Category: data-and-semantic-web

I have been meaning to blog about the structured blogging idea for quite some time now. The idea is this…

Structured blogging is about making a movie review look different from a calendar entry. On the surface, it’s as simple as that – formatting blog entries around their content.

On another level, it’s a bit more complicated – what we want to do is create structure (in the form of XML) around each of these types of entries, to organize the data inside and to let machine readers – other programs, sites, and aggregators – better understand the content.

Yep great can not disagree with that. Greg from Blogdigger has been thinking about this too. The overall concept is a interesting one for myself, but I see lots of connections with the semantic blogging idea which has been pioneered by the great guys at HP Research Labs, for quite some time now. Generally Semantic blogging for me seems to be adding machine readable meta-data to the content of the blog entry. Blojsom for ages has had meta ability for years now, which I have not really made full use of yet. But theres lots of work already moving ahead in this area around FOAF, XFN and Tagging or Folksonomy.

With Friend of a Friend (FOAF) its easy to put a link to a persons name and there FOAF profile. I'm sure it would be trivial to add a rel attribute to the link for more context. Which leads nicely on the XFN idea which is exactly that. Using rel attributes and a classification of types to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. Works well but I would like to get rid of the classification and go more fuzzy like tagging. The best examples of tagging full stop has to be Del.icio.us, Flickr and others but tagging on personal blogs is still quite new. Oreilly's radar points to whats possible with a little time and lots of meta-data in entries. Technorati makes this possible via there site. For example I have tagged semantic blogging and structured blogging in this entry and sent them a ping to make sure they pick it up. Theres nothing special in the links besides the rel attribute which is set to tag.

I also have to agree with Greg about what happens to the meta-data beyond the blog. I really want to see RSS feeds with the same meta-data making its way towards aggregator via namespaces and rdf. GRDDL is good and well worth looking into for the future. But once again this is all covered in the semantic blogging ideas. It has been a long time in coming but I disagree that the time is right. Blogging Clients need to change to reflect these changes otherwise no one except a handfull of people are going to manually put in meta-data into there posts. I will because i'm jazzed about meta-data and semantic blogging, others will not. Even if the benefits are different looking entries on there own blogs.

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For quite sometime I've been talking and pushing the use of Open RESTful API's. Its so easy now, sign up get a API, Development, Session, etc key and your pretty much away. The only question then is what framework you choose to develop in?
I personally use Apache Cocoon because it allows me to do almost anything I like and its completely dependant on XML technologies like XSL. One of my aims back in 2002 was to use XSL as a tool for almost anything I needed to do again and again. Well it that aim is very real now. For example I was creating quite a few emails with slighly different information in each one. Well I thought about using copy, paste, find and replace. But no need I just wrote up some really simple xml files which contains parts of the infomation then a sitemap in cocoon using a little bit of simple logic to read the URL string and certain parts as a variable for the XSL. Before you know it (timed myself, it took only 45mins with instant message interuptions) I had what I wanted. The only thing which was missing was for the pipeline to send a email at the end. I still had to copy and paste the result into a email. So how would I solve such a problem?

Well from my understanding of Servlets, it shouldnt be too difficult to send messages/streams from Cocoon to a SMTP JAR which sits in the same servlet container? But I'm still a little unsure of how this is exactly done. The other thing I could do is to create a email file which Thunderbird would pick up and send or at least put in the outbox with little user interaction on my part.

Anyhow, one of the issues with cocoon for the longest time was getting content in to it. Yes you have many different neat ways like the Directory reader, Zip reader, standard xml reader, image reader, JSP reader, hey there was even a Database reader which would create a connect to any SQL database. But theres so much more needed in this area, for example a while ago I was looking for a way to analyse lots of CSS and in the end we had depend on a Perl lib which understands CSS and then had to be written to XML before it could be pulled into cocoon. Now theres nothing wrong with this method but you would think a CSS reader would be useful. Along with a EXIF reader which I swear would be so great. All the metadata is sooo useful!! However its all changed now thanks to webservices. I could upload all my pictures to Flickr and use there REST API to pull the metadata out and into Cocoon. And this is the thing, its pretty true of a lot of things now. Want to get the weather in Tokyo? Just grab it from somewhere else, I bet its also more effective than doing it yourself too. And I wonder where things are going with this? Will we get to a point where it will be more effective to get the date or even the time from a webservice?

So the input side is covered, the internal transformation is pretty much there now with XSL 2.0 and Cocoon. But what about the output? Cocoon can output or serialise to almost anything you can think about including SVG, PDF, OpenOffice, Zip, Text, XML, HTML, XLS, etc. But this is the thing which needs the most development at the moment. The user interface for services are still pretty poor. So what options do you have? Well my fav is still SVG but still there very few browsers which support this natively. Which will always be a problem. Then theres the whole Flash thing, which I still really really hate but have accepted a tiny bit in the absence of SVG for some things. There's also tons of Javascript + XHTML solutions being used now, which I'm actually thinking is not so bad now (A lot of these solutions are using standard DOM's which makes them work across all new and coming browsers). XML.com has a really good piece about client side processing using Sarissa which I have been messing with recently. XMLHttpRequest has made a huge difference to what can be done on the client side and has issued in things like google maps and google suggest.
Then of course if you want to get really rich theres a whole host of technologies just on the horizon including XUL, XAML, XForms, WebForms2, sXBL, etc. Being a opensource kinda of guy, i'm gunning for XUL with Xforms and sXBL with SVG for my own applications. Can't help be interested in XAML though…

Following on, I've been reading a couple of thoughts from others out there. http://www.Peej.co.uk dispells the meme that REST is not ready? Theres a great little quote from Mark Baker in the same entry.
The same tools that create Java servlets could be used to build REST-based Web services, Baker says. “They follow the HTTP specification, and by following it, they implicitly are following the constraints of the REST style,”
Bang on the money! I was explaining to David the other day over a drink why PHP is great but Servlets are just well different. You cant really compare them, it would be better to compare JSP with PHP but servelts are logically different and simple just like RESTful services. It fits perfectly with the next generation of web 2.0.

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I have been meaning to blog about Stephen Downes' community blogging presentation for quite some time now. I've already touched on the Long tail stuf through the blog and recently in the Why I still listen to Dave Slusher's podcast entry. And Stephen's presentation was the spark for me adding more metadata to my RDF RSS feed. Anyhow here's some great quotes which should spur you to listen or read the presentation.

in Canada we have socialists and socialists always say, “We represent the working class” and that's kind of like the socio-economic way of saying “We represent the long tail.” And they come out with these platforms and these policies that identify with the working people. Ask any of the working people, they don't want to be working people. And so, they're more likely to choose policies that support the rich people, because they all want to be rich, and when they're rich, they don't want to be pushed back into that long tail again. So I don't see a virtue in the long tail.

Because the meaning of a post is not simply contained in the post. And this is where we have lots of trouble with meaning, because we all speak a language and we all understand words and sentences and paragraphs, and we think we've got a pretty good handle on how to say something about something else, and we have a pretty good handle on how to determine the meaning of a word. What does the word 'Paris' mean? Oh, no problem, right? 'Capital of France.' Right? But, you know, it might also be, 'Where I went last summer.' Or it might also be, 'Where they speak French.'

When we push what we think of as the meaning of a word, the concepts, the understanding that we have, falls apart pretty quickly. And the meaning of the word, or the meaning of a post, is not inherent in the word, or in the post, but is distributed.

We can't just blast four million blogs, eight quadrillion blog posts, out there, and hope Technorati will do the job, because Technorati won't do the job, because Technorati represents the whole four million things and I'm not interested in three million nine hundred and ninety-nine of those. What has to happen is this mass of posts has to self-organize in some way. Which means there has to be a process of filtering. But filtering that is not just random. And filtering that isn't like spam blocking. Filtering has to be a mechanism of determining what it is we want, because it's a lot easier to determine what we want than what we don't want.

So how do we do this? We create a representation of the connections between people and the connections between resources. The first pass at this I described in a paper a couple of years ago called “The Semantic Social Network” and the idea, very simply, is we actually attach author information to RSS about blog posts. It kills me that this hasn't happened. Because this is a huge source of information. And all you need to do is, in the 'item', in, say, the 'dc:creator' tag, put a link to a FOAF file. And all of a sudden we've connected people with resources, people with each other and therefore, resources with each other. And that gives me a mechanism for finding resources that is not based on taxonomies, is not based on existing knowledge and existing patterns, but is based on my placement within a community of like-minded individuals.

Great stuff, well worth reading and theres tons of links to learn more from in the page. Very cool presentation, even though I dont totally agree with everything said. The emergence of tagging is something well worth considering into the future. Even Miles has talked at great length about community driven tagging with aggregation playing a role in bring sense or even meaning to resources. Honestly we're not that far off the semantic web in my eyes.

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I just added a whole load of extra metadata and content to my RSS 1.0 feed (RDF). So first thing which you will notice is comments and trackbacks are added so there is no need to visit the XHTML site unless you actually want to comment back and even then you could use the WFW:comment system, which I honestly have never really looked into. I also added a comment count before the actual comments, so you can skip around the RSS easily. This will also mean I need to get harsh with spam as I dont want spam in my RSS too. So I'm turning off trackback autodiscovery if I get any more spam.

Then I added the Creative commons licence to my RSS feed, which was easy enough. Ben Hammersley has a complete guide on how to do this with RSS 1.0. But this is where I got stuck, I was listening to some podcasts from Northern voice and heard Stephen Downes' Community Blogging session which talked about alot of things to do with the longtail, tags, metadata and emergence. But he also suggested people should link or put FOAF content into there RSS feeds. And I just thought this was fantastic! It makes so much sense, so I went about trying to link my FOAF profile into my RSS 1.0 feed. Well its not as easy it would first seem. I tried to work out how to link rather than just add FOAF to directly into the RSS. And in the end came up with this.

< foaferson rdf:ID=”Ian Forrester” >
< rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="http://adrenalin-online.demon.co.uk/profile/foaf.rdf"/ >
< /foaferson >

Which sits in the channel block. While this may not be ideal, its seems better than anything else i've seen. Now if I can only get feedburner to pass on the feed without interfering with the metadata.

Update – My friend David showed me evidance that my new changes to the RSS feeds are causing problems. So I've decided i'm going to remove the extra comment and trackback fuctionality from the RSS 2.0 and ATOM versions. Which means if you subscribe to the RSS 1.0 version, you will get trackbacks, comments and lots of other juicy bits and bobs. The change back should happen tonight which will be the morning of the 2nd March for most of you. Till then, my feedburner one is still turning out standard RSS combined with my bookmarks. Thanks David, if anyone else is having problems please leave a comment…

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Oh I'm in such a funny mood after listening to Harry talk about the joys of Mac for 30mins earlier last night. And its getting very late now, but I had to write something about these contact sharing services which are bouncing up everywhere.
Bebo, Plaxo and Ringo is one of the three on the tip of my toungue which I remember. How much of a pain is it to use these services when they do not interoperate at all. Hello Gap in the market. Wouldnt it be great if there was a service which interoperated with not only your outlook contacts but your mozilla, ical, etc contacts and stored them in an interopable format like RDF (yes you can see where I'm going with this) Friend Of A Friend has been used in social networks for quite some time now, why dont these contact services use FOAF profiles which people put on there blogs? Why should I need to enter in the same contact information into different services? Hell why do I need these services when I have a FOAF profile? As someone once commented Here's to owning your own data

Update, I just finished listening to a IT Conversation podcast titled Lessons Learned, Future Predicted by Marc Andressen and Dan Rosensweig. One of them (i think it was Marc) talks about how the client walled garden is a mistake and the real walled garden is now the data.
Roughly this is the key point, Not a blockquote sorry…

Its striking if you list the amount of things you can't do. There's no personal service on the internet, yahoo or anyone which allows you to get your personal profile out and import it into some other service. Theres no job service which allows you to do that. All the search engines which track your search history and take that somewhere else. You can't take your Amazon recommendations and take them somewhere else. Your ebay repurtation, or even your mail. You can't take your online mail from one provider to another. its difficult or impossible. Its striking the pattern which is being setup, the level of lock in which is being setup which makes perfect sense from a business stand point. But it is some kind of propitery lock in which is as strong as the lock in you use to have at the software level.

Marc – It is the form of locking for the next 10 or so years…. Doug Kaye later presses both the panel guests about open data and attention data. but does not really get a answer worthy mentioning. However someone talks about FOAF and how a couple of services support it for importing and exporting. I can also say Audioscrobbler also supports FOAF exporting now. Here is my FOAF profile from audioscrobbler which is nothing like my own personal FOAF profile. Enough said really… By the way Its also interesting that Bebo and Ringo are running on the same software or are the same company!. I guess this strikes myself as the example Dan talked about, where AOL would not allow interop between AIM and ICQ even thought they owned both services! Crazy! own your own data because these services cant even get the simple things right.

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So I finally got around to checking my email tonight and jumped for joy when I read one from XTECH.

Dear Ian,

Congratulations! Your submission “RSS Syndication for a Worldwide Audience” was selected for presentation at XTECH 2005 taking place at the RAI Centre, Amsterdam, 25-27 May. Your presentation is currently scheduled for Wednesday, 25 May.

— Snip —

Thank you for your submission. We look forward to seeing you in Amsterdam .

— Snip —

This is great news for BBC World Service New media and the BBC as a whole. I would like to say a big thanks to everyone who has supported me so far, including Sarah and even Joel. I think this will be a great place to discuss the need to look beyond Latin based languages for RSS syndication, and explain the issues which come with internationalised RSS and in turn international RSS adoption. This is indeed the year of RSS! on a side point its great to see a very useful wiki for the event too. I have already setup myself up and

I forgot to say that the Keynotes for the conference which was announced a few weeks ago are some of the most cutting edge and smartest people in the industry at this moment.
Paula Le Dieu, Co-Director, Creative Archive, BBC
Jean Paoli, Senior Director of XML Architecture, Microsoft
Mike Shaver, Mozilla Foundation and Oracle
Look forward to seeing you all there…

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Audioscrobbler sent me a email today to notify me that Tim had selected myself as a friend of his for audioscrobbling. Yes this is correct information but I had not really looked into the friends option of audioscrobbler. And it made me think about the whole friend of a friend dynamic and why should I fill out foaf information for each silo webservice like flickr, audioscobbler, amazon and del.icio.us?

Someone once say asking for someone to be your friend was not a good way of doing things in the social networking space. It doesnt lend its self to the offline world either. I would kinda of agree but no one has really come up with an alternative. I know FOAF allows you to just add people without asking them first which can be kinda of cheeky but seems more reasonable to me. I mean I could say someone is just a contact, friend or family member if I like, that someone may say I'm there worst enemy or good friend in return. I dont really care if you see what I mean. In my scope there a contact while in there scope i'm a good friend. Where things get complex is when you try to build meaning out of these abstracts. A machine could come along and say well no human's going to add enemy's to there FOAF profile so it must be a friend? Or it could do some serious analysis on the terms used between us and decide to not link us because its not sure what the relationship is. And honestly that wouldnt be such a bad thing.

In Microsoft Wallop, I have a link to a couple of people who simply commented on my blog posts, nothing more. But Wallop adds those people as friends? Now I understand the reason for this, as these people have contacted me so they must be friends of somekind right? But what if they simply wrote comments to wind me up or slag me off? Then I would be pissed off to know there now friends! However this is hard work for the machine to work out whats positive and whats negative, so I guess it relys on me to manually delete or remove them? Which I guess is fair…

But lets move out of the usual social networking applications like wallop, friendster, etc. And think about all those other social applications. And when I say that I mean from email to instant messenger to blogs to flickr. Thunderbird which I use for my email at home, has a nice feature called collected addresses. The idea is that anything I reply to will be added to the collected addresses and never end up in the junk box. Makes sense I would say but not flawless, for example if I reply to a automated email when I join a forum or something, its added to collected addresses. But say I remove myself from the list 2 days later, well the address is still in my collected addresses. Once again i could remove it myself, but I'm human and I forget to do such things. I think there is some projects going on in the closed and opensource worlds regarding machine intellengance which keeps a record of what you do and what you reply to etc but across your whole desktop. Even though it fills me with a little terror, i'm sure there will be secure and privicy assured versions which you can control. I'm envisioning something like zonealarm which tracks what I do with people on my instant messeger list. For example during work time I will ignore most people because I'm working. Wouldnt it be nice if this application could block certain people from sending me links during this time? Then unblock them when i'm less busy. And thats only the start…

When I usually reply to peoples blogs aka leave a comment, its because I think I have something which could move the entry along or general yep totally agreement and alternativly i disagree comment. If this application could tell the difference (hey it could simply ask me, like Zone alarm does) It could track the name of the owner of the blog and effect the way I deal with instant messeges, emails and other requests. For example writing a positive comment on scott's blog should automaticly add his email to the collected addresses in thunderbird, put his blog into a browser zone which allows for popups and flash useage (I'm using Flashblock which I adore), automaticly allow his skype and im addresses to contact me without authorisation. Obviously these should be manually overrideable and you should beable to change levels of trust as such. Another example where this would work. I use Tesco.com for my food shopping. They have this bizarre system where popups are used to display goods with all the label information which is useful. They also send confirmation emails when there going to send the food and what there going to send. Now I think its not crazy to say if I trust the email from tesco.com then I trust the popups too. And if you move this into the mobile world for a minute. Then it wouldnt be too much to say I also trust tesco.com to send text messages to me and call me. Yep text/sms spam is becoming a problem in europe.

Back to the first thought, Tesco may not be my friend but theres a certain level of trust I allow for when dealing with them. I know Tesco mine my foods list every month and they then profile me and send certain discounts and offers to tempt me to buy more. Fine, but I dont want Asda (Wallmart) to do the same! In the same way you can block people on im and disallow cookies on certain sites I want to see the same happening across my interfaces I use. If I'm ignoring someones emails, it might right to say I would like to ignore there calls and texts. This may mean there not a foaf and that I dont want anything to do with them ever? who knows, were only human and I certainly change my mind all the time. But if I do, I should not have to unblock im's, unblock text's and phone calls on all my phones and change the email filter.

So back to Tim a second. When Tim adds me to his del.icio.us, his flickr, his email, his im. I honeslty dont want to keep authorising him. He's a good guy and likewise he shouldnt need to authorise myself when he's already added me as a friend in audioscobbler. Does Flickr trust audioscobbler enough to allow friends on that to be friends on flickr without the usual authorise this person? No, or not at the moment. Maybe that will change in the future? (Because I added a picture from Pmtorrone to the top of this post mean he's trusted or not? And exactly how much trustworthness will he have? Now thats a question not worth thinking about at this stage)
I swear to you theres a serious link with Attention.xml, FOAF and all of what I'm talking about – but alas its late and I cant think of it right now. There are too many questions and not enough answers in this post!

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In blojsom theres 4 types of content syndication available to you, RSS 0.91, RDF 1.0, RSS 2.0 and ATOM 0.3. Well I've got rid of the RSS 0.91 icons and prefer people grab the others. But realisticly its all the same content at the moment. However I'm going to start experiementing with Enclosures in the RSS 2.0 feed. It relates back to some thinking earlier. At the same time I'm thinking of trying out Greg G's idea of using the Link element in ATOM to do the same. The first piece of content I'm considering adding is related pictures based on not the title but metadata which I'm going to add to every blog entry in the near future. So if theres metadata and the flavor is RSS 2.0 or ATOM it will add an enclosure to pull in a picture from Flickr. For example on this post I've added metadata hyde park(meta-keyword=hydepark). Which when searched in flickr will generate this page. So I will grab the first one and attach it as a flash file? What would be better is if I could filter by cc only licenced photos. Shame Open photo doesnt have a better system behind it. I'm also considering putting cocoon somewhere in the middle of the process so I can use xsl to transform content rather than using vm templates. One of the things which has made me think about this area more is this posted by doc searls.

By the way this would be the search string which would be generated – http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-nc-sa-2.0/tags/hydepark and I would take the 2nd photo in this example. And the end result photo would be this sweet entry by myself.

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First thing I have not said anything about flickr or del.icio.us recently but there very good ideas and well excuted. i think even Jon Udell is happy with these RESTful/web services/applications? In my view anything which creates semantic-ish meaning is good. Some things which I've seen recently.

FOAF
RSS 1.0
ATOM
ebay to rss
another one, rss auction
Google to Atom
bleb.org tv-listings
Netflix's rss feeds
iTunes music store rss feed generator
iTunes playlist to RSS

When's imdb going to do rss?. Now owned by Amazon they must have syndication in there future plans. I mean it wasnt long ago when imdb would allow you to copy there databases?

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Found this interesting idea in my feeds today. I think the crux of the idea can be explained through this quote.

Behavior obviously contains clues about the intent that stitches actions into meaningful streams, although the clues can be awfully misleading: If you see that I move from a web page to a word processing document, there's a chance the first inspired me to write something in the document, although it's also possible that I got bored reading the Web page and decided to get back to work. If I copy from the Web page and paste into the document, you have a stronger clue.

I've already wrote a comment so I hope the trackback works. I sent a email to David, because I think the log of data from such a client application would be perfect for his OS david application. What ever happened to that?

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I saw Platypus wiki before but wrote it off because blojsom had a wiki plugin. Actually think Poil sent me the link that time. Then quickly realised that the wiki plugin in Blojsom was only so you could input text like a wiki not an actual wiki as to say. I even considered the wiki app blojsom.com is using, because I've quickly realised there is bit of my site which really need a wiki and there are parts which could do with a blog. For example own writing, my mixes and lectures should all be blogs of somekind. While Streaming, calender and Pictures should be a wiki or some kind of application to do with those areas.

Anyway I'm going to try it out tonight, see what it can and cannot do. Will be interested in interchanging data between blojsom, cocoon and platypus. Cant be too difficult if there using rdf. Something really simple like linking definitions in the blog to the wiki would be a nice start. Already thinking of ways to blend in FOAF too.

The day afterwards…
I quickly realised that Platypus wiki will only work on Tomcat 5.x because its using a yet to be ratified Java servelet 2.4 spec for its web.xml. So I downloaded Tomcat 5 and tried it out on my laptop. It actually works quite well. I only scratched the surface but it seemed to generate tons of standard metadata. Miles asked if there was some way of keeping track of all the pages? Like a index I asked? Well I'm not totally sure but I will find out sometime today or tomorrow. I also need to setup my own wiki, rather than use the example wiki. Overall its looking quite good, not sure how it compares to JSP/Wiki with the RSS plugin though…

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I'm finally finding time to explorer the possibilies of Friend of a friend through this article on xml.com. Just created my own basic FoaF rdf for myself, looking at how to link myself to other people. I keep meaning to do more research on this whole area for ages but kept putting it off till now. Didnt realise there was a foaf-a-matic, using that now. Foaf-a-matic 2 looks like a good move, would be nice to adapt it to the pocketpc as well as the desktop.

I also in the back of my mind, I keep wanting to use the XHTML friends network but never have the site to hand when typing away. How does this fit with FOAF? and why are certain values not available? I'm very sure Xhtml meta data profiles are not as good as FOAF. Maybe I should use the XFN creator more often.

But back to FOAF. I'm quite amazed by the simplicity of foaf and the great lengths of data you can put into foaf. I mean looking at this page which describes what can go into a foaf rdf schema.
foaf:myersBriggs – A Myers Briggs (MBTI) personality classification. foaf:jabberID. foaf:geekcode A textual geekcode for this person, see http://www.geekcode.com/geek.html. foaf:weblog are just a few of the more interesting ones.

I've now completed my FOAF for now. And added links to it on every blog page. I have to say this is also a really good introduction into rdf just like RSS 1.0 because it has an outcome and tools already built so you can see the results of it.

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Adam sent me a couple of links the other day, following our nice saturday night get together in central London.

The link to iTunes RSS site:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/MRSS/rssGenerator

Now feel the power of the mac come to you Ian, with Rendezvous
Executable for PocketPC 2003:
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/rendezvous/

Go on, you know you want to try it! You it makes sense 😉

My reply goes something like this…
Alright alright I'm mildly impressed with Apple.
The rendez-vous client could be useful, but your still playing with the limits of battery power and non-sync connections over bluetooth and less so wifi. I dont think Rendez-fool was made for such connections? Dont know enough on this issue…

Anyway the RSS generator – Yeah this is useful. Cant quite work out there Url scheme. But not looked at it enough really. Something like Amazon's A9.com would be sweet…

Using RSS2.0 – sweet, am option for RDF would be equally nice, but easy to convert from RSS2 to RDF using XSLT. Sure Atom wouldn’t be much of a challenge either. Really need to write the xsl's soon, as the BBC also requires something like this for RSS 0.91 to others.

Good use of standard namespaces rather than making there own, unlike others I've seen recently. Would be interested to see what else is inside the itms modules though.

BUT, what the hell is going on with the content:encoded elements!
TABLES in a RSS Feed? Surely the point of RSS is to syndicate not force your style on other services? XML with style, not a good idea at all, and I would usually go into a rant about how Apple always do something like this. Tease us with applications and services which claim to be standard complient and all, till you look a little deeper and find a flaw. Think Microsoft WordprocessingML! I would gladly rip out all that crap soon as possible if I was working on it.

Generally this work has to be supported with clap of hands and a happy smile. Keep it up Apple. Sure the BBC would be interested in doing something very simular some point soon. Although I would prefer something a little more like XMLTV or something from Kendra.

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So Amazon have launched there A9 search engine, and I've been checking it out.

First thoughts, its a little large and the style is down a touch from even all the web. Certainly not your google or teoma. But how good is it? Well its a odd beast. A search for cubicgarden my own site gets results close to google, but check out that url! a9.com/cubicgarden.com. Wow now interesting… No query strings for A9 it would seem.

http://a9.com/cubicgarden : A9
http://www.alltheweb.com/search?cat=web&cs=utf8&q=cubicgarden&_sb_lang=pref : All the web/Fast
http://s.teoma.com/search?q=cubicgarden&qcat=1&qsrc=0&Search.x=0&Search.y=0 : Teoma
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=imdb&btnG=Search : Google

Interesting enough Teoma looks at my mixes and finds some lostfeeds stuff, some comments I've made on city of minneapolis and built for the future. While All the web does pretty much the same, but avoids the nackerd lostfeeds links. Google and A9 generate almost the same results except… 1,510 for cubicgarden. (0.09 seconds) from Google and only 52 for A9… Looking at the results too, A9 picks the best ones of googles selection. Even when you get close to the end of 52. I'm still getting good results. Noticed the querystring finally gets used via pages.

So yeah I'm basicly saying this A9 stuff is good, and I havent signed in yet…Which you need to do to use search history and other features. Nice url by the way amazon.

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I have no idea what to make of Speechbot. This is so typical of the cutting edge work HP research labs are doing. I havent done any real research into it but even the concept alone makes me feel very sick.

Ok I've just done tests, and it couldnt find for example Mpeg4, which it should have found if its indexed content from streamingmedia.com. However streaming did match 200 items. Wow, the show me extract part is pretty slick… It also seems speechbot isnt working on semantics. As its picked up non streamingmedia.com content too. HP Labs have done it again… Kudos from the BBC.

Take this for a great example.
Search for any words with streaming in it like above. And got a link to public interest transcript, here is the section taken from the actual stream. Yes believe it…

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