When you see facebook adopting a version of RDFa then you can assume you are onto something.  And now we’ve seen this.

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On the downside mentions some negatives e.g.’ to radically redefine individual privacy, and to expose our children to unprecedented levels of violence and pornography – disincentives to innovation’.

Have to say as someone who grew up in a time of far less surveillance this does worry me a lot for the kids of today.  Many’s the stupid things that we did when we were growing up – which were better not being video’d and posted to the world.  To be honest the prevalence of digital cameras and similar devices are probably more of the problem than the web itself.  But I’m not sure hor w this will work itself out – potentially a nightmare version of Orwell’s 1984 is playing itself out – where Big Brother is now a combination of ‘citizens’ snooping on people and the web as Big Brother processing and forwarding the data.

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Main focus of the book  seems to be Bruce Mau and his approach to Design – of his philosophy re Design and its place in the world.

The ‘Glimmer Principles’ are:

Ask Stupid Questions, Jump Fences, make hope visible, Go deep, Work the metaphor, Design what you do. Face consequences. Embrace constraints, Design for emergence and BEGIN ANYWHERE.

The book and the examples are built around these principles.

There are basic entry level introductions to a number of frameworks and concepts e.g. Doblin Inc.’s five phases of a consumer experience: attraction, entry, engagement, exit, extension (pp 134-137).

As someone who has been involved in BPR for many years now I could certainly relate to the principles referenced.  Asking Stupid Questions and Going Deep are critical to any effort.  I think current focus on lean processes in start ups also echoes many of the ket principles, in particular Make Hope Visible and Face Consequences – in the context of maximising learning/ experimentation with the potential users of the solution.

In summary, I found the book more to be an interesting introduction to Mau and a number of other Designers rather than a ‘how to’ type book.  In this sense I found the title a little misleading and the book a little disappointing.  On the positive side the book is a call to action for everyone to put on their Designer Hat – that design is not something limited to a small few creative types.

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“We are amassing an unimaginable amount of data in the world. In just three years, [internet] traffic is expected to total more than half a zettabyte. That’s a trillion gigabytes – or a one followed by 21 zeroes,” he tells industry, academic and political leaders.

“Where we once inferred, we now know. Where we once interpolated and extrapolated, we can now determine. The historical is giving way to the real-time and it’s not just about volume and velocity. The nature of the data we are collecting and analysing is changing, too.

“All this data is far more real-time than ever before. Most of us today, as leaders and as individuals, make decisions based on information that is backward-looking and limited in scope. That’s the best we had, but that is quickly changing.”

This just reinforces my previous blog of June 2009: here.

And this week we had the official launch in the UK of its government linked open data site.

We’ve seen the debate – back and forth – about linked open data.  We’ve seen the debate about top down v. bottom up approaches to semantics.  We’ve seen the arguments about the merits of RDF as against other frameworks.  But the volumes of data continue to increase – as does participation in social networks.

On a daily basis we see announcement about new products.  Nova Spivack tells us that the days of ‘Search’ are running out – we need ‘Help’ not ‘Search’.  We eagerly await his Twine 2.0.  We have seen significant product advancements announced this month in products such as Open Calais and Open Amplify.  One other product which caught my eye last week is Kngine.

Products such as Amplify aim to deal with the ‘tricky’ content – e.g. the ‘opinions’ implicit in content of social networks.   And this is a key element of what we are looking for: context for the content.  I am more interested in information on a particular subject when I understand the context, the perspective of the provider of the information.  I also want the richness of analysis possible through the combination of wider sources of data – including data compiled by government agencies which should be available to me.  Linked open data initiatives are required in all countries.  For Ireland – the sooner the better, if we consider ourselves a smart economy or a knowledge society.

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Dr O’Brien rightly distinguishes between the concrete benefits in terms of successful  projects and the benefit of encouraging the more generic culture of research and entrepreneurship.

Article includes several interesting examples of recent initiatives.

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I have commented previously on the social dimension of reading a physical newspaper in, say, family surrounds as against sitting at a laptop reading whatever. I’m struck more than ever by the difference.  Don’t get me wrong – online reading makes it so easy to forward anything of interest to another online contact or to add it to your library (I use zotero).  But, in the immediate community, it seems a lot less interesting and a lot less sociable.

I have also notice that the various online versions of the newspapers have been designed to be efficient, searchable, referenceable – but perhaps in striving for this have lost the feel/ charm of a newspaper.

Wonder how others feel.

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For those brought up on Microsoft, with what seems like unlimited (if somewhat daunting) functionality in the Office suite, it always seems that the Google Apps suite is ‘dumbed down’ – you are required to give up some functionality.   On the other hand it may seem like nearly everything you actually  need to do can be done in Google Apps – and there’s less to learn.

The cloud seems to have caught fire.  Microsoft has been pushing aggressively on its BPOS offering and the pricing has become a lot sharper.  Meanwhile Google has been busily beefing up its sales and support resources around Google Apps.

Either way both offerings have many attractions for the CIO – in terms of taking away headaches around upgrades, storage, support, etc.

And both offer lots of functionality in the collaboration type space – wikis, blogs, etc.

Side by side with this there are all the other players e.g. zoho with a very comprehensive offering for the information worker – also priced on a subscription basis.  And for project management basecamp seems to be getting a great deal of traction.  And one goes back to the previous thought – are some of these simpler, built for the cloud, product offerings easier to use, if somewhat ‘dumbed down’?

Interesting piece in Forbes re Google, ‘When Google runs your life’.  Seems to me that no more than Microsoft pushing wall-to-wall MS, Google is inevitably pushing google wall-to-wall.  Apologies for unfortunate use of outdated imagery – probably should be cloud-2-cloud.

I think much of the elegance of the web 2.0 applications has been their simplicity and ease of use.  That has driven initial uptake. Products such as googlewave, in trying to deliver a very rich solution, risk contradicting some of this.  There are similar risks in any vendor looking to achieve cloud-2-cloud dominance.

Seems to me that what the internet and the cloud  should be offering – as they evolve – are  easier and more effective ways to access resources (people, knowledge) – both inside and outside the organisation in which you work/ study/ volunteer.  Cloud based computing is part of this.  I think as such the winning solutions may be ones built from scratch for the cloud, expecting to coexist in the cloud, not expecting to dominate.

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Takes you through web 1.0, through to 2.0 and on to 3.0.  Explains why web 3.0 is required and gives some current examples.

Worth spending 15 minutes – for anyone new to semantic web.

This 6 minute video is also an excellent introduction to the semantic web.

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The presentation addressed, inter alia, the lack of excitement about semantic web.  My key takeaway from his talk was that semantic web is about networking knowledge for the benefit of PEOPLE.  I think in getting caught up describing things in terms of computers being able to process information on sites thought use of various standards (not of interest to anyone except the technical community) etc we have lost the focus on the fact that what we really want is more collaboration, more productivity, more discoveries.  Semantic web initiatives have an end game of helping people make more use of the information.

Just looked at a nice 3 minute video from Binaryplex – promoting their beta product Hivemind.  I do not know what the underlying technologies are.  They do not even mention the worked ‘semantics’ in their three minutes.  But what it is about is helping people to find expertise and, more importantly, experts in an organisation.  Recognising that people, for any number of reasons, may not update their profiles within an organisation the product seeks to address this gap, in the background.

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Was I excited?

On a personal level I have found a number of these products useful e.g. feedly.  And they do represent some interesting development and practical examples of various elements of the semantic toolbox.

But not that exciting.

Working with business executives looking to uderstand the relevance of semantic web to them not sure that this range of products will excite them.  In fact don’t think it will.

I am beginning to think that we should think of semantics in terms of a set of tools and standards designed to enable us to get more from the web.  Web 3.0 seems to me to suggest a new web – I don’t see that at present.

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