Curiouser and Curiouser!

Curiouser and Curiouser! on topics http://matt.blogs.it/ RSS feed for topic topics Copyright 2006 Matt Mower Squib/0.1 self@mattmower.com self@mattmower.com en-gb Trackback and topic maps Mon, 15 Jul 2002 22:18:28 +0100 <A href="http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/2002/07/15.html#a2659">Truly Closing The Loop With Trackback</A>. <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> "Blogging is currently a one-way medium. Best you can do is have 2 (ok, 'N') people subscribing to each other's monologues. But with <A href="http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/">TrackBack</A> you close the loop and notify your conversation partner that it's now her/his turn. Now you can TRULY have interchange. Something that's only hackishly possible at the moment. (Check the userland discussions for the number of times people ask for 'comment notifications'.)" [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0108194/2002/07/15.html#a118">The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty</A>] "I agree.  I think TrackBack is a very important technology.  I'm reaching for a metaphor but can't find a good one.  But effectively it's the difference between a broadcast system and a network.  Blogs alone are too much like public broadcasting.  You send and if you're lucky you get back letters and phone calls.  With TrackBack people can be wired in, feedback loops will be established, communities will grow, it'll all come alive." [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/">Curiouser and curiouser!</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> TrackBack is a fantastic idea, because I could never manually find all of the posts that might point to mine. So it goes out and harvests them for me, but the problem becomes time to review them. Depending on how popular your posts are, it might be useful to Trackback notifications into your news aggregator. Of course, this could pretty overwhelming for folks like <A href="http://www.scripting.com/">Dave</A> and <A href="http://doc.weblogs.com/">Doc</A> but then again, it might save them the type of finding the cites manually. And could you build a master database of these things and organize them by category? Kind of make a Social Sciences Citation Index for your site? Something like that would be extremely useful within the Illinois libraries blogosphere I want to implement. [<A href="http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/">The Shifted Librarian</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » The citation index is an interesting idea.  Combining TrackBack with topic maps would enable some interesting analysis of who was citing you.  This could make Trackback both scalable and more usable.    </BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000203.html Easy topic maps Thu, 01 Aug 2002 19:10:52 +0100 <A href="http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/archives/000114.html">More on topic maps</A>. For those of us who are still struggling to get a firm grasp on topic maps (and I'm definitely in [<A href="http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/">Column Two</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » More useful info on topic maps.</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000241.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/00000267.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/00000280.html PageRank and topics Sat, 10 Aug 2002 12:43:20 +0100 <A href="http://tig.nareau.com/2002/06/21.html#a196">The blogging network</A>. Here's a thought: Blogging is different from simple linking, directional or non-directional, for two reasons: firstly, whether one uses blogger and blogthis! or radio with its subscription list and blogrolls, or a personal directory, there is an inherent bias in the initial set, ie, following links is not random, rather its weighted by some initial set of sources. Haveliwala et.al. model topic specific PageRank using a basis set of topics, I wonder how one ought to characterize this bias in the case of the set of favorites, in the sense that links from favorites have a greater weight. Secondly, in blogging we have inclusion of full or part of a page or RSS item, and this can happen recursively in one of the loosely coupled conversations we see. Thus links already in the item reappear and get a larger weight. Such weights can be used to figure out authoritative sources, one would think, from the perspective of each blog.. [<A href="http://tig.nareau.com/">TIG's Corner</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » Good item (and thanks to John Robb for leading me to TIG's Corner).  I'm following the Haveliwala reference to a set of papers on PageRanking algorithms.  The math is way beyond me (did I really graduate math?)  but hopefully I can make some sense of it all. I have a strong interest in topics, and topic mapping as a way of structuring group knowledge.  Haveliwala (a Stanford researcher) has a paper <A href="http://dbpubs.stanford.edu/pub/showDoc.Fulltext?lang=en&doc=2002-6&format=pdf&compression=">here</A> on PageRanking mechansims that use a bias towards particular topics as a way of vectoring the PageRank toward results more relevant to those topics.  Interesting stuff.  </BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000297.html First book on XTM topic maps? Sat, 10 Aug 2002 23:46:25 +0100 <A href="http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/archives/000141.html">New book on topic maps</A>. Addison-Wesley Professional has just released a new book titled XML Topic Maps: Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web... [<A href="http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/">Column Two</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » Looks good.  Some more info: <UL> <LI>Knowledge bases can be designed that not only relate concepts together but also can point to the resources relevant to each concept."</LI> <LI>Beginning with a broad introduction and tutorial of topic maps and XTM technology, the book then lays out strategies for creating and deploying the technology.</LI> <LI>Along the way the latest theoretical perspectives are offered along with a discussion of the challenges developers will face as the Web continues to evolve and develop.</LI> <LI>"The topic maps paradigm enables Global Federated Knowledge Interchange -- a concept that should be important to you if you are a large information owner with diversely structured information assets and international reach."</LI></UL> And I said I wouldn't buy any more books....</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000302.html Kartoo - a strange search engine Wed, 21 Aug 2002 14:41:06 +0100 KartOO is a new meta search engine with a graphical interface. It's based on a technology developed for 3 years by Laurent Baleydier and his team. KartOO is programmed in Flash although you have an optional traditional HTML interface. What makes KartOO interesting is that it elaborates the so called semantic links between results. Those links are represented by sinuous lines that link the balls. Amidst said lines you find a word that is the one the algorithm considers that links both results semantically. By hovering on top of it you can highlight the related balls. When hovering over the ball you can see all its related semantic links highlighted. <A href="http://www.kartoo.com/"><A href="http://www.kartoo.com/">http://www.kartoo.com/</A></A> [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0112016/">Jon Alsbury's Radio Weblog</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » Good find by Jon, this looks interesting. I can't quite work out what it's doing as the results appear on a number of "maps" which don't appear to be connected.  Is it arbitrary as to what appears on each individual map?  Do the size of the result "balls" indicate relevance?  And what do the colours signify. It looks pretty amazing, and I get the feeling there is something powerful going on.  But I need help with this one...</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000413.html XTM export of a weblog Mon, 26 Aug 2002 21:25:56 +0100 Anyone with an interest in XTM want to check <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/outlines/topics/topics.xtm">this</A> out? It's my weblog + topics exported as a topic map via liveTopics.  I'd be interested in any opinions as to the correctness of my XTM implementation, use of tags etc...   http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000460.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/00000471.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/00000592.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/00000623.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/00000647.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/00000659.html XFML 1.0 (CORE) Published today Tue, 08 Oct 2002 15:33:15 +0100 <A href="http://petervandijck.net/">Peter Van Dijck</A> has published the <A href="http://xfml.org/spec/1.0.html">XFML 1.0 Core specification</A> today. Important points about XFML: <UL> <LI>XFML lets you exchange hierarchical faceted metadata.</LI> <LI>It also lets you indicate topics in different published XFML documents are equal, thus allowing you to reuse indexing efforts.</LI> <LI>Finally, XFML lets you build connections between different XFML maps, by indicating that a topic in one map is equal to a topic in another map: we call this connecting topics, or that a topic is described on a certain resource (a webpage usually), we call this published subject indicators.</LI></UL>   http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000676.html XTM and XFML: more cousins than competitors Tue, 08 Oct 2002 22:34:19 +0100 <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/2002/10/08.html#a420">A faceted classification standard</A>. <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/2002/10/08.html#a464">XFML 1.0 (CORE) Published today</A>. [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/">Curiouser and curiouser!</A>] Does this have the same purpose as XTM (topic maps)? What are the differences? [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/">Seb's Open Research</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » Whilst XTM and XFML do have many similarities (and theoretically you could represent any XFML document using XTM -- I think) they are different. XTM was designed to be a generalized format for representing arbitrary topic relationships. The upshot is that XTM, whilst expressive, is relatively complicated.  XFML is more focused and so, IMO, easier to get going with.  XTM can support arbitrary, complex, relationships among topics.  XFML supports fewer simpler relationships.  Don't go getting the idea that XFML is inferior though. One of XFML's guiding principles is that it be focused and easy to implement.  In this I think it succeeds admirably.  The spec is only about 8 or 9 pages long. In an XTM document everything is a topic or relationship.  This means you can model arbitrary structures, but this very power makes XTM quite complex and an individual XTM document is not necessarily easy to understand. By contrast XFML defines just three structures: <UL> <LI>topics (can belong to a single facet)</LI> <LI>facets (can group many topics)</LI> <LI>pages (can have topics as occurrences)</LI></UL> For most web-based applications these three concepts are sufficiently expressive.  Topics can have a parent (but only 1, which must be within the same facet).  A facet thereby is a hierarchy of topics.  So an XFML document contains a number of topic hierarchies which each define a seperable metadata concept. To understand this idea imagine you define topics under the facet Date of Publication like: 1999 2000   Jan 2000     1 Jan 2000     2 Jan 2000     ...   Feb 2000     ...   ... ... Each page in the XFML document will have an occurence of a topic like "1 Jan 2000" indicating its date of publication. Another facet could be Author with topics like: InfoWorld   Jon Udel   Bob Lewis Novissio   Matt Mower and again each page in the XFML document will have an occurrence of the appropriate author topic. The first thing to notice is that it probably doesn't make sense for a topic from the Author facet to appear in the Date of Publication facet (and vice-verca)  They really are orthogonal concepts. The other thing is that because the topics are hierarchical we can start off with a general filter and drill down.  These two facets would allow you to immediately restrict the range of pages you were looking at to: <UL> <LI>only those published by InfoWorld (or Novissio)</LI> <LI>only those published in a specific year</LI></UL> Drilling down further into either facet will filter to an even narrower (more focussed) set of results.  This is a very powerful tool if you have the right facets and appropriately defined topic hierarchies (for your application). For a much clearer and more succint definition read  <A href="http://www.highcontext.com/">David Gammel's</A> recent post to the xfml group <A href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xfml/message/145">here</A>. The other powerful concept embodied directly in XFML is the idea of connecting topics together.  This allows me to say, within my map, that: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> my topic X = your topic Y</BLOCKQUOTE> Which is a very powerful, decentralised, way of sharing your indexing efforts without requiring that everyone use the same topics/terminology.  For building real-world topic maps among groups of disconnected people (such as those in different organisations) this could be essential. Okay I've about run out of steam for the moment.  Hopefully this was useful though.</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000684.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/00000744.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/00000844.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/00000865.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/00000890.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/00000907.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/00000922.html AsTMa! Sun, 08 Dec 2002 08:47:00 +0000 I'm not actually sure what <A href="http://astma.it.bond.edu.au/constraining.xsp">AsTMa!</A> is yet.  That is, I know its a constraint language for topic maps, I just don't know what that means yet.  Anyone want to enlighten me? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000958.html Filtered feeds - see it yet? Thu, 12 Dec 2002 11:19:44 +0000 I've been going on about filtering RSS feeds with topics and apart from the "!paolo" and "!mikel" I've had little in the way of feedback.  Have I been preaching to the converted?  Or do people not see value in this idea? I have become quite religious about adding topics like "humour", "politics" and "culture" to posts that I consider off-topic for my k-log.  If my views on these things aren't your cup of tea I want you to be able to say: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> Matt's feed - { "humour", "politics", "culture" }</BLOCKQUOTE> to just knock all that clutter straight out of the feed. Alternatively you may find that there are one or two interesting posts in a number of different feeds that share a common theme.  I want to enable an aggregator to make a consolidated feed out of those.  <A href="http://www.javablogs.com/Welcome.jspa">java.blogs</A> is a great example of where this kind of thing is going.  However in order to be useful to a wider community I think the tools have to come to the users, like <A href="http://store.evectors.com/itproducts/story$num=1&sec=1&data=products">RssDistiller</A> So who is working on the smart aggregators?  Who is interested? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000990.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/00001001.html Knowledge maps for k-logs Tue, 17 Dec 2002 08:35:18 +0000 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> OPML directories I agree on the <A href="http://scriptingnews.userland.com/backissues/2002/12/15#When:1:27:25PM">fact</A> that "OPML" directories are a very interesting part of the development of content/knowledge management systems. I think that a particulary interesting application of this technology are self-building directories. This is what we are working on with <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/">Matt</A> and with his <A href="http://www.novissio.com/Downloads/liveTopics/livetopics.html">LiveTopics</A> Radio tool. It's somehow similar to what Dave describe as "timeless weblog", but instead of routing each post to one node, it will do it to several nodes in different categories and, most of all, it will be based on a server-side RSS 2.0 parser, so it will be able to organize contents from several k-logs. What we are working on is the automatic creation of a directory containing knowledge maps based on the topics attached to each post. The main use will be k-logging, but we are already seeing other intresting applications. Stay tuned. [<A href="http://paolo.evectors.it/">Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> Right on! http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001007.html Personal Brain 3.0 Tue, 24 Dec 2002 09:00:41 +0000 <A href="http://www.thebrain.com/">TheBrain</A> have today released the first <A href="http://www.thebrain.com/products/personalbrain/support/downloadPBbeta.html">beta</A> of version 3.0 of PersonalBrain. This is fantastic news in as much as many of us had written PersonalBrain off as an abandoned product.  Better yet, Version 3.0 definitely delivers on many of the must haves that I and others have been sending them over the years. Well done to the TheBrain! Here's the skinny: <TABLE border=0> <TBODY> <TR> <TD width="100%">System Improvements</TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="100%"> <UL> <LI>Support for over 1 million thoughts per Brain - 32 times previous versions. <LI>Support for Windows XP. </LI></UL></TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="100%">Thought and Link Types</TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="100%"> <UL> <LI>Thought types let you create categories of information, such as people, projects, or places. Typed thoughts are color coded and separately searchable.  <LI>Link types let you label the connections between thoughts to give them meaning. For example, you could create a link type called "friend" and use it to show which of the people in your Brain are friends.  <LI>The use of Thought and link types allows you to create a much more sophisticated Brain. <LI>Thought and link types allow an extra layer of semantic meaning to placed on information in your Brain. <LI>Types can be setup via the Options menu or the "Edit types..." button on the properties pane. </LI></UL></TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="100%">Link Types</TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="100%"> <UL> <LI>Right-click on a link to set its type. <LI>Typed links are color coded and named - the name shows on mouseover. </LI></UL></TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="100%">Thought Types</TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="100%"> <UL> <LI>Thought types can be created with name, description, and color. <LI>Types can be set via right click menu or via the Type dropdown in the properties pane. <LI>Thought types are displayed on mouseover. <LI>Search tab contains new indexes for lists of each thought type. <LI>Find dialog can filter thoughts based on thought type. </LI></UL></TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="100%">Fast Brain Access</TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="100%"> <UL> <LI>Get instant access to your Brain with the Brain Hot Key - hold down the Windows key and type the letter B [Windows+B] to show your Brain.  <LI>To jump quickly to any thought, just type the first few letters.  <LI>The Brain Hot Key can be turned on and off in the Preferences menu. </LI></UL></TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="100%">Faster Access & Search</TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="100%"> <UL> <LI>The Find Thoughts feature, which lets you perform advanced searches, is now available via F9 or through the Options menu.  <LI>Find dialog box is easier to use and allows searching by thought type. <LI>Focus (keyboard input) returns to instant search window immediately after any dialog box closes. <LI>Instant search analyzes more history to determine best match. </LI></UL></TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="100%">General User Interface Improvements</TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="100%"> <UL> <LI>Thoughts in lists (Search, History, Instant Search, & Create Dialog) are drawn using thought type colors. <LI>Notes now contains a "Paste as Text" function in the edit menu or via [Ctrl+Shift+V]. <LI>Auto hide feature is animated, so that the window slides on and off screen. <LI>Built-in list of search engines now contains: AlltheWeb.com, AltaVista, Google, Lycos, Yahoo and a customizable setting. <LI>The progress window is smaller. <LI>Menu items have better keyboard compatibility. <LI>The PersonalBrain program directory now contains default folders for color settings and wallpapers. </LI></UL></TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="100%">Plex User Interface Improvements</TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="100%"> <UL> <LI>Thoughts in the plex are ordered by thought type first, then by name. <LI>Right-click menu allows unlinking of the selected thought from the active thought. <LI>The plex resizing circle is enabled with maximum and minimum sizes preventing unwieldy fonts sizes. <LI>The search box is smaller to show more thoughts in the Past Thought List. <LI>F2 renames the highlighted thought, not the active thought. <LI>F4 now uses the highlighted thought for Web searches. <LI>Improved Properties layout. <LI>Thought text color is more consistent - highlight and central text colors removed. <LI>Hints do not appear unless the mouse is held still for 1 second. </LI></UL></TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="100%">Bug Fixes</TD></TR> <TR> <TD width="100%"> <UL> <LI>The Web search dialog does not accidentally pop-up when closing other Windows. <LI>Filenames in PersonalBrain no longer get a "2" appended to them unless there is a name conflict. <LI>Dialogs are never hidden by the main window when in always on top mode. <LI>Removed listing of *.brs files from open dialog (these files are not supported). <LI>Wallpaper does not change when loading colors. <LI>Distant thoughts always draw in their correct color. <LI>Instant Brains are no longer included. <LI>Display of Brains with many links from a single thought is more stable. </LI></UL></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001013.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/00001067.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/00001073.html MetaBlogging *requires* topics Fri, 31 Jan 2003 10:04:59 +0000 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0103807/2003/01/30.html#a1279">MetaBlogging and Human Moderation</A>. The JavaBlogs site is one that aggregates different blogs on Java into one convenient holding place.  And now Kasia is finding that the JavaBlogs site just isn't working for her: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> I really like the concept behind <A href="http://www.javablogs.com/">JavaBlogs.</A>.. and for a while it really worked well for me. I've read many excellent entries on Java I may have (actually very likely would have) missed otherwise. Unfortunately, as is true with any growing website, the signal to noise ratio is becoming worse and worse.. and not in a good way. When I first discovered JavaBlogs I read nearly every entry posted and most were great.. agreed with some, disagreed with others.. typical blog-reading experience. These days I find myself skipping more and more entries.. why? They're not about Java.. and many of the ones that are simply reiterate or link to previously posted entries. <A href="http://www.unix-girl.com/blog/archives/000670.html">[_Go_]</A></BLOCKQUOTE> I see her point.  Take a look at what I just posted in my PHPblog (the entry below on Bunnies).  Yes it was php related but the relationship was tangential at best.  It is almost like we need a "Related But Not Very" type of categorization.  Or a scalable value.  Of course the problem is that if it is human done we'll all just configure it wrong.  Perhaps we need "Latent Semantic Indexing" (this is a really excellent paper if you care about low level search engine issues).  <A href="http://javelina.cet.middlebury.edu/lsa/out/cover_page.htm">[_Go_]</A> I think what needs to ultimately happen is that our aggregators need to get smarter in the background i.e. they still gather everything but show us things that we are more "likely" to be interested in.  They'll have to do this via some kind of background analysis (probably) of links followed out of the aggregator.  And then some kind of periodic training.  And this is a) difficult and b) far, far from perfect. [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0103807/">The FuzzyBlog!</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> I could see this problem raising it's head back when JavaBlogs first took wing.   People don't stay on-topic.  For example, this week I have posted far more about politics, government surveillance, crime and terrorism than about KM, topic mapping, organisational development, etc... It's quite likely that usual readers of what I'm saying have gotten fed up with yet another preachy diatribe ;-) Of course if their news aggregator was smart enough to pick up the topics in my posts (I appreciate they aren't actually in here at the moment, I'm re-working some of the code, they'll be back soon though) they could filter out all the posts I mark with topics like: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> law, politics, privacy, terrorism</BLOCKQUOTE> and so forth. It'll happen. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001118.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/00001334.html Powerful listening Mon, 31 Mar 2003 09:50:47 +0100 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> THE LISTENING LEADER "Lifting Listening Leadership Awareness and Action Worldwide" 03/31/03 -------------------------------------------------------------------- LISTENING-BASED INNOVATION Continuing success comes from value-creating innovation stimulated by disciplined listening. Occasional surveys are insufficient. Organizations need to build listening systems that capture, summarize, and disseminate the unmet dreams and unfulfilled wants of multiple customer groups, including existing, prospective, and internal customers (employees). Listening systems uncover fresh marketplace intelligence, help guide decision making, and nurture creative thinking. Effective listening systems involve both formal and informal methods, conversations with customers, the use of trend data to reveal changing patterns, the distribution of relevant information to all employees, and active discussion and application of findings in work groups. Listening leads to learning, which sets the stage for innovation. Innovation is more likely when employees are well informed about the customer, unafraid to try something new, and committed to the organization's success. Charles Schwab uses multiple methods to listen for customers' dreams that often start with the phrase, "I know it's not possible, but I wish....." Schwab's top management travels extensively to interact with customers in informal settings. Branches host monthly customer receptions, and at least once a week in different cities. Schwab holds town meetings to hear employees' ideas, suggestions, and concerns. Gary Hoover, who has created three innovative businesses (Bookstop, Hoover's Handbooks, and TravelFest) claims that the customers always get what they want. It is just a matter of who gives it to them when. Companies that sustain success continually search for new ways to create value for customers. They choose to lead rather than follow, to act rather than wait, to heed the customer instead of the competitor. Source: Leading for the Long Term, Leonard Berry, Leader to Leader </BLOCKQUOTE> More good stuff from the <A href="http://www.listeningleader.com/">Listening Leader</A> (one of the few daily e-mail shots that I subscribe to). For a company that is ready to hear (and encourage) real news from the front-line a network of internal action journals would mae a very powerful listening system.  More intelligence (and potential for automated news gathering) could be added to this by using simple topic map techniques (e.g. annotating each post with 1 or 2 topics describing the business area/project, tone of each post, etc...) http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001342.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/00001356.html Is RSS1.0 Taxonomy module dead? Mon, 07 Apr 2003 16:22:46 +0100 I'm really interested in finding out whether anyone actually uses (either produces or consumes) the the RSS1.0 Taxonomy module (hereafter <taxo:topics>).  If you do, I would be grateful if you could add a comment to this post along with the URL of your feed and/or application. As I posted on Saturday I am investigating methods for incorporating topic metadata into RSS feeds.  As a Radio developer I'm mainly interested in RSS2.0 feeds but I don't want to duplicate any efforts / re-invent any wheels unnecessarily.  So I'm considering <taxo:topics> very carefully. However my view is that almost nobody is using it.  I've spent a good bit of time this afternoon examining the feeds of various people in the RSS community (obviously trying to home in on those using RSS1.0) and there is no sign. <A href="http://philringnalda.com/">Phil Ringnalda</A> <A href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-dev/message/5326">points</A> me at <A href="http://www.syndic8.com/stats.php?Section=rss">Syndic8's feed information</A> where you can see that even while 25% of feeds there are in the 1.0 RDF format, less than 2.5% actually declare the <taxo:topics> namespace (and we have no way yet to verify whether they actually go ahead and use it). If it really is the case that nobody is using it then I have to ask why? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001361.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/00001364.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/00001380.html Yahoo and ENT? Wed, 16 Apr 2003 10:04:04 +0100 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <BLOCKQUOTE> <IMG src="http://www.radwin.org/michael/blog/archives/ask1.gif" align=left><A href="http://www.radwin.org/michael/blog/archives/000198.html">ask.yahoo.com RSS beta</A>. Ask Yahoo!, a daily column that features Q&A with Yahoo!'s expert team of Surfers, is now syndicating its content via RSS. Here's the link to the RSS file: <A href="http://ask.yahoo.com/ask/index.xml"><IMG src="http://www.radwin.org/images/xml.gif" border=0></A> [<A href="http://www.radwin.org/michael/blog/">Michael J. Radwin's blog</A>] </BLOCKQUOTE> Hey hey -- some RSS action from Yahoo -- subscribe now so they know we're out here! [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100875/">Brain Off</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> I've subscribed, sight unseen.  Now wouldn't this be a great feed to have topics?  So you could see the Q&A that really mattered to you.  And Yahoo! already have a taxonomy. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001394.html TopicExchange does ENT Wed, 16 Apr 2003 17:25:04 +0100 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <A href="http://www.myelin.co.nz/post/2003/4/16/#200304161">New RSS features on topicexchange.com</A>. A minor (but very handy) change to the <A href="http://topicexchange.com/">Internet Topic Exchange</A> today: it now supports <A href="http://matt.blogs.it/2003/04/11.html#a862">ENT</A> (<A href="http://www.purl.org/NET/ENT/1.0/">spec</A>), which means suitably equipped aggregators will be able to pull topic information straight out of the RSS feeds. Making this actually useful is a new RSS feed: <A href="http://topicexchange.com/rss">all posts on the site</A>. If you want to keep track of everything, subscribe to that one (traffic on the Exchange is still not awfully high, so you won't find yourself overwhelmed). An aggregator which understands topics will be able to just pull down this one RSS feed instead of heaps of individual topic channel feeds. The most interesting bit is yet to come: I've been contacted by <A href="http://www.feedster.com/">Scott Johnston</A> and <A href="http://www.blogdigger.com/index.html">Greg Gershman</A>, who both seem interested in using Topic Exchange information to do some sort of classification of search results. Sort of like the way <A href="http://www.google.com/">Google</A> uses <A href="http://dmoz.org/">dmoz</A> to give you links to relevant categories when you search. This functionality is yet to come, but the hooks are there in the Topic Exchange, so any developers are welcome to start using them from now on! For people who are interested in using this, I've written a page to explain <A href="http://topicexchange.com/doc/indexing">how to handle the data</A>. Enjoy! <A title="Click here to comment on this post." href="http://www.myelin.co.nz/phil/pss/comments.php?u=2&p=200304161&link=http://www.myelin.co.nz/post/2003/4/16/#200304161">Comment</A> [<A href="http://www.myelin.co.nz/post/">Second p0st</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> This is fantastic news.  Well done Phil! http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001401.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/00001414.html David Sifry on ENT Mon, 21 Apr 2003 10:01:27 +0100 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <A href="http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000282.html">Easy News Topics</A>. Last week, Paolo Valdermarin and Matt Mower released their specification of Easy News Topics 1.0 (ENT), which is designed as an RSS 2.0 module that can add topic and categorization information to an RSS feed.  I committed to get back to them (and others) with a review and some commentary on the approach. The good news: As a format, ENT is easy to understand, easy for application developers to implement, and pretty easy to parse.  Kudos to Matt and Paolo for coming up with a design that is simple but extensible.  Now the bad news:  I'm worried about two issues.  First is the problem of self-categorization.  ENT presupposes that authors can successfully create microcontent with the following properties: It can be placed in one or more categories the author is qualified to categorize the content correctly the author's categories have meaning to the reader In addition, we then run into a larger problem with self-categorization, which is the question of categorization across feeds.  In other words, we have a problem of definitions - one person's rebel is another person's revolutionary.  Even with ENT's inclusion of clouds, which are (potentially) external topic maps that create self-consistent maps of the world, we still have the problem of intentional or unintentional misunderstanding and misreading of metadata like categories, which leads me to think that the entire concept of self-categorization is extremely difficult to work on a large scale. A good example of this failure to scale is the history of web page... [<A href="http://www.sifry.com/alerts/">Sifry's Alerts</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> David presents a good analysis of <A href="http://www.purl.org/NET/ENT/1.0/">ENT 1.0</A> and, as you would expect from David, some of the wider issues around self-categorization of data.   In particular he compares a future of users adding topics to their RSS feeds to the abuse of META tags in HTML.  It's a point worth discussing: Off the cuff I can see two potential arguments to suggest that this won't be a big problem. <OL> <LI>ENT is not designed only for self-categorization of feeds.  Yes that's how we intend to use it, and certainly I think a lot of people will use it that way.  But ENT could just as easily be used by a categorizer bot that sucked in feeds and annotated them (using heuristics) with topics from it's own cloud.  This thought has lead me to wonder if there is some need for authorizing the use of a cloud.  Would you trust Googlebot to add topics to RSS feeds?  Or Feedster bot?</LI> <LI>As David points out, the solution to the META problem, as wrought by Google, was to bring an element of the social into the mix.  He rightly, I think, indicates that a solution to the eventual problems of metadata in RSS will probably be social also.  There has been a lot of talk recently about identity and reputation systems.  Blogging tends to be very much more personable than ever web publishing was before.  I read sites because they are meaningful to me.  If your categorization isn't, I probably won't read you for long.</LI></OL> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001417.html Aliases in ENT Tue, 22 Apr 2003 13:10:21 +0100 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <A href="http://alevin.com/weblog/archives/001073.html">All Categories are Local</A>. Dave Sifry comments about the draft specification of Easy News Topics 1.0 (ENT), proposed by Paolo Valdermarin and Matt Mower.... [<A href="http://alevin.com/weblog/">BookBlog</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> Adina's feed doesn't carry the whole post so: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> Dave is concerned that a category standard would fall prey to the problems of ambiguity and scamming that killed HTML META tags. As I noted in comments on his post, Dave is absolutely right at the scale of the web or the blogosphere. However, I think that categories will be much more valuable at the community level. For example, Austin has a <A href="http://www.austinbloggers.org/">meta-blog</A>, aggregating posts related to Austin. People in other cities are starting to do the same. If we could map sub-categories, we would be able to create a cross-regional directory. There are local editors who keep the system from being spammed, and make decisions about how to map categories. So, I think that the system can work in the context of defined groups and defined applications. The only thing that ENT is missing is a way to alias categories -- Austin's "music events" maps to Ann Arbor's "concerts." Presumably this could be implemented at the application level.</BLOCKQUOTE> Aliasing topics is a powerful, and sometimes complicated, concept so we choose to leave it out of the <A href="http://www.purl.org/NET/ENT/1.0/">ENT</A> spec.  We took the view that this issue was best resolved by using a proper topic map behind the ENT <TT>cloud</TT>.  However if the functionality is needed and we can find a simple way to do it, we're open to that - especially while the spec is still in at the draft stage. The <A href="http://www.xfml.org/">XFML</A> standard, for example, provides a <A href="http://www.xfml.org/spec/1.0.html#connectingtopicsconcept"><TT><connect></TT></A> tag which can be used to explicitly link a topic in one document to the same topic in another document.  ENT could just duplicate this facility.  But what would it be connecting to? In XFML the answer is easy.  An XFML topics in one document connects to an XFML topic in another document.  Similarly for XTM the implication is that you make associations with other XTM topics.  But ENT topics are transient things that live for a short while in an RSS feed.  So logically you wouldn't connect an instance of an ENT topic in one feed to an instance of an ENT topic in another feed.  Would you?  Apart from the fact that I know of no way to address an arbitrary element in an RSS feed I think it far more likely that you want to alias the use of the topic to a fixed point of reference, e.g. <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> When you see "music event" in the Austin feed you should read it as the same thing that Ann Arbor folks mean by "concert."</BLOCKQUOTE> There may be no current item in the Ann Arbor feed using the concert topic so we definitely need a fixed point of reference.  What is that?  One answer might be a topic map and topic maps are certainly good for this.  How else could we do it? It would be easy enough to add an XFML style <TT><connect></TT> element to the ENT spec.  An example might be:<PRE> <topic id="music_event"> <connect>http://annarbor.example.org/topics.xml#concert</connect> </topic> </PRE> However ENT also allows topics without the backing of a topic map, in which case someone may just want to specify a topic ID, e.g.<PRE> <topic id="music_event"> <connect>concert</connect> </topic> </PRE> But the problem with this approach is that it means that music_event is now synonymous with anyone's definition of concert.  We could add an <TT>href</TT> attribute to <TT>connect</TT> to differentiate but I don't particularly like that either. Maybe someone else can come up with a simple alternative that befits the style of ENT?  I'm still leaning towards this as a problem best solved by topic maps. [Update] I've been thinking about this a little more and feel that the best way forwards is to work with groups like SocialText and the SSA to make sure the right tools are in place to solve this kind of problem using topic maps.  Adina? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001419.html Metadata is a social thing Tue, 22 Apr 2003 18:07:04 +0100 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <A href="http://doc.weblogs.com/2003/04/21#notSoEasy">Not so easy?</A>. <A href="http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000282.html#000282">As <A href="http://doc.weblogs.com/2003/04/11#askNotWhatRssCanDoForYou">requested</A>, David Sifry reviews</A> <A href="http://matt.blogs.it/specs/ENT/1.0/">Easy News Topics 1.0</A>. The upside: <BLOCKQUOTE> As a format, ENT is easy to understand, easy for application developers to implement, and pretty easy to parse. Kudos to Matt and Paolo for coming up with a design that is simple but extensible. </BLOCKQUOTE> The downside isn't so easily excerpted. Read the link for more. [<A href="http://doc.weblogs.com/">The Doc Searls Weblog</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> Without wishing to seem oversensitive I think it is fair to say that David's issues are not with ENT per se, but with the idea of people cataloguing their own items with meta data.  His problems are social and the same argument could be made about RSS1.0 and mod_taxo. David reflects upon what happened to meta data in web pages and wonders if the same thing won't come about here too.  Here is how I responded in a comment on David's blog: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> Thanks for the comment. I think you're broadly right that there will be a capacity for abuse here but it scales differently. When Google was indexing billions of pages the metadata became meaningless even without the abuse. However with RSS I think the game is different. I'm subscribed to 108 feeds right now. I add perhaps 1 a week on average. But I trust that the authors of those feeds would use topics reliably or not at all. Any application I have that can understand my subscription list can usefully utilize those topics whatever I think about anyone else. In a social software context somone else might trust my confidence in the indexing of those feeds. Etc... I think we can find ways of making this work. I also think that automatic annotation of feeds with topics is another possibility. To pick an example from my head. Syndic8 could have a topic engine that creates an annotated feed for every feed they monitor. If you trust Syndic8 you could use that feed instead and get the benefit of their indexing. And so on.</BLOCKQUOTE>   http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001422.html Cast off your discreteness Thu, 01 May 2003 18:58:39 +0100 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <A href="http://www.weblogsky.com#200198758">A note about blogs</A>. I just posted this in a private space, but thought it was worth reposting here: Some of us are seeing weblogs as an early step in the evolution of the web (or, some say, a revolution in the way the web is used), and the general label for the stuff we're talking about is "social software." Social software supports group forming, an activity that wasn't necessarily in the heads of the folks who created the first blog systems as simple content management, emphasizing individual publication. Blogs are evolving, though, as nodes in social networks, and bloggers are drawn to group-forming activities and software developments that emphasize the connections as well as the nodes. It's possible to see blogs as a bunch of discrete publications that order random posts in reverse chronological order, but you get away from that pretty quickly when you get into the space and se what people are actually doing with their weblogs. <A href="http://www.quicktopic.com/21/H/tVuJNMqRSGUaT">Discuss A note about blogs</A> [<A href="http://www.weblogsky.com">weblogsky</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> Interesting.  The work that <A href="http://paolo.evectors.it/">Paolo</A> and I are doing is about elevating blogs from their discreteness and into a world of connections made through topics! http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001439.html Experimental Friday Fri, 06 May 2005 18:58:52 +0100 It's like casual Friday only with fall-out! At one point, when I was using liveTopics, there were topics all over this weblog. Then I decided to go as minimal as possible and stripped a lot of it out. Now, on a whim, I'm bringing some of it back. In the right hand pane I now have a Zeitgiest listing which I shamelessly tried (and failed) to pinch from <a href="http://joi.ito.com/">Joi Ito</a>. Alas my CSS skillz were not sharp enough to work out why the layout goes to hell if I put <tt>display: inline</tt> on the list elements. So I have to have 'em in a drab list for now (Can anyone tell me why it doesn't work? The list items end up at the bottom of the page) However I wasn't done stealing there. Looking at a <a href="http://www.feedburner.com/">FeedBurner</a> rendered RSS feed gave me an idea. Rather than rendering a table of contents as HTML why not just publish each topic as a separate RSS feed and style it? Then it will work either programmatically or in the browser. Turns out it works quite well (although it takes a devil of a time to upstream all 534 feeds). The only problem is that the tags in the <tt><description></tt> field are poking through and not getting rendered into HTML. Apparently my XSLT skillz are no better than my CSS ones. Can anyone tell me what I did wrong? However I think the end result is promising and it means that you can now subscribe to individual topics that I write about. Which is a probably boon if you think I blather on about, for example, <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/politics.xml">politics</a> way too much! :-) Also I have a <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/index.html">quick view of all topics</a> (a blatant ripoff of Joi's format) which highlights those that have been used most recently. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002550.html Go go Styled RSS! Sun, 08 May 2005 23:33:53 +0100 Big thanks to <a href="http://philringnalda.com/">Phil Ringnalda</a> for providing <a href="http://use.perl.org/~TorgoX/journal/24272">the answer</a> to getting RSS styled properly via XSL. It's so obvious once you know. Add JavaScript to the page to detect whether <tt>disable-output-escaping</tt> has been honoured and, if not, fix up the HTML. Now my topic pages work fine in <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/firefox.xml">FireFox</a> and I'm a happy man! Thanks Phil! http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002560.html Must it always be this way? Tue, 10 May 2005 18:37:21 +0100 So today it's Apples turn to incur my mighty wrath. Having gone to hell and back solving all the browser related issues with XSLT rendering of RSS feed, <a href="http://www.bethlet.net/">Beth</a> dropped the bombshell that Safari 2.0 was completely ignoring my stylesheet and rendering the feed itself. Now, i'll grant you that Safari does a pretty good job rendering the RSS, it's <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/images/safari-rss.jpg">sweetly pretty</a>. However it rather pisses on my parade since Safari doesn't know a damn thing about <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/specs/ENT/1.0/">topics</a>! So i'm busy rendering up topic cross-references (major thanks to <a href="http://www.bethlet.net/">Beth</a> for solving what she said were simple XSLT problems but which, nevertheless, had me pulling my hair out) which Safari will happily ignore. Why does it have to be this way? Especially when I am actually telling Safari exactly what XSLT stylesheet it should be using. Can anyone supply me with the magic incantation to make Safari honour my stylesheet? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002570.html A quick view of where I am today Wed, 11 May 2005 22:22:04 +0100 <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/index.html"><img border="0" src="http://matt.blogs.it/images/mytopics.jpg"></a> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002579.html This blog has many facets (well 2 anyway) Thu, 12 May 2005 11:19:55 +0100 After a gap of nearly 3 years I am, once again, publishing an <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/resources/facetmap.xml">XFML facet map</a> of my weblog. The facetmap links the posts I have published to occurrences of topics I have used. I am also automatically generating a Date Of Publication facet which allows you to drill-down by year, month, and then date along with selecting topics. This can be demo'd at via Trav Wilson's <a href="http://www.facetmap.com/">FacetMap</a> service. The current map of my site is <a href="http://www.facetmap.com/browse/curiouser_n_curiouser">browseable</a>, as an example posts I wrote in <a href="http://www.facetmap.com/browse/curiouser_n_curiouser?s=0081016200&v=1">November 2003 concerning email.</a> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002583.html Visualising the topic space Thu, 19 May 2005 12:18:45 +0100 I've been trying to think about better ways of visualizing the topics I use in this weblog and how to make my content archive easier to navigate as well as exposing recent threads. I've added a graphic to the navbar which is a shrunken version of the <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/">topic index</a> page and links to it. The size of a topic on that page indicates how recently used it was so current interests poke out of the crowd. However it's rather a one-dimensional approach. It's also not live, it's just an image. I'd have to regenerate it regularly to make it relevant. There is also an element that, within an archive page, it maybe should reflect those topics I was using at that time rather than those I am using now. I'm thinking some kind of flash based UI (<a href="http://www.laszlosystems.com/">Laszlo</a>?) might be a reasonable approach to this. I had some idea about concentric rings where topics closer to the centre were used most often and the size corresponded to overall use. The idea being that you could make it small in the page so that it's unobtrusive but eye-catching and them, when the mouse goes over, expand it so that people could begin navigating with a usable interface. Anyone interested in working on something like this? We can export the topic information in a standardized format so that other blogs can play along. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002626.html Browsable blogging Fri, 20 May 2005 13:49:39 +0100 Over at How to Save the World, Dave Pollard is talking about <a href="http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2005/05/19.html#a1151">how to make blogs browsable</a>.<blockquote>The task of making weblogs' architecture more robust should be much easier. Weblog software with more dynamic information architecture would not only make blogs much more valuable to those browsing for information, they would make weblogs much more valuable in corporate environments. The current emphasis on adding 'tagging' information is, in my opinion, misguided: That would make their content easier to search, and might solve the information overload problem when they're embraced by keyword search agents, but it won't make them easier to browse. Much of the readership of weblogs is serendipitous -- people stumble on them (usually through search tools) when they're looking for interesting reading. Or, they blogroll a weblog because some of its content is of interest to them. What is needed is a way for people to browse through a selected subset of weblog content, all of the articles on a particular topic.</blockquote>I guess I'm a little surprised not to get a mention. My recollection (am I wrong?) is that I chatted to Dave about this (among other topics) back when <a href="http://paolo.evectors.it/">Paolo</a> and I were working with K-Collector. The basic idea is to allow authors to mark up their posts with topics (I still don't like the phrase tag in this context but I accept I may be in a minority) which are fine grained. Categories for me have always been too inflexible and unwieldy. The use of multiple topics allows rich description of a post. <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/"><img style="padding: 10px;" align="left" border="0" src="http://matt.blogs.it/images/all-topics.png"></a>The magic part is what happens next. In my current experiment it means I can generate a page which allows my content archive to be explored by topics. Clicking a topic name takes you to a page that lists the posts, in reverse chronological order, associated (I would say tagged if I didn't think it was confusing) with that topic. Under each post is a link to the other topics associated with that post. Hence each post also offers a cross-reference facility throughout the rest of the content. It makes my blog into a fully-browsable content index, automatically. These topic pages like <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/aggregators.xml">Aggregators</a>, <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/psychology.xml">Psychology</a>, and <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/blogging.xml">Blogging</a> are, if you check the URL, actually RSS2.0 feeds (with ENT topic metadata) being <a title="Read this for a bit of the background of how it was done." href="http://matt.blogs.it/2005/05/07.html#a1801">rendered in the browser</a> as HTML. But you could also subscribe to a topic like <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/rss.xml">RSS</a> in an aggregator and only read my posts on that topic, blissfully ignoring what I write about <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/politics.xml">Politics</a>, or <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/microsoft.xml">Microsoft</a>. But there's more to come. I also publish a <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/facetmap.xml">Facet Map</a> of my weblog in <a href="http://xfml.org/">XFML</a> format. The potential value of this is not just in <a href="http://www.facetmap.com/browse/curiouser_n_curiouser">improved browsing</a> because XFML also offers a way to <a href="http://www.xfml.org/spec/1.0.html#connectingtopicsconcept">connect topics together</a>. This offers us the opportunity to make sense of each others tagging schemes, harmonizing the view of data whilst allowing us to preserve our own preferences. Two level, even three level, categorization is possible by grouping topics together although things can get tricky at this point. The approach Paolo and I took was to use a simple 2-level structure comprising <ul><li>Who</li><li>What</li><li>When</li><li>Where</li></ul>At the moment I only use two of these. My topics are currently implicitly What and I have automatically generated Date of Publication topics in my facet map file. I might do the other again, maybe. What I've done others can do just as easily. As much as anything it's a mind-set issue. If you think in terms of categories you're thinking in terms of a rigid hierarchy. Topics are more granular and should be used liberally since the tools at the other end will make them usable by users, as I have done. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002638.html Technorati Tag support Tue, 07 Jun 2005 19:27:14 +0100 I've really no idea if <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tags">Technorati tags</a> are at all useful. I've certainly never found them so. But it was trivial to add automatic linking of my topics to their equivalent technorati tags. Now the technorati tag link appears as a (t) in the topic list. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002649.html Farewell Technorati tags I hardly knew ye... Sun, 12 Jun 2005 21:01:50 +0100 I just got rid of the technorati (t)'s I <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/2005/06/07.html#a1851">recently added</a> to my topics. They served a purpose in that they prompted me to take a closer look at Technorati tags. However this just confirmed my impression that Technorati tags are of very little use and likely to get progressively less useful as time goes by. Simply mixing tagging with the content produced in millions of blogs doesn't serve my needs and I can't think whose needs it does serve. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002661.html 2 million red tags go by Thu, 18 Aug 2005 17:55:00 +0100 Floating in the summer sky... I've <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/2005/06/12.html#a1857">said it before</a> and I'll say it again now: I don't understand the value of <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/">Technorati Tags</a>. For all the hype they've gotten I still haven't seen the use case that makes them valuable. What is that they are doing for people? They're tracking 2 million tags by their own count and millions of posts. If they're not spammed up the wazoo how on earth are you supposed to mine relevance or interest here? What, in short, is the point? What <a href="http://paolo.evectors.it/">Paolo</a>, <a href="http://simone.blogs.it/">Simone</a>, and I did and what <a href="http://www.tractionsoftware.com/">the boys at Traction</a> have done is very similar, allowing individuals to tag content to reflect what they think is interesting or pertinet about it. However there is a key difference: we were doing it in a controlled community not the free-for-all that is the blogosphere. In a controlled community you have scaling problems which are orders-of-magnitude less awful and can begin to use and develop the trust relationships which exist. Typically you can subdivide to create workspaces which are meaningful for a cohesive group of people which allows you to build useful tools to go alongside the content. Have a thousand flowers bloomed and I didn't notice? If not, is it ever likely? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002859.html Simple Sharing Extensions for ENT Tue, 22 Nov 2005 09:45:00 +0000 Some time back when <a href="http://paolo.evectors.it/">Paolo</a> and I were developing the <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/specs/ENT/1.0/">Easy News Topics specification</a> for including topic metadata in RSS2.0 feeds I was considering the ways in which a weblog taxonomy should be considered a living entity subject to change with new topics being born, topics getting married and using the same name, old topics withering away and dying, and so on. At the time I was playing with the notion of publishing a changelog for an ENT cloud that could be used to keep track of these changes. This morning I started reading the <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/rss/sse/Default.aspx">Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS and OPML specification</a> by Ray Ozzie and George Moromisato of Microsoft. It immediately hit me that SSE was a great mechanism for distributed taxonomy without requiring a central respository. By allowing the user to keep control it also solves the problem of what to do about conflicts/unwanted topics: Let each user decide what their outcome should be. As a first step in exploring this I am will be attempting to build support for SSE into the ENT support within <a href="http://rubyforge.org/projects/squib/">Squib</a>. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00003084.html