David Davies, last year, for example, blogged from the crowd at a football match, and from inside a plane.

The fact that so many things are new so many times is a good thing, even though to those who came before it can be very irritating to see people claim credit for inventing what you thought you invented. Here's why it's good. Because ideas get improved, and made relevant in new contexts. It's why patents in software are so dangerous and so unlikely to be deserved.

I explained it once quite concisely. "Everything on the Internet is just like something else. Or if it's any good it's just like everything else."

And I have a motto to go with this, of course. "Only steal from the best."

OK let me catch my breath!  Apparently Samsung and Warner Pictures have worked out a cross-promotional deal - like no other.  Go to The Matrix Phone and sign up for 'future news.

Then go to and tell all your friends "The Matrix is coming."  The meme is spreading.

I knew this would happen.  The tie in and relationship between The Matrix and the Mesh is not coincidental.  Now all we need is Keanu Reeves as a spokesperson for open standards!

HHhhhhhmmmmmmm.

Here's a presentation on "The Economy of Distributed Metadata Authoring" by  Stefano Mazzocchi . A few passages ring especially true to me.

First Law of Metadata Quality:

• Artificial intelligence is just that: artificial!
• So: for a system that feels smart to humans, you need human-crafted metadata

Suggestions:

• Do all efforts to make instant return on the investment of metadata authoring
• Don't ask too much
• Be smart but not smarter

Some of the same wisdom went into the design of the Internet Topic Exchange.

[Seb's Open Research]

Right on to Seb - as he seems to grok intuitively the big picture issues.  My only comment would be that as much as we need humans to create the meta-data, there still is MUCH MORE that we need a Topic Registry to do.

As I've requested before - Matt Mower's LiveTopics (I'm a Radio user - so I'm addicted/or shall I say dependent upon LiveTopics to express my personal ontologies) - needs to do some of the slave labor for me.  Why should I have to go and find TopicExchange.com and manually paste in my post into my channel of choice?

That's bizarrely medieval in it's crudeness.  That's what computers were invented for - to automte those slave tasks.  Let alone where we'd go once a true topic registry was in place.

BTW Seb also has a great pointer to some more 'Semantic web' stuff:

The semantic web explained (without the agonizing pain). A very neat, painless introduction to the Semantic Web (pdf), from Toronto-based Semaview. [Co-construction des savoirs à IDITAE via Michel Dumais via Gilles Beauchamp] From the same source, check out these one-minute overview charts: The Semantic Web, RDF vs. XML. And while we're at it: there's a new Journal on Web Semantics.

At the Staggernation Google API Relation Browsing Outliner (GARBO).  [The Doc Searls Weblog]

This link was actually sent to me first from my Nephew Dane Knecht.  He's been getting into outlining recently - in a big way.  Dane did an internship at OpenLabs and is now back at Columbia - doing what nerdy kids do.  I wonder what HE thinks of ThreeDegrees?  His cousin (my eldest) Aryeh - IMes with four windows open at the same time.  They're both members of Generation ICQ.

If anybody doesn't know why Dave is going to Harvard - now they should.  I believe this will put Dave in touch with the current complexities and realities of using Radio today.  The utter simplicity of Blogger, Ryze and Fotolog have been affecting me allot recently.

This is how our tools should work.  No manuals or need to ask questions!

BTW This also puts into retrospective what Evan Williams was getting at - when he started talking about centralized news aggregation.  Now that Pyra has Google's infrastructure, they can add RSS channels to Blogger (as part of Blogger*Pro - of course.)

It's been almost three years since Polycom bought PictureTel and tried to gain a stranglehold on the videoconferencing world.  Yet they've failed to make the leap over into a reasonable solution, that works.  Meanwhile I don't have to tell you who's been raking in the bucks - based upon what pop-under ads you've probably been bombarded with.

So now we see if Polycom can make that leap into the real world - where people don't pay $50k for a teleconferencing system.  In fact real developers won't pay even $5k for a conferencing system and that's what's wrong with Macromedia's Flashcom server product.  Technically it's right on.

Semantic blogging tool?. Danny Ayers is working on a 'semantic weblog server'. It'll be interesting to see how this turns out. The semantic web needs working apps, so the rest of us can get a clue re what it's all about. [Second p0st]

This looks interesting.  [Curiouser and curiouser!]

 I was hoping Matt picked up on this and he did!  I left Danny a comment on this post, encouraging him to think about other micro-content types besides blogging and he left a nice comment on the post below - saying he grokked it!  Isn't the blogosphere wonderful?

This is getting down-right fun!

LiveJournal's process is a little more convaluted, but it's still powerful.  Regardless of the navigation metaphor - basing a system upon end-user's profiles is where it's at.  If we could imagine a) a way of encrypting and securing profiles so that one could be compatible with something like the Liberty Alliance standard, while at the same time control their own identity profile = that's what PingID is.

And b) if you could imagine all of these identity systems interlocking between each other - enabling Ryze, Fotolog or LiveJournal users - to access and add each other as friends of one another - that's what we're hoping to do with the open People server idea - I floated.  Hopefully this is what we'll get Ascio to put into open source.

BTW Let me give you another insight into how standardized idenity browsing can unfurl - and we don't have to look any further than Joi's digital lifestyle.  Joi (as most of you know) is a leader in the world of moblogging.  In that role - he has a moblog photo album, which (I guess) is where he flows all his email moblogging photos.  Joi exposes his latest moblog photo on his blog home page, and if you click on that photo - it takes you to his moblog album.

Now this is where it gets confusing and where an open standard for media management could help.  Joi ALSO has a photo album built-into his blog - which is no where as elegant or cool as his moblog album, but I guess it serves a different purpose. If for no other reason - the images inside the blog album were not generated via cell phone.

OK - so what's wrong with this picture?  Between his fotolog, his moblog album and his blog album - Joi has his imagery in three different locations.  Now it's not too hard to imagine that a standard for media could create a level playing field and connect up photos from Joi's three different albums, with artwork from the Internet Archives and the entire Creative Commons.  Now this is where it gets fun.

A open standard people server could unite disparate identity systems (like Ryze, Fotolog or LiveJournal) with standard media management.  That means that by clicking on Joi's face or any of his media, we could add Joi as a friend, wherever we ran into him - in the lobbby of the Hotel Okura, in Davos or in cyberspace - and cruise through his digital lfiestyle.

This sort of inter-connecting will be possible once a series of open standard servers gets promulgated.  Hopefully the SocialText folks will help make standard open conversations possible and hopefully Evan (and the folks at Pyra/Google) will implement Evan's idea of not only a Movie Review Blog (and associated micro-content type and server), but all sorts of other kinds of reviews as well - which we all can share.

And that's one way we can get to the semantic web.

It isn't exactly what I've been waiting for. I think they're doing too much, I don't want them posting to my weblog, I want them to send me a URL of the MP3 they create via email, and I'll link to it from my weblog. If someone with a weblog can't manage that, it ain't much of a weblog. [Scripting News]

This is a clear juncture and difference of opinion as to how things should be done.  Dave sees no problem in having humans grok the inner workings of software, and to intercept an audblog feed and route it to whatever blogging tool they use.

Evan and Noah and a bunch of other people see that sort of "grokking" as being an inhibiting factor in the spread of blogging and personal publishing.  I agree.  Though flexibility and 'scripting' capabilities are ke