Curiouser and Curiouser!

Curiouser and Curiouser! on livetopics http://matt.blogs.it/ RSS feed for topic livetopics Copyright 2006 Matt Mower Squib/0.1 self@mattmower.com self@mattmower.com en-gb Tue, 07 May 2002 17:48:58 +0100 <A href="http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes.php3?author=Ralph+Waldo+Emerson">Ralph Waldo Emerson</A>. "Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good." [<A href="http://www.quotationspage.com/mqotd.html">Motivational Quotes of the Day</A>] http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000001.html liveTopics Fri, 21 Jun 2002 17:32:13 +0100 I haven't posted much the last couple of days because I've been working hard on my latest Radio tool.  It's called liveTopics and you can see the results on this page.  Some of the postings have a new Topics: section under them with links from various topics that the postings are related to. Each link goes to a central Topic Table of Contents for my weblog.  Where you can see all the postings related to a particular topic grouped together. The tool also provides automatic generation of META tags with keywords and a "what i'm talking about" banner showing the topics associated with recent postings. It should start being tested in the next couple of days and, if all goes well, I hope to release it next week.   http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000029.html liveTopics progress Mon, 24 Jun 2002 23:33:08 +0100 Once again I'm neglecting all other interests in the rush to make liveTopics a workable tool for Radio listeners.  I'm learning what a struggle it is to debug problems on an unfamiliar OS over a 4,000 mile and 5 hours gap.  Maybe I should just write better code, it'll be easier in the long run! The good news is that two people now seem able to use liveTopics and hopefully by the end of play tomorrow there will be four.  If we don't find any more serious bugs then I am on schedule to release version 1.0 at the end of the week.   http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000036.html Categories, topics & audiences Tue, 25 Jun 2002 12:39:37 +0100 <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0108019/2002/05/20.html#a55">Blog Notes 4: Categories</A>. No Audience is Interested in Everything You Produce XML gives Weblogs the capacity to be organized into categories. It's good news and bad. When authoring an article (or one of those littler bloglets), the author is confonted immediately with a series of usability questions like: <UL> <LI>If I put this piece in several categories, does that reduce the meaning of each category? <LI>If the piece is on the home page and in a category, why would anyone ever go to both? <LI>If the piece is only in a category and not on the home page, how does anyone know? <LI>If the piece is only on the home page, what are categories for?</LI></UL> [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0108019/">5th Constituency</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » Another interesting piece.  I heartilty concur. My own take on categories is that they are difficult to use.  I currently define six categories including the Home Page.  They are: <UL> <LI>home page</LI> <LI>learning</LI> <LI>community</LI> <LI>personal</LI> <LI>technology</LI> <LI>tuning</LI></UL> My guess is that only "home page" and "tuning" are separably useful.  I do put items in the other categories but I suspect no-one would ever subscribe to them rather than the "home page."  (Assuming you wanted to subscribe at all!) This was really my reason for developing the liveTopics tool.   My problem with categories is that they are not granular enough.  "tuning" works as a category because I only use that for discussing Radio development work which is, for the most part, orthoganol to what I'm talking about normally. Using liveTopics I can associate a number of individual topic references to each post (as I have done with this one).  This can be used to determine what I'm talking about and by using the topic table of contents what else I've said about a particular topic.  Where this will really score though, to my mind, is when you and I can filter each others RSS feed based on the topics we reference. Categories are dead!  Long live topics!  </BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000046.html Classification schemes Thu, 27 Jun 2002 14:56:21 +0100 <A href="http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/archives/000030.html">Classification schemes</A>. I've just stumbled across a paper on faceted classification of information, which talks about applying multiple sets of indexes to [<A href="http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/">Column Two</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » Note to self: Read this paper.  </BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000053.html Bringing topics to RSS Sun, 30 Jun 2002 10:10:55 +0100 <A href="http://www.iaslash.org/node.php?id=4523">Bringing metadata back into RSS with subject taxonomies</A>. I hope to be able to spend time experimenting with XML again after a few projects I'm working on settle down. First on my plate will be to read more about how to bring <A href="http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/05/02/semanticwebsite.html">subject-headings/topics into RSS</A>. Specifically, I think <A href="http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/index.html">XTM for Topic Maps</A>, the <A href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-dev/files/Modules/Proposed/mod_taxonomy.html">RSS taxonomy and Dublin Core modules</A>, and Peter's <A href="http://xfml.org/">XFML</A> are where I am going to be spending my time at first. [<A href="http://www.iaslash.org/">ia/ - news for information architects</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » Serendipity! I'm also interested in how to add topic-based metadata to RSS feeds.  I'd come across XTM a while back but not had an immediate use for it.  Time to start reading I guess.  </BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000062.html liveTopics progress Sat, 06 Jul 2002 22:41:21 +0100 Only a week after I had hoped to release version 1.0 of liveTopics and I'm nearly there. I've had a lot of good feedback from uber-testers Marc Barrot and Jack Mancilla.  This thing should be pretty well shaken out when it arrives. The basic functionality is now all in place.  You can successfully add topics to posts, have them displayed with the post and traverse the weblog using the Topic Table of Contents (TTOC). The TTOC, for example <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/outlines/topics/allTopics.opml#liveTopics">Curiouser and curiouser!</A> shows every topic defined in the weblog.  For each topic it lists the weblog posts associated with that topic, in chronological order.  Each of these postings in turn lists the other topics associated with that particular posting.  The end result is a very easy way to traverse the weblog following threads of thought. Things that are in the pipeline just past v1.0: <UL> <LI>Exporting topic information in your RSS stream. </LI> <UL> <LI>Clever aggregators will be able to use this topic information to rank & prioritize postings in your news view.</LI></UL> <LI>Topic Mining</LI> <UL> <LI>Quickly and easily add topic information to archive postings</LI></UL> <LI>Sharing topics <UL> <LI>Your topics will be published as <A href="http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/">XTM</A> topic maps. <LI>Subscript to other users topic rolls and be able to use their topics as well</LI></UL></LI></UL> Please let me know of any other ideas you would like to see implemented.   http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000104.html TopicRolling 101 Tue, 09 Jul 2002 20:56:58 +0100 A feature that I have planned for the next release of liveTopics (the finishing touches go on the 1.0 release this week, for definite) is the topicRoll. In the same way as a blogroll represents your subscription to other what other people are writing, the topicRoll represents your subscription to what other people are writing about -- their topics. Whenever you add a topic to a post it is added to your topicRoll and (optionally) published automatically to your weblog.   In turn you can subscribe to as many other topicRolls as you like.  This means that as soon as someone uses a new topic, it is automatically added to the topics that your copy of liveTopics has ready for you to use.  In the same way other users can see & re-use the topics you are using. When combined with the idea of topicMiner (also due in version 1.5) this will allow you to thread together existing archived discussions in a completely new way.  Mining topics allows you to find existing topics in archived posts.  You will be able to mine other peoples topics from your own posts and vice verca. I'm hoping this will enable some interesting cross-blog exchanges.     http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000141.html Splitting topics Tue, 09 Jul 2002 22:28:55 +0100 The topics being used in liveTopics now are likely, if you're like me, to be quite simple.  Usually one word, or two words joined with a hyphen.  This is fine when you're blogging alone. However in preparation for adding topicRolls where you can share your topics with others it becomes a little more complicated.  Where I might be talking about aids in the sense of AIDS you might be talking about hearing aids. It seems sensible to have some kind of scheme for allowing topics to crop up in different contexts: "aids with respect to deafness" versus "AIDS as a disease" and so on.   I've written them in this rather stilted way to avoid introducing a syntax too early. This will inevitably complicate the interface a little.  However it may also make it simpler to use.  At the moment the drop-down for selecting pre-existing topics fills up pretty quickly.  Selecting a "topic theme" might drastically reduce the choices to be waded through looking for the right topic. I'd welcome feedback...   http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000142.html More on liveTopics Wed, 10 Jul 2002 21:51:52 +0100 I gave an initial pitch of some of my ideas today.  Not a pitch that I would like to give to an objective audience but, then, this is only my second day <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/2002/07/09.html#a179">off the job</A>!! I was trying to show how liveTopics and blogPlex fit together. liveTopics really started life as a bootstrap technology for the blogPlex.  blogPlexing depends upon being able to extract meaningful information from what people say on their weblogs.  Until such time as technologies like Cyc or Summarizer (see Share in the sidebar) can deliver the goods I needed something else.  Hence liveTopics was born to allow you to annotate your posts with descriptive concepts.  From a very simple original concept it has taken on a life of its own which is kind of cool. There are two steps on the way to blogPlex that I think are worth sharing.  The first is topicRolling which I have discussed in another <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/2002/07/09.html#a181">recent post</A>.  Briefly topicRolling allows you to publish your topics & subscribe to the topics used by others.  This allows a group of people to develop a shared conceptual vocabulary or BlogSpeak. The second is the super-blog.  This was really <A href="http://www.wwpp.org/">Jack Foster Mancilla's</A> idea.  This is an extension of the Blog Topic Table of Contents (TTOC) idea which will be familiar if you click through any of the topic links on my page (or click <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/outlines/topics/allTopics.html">here</A>).   At the moment the TTOC is an individual affair, however pretty soon I am to provide the ability for a group of people to create a super-blog together. In the same way that the TTOC now lists each of an individuals posts under a topic, the super-blog will list the posts of every member creating a way to see what each member of the group has posted regarding specific concepts.  This makes topicRolling very important.  We will also need tools to support the merging and grouping of topics into <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/2002/07/09.html#a182">topicThemes</A>. My view at the moment is rather than embarking on a massive project to create some kind of control language or standardized vocabulary that we allow Darwinian pressures to select topics.  As has been written elsewhere people will gravitate towards "good" topics and abandon the bad (and there will be tools to help the losers graciously migrate).   The pressure will come from the other users of the plex, in order to be listed you have to use the right topics. I can imagine situations where two similar topics will grow equal in size.  Thats okay.  Clever software can work out that they are synonymous by examing their associations with other topics.  And the use of topicThemes will help to prevent unnecessary isolation. And then we reach the blogPlex itself.  At the moment I envisage this as a service subscribed to many blogs or klogs.  Using the data in each along with the topical metadata to create profiles of bloggers and kloggers. The value of the profiles is that they will allow the blogPlex service to match up bloggers who are writing about similar concepts - who are not already linking to each other.  This is a key point because it is this that enables new communities to form.   http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000159.html The Tao of Topic Maps Wed, 10 Jul 2002 22:30:08 +0100 <A href="http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tao.html">The TAO of Topic Maps</A>. <A href="http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tao.html">The <ACRONYM title="Topics, Associations, and Occurrences">TAO</ACRONYM> of Topic Maps</A> introduces <A href="http://www.topicmaps.org/">topic maps</A>, a new <A class=acronym title="International Organization for Standardisationclick to visit the ISO web site" href="http://www.iso.ch/">ISO</A> standard for describing knowledge structures and associating them with information resources. [<A href="http://home.netcom.com/~luskr/weblog/radio/categories/kLogs/">Ron Lusk: Ron's K-Logs</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » Wow cool.  More reading for tomorrow!  </BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000167.html TAO of topic maps Mon, 15 Jul 2002 21:52:39 +0100 <A href="http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/archives/000090.html">The TAO of Topic Maps</A>. Steve Pepper has written a succinct introduction to topic maps, titled The TAO of Topic Maps. To quote Steve: Topic [<A href="http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/">Column Two</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » I finally got a chance to read this paper on the tube going to London today.  A key paragraph that leapt out at me was: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> "But knowledge is fundamentally different from information: the difference is that between knowing a thing versus simply having information about it.  And if, as one writer claims, 'knowledge management covers three main knowledge activities: generation, codification, and transfer', then topic maps can be regarded as the standard for codification that is the necessary prerequisite for the development of tools that assist in the generation and transfer of knowledge."</BLOCKQUOTE> In general the topic maps approach seems very sound to me with very laudible goals.  It also dovetails nicely with a lot of my liveTopics efforts and lends some new and credible directions. For example I have already implemented code in the liveTopics plugin to export the topical references in the weblog as an XTM topic map.   Additionally my idea for topic themes seems almost identical to the concept of themes in the document. It also highlights some things I should address.  The idea of synonyms and homynyms are clearly important once people start sharing their topics (via topicRolls).  It may also be useful to allow people to define their own glossaries (maybe integrated with the existing Radio glossary).  And in order to generate occurrence data the permalinks of each posting should be used as topic references to that posting. All in all a useful guide to the capabilities of topic maps.  What is required now is another work building upon this that details some of the applications that topic maps will enable.  </BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000200.html liveTopics 1.0 release iminent Wed, 17 Jul 2002 02:01:56 +0100 Okay I've said it before, but barring major incident liveTopics should be released before the end of the week.  My current target is thursday since I move house on Friday and I'm not sure what my connectivity is after that.  Or, maybe that's not a good time to release... :) Oh well, damn the torpedo's, full steam ahead!   http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000238.html Let's see what's on the slab... Thu, 08 Aug 2002 20:52:14 +0100 Well in the last couple of days I have been working hard on the liveTopics 1.0 release.  It's so close I can almost feel it.  We're testing and hopefully will have the kinks worked out in the next couple of days then I can finally get this sucka out the door. Also I'm really besotted with TrackBack but haven't seen it work the way I would like yet.  So I've rolled a TrackBack server in Frontier that comes with a Radio client.  The two communicate with a simple XML-RPC interface that would allow any klogging system to join in. At the moment the Radio client automatically harvests each posting for links (when you submit it) and automagically pings each one.  The ping contains the permalink for the post, the Url of your weblog, the title of the post, your name & email address.  But you can drop most of this information you don't want to pass it.  I guess some people will also want fine-grained control over what they ping.  That shouldn't be too hard. Along with this are some macros to show your TrackBack information against each item. At the moment the server is hosted on my laptop which isn't ideal but is good enough for testing.  The next job is to find a better host and then look at adding a simple federation mechanism.  That would allow lots of different people to provide TrackBack servers and share the results. More on this later. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000265.html Integrating klogs with Big-KM Thu, 08 Aug 2002 23:08:31 +0100 In order for klogging to be successfully I think it is going to have to come to an understanding with Big-KM. Example:  BigCo has invested half a million dollars in a big knowledge management system for their world-wide operations.  This kind of investment can become a lode-stone around any other systems neck.  For klogging to thrive here it is going to have to integrate. Here's one idea I have for how this could work. <OL> <LI>Extend Big-KM System-X so that it can aggregate RSS feeds like Radio, MT and others do now.</LI> <LI>Extend your klogging software to allow per-post meta data.  (liveTopics does this for Radio)</LI> <LI>For each project in System-X define a set of topics that will act as trigger phrases for that project</LI> <LI>Get the kloggers to use those topics when they want to involve a post in a particular project</LI> <LI>Now subscribe System-X to every klog in the organization and watch as it indexes and archives all that information.  Each project grabbing only those postings that are appropriate (by use of the trigger phrases)</LI> <LI>This means that the klogs add value to the big-KM system.  Suddenly it doesn't just have the dry dusty project documention, but all the live vibrant stuff that people are really doing!</LI> <LI>Now extend System-X to generate a per-project RSS feed.</LI> <LI>If I am on the project I can subscribe to this feed.  Now instead of receiving email from System-X or having to go to an arbitrary web page, I get all the "official" project stuff (new documents, forms etc...) delivered in my RSS stream.</LI></OL> Closing the loop between the big-KM and the klog so that they both add value to each other. Just an idea....   http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000277.html liveTopics and categories Sat, 10 Aug 2002 13:57:09 +0100 The the real use of categories to my mind is to allow upstreaming to multiple locations.  That way I can have my public weblog (and maybe a salon blog too like <A href="http://blogs.salon.com/0001048/">Marc Barrot</A>) as well as a number of private klogs. I would still like to be able to use liveTopics when posting to a private klog, but the topics perhaps should not be shared or, if they are shared, it should be done in an intelligent way.  Specifically each category needs it's own Table of Contents where the URL's to posts are not cross-referenced. I'll have to figure out how to do this and it probably won't be easy. Of course a better solution would be for Radio to natively support the idea of mutli-site operations. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000299.html liveTopics license Sun, 18 Aug 2002 16:13:44 +0100 So I'm ready at last to release liveTopics 1.0, the last remaining task is to find the license to use.   I want a license that allows me to release it free for personal use whilst still retaining my ability to charge businesses for it.  I want a license that allows me to publish the source (with Radio is there any other choice?) and encourage others to contribute, yet doesn't allow my work to be unfairly exploited. Can anyone recommend what license I should be using? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000341.html liveTopics licensing. It's getting thorny Tue, 20 Aug 2002 12:27:13 +0100 I've been thinking about licensing and how it applies to my business, to my plans for making my living. I've used free software and appreciated it.  I've bought commerical software and been happy to do so.  I am happy to buy reasonably priced software - when I have the money.  I don't expect, or even want, all software to be free.  Now, for the first time, I am releasing software in the context of my own business, making a living.  It colours things. My plans for liveTopics means that it will, increasingly, be relevant in an organizational context.  I anticipate a point where I could have commercial and non-commercial customers.  I want to license liveTopics appropriately but my head is getting very sore trying to work that out. I need help.   http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000358.html More on licensing Tue, 20 Aug 2002 12:33:56 +0100 Maybe I should just GPL liveTopics and avoid the subject of money altogether. Is there a way to make a living from software without licensing it when the source is freely available?     http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000361.html liveTopics to create virtual weblog channels Tue, 20 Aug 2002 16:57:14 +0100 Here's an idea I've been thinking about for the use of liveTopics. At the moment as author's we categorize our posts for our readers.  If using default Radio by explicitly putting them into categories (or, by default, not doing so).  With liveTopics I can add some granularity to that.  But basically it doesn't have too much impact on my reader.  It also doesn't give the reader much choice. What I'd like to do is offer the reader is the chance to create their own categories and here's how I think it would work: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> We add a "customise this site" button that pop's up a list of all the topics available on the site. The reader can then group topics they are interested in together to create "virtual channels."  These along with the default selection are bundled up into a cookie that is stored in the readers browser (with their permission). The next time the reader visits the page they only get posts that match the selected "virtual channel." along with a drop-down to change channel and the customise button.</BLOCKQUOTE> Anybody else think this is an interesting idea?   http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000381.html Entropy, big-KM, klogging and the wheel Tue, 20 Aug 2002 19:57:17 +0100 <A href="http://www.rolandtanglao.com/2002/08/18.html#a2630">Roland's Natural Klog Progression.</A>. I spoke of <A href="http://dijest.com/2002/08/13.html#a1927">four klogging roles</A> last week: catalyst, coach, armorer, practice leader. <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/2002/08/19.html#a287">Matt Mower</A> advocates the the role of "Intranet Editor:" <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> Much as the users of a Wiki should occasionally re-factor pages that are becoming "busy" I think that a good intranet editor should be grooming the klogs in their organization and drawing together useful strangs to form part (or all) of the static intranet.</BLOCKQUOTE> <A href="http://www.rolandtanglao.com/">Roland Tanglao</A> builds on this: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> I think <A href="http://www.rolandtanglao.com/categories/radiouserland/2002/06/02.html#a2066">a natural progression for knowledge</A> is: <OL> <LI>blog breaking news <LI>harvest it periodically (say weekly) into an FAQ and/or other knowledge base type of documents <LI>Put the link into a a directory that supports transclusion like Manila style directories. </LI></OL> K-Log => (FAQ or other knowlegebase article) => directory.   K-Logs need to be periodically (at least once a month) harvested for content that should go into an FAQ or other knowledgebase document and links that that should go into a directory. This is the job of a K-Log editor :-)! I have been trying to do this with VanEats but after a klog gets to a certain size, it really needs to have some time set aside for it.</BLOCKQUOTE> Practice Leader is probably the closest to a dedicated multi-author editor. Summarizing work in a field, showing the aggregate progress and useful threads. Structuring knowledge into FAQs or other KM systems may be a natural progression, especially as klogging tools and KM tools build bridges. Entropy, bad. Fighting entropy, expensive, slow.  Self-review is a powerful tool for learning. Going over my own posts for the past week, month, and quarter has shown patterns I missed, ideas I was skirting but never wrote outright. It reinforced brief social connections, blogs to which I linked to and people with whom I briefly corresponded. It takes concentrated time and effort. It helps me to print out all the pages on my blog for that period; something about shuffling through paper. Folks are trying hard to automate this work. Summarizers. Cluster analysis. Text to Structure converters. Taxonomy systems. But the expert author of the original content is often the best judge of relevance. [<A href="http://dijest.com/aka/">a klog apart</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » I think one of the things about klogs is that are no better than any other KM system when it comes to entropy.  In fact they are likely to be a hell of a lot worse -- it's just the entropy matters less.  Any information system that isn't properly maintained has the potential to quickly deteriorate into chaos. The fact is that most people don't want to have to find just the right place to put something.  Most people aren't going to review what they have done.   You can force this behaviour, you can encourage it.  But is it really necessary that everyone has to become a librarian in order to function in a knowledge environment? My alternative is that we recognize and promote the value of good editing (and, hence, good editors).  Have an editor/practice leader to head each area whose responsibility it is to aggregate good knowledge.  Then reward them when they do it well.   Example:  Look at the number of search engine queries for specific keywords.  Tie those keywords to projects/areas.  If the number of searches trends downwards something is working.  Okay, too simplistic? Then suggest something better! An area I have been thinking about is how I would integrate the idea of uploading files to a KM system when klogging.  One approach would be to provide some kind of clever dialogue to allow the user to specify where they want the file to end up.  That sounds like hard work for me & for the user. Alternative strategy:  Allow the user to put a file in an enclosure.  Radio will upstream it to the KM server as part of the RSS feed.  The KM server will toss the file into an upload bucket in an area based upon the metadata of the post (ala liveTopics).  It's then up to the practice leader for that area to decide where the document actually belongs and move it there (or indeed if it belongs at all). Is this less efficient?  Maybe so.  Is it more effective?  I think so. Agree? Disagree?  Ideas?</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000388.html More on licensing for liveTopics Tue, 20 Aug 2002 23:18:09 +0100 Here's how I'm leaning: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> I make liveTopics free software issued under the GPL. </BLOCKQUOTE> I can see the arguments for and against commercial licenses for the software.  But like the Zope guys I have weigh up how much license revenue I'm actually likely to generate versus the inertia that having to pay could generate.  I'm hoping to build a reputation in the KM/klogging space and liveTopics if widely accepted could be a part of that.  I also want to take liveTopics into corporate blogging directories, topic-maps, XTM, and visualization.  I want to take it into group/shared-blogging.  I want lots of you to come along for the ride. So I think it's real values to me are: <UL> <LI>reputation</LI> <LI>a lead-in to other services</LI> <LI>the vision</LI></UL> The other services could be support, as well as more general KM/klogging consultancy or integration work. Am I making sense?  I guess we'll know if I end up starving and homeless in 6 months time! http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000401.html liveTopics license Wed, 21 Aug 2002 18:10:08 +0100 <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0108194/2002/08/21.html#a279">More on licensing for liveTopics</A>. <BLOCKQUOTE>[<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/">Curiouser and curiouser!</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> I've gotta say I really love watching this process. One point of potential revenue could very well be 'corporate consulting' i.e. installation and integration. People aren't going to know what to do with liveTopics (or blogging directories, topic-maps, XTM & visualization for that matter) without being pitched and well trained, and even then it's going to be difficult for them to wrap their head around the concept enough to drop it into their IT culture effectively. It's much easier from that perspective to hire the people who wrote it to come in, train IT in the installation process (or actually provide the service) and talk with the user base to bring them up to speed and show them some of the possibilities and how it "affects their day." If liveTopics is (or is going to be) that robust I think you should have no particular difficulty generating a revenue stream through such ancillary services. [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0108194/">The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » Thanks for the perspective.  That's kinda what I'm looking for right now.  Well either that or "You're mad!  Mad! Mad! Mad!" I guess this will become one of those experiments that my life has now become. Exciting!</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000420.html Active reading with liveTopics Thu, 22 Aug 2002 11:05:40 +0100 <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/2002/08/21.html#a155">liveTopics to create virtual weblog channels</A>. Here's an idea I've been thinking about for the use of liveTopics. What I'd like to do is offer the reader is the chance to create their own categories and here's how I think it would work: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> The next time the reader visits the page they only get posts that match the selected "virtual channel." along with a drop-down to change channel and the customise button.</BLOCKQUOTE> Anybody else think this is an interesting idea? [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/">Curiouser and curiouser!</A>] It is interesting, but in my view it would be even better if we could subscribe to a RSS feed for the shared categories we like. This is a generalization of <A href="http://www.highcontext.com/kmpings/">KMPings</A>. The following step would be to document and interlink the shared categories in a (shared) wiki. [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/">Seb's Open Research</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » Agreed.  For a while now the ability to create dynamic channels from the RSS feed has been part of my plan.  RSS 0.92 already has the necessary <category> tag that can be co-opted to take topics instead / as well.  I've patched the Radio RSS generator to do this, but need to do some more work in terms of turning this patch into something that can be distributed in Radio. A key advantage would be the ability to have multiple RSS feeds aggregated together into a channel when they reference the same topics. However I still think there is a role for the browser view.  Despite the growing popularity of RSS I think people are still going to want to read some sites and at the moment they don't work for the reader. The way I see it is that this is a control thing in the same way that blogging itself is a control thing.  As a blogger I write what I like, that's where I get my control.  But as a reader I have no control.  I see what the writer intends (or not -- consider the font sizing issue that has been hot recently). I was just musing that it would be interesting for the reader of a site to be able to re-frame the content in a way that suited them.  But RSS does come first...</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000423.html Licensing: The final word (from me) Thu, 22 Aug 2002 20:24:42 +0100 Okay the GPL license is now embedded in liveTopics 1.0 So far most of the comments I have received suggest that making liveTopics free software has more advantages than keeping it proprietary and trying to commercialize it.  Although the idea of money seems really great (and really remote) to me right now it's how I was leaning anyway. I'm going to sleep on it and, barring an overnight conversion or conclusive message to the contrary, I shall be releasing liveTopics 1.0 tomorrow under the GPL. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000435.html Tables of Contents Thu, 22 Aug 2002 21:43:33 +0100 As anyone who has clicked on a topic link for one of my posts recently will be aware, my Table of Contents is now pretty big.  I hadn't realised how big until someone told me it was over 600K!!  I guess if I didn't have broadband now I wouldn't have let it get this far without addressing it. My solution is to provide 2 "drivers" for building the table of contents.  A single outline driver suitable for small sites and a mutli-outline driver suitable for larger sites.  These and other drivers can be selected using a preference (it's pretty simple to add a new driver, e.g. one for doing tables instead of outlines). The new mutli-outline driver will split the table of contents alphabetically.  This might still lead to some pages being heavier than others but is a simple strategy to implement and should spread things out better than they are at the moment.   http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000437.html Java XML-RPC Fri, 23 Aug 2002 16:25:14 +0100 I've not done anything Java wise for a couple of months but, partly to keep my hand in, and partly because I think it's easier I've been thinking about using an applet or Java WebStart application for managing the topic information in liveTopics.  This leads to some questions: What's the best XML-RPC implementation for Java at the moment? For a simple API is XML-RPC a better bet than SOAP? Is it safe to use Swing in applets these days? What are the relative advantages/disadvanages of JWS over Applets?  Maybe even thinlets? And what IDE should I be using (I used to use JBuilder) Can anyone help me out? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000447.html Not quite the last word on licensing Fri, 23 Aug 2002 22:54:09 +0100 Not quite the last word on licensing. I've been speaking to Mark Paschal about his choice of the BSD license for Stapler.  Mark's reasons for open sourcing Stapler may, fundamentally, be more altruistic than mine but having decided to do it (open source liveTopics) I want to do it properly. They key difference as Mark explains it is that under the GPL liveTopics could not be integrated into Radio, because Radio is not itself GPL compatible.  Indeed Mark couldn't incorporate any functionality from liveTopics into Stapler (for example) without breaking the license.  Is that what I intended?  I'm actually wondering now whether whether it would be breaking my own license to distribute Radio & liveTopics to a customer?  Would I have to require a separate download & install step to comply? Since I don't think I can go back and do this again I need to get it right.  Some stuff I need to understand:  Am I bound by my own license?  Can I re-issue liveTopics later with a different license?  Can I grant exceptions to the GPL?  If so, what happens when an exception is contradictory to the GPL? Does anyone else want to weigh in on the best license to use?   [please!] http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000454.html Klogs can improve the value of what you write Wed, 28 Aug 2002 15:27:46 +0100 <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/">Curiouser and curiouser!</A> in <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/2002/08/27.html#a339">There's a hole in my bucket...</A>. <BLOCKQUOTE>As a klogger, over the past 3 months or so, I have recorded & published tens if not hundreds of thoughts.  I doubt if I shared one quarter of output during the last 6 years I worked at various companies.  Oh I would probably have emailed here and there, spoken up during meetings.  But I wonder just how much knowledge is being lost, second by second, in most companies by each employee.  Then multiply up...</BLOCKQUOTE> But even if they would catch those thoughts, it's going to be very difficult to find something relevant and to understand it our of the context. More or less like forum discussion: you have to follow for some time to make sense of it. Going through blog archives is not easy... So far I benefit more from the distributed dialog and from the collective filtering. So, blogs is more for sharing, rather than capturing... [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0109961/">Mathemagenic</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » I don't think this problem is necessarily inherent in blogging/klogging as practiced, more a problem in the simple calendar based access method most weblogs provide by default. But there are other options, for example a Radio weblog with liveTopics adds another dimension for relating posts together to create a train of thought.  You can follow a topic from a post into a table of contents where you can see other posts referencing that topic.  You can also see, for each post, other topics that were associated with it allowing you to hop from one subject of conversation to another. The next level is based upon XML topic maps (in XTM format) which I am experimenting with generating right now.  This will allow you to reconstruct the weblog to serve different purposes and, by merging topic maps from different weblogs together, to analyse a larger conversational "space." All in all I think klogs will, ultimately, vastly improve the ability for people to find things that are relevant and meaningful among the discourse of themselves and others.  </BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000469.html A step towards the license Wed, 04 Sep 2002 10:56:45 +0100 Okay I want to get the liveTopics license issue resolved once and for all.  To this end I have setup a <A href="http://www.quicktopic.com/16/H/tVkeJYmT2Wr">QuickTopic</A> to discuss it and hopefully reach a consensus.  If you are at all interested (even in the process of a license being worked out in the open) please join in the topic and share your views. My intention is that once an approach is decided I will use QuickTopic again to review the license text (if any one is interested to participate in that process) before issuing the final agreed license. All are welcome. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000483.html liveTopics license Thu, 05 Sep 2002 22:52:57 +0100 <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/2002/09/05.html#a288">Radio Tools Licensing</A>. <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/">Matt</A> is looking for the perfect license model for his Radio tool. If you want to get your hands on <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/outlines/liveTopics.html">liveTopics 1.0</A> before Hell freezes, you'd better join the discussion at <A href="http://www.quicktopic.com/16/H/tVkeJYmT2Wr/p-1.-1">http://www.quicktopic.com/16/H/tVkeJYmT2Wr/p-1.-1</A> and help Matt make up his mind fast. [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/2002/09/05.html#a288" target=_blank>read more</A>] [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/">s l a m</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » Oh how I wish Marc was being unkind with that "Hell freezes over" remark :-)</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000496.html liveTopics Software License Agreement posted for review Sun, 08 Sep 2002 07:35:29 +0100 Hopefully today I've taken a positive step.  I posted in the <A href="http://www.quicktopic.com/16/H/tVkeJYmT2Wr">license discussion</A> at QuickTopic a draft of a license for liveTopics that covers personal use.  It won't be perfect, it may be too restrictive but it's there for you to comment on and I hope that you will. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000503.html liveTopics rename done Sun, 08 Sep 2002 20:07:35 +0100 If anything appears to be messed up about my weblog it's probably to do with testing the rename topic functionality of liveTopics.  I've done quite a lot of testing today and the feature seems to be stable now.  Unfortunately I need to republish the entire weblog to clear up the mess! http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000505.html Analysing new topics Sun, 08 Sep 2002 22:58:49 +0100 I'm reading a paper [<A href="http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cache/papers/cs/1119/http:zSzzSzwww.cs.jhu.eduzSz~sheppardzSzcs.605.754zSzpaperszSzpaper3a.pdf/joachims96probabilistic.pdf">Joachims, 1996</A>] about text analysis.  The idea is to produce a facility within liveTopics for suggesting topics based upon the text entered in a post.  At the moment there is a simple facility based upon a word search for existing topics, I'm keen to improve upon that in the future. Does anyone know of any good papers on this subject? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000507.html 2nd draft of liveTopics license posted Mon, 09 Sep 2002 21:15:24 +0100 I've posted a <A href="http://www.quicktopic.com/16/D/FtsR9n38BJYc4.html">2nd draft</A> of the proposed "free for personal use" liveTopics license agreement.  It's modelled philosophically after the BitKeeper license.  Hopefully the text is now clearer.  I'm really looking for comments/criticisms to surface now so that I can get this knocked out soon. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000520.html 3rd draft of the license Tue, 10 Sep 2002 21:12:57 +0100 I've posted the 3rd draft of the liveTopics license <A href="http://www.quicktopic.com/16/D/saTXuaJkyNZP.html">here</A> for review.  It's nearly done I just need to know that people are comfortable with section 3 and what, if anything, I need to go in section 5.  The end is in sight (which is good because I've done a fair bit of work that I want to release). http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000533.html Beginning to market your software Thu, 12 Sep 2002 09:20:32 +0100 <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107789/2002/09/11.html#a839">TidBITS: Marketing Software, Part 1</A>. A great article on <A href="http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06933">Marketing Software</A> in todays TidBITS <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> "You may have an application, and it might be truly useful (rather than a candidate for MacHack), but you don't necessarily have a product or, more importantly, a solution. What's the difference? A pencil is a product, but it's not a solution."</BLOCKQUOTE> A good read for anyone in the software business. Also the first time I've ever read an article and actually contacted the author to query about <A href="http://www.emortal.com">their services</A>. We'll see what comes of it. [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107789/">rebelutionary</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » Thanks Mike, A great article.  Timely to as I was just thinking about productising liveTopics now that the non-commercial license is finallly worked out.</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000535.html liveTopics pre-release update Thu, 12 Sep 2002 20:57:02 +0100 The license is, unless a last minute incident crops up, done and I'm packaging the liveTopics release to go out either tonight or tomorrow depending upon how quickly I can tidy the loose ends.  I think I'm going to have to abandon my hope of producing a proper installation since I can't seem to find an installer that runs on Windows and can build installation packages for both Windows & Mac.  I'm also struggling to get the website into reasonable shape for launch. This time it's for real... http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000541.html liveTopics finally released Fri, 20 Sep 2002 00:43:40 +0100 Kind of a double celebration: <UL> <LI>Today, and with great relief, I formally announce the release of liveTopics (v1.0.3) which is now available for <A href="http://www.novissio.com/html/livetopics.html">download</A>. <LI>You can read more about it at my company's <A href="http://www.novissio.com/">website</A> which I am also launching today.</LI></UL> It's been hard work putting together even the little currently on the website, but I hope to improve it significantly in the days and weeks ahead.  Any feedback would be very welcome. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000560.html It was due Fri, 20 Sep 2002 09:18:29 +0100 <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0109150/2002/09/19.html#a640">It's Too Much For A Single Week!</A>. First <A href="http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/">Jenny Levine at TSL</A> returns, then liveTopics actually gets released. [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0109150/">blog cognosco v 0.1</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » After the endless delays I guess I was due a healthy dose of sarcasm :-)</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000562.html liveTopics issue management by JIRA Fri, 20 Sep 2002 10:31:22 +0100 liveTopics now has an <A href="http://opensource.atlassian.com/novissio/secure/Dashboard.jspa">issue management</A> database.  This is hosted by <A href="http://www.atlassian.com/">Atlassian software</A> on their excellent <A href="http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/default.jsp">JIRA</A> application. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000564.html JIRA roadmaps see into the future! Sat, 21 Sep 2002 11:46:43 +0100 One of the really cool features in JIRA is the RoadMap. JIRA allows you to create versions in your project, both released and unreleased, and to attach issues to them.  In effect, specifying which release the bug will be fixed in.  This is pretty neat.  Then you can look at the project roadmap which will show you upcoming releases, which issues are attached to them and, by looking at how many of those issues are resolved, how close the release is to being ready. It's a great project visualisation tool and I already have the next 4 releases of liveTopics mapped out.  I'll flesh out the issues for those as we go forwards.  If you're interested then sign up and vote! http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000566.html Working towards 1.0.5 Sat, 21 Sep 2002 12:11:34 +0100 I'm concentrating on fixing bugs now for liveTopics 1.0.5 which I hope to make available early next week. A great thing about having issue management is that it actually makes fixing bugs so much easier.  I can see the bugs I am intending to fix for this release all in one convenient display, but still get at the details quickly. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000568.html JIRA does RSS, so cool! Tue, 24 Sep 2002 23:05:56 +0100 Oh man <A href="http://opensource.atlassian.com/novissio/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?pid=10000&tempMax=25&view=rss&reset=true">this</A> so rocks! I'm now have Radio subscribed to a <A href="http://opensource.atlassian.com/novissio/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?pid=10000&tempMax=25&view=rss&reset=true">feed</A> coming out of my liveTopics <A href="http://opensource.atlassian.com/novissio/secure/Dashboard.jspa">JIRA project</A>.  I get an RSS item for each change that happens, i.e. someone adds a new issue, someone adds a comment, it's all there.  This is *so great* for project visibility. Unfortunately it does kinda point out the weaknesses in the Radio aggregator interface.  It was probably fine when you only had a dozen or so feeds but I'm up to 58 and some of them are really big.  I need a tabbed interface that lets me organize feeds the way I want.  I need keyword prioritzation, I need the ability to delete all items from a specific feed at once.  I'd like them outlined to save screen real-estate.  [Actually John Robb's just pointed out that I can delete all the items at once, using the magnifying glass icon - must check that out] Damnit I want aggregator Mark 2.   http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000584.html Sharing zones of control Tue, 24 Sep 2002 23:48:52 +0100 <A href="http://www.smartmobs.com/archives/000171.html">IBM turns to social network analysis</A>. A critical resource embedded within organizations is the knowledge that highly skilled workers bring to work on a day-to-day basis. However, aside from human resource policies targeted at the attraction, development and retention of skilled knowledge workers, there has been little effort put into systematic ways of leveraging knowledge that is embedded in people and relationships. Given the extent to which people rely on their own knowledge and the knowledge of their contacts to solve problems, this is a significant shortcoming. Social network analysis allows us to understand how a given network of people create and share knowledge, helping us to move beyond this approach. [<A href="http://www.smartmobs.com/">Smart Mobs</A>] An important issue that would arise for me, if I were to work in an enterprise, would be to restrict my sharing to the organization. This would require a degree of corporate loyalty that I just might have some trouble with. From a personal standpoint, it would be more useful for me to share all my knowledge publicly: it would enable me to build more relationships with outsiders, and establish a reputation that is not limited to my organization. When the time comes to move on, I'd probably be in a better position. [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/">Seb's Open Research</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » As in most human endeavours I think there's going to have to be a compromise.  I can imagine increasingly relaxed zones of control over blogged information.  Sharing layers if you like: <UL> <LI>My personal private blog (backup brain)</LI> <LI>Team / Project Group / Community blog (private sharing)</LI> <LI>Intranet blog (corporate sharing)</LI> <LI>Public blog (real sharing)</LI></UL> All of which could be done now using Radio category routing.  A simpler interface could be introduced in Radio so that people can specify how wide they want that post shared and Radio selects the right routing category itself. I'd add that liveTopics (plug, plug) will soon support categories and less soon the idea of a corporate weblog directory.  This will group posts from different weblogs around shared topics.  Add theme support and you can cluster related topics to create a real navigable knowledge structure for each layer. I haven't forgotten about BlogPlexes either... [I do seem to have gone italic mad lately though]</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000589.html liveTopics RSS Feed now available Wed, 25 Sep 2002 12:33:28 +0100 For anyone interested in liveTopics I have added an <A href="http://www.novissio.com/ltlog/rss.xml">RSS feed</A> which will be used to announce new releases and important events. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000596.html For a well baked blog, add topics Sat, 28 Sep 2002 12:59:52 +0100 <A href="http://www.networkcomputing.com/1320/1320buzz2.html">Michael DeMaria</A> over at Network Computing wants weblogs to have topical lists of posts.  He points out that the time-based format isn't the easiest thing to use when looking for specific posts on selected topics.  There are obviously two ways find posts contain a specific topic: 1) Use a search engine.  This is the best approach to use when people are resistant to entering metadata.  2) Use a metadata tool like LiveTopics by <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/">Matt Mower</A>.  Matt has built a tool for Radio that makes it easy for authors to enter in metadata with each post.  This makes it easy to provide directories that list post by topic (through use of the outliner).   Basically, Livetopics can create a simple list of topical links to posts, or a complex hierarchy of topical links.  Matt has a complex hierarchy on his site. [<A href="http://jrobb.userland.com/">John Robb's Radio Weblog</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » With thanks to John for the link. Clearly I think Mike makes a very valid point.  Weblogs make great diaries, but the by-date navigation structure sucks for locating topical information.  More information about liveTopics can be had by either clicking the liveTopics see-also reference under this post, or going to the <A href="http://www.novissio.com/products/liveTopics/liveTopics.html">liveTopics</A> page on the <A href="http://www.novissio.com/">Novissio</A> website.</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000617.html What's the difference between topics and categories? Sat, 28 Sep 2002 17:05:23 +0100 With more people interested in liveTopics the question is coming up: "What is the difference between topics and categories?" I think Rick Klau <A href="http://www.rklau.com/tins/2002/08/21.html#a448">sums it up</A> excellently on his weblog (thanks Rick). What categories do best is act as a channel to route content to different places.  This allows you to, for example, run multiple weblogs from one copy of Radio, or have RSS feeds for specific purposes (e.g. I have a feed dedicated to liveTopics announcements, there is no HTML just RSS). But, as Rick points out, categories are a poor choice for organising the metadata for your posts.  They are too inflexible and too hard to setup.  They require choices (e.g. theme) that aren't relevant to metadata and impose limitations (both of interface and duplication of content) that are unwelcome. On the other hand liveTopics are very simple to use.  You create a new topic by using it.  Just type it's name into the field provided when you edit your post.  You can remove topics just as easily. <IMG alt="Weblog Post Form with liveTopics" src="http://www.novissio.com/static/weblogPostForm2.png" border=0> When you publish a post, liveTopics automatically creates a table of contents that contains every topic you have used, and links to each post using each topic.  You also get a number of handy macros to display topics on your weblog.  For example, here is the output from a macro that shows your "Hot Topics" (i.e. the ones you use most often). <IMG alt="hot topics" src="http://www.novissio.com/static/hotTopics2.png"> So that's what topics & liveTopics can do for you today.  Tomorrow?  That's another story.   If you want to see for yourself, click the button and download liveTopics today. <A href="http://www.novissio.com/Downloads/liveTopics/livetopics.html"><IMG alt=Download src="http://www.novissio.com/downloadLT.png" border=0></A> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000621.html Playing with liveTopics Sat, 05 Oct 2002 09:56:07 +0100 <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/2002/10/04.html#a413">Playing With liveTopics - Part II</A>. I still don't know how many <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/2002/10/02.html#a403">episodes</A> this mini <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/2002/09/30.html#a393">series</A> will consist of, but today I'm focusing on the liveTopicsSeeAlso macro, which displays a list of related topics with each post. [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/2002/10/04.html#a413" target=_blank>read more</A>] [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/">s l a m</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » I'm grateful to Marc for his excellent introduction to the features of liveTopics.   His work has shamed me sufficiently to promise that the next full release will come with a complete macro reference.  I aim to put more emphasis on the new user in future releases as well.</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000640.html XFML and the weblog Sat, 05 Oct 2002 10:38:06 +0100 <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/2002/10/04.html#a393">An overview of faceted classification</A>. Peter over at <A href="http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/">Ease</A> provides a short overview of what's happening now in <A href="http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/000481.html">faceted classification</A>. Worth looking at if you're interested in metadata and taxonomies. Peter writes: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> tool availability is coming, and that's good because that will allow us to experiment and then refine the theory.</BLOCKQUOTE> This is precisely how I think it should happen. It's a bootstrap process. [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/">Seb's Open Research</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » The forthcoming 1.0.5 release of liveTopics will have a built in XFML exporter.  However, in a sense, this is nothing more than the simple XTM exporter already present (although somewhat buried). To see a sample of the XFML from a liveTopics enabled weblog take a look <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/outlines/topics/xfml-map.xml">here</A>.  As you will see we have only one XFML facet generic defined to which all of the topics belong. In considering my own ideas for theme support in liveTopics I think they can be mapped to XFML 'parent topics' and so we won't really be using XFML facets at all. This then begs the question:  Of what use is XFML faceted classifaction in a weblog?</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000645.html Faceted Radio weblog demo Mon, 07 Oct 2002 21:14:52 +0100 This is pretty exciting. I've just exported an XFML version of my weblog to facetmap.com so that you can browse my weblog by-liveTopics and drill-down by Date of Publication (e.g. start at 2002, drill-down into May, drill-down into 23rd May). If you go to <A href="http://facetmap.com/demo/browse.jsp?map=curiouserandcuriouser">here</A> you will see an example faceted browsing interface. It's basic but quite functional. You will see two "facets" <UL> <LI>The liveTopics facet contains all my regular topics in a big old list (with number of posts in parens) <LI>The Date of Publication facet contains one topic 2002</LI></UL> Underneath you will see the "top 10" pages at this point. If you drill down into either facet (please try drilling down into 2002 first) you narrow the range of available posts to display. Keep drilling down via and notice how this restricts the liveTopics that are displayed in the other facet to only those used in posts that are still available in your selected date range. Now start to think about other ways of chopping your weblog than just "Date of Publication" http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000658.html XFML 1.0 (CORE) Support in liveTopics 1.0.5 Mon, 07 Oct 2002 22:19:23 +0100 Just a note to say that "beta" support for the new <A href="http://xfml.org/spec/1.0.html">XFML 1.0 (CORE)</A> specification has been included in <A href="http://www.novissio.com/products/liveTopics/liveTopics.html">liveTopics</A> version 1.0.5 which is now available from the beta update server and will be available from the release server at the end of this week. The new liveTopics XFML exporter will allow you to publish an XFML topic map from your weblog that contains all of the topic information defined in your public weblog, with each topic linked to the pages it occurs on. Additionally support for a Date of Publication <A href="http://xfml.org/spec/1.0.html#facetconcept">facet</A> has been included.  Using this facet a compliant application can offer users the ability to drill-down by year, month and even to a single date as well as drilling down by topic. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000661.html Ad hoc group forming with liveTopics and BlogPlex Wed, 09 Oct 2002 16:42:14 +0100 <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/2002/10/09.html#a426">Making group-forming ridiculously easy</A>. Now, the idea is this. When I come across a post on an interesting theme that seems like it might have lasting value, I want to be able to <OL> <LI>Create a topic, with a title of its own and a definition or description in plain English (which may contain arbitrary hyperlinks). Just "where" the topic is stored is unimportant. The important thing is that it is a public entity. <LI>Subscribe to that topic. Subscribing has two effects: it adds the topic to a personal topic list of mine, and it means I'll get posts by other people on that topic in my RSS aggregator because each topic is associated to a shared RSS feed. <LI>Post to that topic whenever I talk about it in my weblog. This has to be *easy*, like checking a box or selecting from a drop-down menu displayed under the box where I write my posts. <LI>Access an archive of posts on that topic somewhere on the Web. <LI>Let anyone edit the description of the topic when important things are added to the "state of the art" on the topic, or when other related topics spring out of the discussion, to let people know where the conversation has branched off.</LI></OL> Basically, from where I stand, this sounds a little like a witch's brew of <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/outlines/liveTopics.html">liveTopics</A>, <A href="http://www.movabletype.org/news/2002_08.shtml#000571">standalone TrackBack</A>, and this peculiar brand of editable web sites known as <A href="http://www2.iro.umontreal.ca/~paquetse/cgi-bin/om.cgi?Wiki">wikis</A>. [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/">Seb's Open Research</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » What you are describing sounds very like the idea behind the <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/2002/05/31.html#a63">BlogPlex Server</A>, for forming ad hoc communities, I put forward a little while back and is the start and endpoint for liveTopics. In order to form BlogPlexes you need enough good metadata in someones weblog to being to make connections between them.  When I looked around I realised categories weren't going to cut it, AI wasn't ready and hence I began working on liveTopics. Obviously since those initial thoughts (which I don't claim are particularly original) I have come across lots of other new ideas like RSS, XFML and so on.  These will all feed in to the design and I think improve it.  For example in considering item (5) one of the powerful features of XFML is to allow us to connect topics together.</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000691.html Anybody got a wrench? Sun, 13 Oct 2002 19:30:49 +0100 So, a description of services, I should be able to whip that up in a couple of minutes shouldn't I?   Turns out its a bit of a chase your own tail problem for me. Services I can offer fall under three broad categories: <UL> <LI>Consulting <LI>Implementation <LI>Product</LI></UL> Way back, when the madness first gripped me, it was on my mind to be a consultant.  I'd done product and implementation and really wanted to move to where the decisions are made.  Unfortunately I didn't heed the warnings.  Consulting is about 80% network and 80% reputation.  You could probably survive with either and thrive with both.  But neither...?  Right. Now implementation skills I have.  No problems there.  I can hook & eye systems together with the best of 'em.  I also have a budding application in "!livetopics".  If I could just choose between them I should be okay right?  Turns out there's a problem though. Because there are no klogging consultants in the UK, there are no pilot programs already in place.  Nobody needs implementation services if they aren't implementing things.  Rats.  Well then how about product? "!liveTopics" is a knowledge-logging application built on "!radio".  But that makes it an application without a market (at least in the UK).  If there is no existing market and no consultants out there fostering a market that leaves a big hole where the customers should be.  Anyway we all now how difficult it is to be a software company post-1999. And last but not least: Where's the leaky pipe? I've referred a few times to Geoffrey Moore's <A href="http://www.rklau.com/tins/2002/09/25.html#a540">leaky pipes</A> metaphor.  That, in todays market, company's will only spend money to fix their pressing problems (their leaky pipes) and then only if it looks like the leak will get worse soon, and then only if the fix can pay for itself.  I'll also note in passing that Moore says that business by referral becomes even more important in a down market.  Nobody wants to trust a software company anymore. Hence my recent interest in framing klogging as the solution to a leaky pipe kind of problem.  I believe that if this is possible then many of the other pieces might fit into place.  But so far I haven't found the a compelling pipe for which klogging will be the wrench.  It still all too "a better tomorrow." So, that's the problems.  The challenge is in 28-days or less to turn this around and create a compelling statement of services. All suggestions warmly welcomed! http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000713.html It's not just for MovableType Wed, 16 Oct 2002 12:35:16 +0100 <A href="http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/2002/10/15.html#a2951">A Different Way Of Looking At Blogs</A>. On the <A href="http://www.info-arch.org/lists/sigia-l/">SIGIA-L mailing list</A>, <A href="http://poorbuthappy.com/ease">Peter Van Dijck</A> pointed to something very cool. <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> "<A href="http://pixelcharmer.com/fieldnotes/">Tanya Pixelcharmer's weblog</A> as viewed through Facetmap: <A href="http://facetmap.com/demo/browse.jsp?map=pixelcharmer"><A href="http://facetmap.com/demo/browse.jsp?map=pixelcharmer">http://facetmap.com/demo/browse.jsp?map=pixelcharmer</A></A>. Tanya exported her metadata as XFML (<A href="http://xfml.org/"><A href="http://xfml.org">http://xfml.org</A></A>) using a template in Moveabletype, and imported it in facetmap."</BLOCKQUOTE> I'm still wrapping my mind around this one, but it's an interesting alternative view of a blog. Kind of a cross between <A href="http://www.novissio.com/Products/liveTopics/livetopics.html">liveTopics</A> and <A href="http://www.yahoo.com/">Yahoo</A> with more format options. [<A href="http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/">The Shifted Librarian</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » Radio users (with "!livetopics") get to play too: <A href="http://facetmap.com/demo/browse.jsp?map=curiouserandcuriouser">http://facetmap.com/demo/browse.jsp?map=curiouserandcuriouser</A> is a recent copy of my Radio weblog exported to XFML.  At the moment liveTopics aren't hierarchical so they all appear as a big glob, but I'm working on this. At the moment I define two facets that you can browse in.  The first, liveTopics, is all the topics I have manually added to my posts.  The second, Date of Publication, is automatically generated by the exporter.  I'll be adding other facets as I go (suggestions welcomed).</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000743.html liveTopic 1.0.5 released Fri, 18 Oct 2002 17:33:54 +0100 Today I am releasing liveTopics version 1.0.5 This is a minor upgrade and bugfix from version 1.0.3.   The documentation in this release is slightly worse than for 1.0.3 in that it is now out of date.  Documentation will be a priority for the 1.1 release. If you do not have automatic updates enabled you will need to update manually. You do this my opening the Radio application (using the Open Radio option of the Radio icon in the system tray (or mac equivalent). Then from the Tools menu, choose the liveTopics submenu and from that "Update" The ZIP file of v1.0.5 is posted on the Novissio website. Whats new in this version: 1) Tools. <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> The liveTopics page now has a Tools section with the following tools: <UL> <LI>Topic Editor (basic info, rename and delete) <LI>Category Converter Wizard (turns categories into topics) <LI>Table of Contents Publisher (re-publish the Table of Contents via the web) <LI>XFML exporter (create an XFML export of your weblog suitable for facetmap.com and other sites)</LI></UL></BLOCKQUOTE> 2) Multi-word Topic Phrases <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> By enabling the preference <A href="http://localhost:5335/liveTopics/preferences?page=toc">here</A> you can enable the use of multi-word topic phrases in liveTopics. With this feature enabled you can use ' ' spaces to separate words in topics.  When entering topic phrases they should be surrounded using '"' (double-quote) character as in "a multiword topic phrase".</BLOCKQUOTE> For more information and to see which bugs have been fixed, check <A href="http://guests.atlassian.com/novissio/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?reset=true&pid=10000&fixfor=10002">JIRA</A>. <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">  </BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000755.html liveTopics 1.1 in progress Fri, 08 Nov 2002 20:33:10 +0000 I'm hard at work on liveTopics 1.1 this weekend.  This will be the first version to support a table of contents per category meaning that you will finally be able to mix categories and topics the way nature intended. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000820.html liveTopics 1.1 close to release Fri, 15 Nov 2002 00:18:21 +0000 It looks like I might finally have squashed the remaining bugs in liveTopics 1.1, what started as your run of the mill complex update spiralled into an endless cycle of fiddly little bugs.  But it's starting to look good now.  I'm hoping to roll out to testers very soon. Between this and trying to come up with a decent pitch for business blogging I haven't been posting much.  I've been reading a lot though and making lots of new friends via <A href="http://www.ryze.org/view.php?who=mowerm">Ryze</A>. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000824.html activeRenderer 1.3.1 Fri, 15 Nov 2002 15:44:55 +0000 <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/2002/11/14.html#a480">activeFix for liveTopics</A>. <A title="meet Matt" href="http://www.ryze.org/view.php?who=mowerm">[img] </A>Or is it liveFix for activeTopics ? :-) <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/">Matt</A> and I quickly found out that the new 1.3 version of <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/outlines/aR/activeRenderer.html">activeRenderer</A>, with its new 'page' wedges for HTML link attributes to outline nodes, was thoroughly breaking <A href="http://www.novissio.com/Products/liveTopics/livetopics.html">liveTopics</A>' indexes. The updated 1.3.1 version of activeRenderer fixes a couple of minor bugs, and handles HTML link attributes in a more liveTopics friendly way. [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/2002/11/14.html#a480" target=_blank>read more</A>] [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/">s l a m</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » My thanks to Marc for quickly & elegantly fixing this problem.  The new activeRenderer features are very cool so you can be sure that liveTopics will soon be exploiting them!</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000828.html Topic Maps: CMS is only the beginning Thu, 21 Nov 2002 09:59:41 +0000 <A href="http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/archives/000381.html">Topic maps in content management</A>. Lars Marius Garshol recently e-mailed me, and pointed me his very interesting article on topic maps and content management. This talks about using an Integrated Topic Management System (ITMS) to provide a much more powerful management interface to the normal... [<A href="http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/">Column Two</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » I'm fundamentally a believer in topic maps even though I haven't really seen them in concrete action yet.  I just believe that they are too simple and elegant an idea to not work.  The nice thing is that with XTM and XFML beginning to take off we are sure to see more and more applications that do support topic maps. One thing in particular that interests me is that Alex Shapiro (of TouchGraph fame) has created a Personal Brain viewer.  This uses the new brain exporter to create a map that is browsable in a TouchGraph viewer.  It's very cool to be able to take the plex-style view of Personal Brain and switch to a TG style view.  If only they could be integrated somehow... For my own part liveTopics adds to the capability of Radio as a CMS by overlaying a topic based structure onto the content.  This will become more powerful when topics can themselves be structured, and when the postings from multiple weblogs can be related by content. Something that worries me though is a recent comment (I cannot remember the source) that weblogs+topics are just recreating threaded discussions.  I can't quite articulate yet what it is I don't like about this comment, but there is something here that bothers me.  (Note: I see nothing wrong with threaded discussion per-se, I think I am more bothered by the possible perception that blogs = another usenet somehow)</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000843.html liveTopics in RSS2.0 Wed, 27 Nov 2002 09:52:54 +0000 Is <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/gems/aaa.xml">this</A> the first <A href="http://aggregator.userland.com/validator?url=http%3A%2F%2Fradio.weblogs.com%2F0107808%2Fgems%2Faaa.xml">valid RSS feed</A> with topic metadata? Today I've finished the experimental RSS generator for Radio that exports the associated liveTopics with each post in the RSS feed.  At the moment topics are contained in a "liveTopics" XML namespace. This will enable a smart aggregator to use the topic's for filtering & combining feeds together.     http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000862.html liveTopics in RSS2.0 #2 Thu, 28 Nov 2002 15:55:44 +0000 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/2002/11/27.html#a566">Matt Mower's Knowledge Log - ( liveTopics, k-log, radio, blogging, RSS )</A>: "This will enable a smart aggregator to use the topic's for filtering & combining feeds together." + filtering is in the pipeline for myRadio, on dates, keywords, and now topics. will be tricky to devise a UI. + filter a single feed, or multiple feeds. multiple feeds would require agreement on a common pool of topics, i think. + Syndication, with meta-data, gathered by smart aggregators, has a lot of possibilities. It would be cool to hear more about usage scenarios. [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100875/">Brain Off</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> Mikel picks up on my post yesterday regarding adding topics to Radio RSS.  I've got a few things in mind for this, but I'm sure others will really lead the way.  Let's just address one point first. When trying to handle feeds from multiple blogs, inevitably, as Mikel points out, we will reach the situation where people using different words to mean the same topic.  This will be a problem, but hopefully not as a big of a problem as it could be.  It is for this reason that I have been tracking <A href="http://xfml.org/">XFML</A> so carefully.  With XFML we have the ability to say "A's topic X is the same as B's topic Y".  liveTopics already does XFML. So I think the first and simplest usage scenario will be within the type of aggregators that we have now as a way of filtering a feed to get rid of posts we deem irrelevant.  This will allow us to subscribe to many, many more feeds since we don't have to weed out so much chaff.  Although I think we'll need to be careful as it may make it more difficult to experience serendipitous moments. The next scenario I can imagine is as a way of producing a consolidated "on-topic" feed from a number of other feeds.  Combined with technology to scrape RSS from sites and databases and with a little automagic to add topics where they don't exist this could be very powerful. My imagination runs out here, maybe someone else..? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000887.html BlogChannels with liveTopics + RSS Thu, 28 Nov 2002 20:06:46 +0000 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/2002/11/20.html#a580">BlogChannels for loosely joining webloggers?</A>. Sebastien reports on a very cool project. BlogChannels could be a powerful tool... and it might save me a lot of manual work that I need to do for Seblogging. If people simply "pinged" a common channel I would not need to sift through all the stuff that is getting published on the individual Weblogs. This is especially the case with less focused Weblogs where only now and then a posts refers to educational applications of personal Webpublishing and Weblogging... [<A href="http://Seblogging.cognitivearchitects.com/">Seblogging News</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> The BlogChannels idea presented here merges very neatly with the <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/2002/11/28.html#a577">work</A> I am doing with liveTopics + RSS2.0 and one of the suggested applications of that work, i.e. consolidating multiple RSS feeds based upon topic information.  The nice thing is that this work can be easily duplicated for any blogging system. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000894.html liveTopics in RSS2.0 #3 Thu, 28 Nov 2002 20:43:06 +0000 My RSS2.0 feed is now live using a liveTopics namespace to add topic information to each post.  If your aggregator gets smart you could filter out all the stuff I say that you're not interested in....  err... hello?  Where did everyone go? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000896.html liveTopics RSS, RDF and the Dublin Core Fri, 29 Nov 2002 08:55:46 +0000 liveTopics RSS2.0 feeds now use a vendor neutral XML namespace: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> xmlns:rsstopics=<A href="http://purl.oclc.org/NET/rss-topics/">http://purl.oclc.org/NET/rss-topics/</A></BLOCKQUOTE> which is currently pointed at <A href="http://www.novissio.com/resources/rsstopics/">http://www.novissio.com/resources/rsstopics/</A> So each <item/> now comes with an <rsstopics:topic/> definition for every topic it is associated with.  These <topic> tags will soon be pointing back to their ToC entries and optionally to their definition within the XFML version of the weblog. I have taken a quick look at the work done on the RSS1.0 taxonomy module with defines an RDF syntax for specifying topics and advises the use of Dublin Core metadata for adding information.  I'll certainly be persuing the use of DC tags but does anyone think I should be trying to re-use the RDF module & syntax? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000903.html More on BlogChannels and topics Fri, 29 Nov 2002 14:52:45 +0000 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/2002/11/20.html#a580">BlogChannels for loosely joining webloggers?</A>. There's a dual way to look at blog channels. They provide a sociality-driven incentive for bloggers to apply metadata tags to their posts. By tagging X on a post you're in effect hanging out a bit with the X crowd.  "Metadata has never been more fun!" Well, that's perhaps an exaggeration, but I'm personally much more interested in metadata that means something for people other than me. This is what I find most interesting in this scheme: metadata is shared - that's built into the design. The meaning of the shared term takes shape through the efforts of several people. Contrast this to what currently happens with individual blog categories, where we often have a hard time making sense of each other's categories. UNQUOTE [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/">Seb's Open Research</A>] [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/categories/brainToBrain/">Al Macintyre: Brain to Brain</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> Al groks it.  Adding metadata is a way of self-selecting the crowd you want to hang out with. And the problem of differences in metadata can be overcome by building shared taxonomy (e.g. using an XFML map) to relate your topics to each other.  By building it out in the open you encourage other people to adopt the same terminology (this is what liveTopics topic rolls will be all about). http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000920.html Timeless weblogs Sun, 15 Dec 2002 21:47:38 +0000 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> The other outline-related idea that I never got around to implementing, but do know how to implement (I think) is what I <A href="http://www.google.com/search?as_q=timeless&num=10&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&lr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all&as_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=scriptingnews.userland.com&safe=off">called</A> "timeless weblogs". Basically you'd route a weblog post to a section of an OPML directory, as described above, using the <CATEGORY><A href="http://backend.userland.com/rss#ltcategorygtSubelementOfLtitemgt">element</A> that's been in RSS since 0.92. Then it would appear in a news box on that category, so you'd get persistent links on the left hand side, and new bits that are not permanent, in the news box. As with all these things, if you have an idea, the time may not be right. Maybe it's right now for these ideas. Just a Sunday morning pondering. [<A href="http://www.scripting.com/">Scripting News</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> For "timeless weblogs" read "topics".  liveTopics that is :-) http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001000.html Testing RSS liveTopics Sun, 15 Dec 2002 22:59:04 +0000 Test RSS topics. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001002.html Nose back to the grindstone Mon, 30 Dec 2002 20:04:39 +0000 The christmas RSS backlog is now reduced to managable proportions.  Back to work on the liveTopics user guide! http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001020.html Current progress on liveTopics 1.1 Thu, 02 Jan 2003 16:22:44 +0000 liveTopics 1.1 has been further delayed.  Unfortunately the delay is not entirely due to my inability to finish the user guide.  Well it is, but it's not quite that simple.  Allow me to explain: I've gotten to the stage of writing the part about how you configure the product.  At this point I have realised that the configuration process is a mess and needs fixing.  It's too complicated and basically too broken as it stands. So I'm going back to fix how preferences are handled once and for all.  This should lead to a better product and, hopefully, one that is easier for me to document! With luck it will only introduce a small delay and I can confidently state that liveTopics 1.1 will be released in 2003! http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001030.html liveTopics configuration Sun, 12 Jan 2003 18:09:23 +0000 As a small demonstration that progress towards liveTopics version 1.1 is being made I've just put up a <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/gems/ltcap.jpg">screenshot</A> of the new status & configuration screen. This is a radical overhaul of the interface both in the current release 1.06 and that I initially developed for 1.1.  I've put everything on a single screen and tried to make it as simple as possible. Everything got a lot more complicated when I started to have per-category preferences and, rather than continue with the grotty hack I had in place (which was proving incredibly hard to document, and wouldn't have worked properly) I decided to start with a clean slate. All feedback is welcome. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001062.html The Topic Exchange Tue, 14 Jan 2003 09:57:10 +0000 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <A href="http://blogs.salon.com/0000002/2003/1/14/#200301141">New and improved</A>. Thought I'd mention something new I've been hacking on for the last few evenings. It's not all done yet, but people are e-mailing me about it so here's a bit of an introduction:     <A href="http://topicexchange.com/">The Internet Topic Exchange</A> It's the first (as far as I know) real-life implementation of <A href="http://www.myelin.co.nz/cgi-bin/wcswiki.pl?RidiculouslyEasyGroupForming">Ridiculously Easy Group Forming</A>. Basically, it lets you create sites like <A href="http://www.highcontext.com/kmpings/">KMPings</A> just by filling out a <A href="http://topicexchange.com/new">form</A>. Once you've created one, you can send <A href="http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/">TrackBack</A> pings to it, and see them <A href="http://topicexchange.com/t/test/">like so</A>. There's also <A href="http://topicexchange.com/t/test/rss">RSS</A> for the aggregator junkies. With any luck <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/">Matt Mower</A> will be supporting it with his <A href="http://www.novissio.com/products/liveTopics/liveTopics.html">LiveTopics</A> tool, so it'll be trivial to use from <A href="http://radio.userland.com/">Radio</A> as well. Any suggestions / feature requests? <A title="Click here to comment on this post." href="http://rcs.salon.com/rcsComments/comments?u=2&p=200301141&link=http://blogs.salon.com/0000002/2003/1/14/#200301141">Comment</A> [<A href="http://blogs.salon.com/0000002/">Second p0st</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> Indeed I will be.  I hacked in the basic support for the configuration of this feature last night (since I was working on preferences code anyway).  Adding the ping code as another publishing activity should be trivial. What Phil has done is to implement a very simple, elegant, solution along the path of the BlogPlex idea I've been working towards.  With the Topic Exchange, it will be simple for users to cluster around topics simply by using them. What might be interesting is to combine this with the idea of synonyms (from XFML) so that even when people don't use exactly the same topic name, if they are talking about the same thing, they can still cluster with everyone else!   http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001065.html Testing liveTopics 1.1.1 Wed, 15 Jan 2003 12:59:26 +0000 I've spent the last two days reworking some of the innards of liveTopics.  First, I've implemented a completely new preferences management system, and, second, I've removed a great deal of the cruft that has accumulated as liveTopics has grown from a quick and grotty hack into a big and tangled hack. This is kind of a test to see whether things are still working in my blog. I've also pushed the version up to 1.1.1 for reasons which are probably not too interesting. Okay there are clearly problems...  <grrr> Well of course it would have helped if I had remember to reset the new preferences.... That fixes the topic links, unfortunately the TOC is not being updated now... Try this.  Nope, how about that.  The other? Right with a bit of luck the ToC generator is fixed.  Now to try and ping the Topic Exchange ;-) http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001070.html Testing topic exchange Wed, 15 Jan 2003 18:15:01 +0000 If this test works then liveTopics will have automatically pinged the topics associated with this post at <A href="http://topicexchange.com/">Topic Exchange</A>.  The evidence will be <A href="http://topicexchange.com/t/liveTopics/">here</A>. Okay, slight hiccup -- let's try that again... http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001074.html Plans and licenses Wed, 15 Jan 2003 23:16:30 +0000 After all the pain I went through last year I can't actually believe I am doing this, however, I am thinking of changing the license for liveTopics from my custom license (the <A href="http://www.novissio.com/Products/liveTopics/liveTopics_Software_License_Ag/livetopics_software_license_ag.html">LSLA</A>) to use a <A href="http://www.creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons</A> license. My current plans are to release two editions of liveTopics tentatively dubbed the Personal and Collaborative editions. liveTopics Personal Edition (PE) will be basically continue to be free for non-commercial use as liveTopics is now.  Of the license available I think the: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <A href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0">Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0</A></BLOCKQUOTE> seems closest to the spirit of the LSLA.  liveTopics PE will include all of the Table of Contents & weblog based features that most people are using now, but it will not include any of the topic mapping functionality. liveTopics Collaborative Edition (CE) will include the ability to create topic maps (in both <A href="http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/">XTM</A> and <A href="http://xfml.org/">XFML</A> formats), the ability to do trackback pings on topics (ala Phil Pearsons <A href="http://www.topicexchange.com/">TopicExchange</A>), and be able to output topics in RSS2.0 to enable smart aggregators.  liveTopics CE will support commerical use. I am considering a price tag of $65 (USD) / £40 (UKP) for a CE license. I'd be interested in any and all feedback on these plans.  They are by no means definite (other than that all of those features will be available in some combination, somehow). http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001076.html RSS topics in the mix Tue, 21 Jan 2003 18:17:40 +0000 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <A href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/radio-dev/message/7369">Dave Winer</A>. Callbacks for RSS-writing released [<A href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/radio-dev">radio-dev</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> This is good stuff.  liveTopics was using my own witches brew of code to inject topic information into the RSS feed.  Now it can do it with a proper set of callbacks.  And this will work across all categories as well.  Neat, thank you Dave.   http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001083.html Catch up... Fri, 14 Feb 2003 09:53:57 +0000 Just catching up... Had drinks with <A href="http://www.rklau.com/tins/">Rick</A> and <A href="http://www.surveyanalysis.com/">Roger</A> on Wednesday night in central London.  I hadn't seen either of them in quite a while so it was good to catch up.  Add <A href="http://paolo.evectors.it/">Paolo</A> to the mix and i've had a very interesting week! Yesterday was spent getting the liveTopics release together.  It was quite frustrating but I think I should have it done by this afternoon. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001156.html liveTopics 1.1.3 Wed, 19 Mar 2003 20:30:00 +0000 I hope to give you guys liveTopics 1.1.3 tomorrow which inclues basic topic types functionality. This will allow you to edit existing topics and specify a type (fixed at the moment to generic, person, project, place & time).  These types will then be exposed via the RSS feed. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001309.html Topic Rolls near reality Thu, 27 Mar 2003 23:38:44 +0000 Some while ago I talked about the facility for users to share topics with each other.  I was just beginning to experiment with topics and blogging and, at the time, was thinking of an ad hoc P2P mechanism by which users could ensure they were talking about the same thing by using the same topics.  I called this concept a topicroll playing on the theme of the blogroll. More recently Paolo and I have been working on making use of topics to create a superior Action Journalling environment.  <A href="http://paolo.evectors.it/">Paolo</A> has also been involved in the <A href="http://www.bookcafe.net/blog/aggregator/">Italian Blog Aggregator</A> project about which he has written on several occasions.  These efforts have begun to dovetail and I wanted to document some of what we are doing. For a while now liveTopics has provided the ability for Radio users to associate multiple topics with their posts.  This allows for fine-grained, ad hoc, associations between posts in a much more flexible way than categories allow.  Release 1.1.3 (due RSN) adds also the concept of topic types and these are central to our efforts. liveTopics types are a way of classifying topics into functional categories.  For example the default types created by liveTopics are: <UL> <LI>generic <LI>person <LI>project <LI>place <LI>time</LI></UL> Each topic can belong to only one type (which defaults to generic).  Now my topic <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/topics/topicsP.html#paolo">Paolo</A> can be classified as being a person topic.  Now all topics are not equal and our software can start to provide useful interfaces based upon topic information. Systems such as the Italian Blog Aggregator may want to define a control language for topics rather than allowing users to make up their own.  Even if it does not wish to control the topics, it may be useful if users can pre-fill their topic list with system defined topics.  That's what the topicroll is all about.  Now we're going to implement it. To begin with we have choosen to use the <A href="http://www.opml.org/spec">OPML</A> format for the topic roll (later on we will probably implement them in <A href="http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/">XTM</A> as well).  Whilst OPML is not a semantically ideal language for describing a topic roll it has a number of advantage for us right now: <UL> <LI>It's simple: It basically has only 1 tag <outline> so it's pretty easy to get along with <LI>It's a standard: OPML is already used & understood around the world, we're not inventing it ourselves <LI>There are tools: In principle you should be able to create a topic roll in any OPML editor and load it into liveTopics and vice versa</LI></UL> As an example you can see my current <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/topics/resources/topicRoll.opml">topicroll</A> for yourself (although I notice that Radio doesn't seem to make anything of it, I wonder if my OPML is bad). [28/03: With a little help from Paolo the topicRoll OPML is now fixed and the outline works in Radio!] The next step is to allow liveTopics to import topicrolls from other locations. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001331.html MarcB hits town Tue, 01 Apr 2003 11:38:08 +0100 <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/">Marc Barrot</A> is in town and came to visit last night.  We spent a good chunk of the evening drinking red wine & chatting about the war (like you do).  Then Marc showed me the progress he's made with WebOutliner and boy is it impressive (you'll just have to wait and see).  He's also taught me some neat tricks with Javascript & DOM which radically improve the liveTopics interface, expect these very soon. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001345.html Mozilla and liveTopics Wed, 02 Apr 2003 19:40:34 +0100 I don't use Mozilla as my day-to-day browser.  Over the last couple of years I have become very dependent upon MS IE.  IE may be a terribly irritating browser at times but it's still ahead of Mozilla on Windows and the WYSIWYG editor is a major plus when editing weblog posts. However I have to take my hat off to the Mozilla developers for providing a vastly superior environment for writing web applications.  Over the last couple of days I have been delving into the DOM and using JavaScript+DOM to create a dynamic interface for liveTopics.  IE just sucks in this respect.  It's error messages are hard to find, unhelpful or just plain wrong.  Using the Mozilla console & DOM inspector have just made things much easier.  Now if I could just figure out the debugger... One thing that does puzzle me though is why the built in View Source application: <UL> <LI>doesn't show line numbers <LI>doesn't have a jump-to-line-n command</LI></UL> Both seem like pretty obvious functionality to me. So, what is this all in aid of?  Well <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/">Marc</A> wowed me with the possibilities available with DOM & JS in today's browser (I did most of my HTML & JavaScript coding over 3 years ago) and I realised that I could totally overhaul the part of the liveTopics interface that needed it most. Here are some screenshots to give you an idea where I am going with this. <%softShadow( "http://matt.blogs.it/images/liveTopics/topicManager1.jpg" )%>The old suggest topics interface is gone, long live the topic manager.  You'll notice that this interface displays the topic types available in my weblog. <%softShadow( "http://matt.blogs.it/images/liveTopics/topicManager2.jpg" )%>There are no suggested topics shown in this shot but they would appear as regular checkbox items. Here I have popped open one of the types to show the topics I can select from it. All thanks to the magic of activeRenderer. <%softShadow( "http://matt.blogs.it/images/liveTopics/topicManager3.jpg" )%>Heres the magic. Click + and add a new topic. You can also say what type it should belong to. <%softShadow( "http://matt.blogs.it/images/liveTopics/topicManager4.jpg" )%>The interface is totally dynamic. There are a few more days work to get this to a point where it is usable.  I hope to release 1.1.3 to interested parties (Roland?) at the weekend.  Oh and of course this release also contains RSS+topics and Topic Types! http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001348.html Exploring topics in RSS2.0 Sat, 05 Apr 2003 10:38:33 +0100 I've been doing some thinking about how to encode topic information into RSS2.0 feeds.  As a simple test of the Radio callback facility I have <A href="http://matt.blogs.it/rss.xml">implemented</A> a very simplistic protocol.  Within each <item> is a tag <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <topic id="topic_id" type="topic-type" source="url">topic name</topic></BLOCKQUOTE> for each topic associated with the item (post).  A concrete example (using the rsstopics namespace): <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <rsstopics:topic rsstopics:id="the_state" rsstopics:source="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/topicsT.html#the_state" rsstopics:type="generic">the state</rsstopics:topic></BLOCKQUOTE> Whilst this does have the advantage that it's simple and direct it's also a bit silly to invent a new format for topic information when we have two standard culprits available already: <UL dir=ltr> <LI> <DIV><A href="http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/">Resource Description Framework (RDF)</A> </DIV> <LI> <DIV><A href="http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/">XML Topic Maps (XTM)</A></DIV></LI></UL> RDF is a general format for describing resources.  A resource in RDF terms is anything which can be uniquely identified by a URI.  An RDF statement (utilizing <A href="http://dublincore.org/">Dublin Core</A> metadata) that asserts me as the owner of my weblog might look something like: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <rdf:Description rdf:about="http://matt.blogs.it">     <dc:Creator>Matt Mower</dc:Creator> </rdf:Description></BLOCKQUOTE> If you cut away the syntactic fluff what this says is: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> Matt Mower is the Creator of <A href="http://matt.blogs.it/">http://matt.blogs.it</A></BLOCKQUOTE> Referring back to the problem at hand, describing what a post (expressed as an RSS item) is about we could come up with something like: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <item rdf:about="permalink">     <topic id="topic_id" type="topic-type" source="url">topic name</topic> </item></BLOCKQUOTE> Which is more or less exactly where we started -- using RDF hasn't altered the solution but it has added some framework around it (in this case adding rdf:about to signal the presence of RDF data within the item).  However we can go a step further.  A useful <A href="http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/05/02/semanticwebsite.html">article</A> by <A href="http://www.xml.com/pub/au/74">Eric van der Vlist</A> discusses this very subject and refers to the RSS1.0 taxonomy module. Somewhat counter to what you would expect <A href="http://backend.userland.com/rss">RSS2.0</A> does not follow on from <A href="http://www.purl.org/rss/1.0/">RSS1.0</A>, nor does RSS1.0 follow on from the popular RSS0.9x formats.  RSS1.0 is, depending upon your point of view, a step forward or an aberation.  RSS1.0 uses a modular set of RDF based tags to describe items in the RSS feed.  One such module is the <A href="http://www.purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/taxonomy/">Taxonomy module</A> which is intended to allow classification of RSS channels & items. Using the taxonomy module you create something like: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <item rdf:about="permalink">     <taxo:topics>         <rdf:Bag>             <rdf:li resource="topic-uri-1"/>             <rdf:li resource="topic-uri-2"/>         </rdf:Bag>     </taxo:topics> </item></BLOCKQUOTE> Here the <topics> element contains a list (using the RDF defined Bag - or unorderer list - container element) of resources indicating topics that describe the item.  Each resource then has a <topic> element that describes the topic.  It  might look something like: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <taxo:topic rdf:about="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/topicsT.html#the_state">     <taxo:link>http://matt.blogs.it/topics/topicsT.html#the_state<taxo:link>     <rsstopics:type>generic</rsstopics:type>     <dc:title>The State</dc:title> </taxo:topic></BLOCKQUOTE> Although it's a jumble of RDF, the RSS1.0 taxonomy module, Dublic Core, and, a custom rsstopics schema this says exactly the same thing as the original: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <topic id="topic_id" type="topic-type" source="url">topic name</topic></BLOCKQUOTE> But do we have to deal with such an ugly mess?  Perhaps not.  Our original choices included the XML Topic Maps format.  This is a complete specification for exchanging topic information.  An example of a topic in XTM format might look something like: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <topic id="the_state">     <instanceOf>         <topicRef xlink:href="http://www.purl.org/rss-topics/rss-topics#generic">     </instanceOf>     <baseName>         <baseNameString>The State</baseNameString>     <occurence id="the-state-item">         <instanceOf>             <topicRef xlink:href="http://www.purl.org/rss-topics/rss-topics#story">         </instanceOf>         <resourceRef xlink:href="<permalink-uri>">     </occurence> </topic></BLOCKQUOTE> Again this encodes the same information, using a standard format and only one required namespace (that of XTM itself).  A URI such as <A href="http://www.purl.org/rss-topics/rss-topics#generic">http://www.purl.org/rss-topics/rss-topics#generic</A> points at a topic in another map (in this case a topic describing the topic-type generic). The use of XTM comes with a number of advantages with the main one being that there are an increasing number of tools available to process & manipulate it (for example, see <A href="http://www.topicmap.com/topicmap/tools.html">topicmap.com</A>).  However there also a number of problems with this representation when you attempt to embed it within another XML format such as RSS. <UL dir=ltr> <LI> <DIV>It's not clear whether an XTM fragment such as this is valid when used in this way</DIV> <LI> <DIV>Each time a topic is used we will be duplicating it's details, bloating the markup & potentially creating invalid entries</DIV> <LI> <DIV>The <occurence> relation within the <topic> element is technically redundant.  The enclosing <item> indicates the occurrence.  </DIV></LI></UL> One way to avoid these problems would be to embed the topics within the RSS <channel> definition and refer to them from each <item>.  However we still need a way to refer to the topic and XTM doesn't provide this.  If we had a good way to reference topics then we could either embed mini topic map within the RSS file, or just have the <topicmap> in an external file and point to it.  What could we use?  One possibility is RDF. Using a combination of RDF and XTM would mean something like: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <item rdf:about="<permalink-uri>">     <rsstopics:topic>http://www.example.org/myTopicMap.xtm#topic-id</rsstopics:topic>     </item></BLOCKQUOTE> or <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <item rdf:about="<permalink-uri>">     <rsstopics:topic>#topic-id</rsstopics:topic>   </item></BLOCKQUOTE> In this example the item now refers to an XTM defined topic either elsewhere in the RSS feed (contained within a valid <topicmap> element) or within an external topic map.  The referenced <topic> element can further describe the topic (names, types and so on) using all the expressiveness of XTM.  It's also efficient since there is no duplicated information within the feed. I have described approaches using RDF, XTM and a hybrid of the two.  Each has advantages and disadvantages although I believe the hybrid makes the best use of both formats. I'd welcome comments and or opinions from interested parties. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001351.html Topic Rolls, Controlled vocabulary and the ITE Mon, 07 Apr 2003 16:51:49 +0100 <BLOCKQUOTE> <A href="http://matt.blogs.it/2003/03/27.html#a836">Topic Rolls near reality</A>. <BLOCKQUOTE cite=http://matt.blogs.it/2003/03/27.html#a836> The next step is to allow liveTopics to import topicrolls from other locations. [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/">Matt Mower</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> Matt expands his work on topic information for Weblog entries. He adds another hierarchical layer by introducing "topic types". This basically allows you to group your containers (topics) into another layer of containers (topic types), thus adding more modelling power to one's own topic structure. Without knowing what really is going on in Italy I would be very cautious with attempts to "define a control language for topics rather than allowing users to make up their own." This is where most projects in this are seem to go the wrong way. At some point someone steps in and wants to take control instead of developing tools that would allow the negotiation of shared topic meanings... [<A href="http://Seblogging.cognitivearchitects.com/SebastianFiedler">Sebastian Fiedler</A>] [<A href="http://Seblogging.cognitivearchitects.com/">Seblogging News</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> Since Paolo's currently out of <A href="http://paolo.evectors.it/2003/04/07.html#a1559">range</A> I guess I should add something here. <A href="http://www.bookcafe.net/blog/aggregator/">Blog Notes</A> (Giuseppe Granieri's blog aggegrator project) is a structured news feed viewer.  It allows you to attach certain pre-defined topics to a post to indicate such things as: <UL> <LI>the post is an ironic comment</LI> <LI>the post is about politics</LI></UL> In order to keep the structure under control the range of topics must necessarily be restricted.  So in essence the range of topics in Blog Notes forms a controlled vocabulary and liveTopics will, to some extent, support this. However that won't mean that people will be unable to create their own topics or interact with other applications that do permit is such as Phil Pearson's <A href="http://topicexchange.com/">Internet Topic Exchange</A>.  As a sidenote I am very conscious that the work in integrating liveTopics and TopicExchange never got finished.  I have it in mind to get in touch with Phil again and see where we are with the outstanding issues.  (Phil if you see this and have a moment, please ping me via IM). http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001363.html Pepping up liveTopics performance Mon, 07 Apr 2003 20:40:01 +0100 I knew that Radio's outline were slow but... Internally liveTopics uses Radio's outlines quite a lot.  When you are outputting outlines for activeRenderer it seems quite convenient to use Radio's built-in support them as a type.  But as my topics database has grown, liveTopics has begun to groan.  And this on a pretty zippy P4 1.6GHz, I can only imagine what it must be like for some people out there with somewhat slower machines (Marc?) So I took a first cut a few minutes ago at re-writing the liveTopics outline generator and did a little benchmarking.  At the moment it takes the Radio outline based generator 64 seconds to generate the XML for my topic liveTopics which is the largest topic in my database at 82 posts. By contrast it takes my hand-rolled OPML generator just 2 seconds to do the same work! It will take a little bit of time to replace the current generator properly but I anticipate the performance difference will be startling. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001365.html liveTopics go fast now Mon, 07 Apr 2003 22:27:26 +0100 I'm actually pretty pleased with this. I wrote a new Table of Contents driver for liveTopics which uses the new OPML generator. Now, fully regenerating my table of contents (the whole 239 topics A..Z of it) takes 49 seconds start to finish! This was a task that took well in excess of 16 minutes (not counting upstreaming) last time I tried it. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001367.html Announcing: ENT v1.0 Easy News Topics for RSS2.0 Fri, 11 Apr 2003 13:59:53 +0100 <A href="http://www.purl.org/NET/ENT/1.0/"><IMG alt="Easy News Topics" src="http://matt.blogs.it/specs/ENT/1.0/ENT10.gif" border=0></A> <A href="http://paolo.evectors.it/2003/04/11.html#a1567">Paolo</A> and I are pleased to announce the release of the first public draft of the <A href="http://www.purl.org/NET/ENT/1.0/">Easy News Topics (ENT) specification</A>.  ENT1.0 is an RSS2.0 module designed to make it really easy to incorporate topics into RSS feeds.  Why would you want to do that?  Because it will help to enable a raft of new, smarter, aggregator products. RSS has become very important to a lot of us and we are starting to see its penetration into the business world as well.  We think that integrating topics will help aggregators applications to scale to meet the future needs of users as well as delivering some very powerful applications.  I've spoken before about the kinds of thing I want my aggregator to do: <UL> <LI>group posts from many feeds by interest. <LI>filtering posts I don't want to see <LI>scoring & promote posts <LI>recombine different feeds dynamically.</LI></UL> I hope that ENT might help bring all these things a little closer.  We also see a role for classification in bringing new ways to order, view, and, search weblog data. We are offering ENT1.0 to the community (under a <A href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/">Creative Commons License</A>) in the hope that we can foster these applications and many more, that we haven't even begun to think of yet. I will soon be releasing to the public the next version of liveTopics which will be ENT compliant.  At that point any Radio user will be able to easily add topic metadata to their RSS feed.  We hope that there will soon be many applications available to make use of it. We look forward to your comments. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001376.html liveTopics 1.1.3 beta test Tue, 15 Apr 2003 21:37:04 +0100 I've created a <A href="http://linux.evectors.it/wiki/liveTopics/wiki.pl?BetaTesters">page</A> for people interested in beta testing liveTopics 1.1.3, please go add yourself if you want to get involved. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001391.html MyRadio gets ENT Mon, 21 Apr 2003 09:45:18 +0100 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100875/2003/04/17.html#a932">myRadio supports ENT 1.0</A>. My<IMG src="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100875/images/radioBadge.gif"> supports <A href="http://matt.blogs.it/specs/ENT/1.0/"><IMG src="http://matt.blogs.it/specs/ENT/1.0/ENT10-small.gif" border=0></A> Announcing the release of <A href="http://matt.blogs.it/specs/ENT/1.0/ENT10-small.gif">ENT 1.0</A> (Easy News Topics) support in <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100875/outlines/myRadio/">myRadio</A>. One of the stated goals of ENT is to "represent topics sufficiently that they be useful in enabling smart aggregators (e.g. filtering, recombining feeds, etc...)". RSS+ENT feeds can be filtered in myRadio, by selecting topics of interest. Available topics for a feed are those seen by the aggregator, in the RSS feed. That list will grow in time. Later, myRadio will support topicRolls for this purpose. Future features may also include recombining feeds according to topic. Update myRadio.root in RU, or download the latest <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100875/gems/myRadio.root">here</A>. Configure using the "Edit Topics" link in the myRadio navigation bar. Please contact me with any feedback, suggestions, and bug reports. Currently, the only known feeds supporting ENT 1.0 are <A href="http://matt.blogs.it/rss.xml">Curiouser and curiouser</A> and <A href="http://topicexchange.com/rss">Topic Exchange</A>. ENT enabled feeds should increase greatly when liveTopics 1.3.3 is released. [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100875/">Brain Off</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> Fantastic news.  Well done Mikel. This will be the first application in the hands of users that will let them get the benefit of topics in their feeds.  liveTopics 1.1.3 is in beta at the moment and should be available soon.  Once that happens there will be a small cluster of feeds that do support ENT.  But we need to do more. Specifically we need to find a way to get at the hordes of MovableType users and get them in the game.   http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001411.html More about k-collector Wed, 07 May 2003 15:08:52 +0100 A little bit of background about the k-collector client. k-collector client for Radio Userland is really a totally stripped down version of liveTopics.  Out go tables of contents, local databases of topics, lots of macros, XFML, XTM and a raft of other stuff i'm like. What you end up with is a simple client designed to bootstrap itself from an online cloud of topics.  For an example of such a cloud is <A href="http://k-collector.evectors.it/itentdirectory/topicRoll.opml?dir=8">here</A>.  Topics created on the local system are exported via the RSS feed using <A href="http://www.purl.org/NET/ENT/1.0/">ENT</A> and from there appear on the k-collector server.  Each k-collector client regularly polls the cloud looking for new topics and makes them available locally. It's a nice, simple, dynamic system for publishing using shared topics. What k-collector doesn't have most people probably won't miss (especially if they are using a k-collector server) and as a result k-collector is much smaller, lighter and more stable than liveTopics.  liveTopics is a complicated application and the combination of Radio & Usertalk don't really support complexity very well.  k-collector should suffer from far less problems than it's bigger counterpart. More later. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001457.html Not so ancient history Sat, 22 Oct 2005 10:36:07 +0100 Todd Higgins asks me: <a href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0101495/2005/10/21.html#a4">Is liveTopics still available?</a> The answer is: yes and no. Back in August I had dinner with <a href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/">Marc Barrot</a> and he asked me the same question. At that time I gave him an email putting the liveTopics code under the <a href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php">MIT License</a> and gave him my blessing to do what he liked with it. My single caveat was that I didn't want to have to support it. The complication to this is that, along the way, I have lost the last distribution file. It may be on a backup CD somewhere but I'm not hopeful. I have a few root files of uncertain provenance (works in progress) but nothing else. Maybe Marc himself as a copy, or perhaps <a href="http://blog.mathemagenic.com/">Lilia</a> does? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00003055.html