Slashdot Mirror

This is the project that Adam Woswrth was working on. He has left now google

http://www.adambosworth.net/

I'm downloading the speech now, but if it's anything like this great speech he gave last year, it will be well worth listening to. That one changed my mind about what great things might look like. I've realized the great and wonderful content management system that my group is building is utterly doomed, for example, and I already have a new job in hand. It's all about the sloppiness.

People do this all the time, in message boards and on blogs, usually with a standard disclaimer that opinions expressed are not of their employer.

There are so many examples of this... Look at how many Microsoft employees have blogs like Scoble or Don Box, or Oracle's Tom Kyte, or IBM's Kyle Brown, or BEA 's David Orchard (I work for BEA as well) , or Google's Bosworth.. Do you really think these people are vetted by PR? How many employees post to newsgroups or public tech support forums... I see people get into public flamewars too.

On the other hand, there is a problem here with what constitutes a company's "voice". Bosworth, for example, gets into controversy for people confusing his opinions with Google's (or BEA's , previously).

Frankly, I tend to side with the cluetrain. As long as you don't claim to hold the "official" position, and don't talk about internal confidential information, it's beneficial to the company, its investors, customers, and prospects for employees to engage in open and honest dialogue with others.

I guess it depends on how paranoid you are about your company firing you for speaking your mind. Generally I don't get too concerned about it, if they did such a thing, I wouldn't want to work for them anyway.

"...As long as we don't let the ontologists take over and tell us why tags are all wrong, need to be classified into domains, and need to be systematized, this is going to work well albeit, sloppily. What it does is open up ways to find things related to anything interesting you've found and navigate not a web of links but a link of tags. At the same time Wikipedia has shown that a model in which content is contributed not just by a few employees, but by self-forming self-managing communities on the web can be amazingly detailed, complete, and robust. so now people are looking at ways in which the same emergent self-forming self-administering models of tagging and Wiki's and moderation can be used for events (EVDB) and for music and for video and for medical information. It's all very exciting. It is a true renaissance. I haven't seen this much true innovation for quite a while. What I particularly like about all this is how human these innovations are. They are sloppy. To me Tags are sloppy practical de-facto ontologies. Wiki's are sloppy about changes and version editing. It is accepted that we're trying new things and that sometimes messes will occur. In short, it is unabashedly creative and imprecise. I've always believed in the twin values of rationalism and humanism, but humanism has often felt as though it got short shrift in our community. In this world, it's all about people and belonging and working with others...."

Adam Bosworth? Surely he's key to whatever client-side initiatives the Mountain View Monster is developing and yet no mention of him by Dvorak (not too surprising) or here (AFAICS).

Here are some links. See esp. the REST Wiki:
Adam Bosworth's Weblog: Learning to REST
Bitworking - The Well-Formed Web - REST
Debate foams over SOAP 1.2 - REST versus SOAP
How To Convert Rpc To Rest
http://www.xfront.com/ - REST Tutorial, XML et al - Roger Costello's site
ITworld.com - XML IN PRACTICE - XML, Web Services, and the REST Architecture
Mark Baker, Tech Curmudgeon - REST - Transport, transfer and coordination in HTTP
O'Reilly Network: REST vs. SOAP at Amazon [June 24, 2003]
Paul Prescod's REST Resources
Reliable delivery in HTTP - REST
REST A Web-Centric Approach to State Transition - Paul Prescod
REST could burst SOAP's bubble - Hoobler
REST Faq - Alternative to SOAP XML
REST SlideShow: Representational State Transfer: An Architectural Style for Distributed Hypermedia Interaction
REST wiki - Representational State Transfer - alternative to SOAP XML
rest-discuss Message 2330 - ROP vs RPC vs OOP pt 1
Roots of REST - SOAP Debate - Paul Prescod Yahoo! Groups : rest-discuss Messages :Message 1314 of 1646
Roy T. Fielding - REST Architect
Sean McGrath BLOG - REST proponent
W3C mailing-list search service on REST
Why you should not use RPC for GET
xml-dev - Re: [xml-dev] SOAP-RPC and REST and security
XML.com: In a Lather About Security - SOAP security vs REST security
Yahoo! Groups : rest-discuss Messages : 2371-2428 of 2428