This is the year in which hAudio ushers in the era of distributed music publishing and playback on the web. As enthusiastic as I am about OpenId, oAuth and DataPortability (the emerging protocols of the distributed social web), it's microformats that are going to be the building blocks of this shift in the short term. Microformats can be seen as "the nanotech of the semantic web" (Jeremy Keith) and the metaphor for usage is one of proteins and surface-binding. My hope is that this year microformats will have a big impact on media publishing. It's more than a hope because I will be dedicating some of my time to help make it happen.
Spimes are manufactured objects whose informational support is so extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system.
- Bruce Sterling's southern drawl re-enforces the notion of a spime in his Internet of Things eTech keynote. It's an insightful, articulate rant on the language of emerging technology, how RFID will replace barcoding and the state of physical objects in the near future. If you didn't catch this talk a while back it's well worth the podcast.
Getting your head around all the WS-* stuff is like trying to eat an elephant.
- Joe, commenting on Loud Thinking.
So David has pointed out the reality split between the industry led WS-* 'standards' pap and Restian principles. I deal with XML-RPC & Soap API's on a daily basis, and i find our Soap calls in particular over complex. The move from procedure call to state transfer is in sync with the natural architecture of the web. It forces you to think about your web application as an open data architecture from the offset (e.g. Delicious) and that can only be a good thing.
Did i say simple & open?
Four conditions to be met for collective intelligence to flourish:
- Diversity of opinion: Each person should have private information even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.
- Independence: People's opinions aren't determined by the opinions of those around them.
- Decentralization: People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.
- Aggregation: Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.
See the wikipedia page for more.
