for BBC news:

We have built a social bookmarking tool just for BBC News that allows logged in users to tag/bookmark stories and view related stories that other users have tagged using similar terms.

If you go to any story from the front page and login as ‘guest’/'guest’ then you can start tagging stories and see how other people have tagged the same story.

The protoype uses XML-HTTPRequest to allow users to add tags without leaving the page and it also updates the related stories box based on applied tags so that users can see what others are doing in almost real time.

Aardvark is a Firefox extension for interactively manipulating the content on a page. It’s like a second cousin of GreaseMonkey. Once it’s activated you can mouseover all the elements in a page and manipulate each one by making it wider, narrower, removing it, viewing source etc. I couldn’t see a way of making these changes persistent between visits but it’s a neat little tool for making adjustments to pages for readability or printing. Besides, it’s just cool that you can even do this kind of thing. (via Jeff Barr)

Tagging for classification compared with tagging for annotation:

So here is that hypothesis - that the shift from people using blogs to blog represents the increasing dominance of a Flickr-style paradigm of tagging. Imagine the process of annotating a weblog - if you tag it with ‘blogs’ it seems clear that you are adding it to a collection of some kind. ‘Blogs’ is clearly the name of a folder which houses links to weblogs rather than an attempt to describe the weblog itself. But tagging something with the term “blog” suggests quite the opposite - to tag a link ‘blog’ suggests that I’m attempting to describe the link not as belonging to a bin labelled ‘blogs’ but simply as a ‘blog’ in and of itself. It is my conjecture, therefore, that the folder metaphor is losing ground and the keyword one is currently assuming dominance.

For the Semantic Web that is. The biggest barrier to RDF vocabulary deployment has been the long-standing Hash vs Slash debate. This surfaced in the W3C TAG as issue httpRange-14 a couple of years back. The issue was incredibly controversial, probably the single most divisive issue that the TAG has had to date. Now the TAG has proposed an elegant compromise solution which preserves opacity of URIs and allows the existing web infrastructure to form a transparent substrate for the Semantic Web. Well done to all involved!