Web Things, by Mark Baker

A dissappointing story by the normally sure-footed Jon Udell. Publishing interfaces is a necessary but insufficient condition for “swapability” (aka substitution); having the *same* interface is also required.
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Speaking of tuple space based systems…

Google Base is a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content that we’ll host and make searchable online.

Contrast that with this ( snippet);

The tuples have just a few key properties: […] (2) They are persistent, remaining available long after the application that created them has gone on to other tasks. (3) They do not have names or other external identifiers and are stored in no particular order. Instead, they are located by querying their content…

Of course, nothing says they can’t also have identifiers.

Now, if Google Base would just support RDF – which is as sloppily extensible as Adam requires – we’d even get the “tuple” (read; triple) part of tuple spaces. Or, failing that, at least microformats.

A very good move for the W3C
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… the nickname I’ve given to my previous musings on thread evaluation.

One thought I had about an Internet-scale ThreadRank, versus what’s described there, is that one can’t make any closed world assumptions.

For example, where the thread patterns page discusses the “blindingly obvious answer”, it makes a closed world assumption that all responses (answers) are known. In a Web/blog-based “thread”, there may very well be answers that aren’t known.

Moreover, there seems to be an assumption that most participants read most posts, whereas with blogs on the Web, that obviously isn’t the case. Therefore, even if a thread structure like that of the “blindingly obvious answer” was found, it wouldn’t necessarily indicate that the answer was “blindingly obvious”; it could, say, just be a message which was of interest to a number of people in some smaller community.

More thoughts as they occur to me … 8-)

Tim apparently agrees with me that word processors may not be all they’re cracked up to be;

So, I understand why we still need spreadsheets and presentation packages, but assuming you had a Web editor with a good change tracker, why would anyone want a word processor any more?

An interesting corollary, of course, is that OpenDocument isn’t all it’s cracked up to be either… at least in theory.

“Using this binding, you can do correlated request/response over mail” Ouch! SMTP is one-way for a reason. Firewall admins, ready … set … filter!
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I’ll be there. Drop me a line if you want to get together.
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Nice. Next-gen PageRank? I wonder if the same patterns hold for blogs, or what new patterns blogs introduce?
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Cool. I wonder if there’s any way to benefit from this asymmetry on a large scale? And how does it relate to the long tail? Hmmm, much thought required …
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ROTFL! “I’ve attached a memo written by him that I think strikes the right balance between pre-announcement and non-delivery”
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