Big Fractal Tangle: Archive Index

I decided to do this a month ago tonight. I was getting a reckless drive home along Sanibel streets to the Sundial, just coming from a talk-filled dinner with a dozen or so DERI folk, worried I wouldn't have enough time to sleep and pack before returning to Pennsylvania the next morning, when I thought of it: Big Fractal Tangle would be the name of a blog. Earlier that day, we'd all seen the Tim Berners-Lee keynote speech at the end of the five-day ISWC 2003, during which he said the phrase as an aside while describing the Semantic Web....

A day before the conference started, I was sitting in the whirlpool at the Sundial reading Practical RDF by Shelley Powers with a highlighter. I was pretty focused on the book, so I didn't notice the four people that joined me in the whirlpool while I read. I looked up after a while and began being more friendly ... they were all Americans, and all on vacation. After we talked for a while, the man across from me asked, "What's the twenty second rundown on RDF." Apparently he had worked in IT before he retired, and geniunely wanted to know....

Many of the talks I had in Sanibel were about our current social problems: what they are, why they persist, what can be done. I loved having so many Europeans to talk with, since I find them to be more open, more personal, more informed about world events than many Americans, particularly in professional settings. It might seem odd to have a whole lotta philosophizing going on at a technical conference, but I was thrilled by it. As technologists, we have more power to change things than often we realize. With something as pervasive and as influential as the Semantic...

Borislov Popov wrote in response: "As all tools in the world, the Sem Web will be just a tool ... It will be employed by people, so the people are the ones to change; because the tools are just artificial limbs for us --- they fulfill our intentions ... They will help if our intention develops, as does the internet in some cases and radio'n tv in others." Well said, and history agrees with him. With each technological advance, there's always a few optimists like me shouting hope from the rooftops, who then later agree that their world-changing advance is...

Putting aside for a moment all this pie-in-the-sky, we-are-the-world stuff, let's switch to more immediate concerns. We were warned by our keynote at the conference against overhyping our efforts, and he's right. The more we reflect and rhapsodize about our vision, the more we'll tune out the press, and thereby the decision makers. Better to sneak up on them ... we should underpromise and overdeliver. But there's a bigger reason to shut up about it: I think in the short run the Semantic Web is more likely to fail than succeed. I went down to Sanibel to see if "it's...

Years ago, at my father's old ad agency, I took over in the accounting department after they'd let a woman go who'd been doing the books. For a month I struggled with her filing system, rummaging in the cabinets for ten minutes each time I wanted something. Bills from the same health insurance company would sometimes appear in "Insurance", and sometimes under the company's name, and sometimes under "Benefits." I finally gave up and took a week to completely reorganize everything. The ability to organize is a teachable skill, though it's often seen as a personality trait we've either got...

The idea for my company's current project began in January 1999 while I was trying to teach my mom, Rosemary, how to email photos taken with her new Kodak digital camera. The software that came with it was called PictureEasy, and was pretty easy. Of the two dozen photo programs I've used since, it was probably the best for her, but it still had some snags that tripped her up from time to time. Over the next few years, whenever we went to visit her in Bonita Springs, Florida (half an hour from Sanibel), I'd download a bunch of new...

"In the long run [people] hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high." (Thoreau) Mr. Shirky's article The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview is a real piece of work. I don't agree with any of it, but I'm still glad he wrote it. Nothing motivates me more than baseless partisan bluster, and while I know he's just muddying the waters to appear deep, I've decided to use his article, and him, to make a larger point. This is the promise of the Semantic Web -- it will improve all...

Given my entrepreneurial background, I was shocked at the open exchange of ideas in Sanibel. Most projects I've worked on have had non-disclosures. Most of my colleagues hold their cards close to the chest. My amazement reached its peak on the demos & posters night as I walked from station to station, hearing one breakthrough after the next. "This is way too easy," I thought. Given adequate funding, I could probably turn at least six of those projects into lucrative ventures. If you're doubtful, call me up. I'll rattle off the how and who, brainstorming market, branding, and sales potential....

In Shelley Power's "The Value of Human on a Humanless Web", she talks about the mom scenerio in the Scientific American article: "Mom needs therapy? Oh no! Well, we'll work together and make sure she's taken care of!" In this picture, I search for available plans in the area and then call the hospitals and I talk to the people to see if I can trust them to take care of mother; neither I nor [my sister] is so busy as to begrudge the time taken. " While I agree with most of her article, this part rang false for...

I read somewhere that in the early days of telephone, early adopters had a tough time selling the technology to city businesses. Back then, it was standard practice for executives to dictate messages to secretaries, who typed them up to be sent to the mail room, where they would then be rushed by bike messengers across town to the mail rooms of other businesses, which would then deliver them to the executives upstairs. When presented with the idea of a telephone, executives thought, "Why bother? We'd just be saving the bike messenger a trip, and they're cheaper than the telephone...

Imagine you're at a party with people you don't know and you walk into the following conversation (a terrific summary by Peter Van Dijck, btw). You listen politely, not wanting to interrupt, all the while wondering "Just what in the hell are you people talking about?" To a newcomer, we must seem like blind men describing an elephant, debating the semweb's essential nature from our differing vantage points, but rarely addressing the most basic questions: what is the Semantic Web and why should anyone care? If you're new, and you're nodding your head, hoping someone will put the pieces together...

(what follows is an imaginary conversation between Angela Tesoro, billionaire founder of a fictious women's health club franchise, and Timothy Falconer, advocate for the Semantic Web) Angela: Hi Tim, it's Angela. Got a minute? Timothy: Hey Angela. Sure, what's up? Angela: This morning I was approached by a startup company that's looking to make and sell some computer software. They're convinced they're gonna make millions of course, and they need an angel investor, which is why they met with me. Their ideas sound pretty good, but you know me. I'm not the most computer literate person, which is why I'm...

(continued imaginary conversation between Angela Tesoro, billionaire founder of a fictious women's health club franchise, and Timothy Falconer, advocate for the Semantic Web) Angela: Okay, now that we've ordered lunch, tell me about the Semantic Web. What is it? Why should I invest in it? Timothy: Let's start with some definitions. There's basically two pieces to the Semantic Web puzzle: 1) annotating content with metadata, and 2) doing stuff with that metadata. Angela: I'm already lost. You sound like those guys from yesterday. Timothy: (smiling) I'll explain. By "content", I mean anything you can make with a computer or put...

(continued imaginary conversation between Angela Tesoro and Timothy Falconer, now sitting in her office in front of her computer) Angela: Yesterday at lunch you were telling me the world needs more metadata, and that metadata is a kind of one-off description of "real" data. What I don't understand is why this is new. Isn't just about everything we do with computers related to metadata? My friend Julie uses annotation in Word all the time. And isn't every form we fill out on the web like this? I type in "Angela Tesoro" in the "Name" field. Isn't "Name" meta to "Angela"?...

(continued imaginary conversation between Angela Tesoro and Timothy Falconer, sitting with a laptop at their local WiFi equipped bookshop) Angela: Since yesterday, I've been doing "page source" on a bunch of web pages like you showed me. Sure enough, lots of them have these meta keywords. I even gave some thought to our keywords and had our webmaster change them after looking at some competitor websites. Timothy: Meta keywords are just a small example of where we're headed with the Semantic Web. They're baby steps at best. To do better, we need to annotate stuff using shared metadata vocabularies. Angela:...

(continued imaginary conversation between Angela Tesoro and Timothy Falconer, now sitting in her board room with her financial advisors) Angela: Everyone, this is Tim Falconer. He's been helping me understand this Semantic Web stuff in the last few days. I'm now convinced there's a need for the technology, but I still haven't heard the most important part: will this make us money? Timothy: I'm convinced it can, particularly given the ideas in the prospectus you gave me. Your startup company essentially wants to create a worldwide technical talent search system, like Monster.com, only decentralized. I showed you FOAF yesterday so...

Even if you're not from Missouri, it's easy to say "Show me" when first told about the Semantic Web. Maybe we've all become skeptics in the wake of so much failed dot-com exhubarance. Maybe it's the way semweb advocates sometimes sound, describing it as this self-evident holy grail, forever in the future, but arriving any moment. Maybe it's the word "semantic", which to most people gets prefaced by "just", as in "let's drop this pointless argument, it's just semantics." Maybe our society loves to see successful people fail. Who better to take a dive than the founder of the last...

I've watched the blog phenomenom from afar these last three years, but really haven't staked my claim until now. Yeah, I got a company blog, which even was linked by Ev a few years back. I've got a personal blog, which I share with my wife, where I occassional get creative. I even posted my writing in the early days, before the Web had search engines. My Letter to Jack Kerouac had some readers, as did Gravity Notes and The Nine Principles, which have a few pre-Web predictions that are still coming true. But up till now, I haven't done...

Yesterday's post was a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it's a real concern of mine. I can say the right things, I can answer the naysayers, I can champion the grannies, but my words won't be worth much if no one reads them. So how's it going so far? Well, I launched with an email to 33 people, most of whom I met in Sanibel. I got a very nice mention in Shelley Power's blog. I've had a half-dozen supportive emails. Otherwise, no blog comments, or trackbacks, or website links as yet. The stats show that readership is slowly increasing. I'm getting...

He lives below the senseless stars and writes his meanings in them - Thomas Wolfe In Shelley's starlings post, she talks about the URI debate, and how some think we can sidestep the word "resource", since we've gotten this far without precisely considering it. Usually, while reading debates like this, I begin to feel like a kid with his hands to his ears, yelling, "na na na na na" to block out the sound. Thankfully I was a philosophy minor, which means I've developed a tolerance for this "what's in a name" nonsense. I once wrote a paper on Russell's...

Today I've been working on my company's updated business plan, outlining the features of our two new products, describing their competitive advantages in the current market. I went to Sanibel to determine if we should use Semantic Web technology. I came away with a "Yes" from a technical standpoint, but a "Maybe" from a business point of view. Much of my writing here, particularly the Angela Talk, is motivated by my current need to make the business case for the Semantic Web. I really do believe there's money to be made in this space. The tough part's describing how to...

Today I tried to do something I've been meaning to do for a long time: get my websites to validate as strict XHTML. Till today, I haven't rated it enough of a priority to take the time. Giving myself thirty minutes for the first site, I made it most of the way, but bailed because I couldn't get the layout to work easily in all browsers. Now don't get me wrong. I'm a standards conscious guy, and I believe strongly in refactoring. I'm always taking that extra five minutes (or thirty) to make things more readable, more flexible, and more...

I started this blog in response to the many terrific conversations I had while at ISWC in Sanibel, many of which centered around the social implications of the Semantic Web. On the last day, I talked with Dieter Wolf. After some time, he half-jokingly said in surprise, "You are an American, and you care about these things?" Yes, I do, and there's a lot of us, though you wouldn't know it by watching our television. Last week was an exception, though. There was an episode of ER that blew me away. Doctor Carter, one of the main characters, was treating...

Okay, we've got RDF, we've got OWL, we've got Jena, we've got ontologies. Now what? What can we do with them? Let's take the semweb for a spin. In Sanibel, I did lots of brainstorming with folks. Seemed like most there were hunting elephants: big grants and big business. My focus was on a different market: the small and the many. Horizontal markets are harder to reach; you gotta really know marketing. It's not just board rooms you're pitching to... it's everyone. So what semweb products could succeed with the many? Well, there's my own company's products, which I'll talk...

In 2000, my wife and I wanted a new house. We drove all over, we talked with our realtor, we went to open houses, we looked online. Nothing felt right. We decided to write up our "top ten" lists of what we wanted most. My list led with "space" and "light" and "land". Hers included "jacuzzi" and "closets" and "great kitchen". We both wanted "fireplace." These lists became our informal search profile. Such profiles are the stock in trade for real estate agents, whether they're helping you buy or sell a house. The better a realtor can predict whether a...

The word "semantic" is one of those words people sort of understand, but not completely. Like "humility," it's a word that's hard to pin down. Most people don't really know what it means, which is ironic because it means meaning: "of or relating to meaning in language." So, are we trying to build a "web of meaning"? Well, here we run into a similiar problem: "meaning" has many meanings. We use it to show intent ("I mean to please") or purpose ("I was meant for this job") or significance ("you mean everything to me"). We also use it when connecting...

Today my company, Immuexa, formally begins "Project Realize", our own attempt to bring Semantic Web goodness to everyone. Our plan is to develop and market two software products that share the same purpose: helping people organize, explore, and share their digital memories. Tidepool™ (formerly Akimbo and Waveplace) is a desktop application that can be run on any computer. Storymill™ is a web application that's used through a web browser. Both do much the same thing -- they're similar but separate interfaces to the same shared functionality and codebase. Each product will play to the strengths of its interface. Tidepool, the...

Our lives are what we remember. Our culture, our society, our heritage: it's the knowledge we share that defines us. Memories and imaginings form the substance of our shared humanity. Preserving and publishing our memories, whether the story of our individual lives or the history of our neighborhoods, is a profound and necessary endeavor, for it brings us together as a people. Cherishing our shared heritage helps create and sustain real community, real meaningfulness, which many of us hunger for as an alternative to the soulless singularity of corporate branding and rubber stamp franchises that are slowly erasing the color...

Shelley writes: "She who dares [sing] now does not live to pass her exuberance and spirit on to her offsping, and each new generation becomes more silent in the face of adversity." She's referring to birds outside getting quiet when a hawk is in view, among other things. This made me think of ani difranco, an incredible talent who sings her truth regardless. Sometimes I worry for her safety, since clearly there's danger in this world. By telling the uncomfortable truths, we could be painting targets on our chests. My wife once got hate mail simply by choosing Bobby McFerrin's...

Tonight, while much of the world celebrates Christmas Eve, that magical time when we all remember "true meaning", spontaneously helping our neighbors like Scrooge after his big conversion, I'm reminded instead about the divisions between us, the physical and conceptual neighborhoods that make it possible for us to disregard each other easily. I guess it's no one's fault. Our brains are barraged with the demands of the day. We need to find shortcuts, remembered mnemonics, to help us sift through our choices so we know how to feel about stuff. Without intending it, we slip on our "us and them"...

My last week of postings have been mostly sauce with no meat, which means it's high time I quit with conjecture and start talking turkey. For those new to the Semantic Web, I'm sure you're saying, "How do I use this stuff?" I know how you feel. When I'm learning a new technology, I'm usually relieved when the writer stops talking around things and finally addresses the topic directly. So for my first "tangle yarn," I'll tackle RDF, the Resource Description Framework, since it's the technological foundation for the whole magilla. There's a lot written about RDF and friends. I'm...

In my last post, we learned that RDF is all about describing resources, and that resources are referenced with URIs. So how does it describe them? Let's start by looking at the source of this very page (View / Page Source). There's two snippets of RDF embedded in the HTML. The first helps tools like Movable Type create what are called "trackbacks", links to this post from other people's posts. Here's the RDF:  First,...

Now that you've seen some actual RDF, we can take a step back to put things in context. RDF is essentially a data model -- a way of describing data, or in this case, metadata. There's plenty of data models out there. The ones we're most familiar with are connected to programming languages and their functional flavors. Algol, Pascal, and C have their records and procedures. Prolog has statements and rules. Smalltalk, C++, and Java have objects and methods. SQL has tables and statements. At their core, each of these systems describe data in the same way: atomic data nuggets...

Last time I talked about "triples", which are the elementary nugget in RDF. What's a triple? Have a look: <rdf:Description rdf:about='http://bigfractaltangle.com' dc:title='Big Fractal Tangle' /> This triple is saying, "The resource 'http://bigfractaltangle.com' has the title 'Big Fractal Tangle." It's a single fact, expressed as an RDF statement, or triple. The three parts that make it a triple are: resource: http://bigfractaltangle.com predicate: dc:title object: Big Fractal Tangle Every RDF statement has a resource, a predicate, and an object. To see it another way, we can take the Grammar Rock approach: each sentence has a subject and a predicate. The subject is...

Why is RDF worth our time? My short answer is "because RDF is loose, but not too loose." RDF has enough order to do useful things, but doesn't require us to rewire the world first. If tech were tunes, RDF would be a jazz trio, not a Bach fugue. It lets players who hardly know each other improvise, yet it holds things together beautifully: the quintessential jam. In this way, RDF is much like the current Web. RDF shares many of the benefits that made the first Web a success. As Dave Beckett said, "RDF allows loose collaboration with little...

Finished the ten-hour HBO series, Band of Brothers tonight. I found it breathtaking, much like From the Earth to the Moon, also by Tom Hanks and HBO. Trust me, if you haven't watched these yet, you're missing out on some of the most engaging, exhilarating, and inspirational hours on film. Both tell the story of a hard-won triumph. Both detail the human effort, the very personal sacrifices and challenges that collectively contributed to the outcome. As each episode ended, as the credits and the theme music ran, I'd get goosebumps every time. With each hour, I felt a sense of...

The next year will be a big one, no doubt. In 2004, we'll probably hear the first mentions of "Semantic Web" on mainstream media. Somebody's gonna release that category-defining application that people can point to and say, "That's what I'm talking about! That's the Semantic Web!" Blogs will get even more of our mindshare, especially as we get closer to the American presidential election. I fully expect blog rates to soar, both readers and writers. I can't yet tell if something will shake the "power law" fix of the new blogarati class. If anything, it'll be due to mega-corp marketing...

Tonight I found myself wondering in Wegmans, an incredibly overstocked and expensive supermarket, waiting for my wife to finish shopping while I mulled over some design quandaries having to do with our current project. We're trying to match our existing object model with RDF, since we'd like to leverage as much of the power of RDF and related technologies as we can. Why build when you can borrow? Besides, we'd like to integrate with the world, both now and in the future. That's the point of standards, yes? So, here I am, using a supermarket as a development example. Two...

After reading Shelley's New Year's doubts, saddened there need ever be a question in her mind of her true effect, I remembered why I quit the Well: people can be cruel, and it hurts most when you're being real. Right now it seems clearer: Many of us have sorrows and fears that run through us, that define us. Humans are so wonderfully, so frustratingly, frail, that our hard edges & whiplash reactions often steal the show. But from a different perspective, it's easier to see the pain involved in hurting others. My father was a tyrant, who wielded his verbal...

A few days ago, I was chatting with someone about browser cookies. He wanted to know why this site collects them. I told him it was to help keep statistics, that without cookies there's no way to determine the true number of returning visitors. You see, many ISPs use rotating IP addresses, particularly when people log off, then log back on. Without cookies, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between 1000 people who visit once (and never come back) and 200 people who visit five times. If the former, I'm wasting my time. If the latter, I'm doing...

Anyone who's made software for any length of time will be familiar with the perennial quandary: how do we uniquely identify human beings. First and last names are no good. Home addresses and phone numbers change all the time. People are reluctant to give out Social Security Numbers. This leaves the most unlikely candidate of all: email addresses. How did we arrive at email addresses as our universal identifer? Nearly every web account uses email addresses. PGP uses email addresses. Even FOAF uses email addresses (hashed or not) as the primary key. Seems odd that the thing about us that...

I started a science fiction story back in 1986 about a small device called an "Immuexus", which was essentially a tablet computer with a semantic user interface. Instead of a mouse or touchpad, the user used a special pen that served three purposes: first, it was used as a pointer for the screen, much like a mouse; second, it could scan text (and OCR it) while reading a book, line-by-line; third, it had gyro-like sensors, so you could use it to navigate a 3D visualized space by tilting it forward and back, left and right. Back in 1986, this really...

To prep for my upcoming talk with Dan Brickley, father of FOAF, I figured I'd indulge myself in some wild and irreverant conjecture before hunkering down to a more concise and clear FOAF Tangle Yarn. Imagine someone casts a spell, and we all woke up tomorrow without fear of universal IDs. Let's say Dan bought the domain "humanity.org" and established a worldwide FOAF repository. To make this really wacky, let's say someone invented a cheap way to determine a unique hash ID from our personal genetic code. I can see it now: I walk into my local pharmacy, drop a...

Tonight I was negotiating fees with an illustrator for reproduction rights of our upcoming icons and title screens. She quoted numbers from the Graphic Artists Guild, which has the website address gag.org, which is kinda funny. My family business was an advertising agency, so I know how creative folk usually charge for logos, graphic design, and illustrations. They first size you up and try to determine how much money you're gonna make, then charge accordingly. As tonight's illustrator put it, it's not fair to her if she gets the same amount for a Times Square billboard illustration as for a...

While in Sanibel, in between sessions, I was pacing with my portable phone, handling a client crisis back home. Much of the crisis had to do with mismatched expectations. They'd say, "Why doesn't it do {that}? I need it to do {that}" I'd say, "I mentioned {that} in the design talks. You said you didn't want {that}." They'd say, "But of course we need {that}. This isn't what I wanted at all." Same old story. Software is a difficult thing to make, particularly when you're making it with people who aren't used to thinking about their needs abstractly. Seems like...

Probably the most used RDF schema, besides rdf and rdfs, is Dublin Core, a metadata standard established to describe documents. The first thing you should know about Dublin Core is that it has nothing to do with James Joyce or the city in Ireland. This Dublin is in Ohio, which is where some semweb pioneers met in March 1995 to establish the standard. The next thing you should know about Dubin Core is that it's simple and useful. How so? Well, Dublin Core is a set of fifteen essential things people want to know about a document: its title, its...

Of the various labels I could saddle myself with, "entrepreneur" rings true. This may seem like bragging, but it's really not. Entrepreneur means "one who assumes risk for a business venture." I know Inc magazine wants you to think entrepreneurs are the new breed of cowboy, that we're all on our way to being Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, always seeing past the industry buzz to the "new new thing". That's just a lot of journalistic hokey. Entrepreneurs are people who take a chance on an uncertain idea. They risk their time, their passion, and their money for something that...

What's in a name? Well, when you're selling something, quite a lot. A good product name can focus people on your core benefit. It can crystallize the characteristics that set you apart from your competitors. Names can be inspiring, inviting, intriguing. Most of all, they can make money, which is why trademarks are their own little turf war. Today we lost "Akimbo" as a product name. Turns out there's a startup in California that choose the name four months ago, headed by the co-founder of ReplayTV. We had a nice chat this evening. Very likable guy. While it's not clear...

Today after terrific talks with Dan Brickley and Libby Miller, I read up on the W3C to see just why Immuexa should consider joining. I found their Seven Points page, which I recommend you run off and read right now. Pretty good, yes? This is the kind of language I respond to: simple, direct, inspiring. The friendly drawings help too. I've been visiting the W3C site for years to read up on standards, but it wasn't until I read this page that I really grokked their purpose. If I were them, I'd take it a step further and make something...

Last night, I was driving around in a snowstorm, trying to think of a new name for our desktop product. The name game can drive you nuts. It's best to think of it as a game you play for fun, like Concentration or Password. There's a continuum of obviousness when it comes to naming products. Years ago, when trying to name an EDI engine that translates medical records between different databases, my manager insisted on "InfoServer" as a name. I had to go over his head, taking my name, "Rosetta", to his boss before they went with it. At worst,...

This morning, I woke up and looked out on a new landscape: What I love about snow is what I love about writing: the clean sheet of paper. There's that sense of fresh perspective, that anything is possible. The best software design starts the same way: without assumptions. Some call this "thinking outside the box." To me, even that phrase is too constrained. My view is that you've gotta think as if the box never existed, or put another way, do "zero mass design". Zero mass design starts without constraint. You begin with the impossible, then scale it back to...

I'm surprised more people don't use IRC. This might sound nuts to those of us that do, since we rightly think too many people already use IRC, but given the number of people that use the web, that use instant messenging, that read and write blogs, I'm surprised the number of IRC networks, channels, and users isn't much higher. Tonight I explored Search IRC, which is pretty useful resource. The numbers are fascinating. Over a million users, connected by 7000 servers, forming 600,000 channels on 1500 networks. Have a look at the network stats. Four IRC networks with 70,000+ users:...

I lived in Florida for a few years in my mid-twenties in a town called Bonita Springs, between Naples and Fort Myers, just south of Sanibel. It's where I started my first business in 1989, hoping to create something like the web. It's where I first faced the business world as an adult, where I took my first "slings and arrows", where I did a lot of growing up. After I left Florida for Pennsylvania, my parents moved to Bonita permanently. I went back to visit at least once a year for the next eleven years. A lot of life...

How often have you worked on projects where your company first re-evaluated its project infrastructure and development plan? "I think the task priorities should be Hairy, Ignorable, and Pointless." "We need to change our source-control system to MultiMegaMerge." "Let's create a worldwide distributed automatic build like Seti@Home, only more secure." Everyone's got their own opinions about project management, which is why there's so many products in this space, most of them homegrown. Around the time I decided to quit Lotus, they had an all-day, all-hands meeting at a local conference center to "discuss" our new development process. Sitting in the...

Blogs are abuzz with the most recent online nuisance: comment spamming. Someone figured out they can improve their website's Google rank by posting automated comments with their website's URL to popular blogs. Spammers hope that googlebot comes along and records their spam before the blog owner has time to manually remove their mess. It's working. Current solutions all have their problems: manual removal takes too much time, IP blacklists sometimes include "poison pills" (third-party web URLs that spammers include with their own), bayesian filters are too much of a moving target, automatic URL redirection breaks the back button. There are...

Blogging's only a few years old and we're already debating what's real blogging and what's just journaling. I know lots of people spend lots of time pouring themselves into their pages, but really now, isn't it a bit early to be discussing authenticity in the new medium? From where I sit, I see three kinds of blogging: smalltalk, writing, and listing. Lots of people do the listing thing: post a link, write "interesting...", and they're done. Plenty stick to smalltalk: writing about their day, telling us what they had for lunch, who stopped by, etc. Fewer have the discipline for...

The danger in doing very new things is getting wrapped up in being first. Whether it's "first mover advantage" or academic clout, we want to be the one and only, the one people talk about. Second place is "also-ran" at best. Last night I watched The Endurance, which is about a guy named Shackleton who should have been the first to reach the south pole. He was one hundred miles away from his goal, after travelling fifteen hundred, then turned back because he was worried they'd run out of supplies. A few years later, two other teams beat him to...

One thing's clear to me about the Semantic Web: our current user interface metaphors aren't gonna cut it. Lists and trees have served us well, but in the massively interconnected world to come, they'll fall flat on their faces. But wait, don't we already have the World Wide Web? Isn't that the point of hyperlinks? Aren't we already massively interconnected? Well no, not really, at least not to most people. Yeah, we can do it, but most websites use hyperlinks as a kind of menu item, not an indication of inter-related resources. The "hyper" in hyperlink has become of secondary...

Yesterday, I wrote about the need for new user interface metaphors, so more people can better visualize interconnectedness. There are several examples of the semantic graph approach, particularly the ThinkMap prototypes (such as the Visual Thesaurus), the TouchGraph browsers, and the IdeaGraph effort. Even demos such as foafcorp are a step in the right direction, but they're just a step. The goal, I think, is to create a semantic browser similiar to these efforts, but one that non-technical people can use immediately without much orientation. I'm hoping there's a point where interconnected semantic graph navigation becomes extremely usable, where exploration...

Imagine it's four years from now. I'm sitting on the couch, watching Republican candidates vie for the chance to unseat President Kerry. Front and center on my large-screen media monitor is a roundtable discussion on SVN, the Semantic Visualization Network. Some clown is taking credit for the landmark legislation that saved Social Security, and I'm not so sure, so I pick up my media controller, which looks suspiciously like a game controller. It's got two joysticks, a direction pad, and bunch of buttons. I press the "Context" button and my viewscreen shrinks to a rectangle that's about half the size...

Today, after five weeks of obsessive product name uncertainty, our team finally agreed on a new name to replace Akimbo for our desktop application: Waveplace™. Along the way, we considered 137 names, of which eight were given serious consideration. In the end, we went back to a name we already had. I thought of the name Waveplace in June of 1999 when I bought the domains for a "a web-based interactive story realm for children aged 5 through 10 that includes interactive plot lines, animations, games, and cognitive bot characters that learn about each child and make suggestions according to...

The Brookings Institution recently presented a study on how best to to revitalize my home state of Pennsylvania. In it, they make the point that Pennsylvania is especially provincial in nature. Its institutions, organizations, and people are highly disconnected from each other: "The intense localism of the state's 2,566 municipal governments—compounded by the state bureaucracy's own fragmentation—has often caused jurisdictions to work at cross-purposes rather than together on tough problems." We see this at the local level all the time. Everybody's got their own agendas, so they bicker instead of banding together. Even the well-meaning among us are less effective,...

Hi <first name>, I enjoyed our phone talk the other day. Here are a few thoughts before our next call. First, to review, Tidepool™ is our desktop application (built with Java) that people will use to organize their photos & memories. It's in the same marketing space as Adobe Photoshop Album and Apple iPhoto, though we have no illusions of beating Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple at their own game. We're just hoping to skim a little off the top, meanwhile bringing a more authentic, more human, approach to the task. Memories are precious. They form the substance of our shared...

I started Cluetrain last night. Yeah, I know, I'm a little late in the game, though in some ways I'm not (written at the same time). The Cluetrain tone is actually where I started (both written pre-Web). Since then, my challenge has been in avoiding the corporate siren call before it dashes me against the inhuman rocks of pointless posturing. #33, Learning to speak with a human voice is not a parlor trick. It can't be "picked up" at some tony conference. My current project's been stressing me out, though not because of the tech or the schedule or the...

My wife and I bought new cell phones last week, both with Bluetooth, both with SyncML. She's weaning herself off her Palm, trying to find a substitute desktop PIM for Palm Desktop. In the last few days, we've run the gamut: Apple iCal/Address Book, Notes (I worked at Lotus on R5), Mozilla Calendar/Address Book, ACT, Chandler, and even such older gems as Ecco, Goldmine, and Desktop Set. The only product we didn't look at was Outlook, as it's too prone to viruses. Why is this so hard! We're talking about freaking address and event information. Of all application areas, you'd...

To avoid brand confusion with the Wavemarket products, we've decided against the name Waveplace for our desktop app. We've picked another name we like even better: Tidepool™ Tidepool lets you collect, organize, describe, and browse your personal memories, such as digital photographs, movies, sound clips, and stories. With Tidepool, you can tell the who, what, where, and, when of it, using semantic web tagging technology. You can then browse through your memories semantically, with one thing suggesting another, and another. Looking at a photo of Katie on vacation at the beach in 2002, you can then look at other photos...

This morning my house is surrounded by fog so thick it's hard to see the ground from my upstairs window. I can almost feel the earth drinking in the needed moisture this wet morning. In recent weeks, the weather has been getting warmer. The highest, most stubborn, snow drifts are completely melted. We even went geocaching last weekend. For those that live in a place where it doesn't snow, you should spend a winter in a place like Pennsylvania. It's impossible to describe a spring approaching. The changes are subtle, fragrant, wet, and green. Birds slowly arrive. Deer quicken their...

I started this blog in November with the goal of posting once a day, which I kept to for two months, then settled into a rhythm of once every five days. Now that we're trudging hip-deep through the project, it's harder to make time to write. It's even harder to find time to research and reflect on the Semantic Web and its inevitable implications. Such writing requires a stand-back perspective. Instead, my head's been buried in the details of development. What have we been up to? Well, some of you may be interested in the way we're mixing FOAF with...

Writing the website text for Tidepool, I'm realizing that people may have a tough time putting the product into an established software category. If PC Magazine were to include us in an "Editor's Choice" roundup, I'm not sure which category we'd be in. Tidepool's a semantic browser, a digital media organizer, an instant messaging client, an authoring tool, a contact manager, a calendaring app, a PIM sync program, and a personal publisher (blogs & photos & sounds & newsletters), all built upon an agent-based control system and extension mechanism. Sounds like we've bolted a bunch of stuff where it doesn't...

After scrambling for days toward an ambitious release date, we managed today to pull the pieces together enough for our first private release of Tidepool. At the very last minute, we discovered a showstopper bug having to do with Java Web Start. I was actually about to press "Send" on the announcement email, then we found it. Ah well. At least we had a nice lunch to celebrate Immuexa's sixth. Many thanks to everyone who kicked ass to (almost) make this date. Not pictured, but there in spirit, are two Russians, two Canadians, one Brit, one Clevelander, and an American...

One of our clients is a public radio station. Yesterday, they finished their ten day spring pledge drive. For those in the world that may not know, public radio and television stations in the US have pledge drives (usually twice a year), where they cut into their programming to plead with their audience to send them money. In return, these donors become "members" of the station and often receive a thank-you gift. Along with grants and underwriting, this is how stations make all their money, since they don't allow advertising. Yes, that's right: American media without advertising. Our client's pledge...

Ten years ago today, I signed away 51% of my second software company, Gravity Systems Inc, to a businessman with an incredibly deep gravely voice named Don Van Natta. This time around, I'd been in business almost two years, working for next to nothing to chase my dream of a worldwide interconnected marketplace powered by multi-agent systems. In those days, it wasn't unusual for me to donate plasma once or twice a week just to feed myself. Sure, I could get a good job just about anywhere, but I knew too well what was coming. I'd tell people, "the tidal...

While outside it's been a warm inviting Spring, inside we've been driven by single focus, aimed at our product launch in June. Others sometimes call this the "death march" period, which personally I think is disrespectful of those forced to take real deach marches. Besides, death marches are usually considered unhealthy and ultimately counter-productive. Instead, I prefer to call our development endgame, the period of sustained focus before a release, a toboggan run. For those that haven't experienced a real toboggan run, it's starts high up on a snowy hill with five or six people looking down the slope at...

In the second paragraph of Weaving the Web, Tim Berners-Lee writes of the Web as something that "leaves the entirety of our previous ways of working as just one tool among many." I'm sure most people keep right on reading without a second thought about that sentence, as the line resembles much of the overwrought journalistic hyperbole aimed at the Web. When I read it today though, the line stopped me cold. He means exactly what he wrote, and he can back it up. Outstanding. With the WWW2004 show coming next week, I've been trying to gather my thoughts after...

My wife plays Solitaire incessantly. She's got a PhD and a professor's schedule, but nearly every time I look over at her laptop, she's reflexively sorting cards into piles, playing Freecell or some variation. She tells me it relaxes her, which seems reasonable enough, even if my idea of relaxing involves a dark room and a soft pillow. She's not alone. Solitaire is easily the most popular computer program of all time. More popular than email or web browsing, Solitaire is often the first program people use. I used it to teach my mom how to use a mouse. It's...

It's been a while since I talked about "Grannies and Gurus", so before getting into the meat of what we're doing, it'll help to first define the audience we're aiming at. Non-technical users are those that regularly put URLs in the Google search bar instead of the location bar. They're people who've never used a text editor in their life, only Word and email. Non-technical people rarely use menu bars. They're people who have yet to create a new folder in their email program, or even their file system. Non-technical people are the vast majority of computer users. When I...

An hour away from the start of www2004, I'm in my hotel room at the Sheraton, listening to the coffee brew and my wife Paula prepare for her bus trip back to Pennsylvania. We've been here three days, starting with an Ani Difranco concert in Carnegie Hall on Saturday, then roaming round Greenwich Village, South Street Seaport, and lower Manhattan on Sunday, then sleep and work on Monday, topped off with Times Square and Super Size Me, a film that cured me of fast food forever. Now Paula's leaving, which is making me sad. I wish she were staying the...

Just got back from two meals at the Zen Palace, first with semweb photo folks such as Jennifer Golbeck, Ben Shneiderman, Nick Gibbins, and Stephen Harris, then as we were leaving, I ran into Libby Miller, Dave Beckett, Dave Reynolds, etc, so stayed for their meal. Five hours of dinner talk. Storymill.net will have to wait. :)...

A line that stood out for me at yesterday's Tim Berners-Lee talk was "Start off with islands and stitch them together." He said this in answer to a question regarding ontology standardization. Later as I talked to people about it, I was surprised at how controversial an opinion it was. Many thought (or knew people who thought) that modeling efforts should be less haphazard, that we should we aim at a kind of "imperial ontology" and instill a sense of responsible conformity in those around us. One guy even said, when confronted with some "fringe attributes" that people may consider,...

Here's a photo of me and Jon "finishing up" Tidepool in the "Cyber Cafe" this afternoon, while across the hall the conference was officially closing. Eight hours later we're still at it, mostly struggling with issues that weren't originally scheduled for this release, such as uploading the w3photo stuff to storymill. We've been very close to good enough for hours now, but we still can't upload and publish photos and RDF from Tidepool. The rest of the program works fine. Ah well, time for sleep. If I seem half asleep on Developer Day, you'll know why. I had a long...

Waking after what seemed like mere minutes of sleep, I dressed in a daze and wandered down to the photo annotation session of Developer's Day. Greg Elin, Libby Miller, and Mor Naaman gave talks while I played a bit with Tidepool, trying to get it behave. After I made a point regarding privacy at the show, mentioning that we were working on a photo annotation program, Greg asked if I'd like to show it. "Sure", I said without much thought as I wandered up to plug in my Powerbook into the overhead projector. I said a few things about it,...

Last night I ate dinner at the Carnegie Deli with Nick Gibbins, Stephen Harris, Dave Becket, Libby Miller, Jim Hendler, and several others I know only by IRC nickname. We then chatted till 11pm in the hotel bar about a great many semweb things. I'm exhausted! This morning I packed up and checked out with plenty of time to make my bus, then talked for an hour in the lobby with Mor Naaman from Stanford, causing me to miss my bus by 8 minutes. My penance was sitting two hours on the floor in Port Authority, which is its own...

After yet another 4am grudge match with both Tidepool and Storymill.net, we're (mostly) ready for the world to see what we've done so far. You can download the Tidepool preview by visiting: http://storymill.net Details on Tidepool and Storymill can also be found at the site. There's also a Flash demo if you don't have time to install the actual program. We had hoped to get Tidepool uploading its w3photo goodness to Storymill, but we're still inches away, so it will have to wait until the next release. You can still output the RDF locally and upload to w3photo. Storymill currently...

One of the software publishing maxims we believe strongly is "release early, release often." While many software publishers have release cycles of a year or greater, at Immuexa, we've committed to a seasonal release cycle: once every three months, near the start of each new season. From here on out, you can expect a new public release of Tidepool and Storymill on June 21st (summer), September 21st (autumn), December 21st (winter), and March 21st (spring). Yes, a three-month release cycle is ambitious, but it's even hairier in-house. We do a fully-tested release every month, on the 21st of each month....

As we're writing the press release for the impending Tidepool release, the issue of what category to give it has again resurfaced. Believe it or not, we're leaning towards "semantic juxtaposer" or "juxtaposer". Given that "juxtapose" just got picked as one of Merriam Webster's Top Ten Favorite Words for 2004, this further seals the deal. :) What do you think? "Tidepool's a semantic browser, a digital media organizer, an instant messaging client, an authoring tool, a contact manager, a calendaring app, a PIM sync program, and a personal publisher (blogs & photos & sounds & newsletters), all built upon an...

This is the hundredth post on this blog, which may not seem a big deal to those accustomed to blogs with ten quick paragraphs a day, but it feels like an accomplishment to me. In the last seven months, I've kept to no more than one post a day, trying to make each post its own little standalone written work, however marginal its view. Yesterday was another milestone: six months since we started Project Realize, our self-funded mission to bring everyone Tidepool & Storymill. We had planned to release the first selling version yesterday, but Jon and I decided to...

Talk as much as you like about sales & marketing, pay big bucks for strategists and research firms, brainstorm your branding and gonzo attention getters, but it all comes down to the simplest of requests: please give us some money. The natural response is "why should I?" The spectrum of answers can be dizzying: public radio pitches, new car "extras", "don't blame us" anxiety inducers, glamour life seduction scenes, and even straight-up "we have something you want" appeals. If you buy into the cluetrain meme, we all want sellers to be straight with us ... "here's what I got, here's...

After quite a few discussions, some with our new "technosocial strategist", Jerry Michalski (of Release 1.0 fame), we've decided to delay the public Tidepool release until we've smoothed over the Storymill side of things. This release was supposed to be about Tidepool alone, with Storymill merely acting as a public place to put your photos. With a bit more work though, we can bring out the niftier "semantic social network" features of Storymill. We're gonna wait until Storymill is solid, then release both. When? When they're ready. Our next release date will be "today" :) Let us know if you'd...

Everything needs to work with everything else. Can we at least agree on this? There's nothing worse than using a piece of software only to regret it later because it won't play nice with others. Even with things as simple as contacts and calendars, it's incredible how little we can interoperate. How many of us keep our old contact manager around because it does certain things better than our new one, like printing labels or envelopes? Why can't we use both programs simultaneously without worrying about file formats or import/export? Just how many people start completely over rather than figure...

Today Immuexa agreed to sponsor the First Workshop on FOAF, Social Networking, and the Semantic Web, being held in Galway, Ireland, in early September. We're making "FOAF Bingo", a website game that hopefully will get people uploading photos and annotating using FOAF, much in the same spirit as w3photo.org, only in a somewhat more arbitrary and ridiculous way. I'll write more about it in the next post. Tonight, my mind's on Ireland, having never been there myself. I'm roughly half-Irish, given that my father's mother (King) and my mother's father (Brady) were Irish. My grandma was born and raised there,...

We've been extra busy here at Immuexa, trying to get PhotoBingo up and running in time for FOAF Galway. I've been neglecting my blog, which is a sure sign that I'm getting real work done :) Last night I finished the jersey we'll be giving away to people who play the first game, which will be named "1st FOAF Bingo". We'll start it before the workshop and let it run a while after that, so people have time to waste time when they get back home. Here's the bingo jersey, front and back: The illustrations were done just for...

Riding now on the train to Dublin, watching the Irish countryside with its very green fields and patchwork stone walls, I�m finally rested enough to properly reflect on my week in Ireland and the crazy month before. For a small Pennsylvania company to fly to Ireland, there best be a good reason for it. Our primary goal was to create PhotoBingo, then play a game at FOAF Galway, giving nifty shirts to all involved. Beyond this, our goal was useful conversation: Q&A on other efforts, breakout session brainstorming, table chat on shared topics, and feedback on our own products. Though...

Spent most of today adding photo functionality to a client's website so we could display some amazing flood photos, such as this one: Historic Bethlehem Partnership maintains all of these buildings, many of which mean a lot to me, as evidenced by my use of the 1762 Waterworks in the design of Lehigh Valley Storymill as well as the basis for the Storymill logo. Please give what you can. These buildings belong to everyone....

Things have been very busy here at Immuexa, as you can likely tell from my recent lack of postings. We're in the eleventh hour, preparing for our impending public release. Personally, life has been full. I could write for hours about everything going on, but with all that's going on, I have no time to write! In fact, I'm so busy that I neglected to announce our third Tidepool preview release, last Saturday. We release a new version (either private, preview, or public) once a month. This month includes a few new features, but mostly addresses snags we found in...

A year ago this morning, I watched my first Florida sunrise as I left behind Florida and (and ISWC) to start a new chapter in my life: This morning, this sunrise, was a beginning not an ending. From here forward, I realize the dream. On the plane home, I worked out the details of my decision. Immuexa, our six year old software & website service business would need to close to new clients to focus on internal product development (which we did). I'd have to learn more about the semantic web, writing down what I found in a blog (which...

A few nights ago, we saw two co-hosts of CNN's Crossfire, Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson, speak at my wife's college, just a few miles from here. They seemed very well-informed, respectful, and geniunely funny. I was surprised by the two men, whom I'd heard of, but never really paid attention to until the recent Jon Stewart flap. Paula and I watched the video before their talk, and were expecting some well-worn partisan bickering. Instead, the two men were truly thoughtful, delivering analysis and insight rich with surrounding context, something all but lacking on American political shows. Watching them on...

I haven't written since the American election. I've talked about it. I've read and watched a great deal of conjecture. As usual, everyone's exaggerating for dramatic effect, saying the Democrats were trounced, when in the end the difference was just 140,000 votes in Ohio, which is pretty small. If the 2000 election hadn't happened, they'd be calling this one the closest ever. What worries me is why the Republicans won. I'm not sure I buy the whole "moral values" hypothesis (ie, gay marriage drove red voters to the polls), but as a student of persuasion, I'm shell-shocked by the methods...

I started this blog a year ago today. My original goal was to write once a day about the Semantic Web and its social implications: ...which is why we need Round Two: the annotated, interconnected, Web. This new organic, evolving, maintainable, improvement will do more than simply increase the accuracy of our Google searches. It'll help real people understand and visualize interconnection, which in my opinion will alter our society profoundly for the better. I kept up with the once-a-day pace for two months, writing mostly about semweb topics, before getting distracted by the demands of our in-house Immuexa project,...

In the early days of this blog, I talked about improving the semweb's "whirlpool rap", stressing that we need a clearer way to talk about it to non-technical types. Since then, I've learned there's an even greater challenge: convincing developers that RDF and the Semantic Web are genuinely worth the training time required before they pigeonhole it and write it off as hype. Choosing tech is critical for software developers and managers. In the last twenty-four years of wading through languages, API's, platforms, and design approaches, I've learned to bet on established winners because there's no more costly mistake than...

Three weeks since my last post, and a month before that one... guess I'm not doing too well on my one-a-day plan :) Here's the thing: wow. In the last two months we've been scrambling here at Immuexa like we've never scrambled before. If anyone remembers me & Jon at www2004, or me & the other Jon at FOAF-Galway ... multiply the intensity and drag it out for weeks. We've been on the edge of our big public release of Tidepool & Storymill since Thanksgiving. "When the apple is ripe, it will fall from the tree." Personally, it's been grueling....

After nine months of talk and fifteen months of solid work, we're done. Tonight we've released the first selling version of Tidepool and Storymill to a select group of friends. Since there's currently no content on Storymill, we're having a "mill-warming" first, wherein we dress up the place with our favorite photos and stories. After a few weeks of rummaging about the place ourselves, we'll throw open our doors to the world. We go public on March 21st. If you'd like to participate in our "mill-warming", send me an email....

Here's what I wrote tonight before I took out the snipping shears: Q) Why should I pay money when other programs and websites are free? A) Our answer is pretty simple: if you like us better, you'll want to pay our modest fees. We feel they're fair and the money lets us keep making our products better and better. We're not some corporate juggernaut, throwing money and bandwidth away just to capture mindshare to inflate our stock value. We don't secretly have an "acquisition strategy", hoping to be bought out by someone. Truth is, we've all worked for companies like...

Tonight we celebrated Immuexa's seventh anniversary by publicly launching Tidepool and Storymill while having dinner at Bubba's Pot Belly Stove in Quakertown PA. To check out our efforts, visit storymill.com. You can also read the announcement that got mailed out from Bubba's. Quite a trip it's been from our first glimpse release a year ago and project start fifteen months ago. Many heartfelt thanks to Team Realize and the hundred helpful folk who made it all happen....

We started integrating FOAF into Storymill and Tidepool more than a year ago. Like the RSS feeds that served up RDF and photos to PhotoBingo, we've hidden the FOAF fruits of our earlier efforts until we update things to be more compatible with our field-level permissions structure. You'd think with FOAF icons and the word "friend" everywhere on the site there'd be a least one FOAF file! Don't worry, they're there. They're just hidden. Every Storymill user will have an automatically generated FOAF file that gets dynamically created for each person that sees it (friends will see more info). The...

A personal request: please take a few minutes to read over Tidepool's features. If you like where we're headed, please help us spread the word by tellings friends or posting mentions of it publicly. We're a small company without much of a marketing budget that has just spent 15 months making two commercial Semantic Web apps. I believe that if we succeed even a little bit, the Semantic Web will be better for it. Thanks, Timothy...

The last eight months have been for me a forced march through some pretty awful terrain ... chloe's death, my sister's cancer, some surreal brother battles, and .. and .. and .. and .. Hard to even write about this last one, this recent, rotted, overwhelming undertow. Some things are just bigger than words allow, and so with pathetic resignation I find myself talking in a trance, watching words babble out my mouth, feeling like I'm playing a harp with oven mitts. A month ago, my wife and I were joyful beyond measure, celebrating the birth of our adopted baby...

There are moments when technology transcends mere niftiness and reaches high enough to satisfy an age-old human longing, as with the moon landings or first flight. Here's a true eagle cam. Unbelievable. We've been near the bird, but never on the bird....

We had two-way cable before most people (back in 95/96). In 2001, we moved a mere two miles and were kicked back to one-way cable, which means uploads at 56k modem speeds. To a software/web developer, particularly one developing photo software, this is something akin to the sixth level of hell. Every CVS commit in the last four years has been a "let's go to lunch" event. Last week, I saw one of the most wonderful sites in recent memory: Such a small thing to most, but what a difference! I'm two-way at last....

I'm reading Fritjof Capra again, returning to my Daoist roots. In college I studied cognitive science in conjunction with mystic philosophy. Our tendency to divide the perceived world into individual and separate things and to experience ourselves as isolated egos in this world is seen as an illusion which comes from our measuring and categorizing mentality. It is called avidya ... and is seen as the state of a disturbed mind which has to be overcome. - Capra Categorizing mentality! And here I just spent two years making a product that explicitly tags everything in life. I can just see...

Today starts the task of revisiting products and websites in the same space as Tidepool and Storymill. We did some extensive competitive analysis a year ago during the initial design phase, but we've taken a blank page approach since then, not wanting to get into a feature war mindset as we finished things up. Now it's time to revisit iPhoto and Picasa and Flickr and Webshots and Photoshop Album and the rest, then boil it all down to a new website that compares everything with a feature grid, some reviews, and lots of discussion forums. The trick is to do...

After long and stressful projects, I usually allow myself a period of "lateral drift" where I spend time learning nifty things I have no time for. After a sustained period of MUST DO, MUST DO, MUST DO ... I relax with the optional, slowly sneaking up on my responsibilities again. It's my way of combatting burnout, and discovering new directions. My last period of lateral drift was the fall of 2003, wherein I found the Semantic Web and started this blog. This current drifting time lasted two months, wherein I revisited at length the state of Web standards, and spent...

*teefal wakes as from a long dream, picks up pen and paper, and begins again* Four months ago, we finished the fruits of our work, Tidepool and Storymill, our self-named "Project Realize." The plan after finishing was to engage the blogerati and publicize ourselves with links across the blogosphere. Instead, as such things in the web world usually do, someone stole our thunder: Flickr got bought by Yahoo a week after our launch. They soon snapped up the mindshare we were after; Flickr's become quite the phenonemena, in an area we were aimed directly at. For a while there, it...

Whenever I write a blog post, there's a small part of me thinking, "Who am I to be writing this? Just who could possibly care what I have to say?" I sit here typing words with the mild expectation that somebody out there will actually read them. I rarely know if people do, though from time to time I hear that someone has. Most times though, it feels like I'm whistling into the wind. And still I do it anyway. The very act of creating a blog carries with it a kind of "home movie" conceit. Each blogger thinks their...

Just now I logged onto the semantic web IRC chat channel after many months away and immediately saw: <libby> teefal! long time no see Having met Libby a few times on various islands in the Atlantic, I know her as very friendly, so it doesn't surprise me that she'd say hi so quickly. What surprised me is how welcomed I felt by it. This got me thinking about the humanness that interconnects our fragile web communities. Scrolling through nicknames on #swig, I was able to quickly recall faces, voices, and conversations. The fact that these people live all over the...

Lehigh Valley Storymill is our "act local" effort to make our backyard better. Tonight, after a town meeting, I wrote this: -- Finding time to make the effort. That's the key. In recent years we've seen our valley invaded by developers intent on carving up and selling our daily views and vistas as half-acre luxury homes for New York and Philly expatriates. I've seen this happen twice in my life: first, in northeast New Jersey, as the woods around my house were razed to make a commuter town instead. Next, in southwest Florida, as developers rushed in like locusts to...

Since my last post, I've opened my editor many times, wanting to write, but words just wouldn't arrive, though not for lack of subject matter. When life gets too real to merely chat about, I find it harder and harder to write. In September, on the Autumnal Equinox, Paula and I got a call about a woman from Florida who was pregnant. Two weeks later, we learned she'd picked us to raise her baby. We also learned of another woman who'd picked us, who was pregnant with twin girls. Our counselor gave us a rare and flabbergasting choice: twins or...

I'm amazed now thinking I've been back from Florida three weeks. Amazed at both how long and how short it seems, which usually means some life's been lived, which couldn't be truer for me these last weeks. Someday I'll write about our trials down in Florida with adoption and bureaucrats. I'll write when I've had more reflection and walkaway time. It's an amazing story. I'll also write about little Isabel and I finally driving into Bethlehem during Moravian Vespers, which my wife conducts, and Isabel spending her first hour in town listening to Paula's choir and watching handmade Christmas candles...

Reading "Ambient Findability", I came across Peter Morville's discussion of the Semantic Web, which references Shirky's lame criticism of it ("The Semantic Web is a machine for creating syllogisms"). He also quotes David Weinberger: I fear that the Semantic Web will go the way of SGML and for basically the same reason: normalization of metadata works real well in confined applications where the payoff is high, control is centralized and discipline can be enforced. In other words: not the Web. Reading such comments confounds me, since they've got it *exactly* wrong. The Semantic Web approach is LOOSE, not normalized. The...

Today Immuexa turns eight, and as before, Jon and I lunched at Bubba's to celebrate. Last year, we officially launched Tidepool and Storymill, which after fifteen hard months of work, was a big deal to us at the time. Now a year later, I should probably mark the occasion by writing of the year's lessons and course corrections, or wax philosophical about persistence and the future of things, but tonight I'm not in the mood. Suffice it to say that Jon and I had a great talk. We're both still psyched about the semantic web, particularly the upcoming roles of...

Now starts a new week, a new month, a new season. Behind me the falling forward feeling of the Saint John pilot proposal. Behind me the ingratitude over my UFS and histbeth efforts. The "why of waveplace" still holds, though it may not take form in the way we had planned. There's still the spirit of Papert, which is worthy of our passion. There's the rightness of OLPC, which sorely needs our support....

So here I am, with three months of research, and nowhere to use it. Over the summer, I immersed myself in the writings of Seymour Papert and the works of Alan Kay and Mitch Resnick, both of whom drew inspiration from Papert. I've been walking around with a running dialogue in my head, inspired by the same ideas that launched OLPC and countless other efforts. So what's Papert's point? What's the common gist of the half-dozen books he's written, starting with "Mindstorms" in 1980? Okay, I'll give it a shot. Seymour Papert thinks that we're programming our kids in school...

Yesterday we received our very own XO laptop from OLPC to play with. We'd seen one up close at Squeakfest last August, but now we've got time to get to know it and show it off to others. Here Paula's trying Squeak Etoys on it: As you can see next to her 15" MacBook, the XO is made for little hands. I was very pleased with its performance. Fedora & Sugar booted in a minute and Etoys loaded in about ten seconds which is plenty fast enough. Also very impressive was the reflective display. You really can read things in...

In the last two days, I've been teaching twenty-year-old Nicole to use Squeak Etoys. She's never done any programming before, nor does she really know why she'd want to be a programmer, which puts her in the majority. I'm teaching her as warm-up for some video tutorials I'm making for the general public, the first of which is rendering right now. Teaching a novice to program is a humbling task, particularly for an expert. I'm mindful of the pacing of my presentation. Too much and eyes glaze over, too little and boredom sets in. Constructionism is a great fit to...

I've just posted the first two screencast tutorials on Squeak Etoys. Originally, the plan was for us to be in St John right now, prepping for our three-day Etoys workshop at Caneel Bay. Since the funding didn't materialize, I'm making these short movies instead, hoping they're enough for Bill & Mary to struggle through on their own. The first movie discusses how to install Squeak Etoys and the latest OLPC Etoys image on your computer (particularly if you own a Mac). The next shows Etoys in action for about fifteen minutes. My next screencast will be on Tuesday. Let me...

Over the long weekend, I got some very positive feedback regarding my Squeaky Tales series. People seemed to like my movies, though my first attempts had some video compression snags which forced me to temporarily abandon Flash video in favor of Quicktime. The downside was that the movies took a long time to start, since they were essentially fully downloading before beginning. Today I worked out the kinks and encoded them back as Flash FLV movies. They should start up more quickly and should also be more compatible with different systems. FLV is the video format used on YouTube. I...

Towards the end of yesterday's Squeaky Tale, I tried changing the color of something and found (while recording) that I didn't know what I was doing. My first reaction was "Oh geez, I should reshoot that" lest I lose face to the viewing public. Instead, I left my mistake in the video, since it helps demonstrate an important point. Programming is about making mistakes. You try something, see how it goes, try something else, and grin at your flaws. A programmer that thinks he knows everything in advance is a bad programmer. Such an approach might seem alien, since our...

Just had the Shift Happens video link sent to me. Quite an eye opener, as is the terrific Pay Attention video, which focuses more on teaching. Put simply: within our lifetime, the "rote jobs" will ship overseas. It's clear from the numbers. What's left are "spark jobs" ... high creativity jobs. Our schools aren't teaching spark. They're teaching rote....

I've just posted my eighth 15-minute Squeaky Tales tutorial, bringing the collective time to two hours of Etoys fun. My plan is to create four 15-minute movies each week for the next eight weeks for a total of ten hours of video tutorial. What topics will I cover? Well, I'm trying to make the Squeaky Tales series as subject-neutral as possible. My hope is that this approach will allow mentors to adapt the concepts to different ages and subjects more easily. By necessity, there will be rudimentary math concepts like addition and multiplication, but these will be presented as a...

In the year 2000, world leaders made eight pretty incredible promises, which are known as the Millennium Development Goals. The first of these goals is to reduce by half the number of people living in extreme poverty by the year 2015. Extreme poverty is defined as living on less than $1 USD per day. More than 1.5 billion people qualify, which is roughly 1 out of every 4 people alive. Two-thirds of these people don't have access to clean water, and malnutrition is so bad that six million children die EVERY YEAR before their fifth birthday. That's a holocaust-sized catastrophe...

Been a pretty cool week so far. On Monday, Viewpoints Research contracted Immuexa to redesign their Squeakland website. Given that Etoys is the crown jewel in the OLPC lineup, we're pretty excited. We're hoping to launch this winter. On Tuesday, OLPC started mass production of the XO laptops. I've been a fly on the wall listening to their team talk for months. Having been entrenched in development mayhem much of my life, let me simply say it's a big accomplishment. Congrats to all. On Wednesday, we launched the beta of Blazemark 2.0, which is being shown at a fire-fighting convention...

Today I posted my twentieth Etoys tutorial in the Squeaky Tales series, bringing the total to five hours of ten planned. Each fifteen-minute screencast forms the basis for an hour of hands-on instruction with a child, with the mentor first presenting the concepts in their own fashion, then leading the class for the remainder of the time. The videos themselves are aimed at the mentor, not the students, though I suspect older students could watch the videos on their own. Now half done, I've been spending time on techniques to manage complexity. Just like a real software project, the beginning...

Yesterday in a talk with OLPC, we were again confronted with their "airdrop model" of laptop distribution (the term is mine). OLPC advocates a "full saturation" approach to giving laptops to schools and countries. When Waveplace then says, "Our plan is to start with a smaller pilot and scale teacher training to assure effectiveness", they counter with their belief that larger numbers have a magic all their own. Their experience is that full saturation is more important than scaled training. Now these are smart guys with a lot of experience at this, so I'm tempted to believe them. I'm also...

Great article about Waveplace in the St John Tradewinds. Talks about our Virgin Islands pilot, which is into its second week. We also launched our new website, which has a terrific new video from our trip to Haiti earlier this month....

Just sent out a plea to forums and bloggers I know. David Weinberger not only posted it, but he's sending us his XO! Here's the plea: Waveplace is a non-profit starting an XO pilot in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, in ten days. OLPC was going to be giving us laptops, but it fell through, which is why I'm trying to get twenty XOs from elsewhere. Your laptop may end up in the hands of one of the most needy children in the Western Hemisphere. The school where the laptop will be sent is run by Susie Scott Krabacher, who has been the...

Today we're starting our pilot in Haiti, at one of the Mercy & Sharing schools in Port-Au-Prince. Our very own Bill Stelzer, leader of our St John pilot, will be teaching Emile Roulsa Jean and two others to become Haiti's first Waveplace mentors. They'll then start a ten-week pilot using the nineteen laptops we were able to receive in time. Our greatest thanks go to the ten kind souls who donated their XOs last weekend, along with David Weinberger, Jerry Michalski, and Wayan Vota for helping spread the word. David & Jerry are A-List blogerati and Wayan runs OLPC News,...

Just received some photos from the start of our Haitian pilot, along with some new photos from our St John pilot, which is in its sixth week. * Haiti photos * St John photos...

Today I read some very nice comments from a few of the people who donated their XO laptops to children in our Haiti pilot. Last week I posted photos of the children that got their laptops as well as a new video. The first donor comment was from Emily Davidow, who also blogged: Thank you so much for the opportunity to participate in this wonderful program! Seeing the pictures and movie made me so happy. Looking forward to following the progress in Haiti and all your programs through the newsletter. The next was from author David Weinberger, who blogged as...

Today's the tenth anniversary of our business, Immuexa Corporation, which makes custom-built software and websites. Ten years ago yesterday, I drove away from my job at Lotus Development Corp. Ten years ago this morning, we started Immuexa. Here's a photo from the tenth anniversary of my father's business, Arthur Falconer Associates, an advertising agency in Englewood Cliffs NJ. My father and mother are in the photo, which was taken a few months before the first moon landing. AFA went on for another twenty-five years before it folded up shop, though its spirit lives on within my two brothers and me,...

Had a great trip to Saint John last week, finishing up our ten week Waveplace pilot with the fourth grade class at Guy Benjamin School. I got to teach the class one day, which was great fun, and for our last class, we had each student present their storybooks, then gave out four iPods as prizes. The judges were me, Dionne Wells (their principal), and Jamie Elliot (a local reporter). Mid-trip we presented the results of the pilot to the new USVI Education Commissioner by having A'Feyah, one of the students, sit with the Commissioner and show her what she...

We've just posted two new videos from the St John Waveplace pilot, which concluded three weeks ago. The first shows mentoring during the pilot. The second shows students presenting their Etoys storybooks. 1) Scenes from the St John pilot (4 minutes) 2) The St John Storybook Awards (8 minutes) We will be posting the actual storybooks to our website soon. In other news, the Haiti pilot will resume next week, since things have calmed down in Port-Au-Prince. The kids and teachers are well....

Our overall goal with Waveplace is to teach children to become digital storytellers. Just what that means, and can mean, is really the crux of where we're headed. I've been thinking a great deal about this. Most schools define computer literacy as being able to operate Microsoft Office and maybe do a little web design. They're missing the point. That's like saying, 'If you know which end of a book to hold up, and you know how to turn to Chapter Three, then you're literate.' Literature is first and foremost about having ideas important enough to discuss and write down...

Today in Immokalee Florida, Waveplace started its third XO and Etoys pilot. We gave laptops to 43 children, and I taught them for two hours. We also started our first intensive teacher training workshop with our new beta courseware. This week, I'm teaching adults five days, six hours a day, in addition to three student classes. The teachers will then spend the remaining nine weeks teaching the students themselves after I leave. Let's just say that between the teacher training and the children training, and the endless logistics (setting up the projector, arranging the chairs, unpacking the XOs, recording the...

Waveplace has finished its beta "Squeaky Tales" courseware ... 30 lessons (with videos) that teach how to teach Etoys on the XO. To see examples, or to become a beta tester, visit here We took everything we learned in our first pilot (in the Virgin Islands) and started completely over. The pacing is much better, as is the storytelling component, which was crucial in St John. We're using the beta courseware in our three pilots this summer, and will then start completely over and make a physical textbook and DVD series (in English, Spanish, and French). All will be sold...

Just heard the two-part NPR story on Waveplace's XO and Etoys pilot in Immokalee, Florida. Have a listen here. Pretty surreal hearing myself on national radio. I'm a bit disappointed that Etoys got characterized as clumsy ... the alligator thing was from one of our advanced lessons for the adults. I imagine someone watching a person learn guitar for the first time would also think it clumsy. Great quotes from Christa and Susan. Photos from the pilot are here. Video is here....

Last week, Waveplace finished our pilot in Immokalee, Florida. We'll be posting student storybooks soon, but for now you can watch our first Florida video, which gives a taste of our "improv theater" teaching style. There are also several newspaper and radio reports on our press page and a few articles in our latest newsletter. Today we start our pilot near Rivas, Nicaragua. We're using Spanish-keyboard XOs and solar panels this time, since the school has no electricity. Our three Waveplace mentors flew in last night and will begin teaching the teachers today. The kids get their laptops tomorrow. We've...

Just posted the one-hour Waveplace Awards video, which includes the winners and all twelve children reading their storybooks. http://waveplace.com/awards/ You can either watch the full hour from that page, or choose chapter-by-chapter from the list below the video box. Once watching a chapter, click "next" to view the next chapter. If you just want to know the winners, click the "Award Presentations" chapter. Thanks once again to the many who participated....

The president-elect's new website asks everyone to "tell us your vision for the country." Here's what I submitted: Transform everything by teaching our children to be creative problem solvers, not through a broken education system that teaches compliance and deficiency, but through a new spirit of guided discovery with mentors devoted to kindling the spark within each child, so they may feel their own promise. This is truly the lever that will change everything, given a chance. When children learn to question, when they're taught confidence to solve problems with creativity, their lives become stories of opportunity and discovery....

"In a capitalist society, there is always an opening for someone who will do the work of three employees for half the pay."...

I haven't blogged in too long a time, which usually means I've got too much to say and too little time. This birthday morning I woke and felt the need to go on record again, so starting today I'll try to blog a little each day, if only with journal posts like this. Yesterday was a big day for everyone looking to Washington DC, but also big for a small group of dedicated Squeak Etoys fans. We officially announced Squeakland Foundation, a non-profit organization that will take over from Viewpoints Research as the guardians of Etoys. I'm the new executive...

What a lawyer would say: "is conclusively met where the reverse is considered true for all cases known to us at this time" What a programmer would say: ! (that's an exclamation point)...

Lying on the couch in my cabin, listening to the snow fall outside our new Arlington house, on this new Massachusetts Monday, I'm confronted with the best of all possible questions: what would I like to do first? While the coffee brewed, while sitting on the tall chairs, I considered: * learning Squeak * installing Subversion These would be practical and fun, always a good beginning. Since my mind never feels finished until I've reached three, I debated the other task I might like. My laptop battery went dead, so I moved into the tiny afterthought of a room off...

So how does one create a bot? Well, she needs a way to talk with people, which means some kind of command-line interace with a scrolling text pane. I could use a terminal window, an IM chat window, or an IRC client. The latter seems best, as it allows others to easily chat with her as well. Smilla will have many teachers. So what channel will she frequent? I currently run two channels on freenode: #immuexa (my company channel) and #etoys (for Squeak Etoys). Waverly lives on both, logging all talk and injecting optional simplistic call/response chatter. Smilla will need...

Since my Smilla start yesterday, I've come across a few serendipitous signs. First an architecture talk with Jon about a new project for the medical field, where I essentially drew up the Gravity architecture from decades past, complete with channels, prisms, stores, etc. Later I went to the Museum of Science with Isabel and Paula and in the computer room came across two NLP exhibits, one a six foot video image of a robot that forces you to choose answers and questions, another of twins that have decent speech recognition, but only for the presenter. My strong reaction was: I...

And then came Haiti. The very day after my last blog post, I was invited to a think tank at the MIT Media Lab to discuss my experiences with Haiti and the OLPC laptops. Since then, nearly all of my time has been spent organizing and supporting our current seven Waveplace pilots in four locations with 200 XOs. This of course meant three more months of delay for everyone that's waiting for me. "Everything I do is instead of something else I should be doing." After some soul searching since returning from Haiti, I decided to bring on Beth Santos...

Three years of too much to do and today it changes. As Waveplace gathered steam three summers ago, my long-time timeboxing regime went out the window, replaced with an event-driven meandering mess, wherein each day I reached quitting time wondering, "Where did the day go?" Much was accomplished, but much was ignored. If only for my own peace of mind, I require a return to a simpler process . . . Timebox Your Day. Too often some minor crisis intrudes upon a scheduled coding session and before I know it, I'm staring at a timer that reads 15 minutes when...

Yesterday went half-well. I spent half the time scheduled for development and half the time scheduled for sales. The lost sales time went to a late start and a long lunch with Paula, walking around the new buildings on the south side. The lost development time went to unplanned useful tasks. There's the trap . . . "While I'm here, I should do this." The day started with me saying, "I need to check the archived hawkmo media files on my firewire drives." Since I hadn't yet put them in their new spot behind my work chair, I decided to...

Yesterday I started with four hours of one project then ended with four hours of another project. The first was slow going. Trying to get back into the swing of a long delayed project can be very tough, particularly if there's a critical mass of detail you've forgotten, making every step harder. The second project was much easier, even though the amount of forgotten detail was even greater than the first project. So what made the difference? Well, in the second I was using a debugger, stepping through code, trying to find some well defined bugs. In the first, I...

Friday was the problem: intending to do one project, but another project steals the show. This is essentially what the last three years was like. As soon as I do "just one thing" on a project with momentum, it pulls me along for the rest of my time, leaving first tasks with little or no attention. It's a tale of two inertias, with the project you should be doing having stalled inertia and the project you should ignore having moving inertia. Momentum is a good thing, regardless of where you point it, so the "just say no" approach isn't optimal....

Yesterday started well. I did the bait-and-switch described in yesterday's post and it worked wonderfully well. My flow didn't even notice the difference and I started jamming on the new project after just 15 minutes of the other. I read somewhere that it takes 15 minutes to get into a state of flow, which is roughly my experience as well. If you're interested in flow, there's a great book: Getting your flow going, and keeping it going, is probably the single most important productivity boost for any creative professional. When you're grooving on a project, your work is more creative,...

Once upon a time I had a ritual called the "friday afternoon walk of shame". As I finished work for the week, I called each project's stakeholder to tell them where things were, which was usually late, hence the name. In bigger projects, we'd have daily scrums where the status was discussed in detail. Everyone had access to our issue tracking system, so all stakeholders could delve into the immediate details. Full visibility. In the last three years, my visibility on some projects has gone from daily to weekly to monthly to sometimes quarterly. My three current projects have been...