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Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

19
Nov

Information Overload, The Solution?

   Posted by: wkossen

Don’t you agree? There is too much information. Too many websites, too many documents and way to much e-mail. There is just too much information. You know why? There are three simple reasons for this.

1. Information is free to produce,

2. information is hard to get rid of,

3. information is easily copied multiple times.

That’s all there is to it. The solution is allready there in my list. If we want less information we should produce less, copy less and delete more. That’s all. Now that’s easier said than done. Just note that with every character I type in this blog I’m adding information to the pile. Where will it stop?

The real solution is the Document Economy. This is a new concept and I will explain it here. Since information overload makes useing information more tedious and therefor more expensive, the presence of information itself is in fact expensive. So adding to the pile should cost something. That something could then also be earned by removing information from the pile, purging, deleting stuff of plain NOT publishing a document. Let’s asume we create a separate economy based on document credits. Everyone starts with a few credits. He or she can earn credits by cleaning up, and must pay credits for every e-mail, document, blog-item or copy of preexisting information etc. No credits? No new documents. This way step one is taken, an incentive to clean up and also an incentive to not produce more.

The second step would be rewarding information value. The value of a document or e-mail is not that easy to determine. On the internet, websites like Digg.com give you an indication of the value of a webpage. This could be a way to ‘earn’ credits. If you are able to produce good content, you get rewards, which allows you to create more. If you produce lousy content, you just run out of credits and have to ’shut up’. simple ayh?

The third step would be to introduce a very natural proces called decay. If you leave some organic waste lying around, it will slowly disappear all by itself (helped by the odd fungus or bacteria…). Ashes to ashes so to speak. If we were to introduce that concept to our fileservers, mailboxes and the internet, this auto-purge would clean up stuff pretty fast. Naturally we should ‘protect’ good old content….

A few things have to still be resolved. How about document-credit-banking, how about loans, how about marketing of documents, how about ads (note that displaying ads allready costs some credits today!), how about regulations and law, how about taxing of credits, how about environmental law when it comes to polluting the internet, mailboxes or fileservers with document-crap? Should we in fact introduce a pay-per-view system? well, we’ll figure that out later….

I hope you liked this post, don’t hesitate to comment…

26
Oct

Web2.0 Services Integration, wrong or right?

   Posted by: wkossen

Almost all users of web2.0 services will have noticed that it is possible to link different services together, to get data from one service into another, to integrate services. Examples are numberous and I’ll name just a few:

Nice huh? Well, not really. :cry: If you look at it closely you will discover that most of these so called integrations are actually point to point integrations based on openly published, but very service-specific API’s. Do the math: This means that to connect n services you would need n*(n-1) specific integrations based on n different API’s. Believe you me, this can get pretty complicated very quickly… :-?

So what’s the real problem then? Dataportability is the problem, or rather, the lack of it. The only reason anyone would want to integrate services is because this creates added value. You can bring different bits of information together to create something new, something better. Actually, you also want reuse of information. I don’t want to add all the e-mail addresses of everyone I know manually to each new service I join, so I import them from my existing contact list. Since Hotmail has a different API for extracting contacts than Gmail or Yahoo mail or any other contacts-service for that matter, if I’m a web2.0 service owner, I’ld have to implement that API for each contacts-service I wish to support. That’s why you only find a few contacts-services on each site, it’s too much ado. (and € $ £ ¥ etc)

The solution would be an open standard for contacts that is supported by all contacts-services so that ‘your-favorite-contacts-service’ could be accessed from ‘your-favorite-web2.0-service’ by just entering some simple parameters like an URL and your Open-ID.

Let’s look at an example that is actually ok: I happen to like the interface of http://iwantsandy.com/ to manage my todo’s (i can e-mail new todo’s in or IM them etc…) but I also manage my calendar at Google, I don’t want to keep visiting two sites every day to see what’s up for that day… The solution is to export my Iwantsandy todolist using the open standard ICS using an internet URL and have Google calendar add the information in that ICS feed to my calendar display. That way I can also see my todo’s from Remember The Milk and any other ics-based calendar feed in my Google Calendar. In fact, since I can also export my Google Calendar using ICS I could also view all my calendars in Mozilla Sunbird or any other calendar application that supports ICS. Nifty ay? 8-)

As you see from the example, this way I do not create a point-to-point integration but an any-to-any integration based on a common data-format. That’s true integration as we all want it. So how does that translate to the Web2.0? Simple: We need an international open standard for each type of information (contacts, joblistings, weblink collections, micro-blogging-items, profile-information, book collections etc) and we need all web2.0 services to abandon their personal API’s and start supporting those open standards. That way the following situation arrives:

  1. I choose ‘my favorite site for storing and editing information of type x’
  2. I reuse that information on whatever web2.0 service I choose
  3. I save lots of time because I don’t have to add information more than once
  4. I prevent inconsistencies and errors since i always use the same source info
  5. I achieve web2.0 zen

For now, this will not happen and in most cases we will be creating the spaghetti integrations that are available now. You could say it’s better than nothing, it’s the best we have now… I don’t like to settle for that. I hope things will change and I’m quite willing to discuss these things with anyone…

One thing though… These open standards actually describe what bits of information mean. They describe the meaning of data, in other words: the semantics. A lot of people agreed that the semantic web is actually web3.0 and not web2.0. This means that in my opinion web2.0 will not truely arrive until web3.0 comes into full existence. I guess someone’s got their numbering wrong….. My conclusion however still is the following:

true dataportability NEEDS semantic interoperability… Full Stop…

There are a number of initiatives to try and come up with open standards for web2.0 integration like dataportability.org and Opendd.net. Maybe these or some other will alleviate our problems somewhat. If you know of other initiatives like these, don’t hesitate to comment!

Hope you liked this item!

Cheers!

26
Oct

Time Well Spent

   Posted by: wkossen

If you’ve been here before, You’ll notice a difference… SPEED… well, I moved my websites and blogs to a new machine and that helps a lot. This also means that the previous post is now obsolete. In fact, it’s obsolete for more than one reason…

1. The websites now run on a mini-itx formfactor server with 1 GB of mem, so we have spead, yet we save some energy…

2. The number of visitors grew since I started using entrecard as traffic exchange mechanism (which also resulted in me finding a number of pretty cool sites to follow…)

3. I now have 2 machines running 24/7, so even though they’re both low energy consumption machines, the energy consumption has gone up… Not so green anymore, but at least I can support my guests with a better service…

4. I had a lot of fun and quite a large number of interesting moments when things didn’t work (hope all are resolved now…)

So if there’s ever a moment you’re not doing anything usefull, migrate a server or two….

Cheers!

13
Oct

to Green or not to Green?

   Posted by: wkossen

Slow? Yes this site is slow. Why? Well it’s running on a slow server. A low energyconsumption, slow server. Yes, A green server. 7 Watts isn’t that much, so it’s very green.

or is it…

Let’s see.

– in total, 7 watts isn’t that much for a server, so it’s green

– but if you look at the number of visitors per watt, hmmm, not so green at all

– This means I need to get more hits, more visitors

– that would mean however that the site might get even slower

– or maybe go down alltogether… that’s not very green, rather it’s black…

So what is it? Green, or not green?