Andrew Zolli argues in Newsweek that online content should never have been free. I’m probably not the first one to make this profound observation–but if it were not for the free online edition of Newsweek (and link aggregator sites like Digg) I wouldn’t have read a single word of Newsweek in years, nor would I be linking to it as my previous sentence does… Maybe Newsweek is OK with that. -m

This sentence describes a unique story by David Moser. This sentence reinforces the notion that the story previously alluded to is not only entertaining but also thought-provoking. This sentence is false. Some sentences can even refer to themselves without using the word “this”. This sentence concludes the post with a pithy and memorable flourish.

This line contains a link to more collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.

I spent 2 days at the Yahoo! campus at a VoCamp event, my first. Initially, I was dismayed at the schedule. Spend all the time the first day figuring out why everybody came? It seemed inefficient. But having gone through it, the process seems productive, exactly the way that completely decentralized groups need to get things done. Peter Mika did a great job moderating.

Attendees numbered about 35, and came from widely varying backgrounds from librarian to linguist to professor to student to CTO, though uniformly geeky. With SemTech this week, the timing was right, and the number of international attendees was impressive.

In community development, nothing gets completely decided just because a few people met. But progress happens. The first day was largely exploratory, but also covered plenary topics that nearly everyone was interested in. Namely:

• Finding, choosing, and knowing when to create vocabularies
• Mapping from one vocabulary to another
• RDBMS to RDF mapping

Much of the shared understanding of these discussions is captured on various wiki pages connected to the one at the top of this article.

For day 2, we split into smaller working groups with more focused topics. I sat in on a discussion of Common Tag (which still feels too complex to me, but does fulfill a richer use case than rel-tag). Next, some vocabulary design, planning a microformat (and eventual RDF vocab) to represent code documentation: classes, functions, parameters, and the like. Tantek Çelik espoused the “scientific method” of vocab design: would a separate group, in similar circumstances, come up with the same design? If the answer is ‘yes’, then you probably designed it right. The way to make that happen is to focus on the basics, keeping everything as simple as possible. If any important features are missed, you will find out quickly. The experience of getting the simple thing out the door will provide the education needed to make the more complicated follow-on version a success.

From the wrap-up: if you are designing a vocabulary, the most useful thing you can do is NOT to unleash a fully-formed proposal on the world, but rather to capture the discussion around it. What were the initial use cases? What are people currently doing? What design goals were explicitly left off the table, or deferred to a future verson, or immediately shot down? It’s better to capture multiple proposals, even if fragmentary, and let lots of people look them over and gravitate toward the best design.

Lastly, some cool things overheard:

“Relational databases? We call those ‘legacy’.”

“The socially-accepted schema is fairly consistent.”

“It’s just a map, it’s not the territory.”

-m

The remarkable (and prolific) Stephen Wolfram has an idea called Wolfram Alpha. People used to assume the “Star Trek” model of computers:

that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer.

Which has proved to be quite distant from reality. Instead

But armed with Mathematica and NKS [A New Kind of Science] I realized there’s another way: explicitly implement methods and models, as algorithms, and explicitly curate all data so that it is immediately computable.

It’s not easy to do this. Every different kind of method and model—and data—has its own special features and character. But with a mixture of Mathematica and NKS automation, and a lot of human experts, I’m happy to say that we’ve gotten a very long way.

I’m still a SearchMonkey guy at heart, so I wonder how much Wofram’s team is familiar with existing Semantic Web research and practice–because at a high level this seems very much like RDF with suitable queries thereupon. If that’s a good characterization, that’s A Good Thing, since practical application has been one of SemWeb’s weak spots.

-m

Evernote now has import/export (in an XML format), meaning it now passes the generation test for data availability and lock-in-avoidance, as I wrote about some years ago. There’s a server API, as well as client-side scripting. I need to look into the details more, but as a start it looks like a home run. -m

Update: looking at the actual export XML, I’m disappointed. Each note is CDATA-escaped XML? Why???

My quest for a backup brain is (almost) at an end. Evernote flat out rocks. It runs as a great Mac app (on that other OS too, in case through some disaster I ever need it). It has a nice web interface, including a web clipper. It’s on the iPhone. Anything I put in there is immediately at my fingertips.

It only needs one more thing, one of several actually: ability to sync notes to the filesystem OR an API (which is reportedly on the way). Even a way to backup all notes would be a good start.

Check it out. -m

Mur Lafferty’s new superhero novel is making the rounds. She’s encouraging everyone to buy a printed copy on August 25 (buy it here) to make a nice impression in the bestseller lists. I’m a sucker for these kinds of promotions. The full text also recently appeared on the Escape Pod feed, under a Creative Commons license. It’s a whopping 35 megabytes, including illustrated comic book covers…a nice touch.

It would be really nice to have this with me to read during spare moments without the bulk of the printed book. Hmm.

My question is: how I can read it on an iPhone? Ebook support isn’t that great so far, especially for the PDF format. I know about the data:url trick, but it doesn’t work with 35 megs. Has anyone successfully set up an iPhone to read this book? What software and/or conversions did you use? Comment below. -m

It’s been 0×40 years since the dedication of the Mark I. Wired has some great photos and background information. Less than a year later, Vannevar Bush would advance the state of the art with his article As We May Think. A year-and-a-half later, ENIAC unveiled, and with it Turing-completeness. And things have been speeding up ever since. -m

Reminder: Thursday evening at Yahoo! Sunnyvale headquarters is the launch party for the developer-facing side of SearchMonkey. In case you haven’t been paying attention, SearchMonkey is a new platform that lets developers craft their own awesomized search results. If you’re interested in SEO or general lowercase semantic web tools, you’ll love it. Meet me there. Upcoming link. Party starts at 5:30. -m

Update: The developer tool is live. Rasmus has a nice walkthrough.

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them…

The prescient Vannevar Bush, who foresaw (among other things) the importance of hyperlinks. -m

Thanks to chromatic for the link. Largely hidden,  largest app clusters of this particular platform can:

Control over a million computers and can deliver over a hundred billion advertisements per day.

However, “don’t be evil” is not a part of this particular platform’s strategy… -m

Evernote looks like a cool application, and for at least a few more hours, you can get it for free via the Giveaway of the Day site. At first glance, this seems like the closest software I’ve seen to the original “Brain Attic” concept I’ve held for years.

My most pressing questions are (big surprise) around data storage. It seems that in the version 3 beta all the data is kept on a remote server, which makes me a little uneasy. In what format is the data kept? Is it some format that will be readable in 50 years? If the Evernote corporation goes offline or out of business, do I lose everything?

I’ll keep reporting back here with my discoveries and experiences. -m