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Severe case of WWIC.

Actually I think they've done a decent job. Setting back Iran's nuclear weapons program has been the greatest military achievement for years. I just wonder why all these security experts are so eager now to help the antisemites get rid of the bug. Something to put on their CV in case the power balance changes? Oh, wait. That's the Kaspersky blog. No more questions.

Perhaps you are referring this story?
I'm a Googlebot! I will not kill you.

"I don't want you here. Who let you in?"

"I am Google! I find many good things. I find that pair of underwear with the little dice printed all over them. And I watch the tape of you with the life-sized Stallman puppet. These are good unique things. Many keywords and links! My masters will say 'much good job, little robot!' Many searchers will find happy links of Stallman puppet see you! Ahhhh."

Paul Ford wrote a nice story (August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web) about this in 2002, read it and be amazed :P

While Amazon and Ebay continue to have average quarterly profits of $1 billion and $1.8 billion, respectively, and are successes by any measure, the $17 billion per annum Google Marketplace is clearly the most impressive success story of what used to be called, pre-crash, "The New Economy."

Paul Graham's thoughts on procrastination overlap well with Paul Ford's thoughts on distractions, Followup/Distraction, and Are there "good" distractions?.

Graham:
I think the way to "solve" the problem of procrastination is to let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you.

Ford:
The most productive times in my life are the ones where I'm just doing my own thing, focused, and trying to solve some problem that I find interesting-when I'm narrowly distracted.

Same idea, different angle.

Robot Exclusion Protocol courtesy of ftrain.

Well yeah... blogs are for people to express themselves, not a place for them to write great literary works.

Fortunately, some people express themseles in great literary works. Paul Ford has written some incredibly great stuff, and on a technically interesting platform that he created. And even he's got a story about his cat on the front page right now.

We're at the point now where there is enough variety in "continually updated personal websites" that they can abe considered a format.

The trouble is that the most popular blogs are the blogs about blogs and blogging. This is a genre.

Confusion results when people can't distinguish between the genre, the format, and the medium. People who think blogs are revolutionary and like to talk about it a lot tend to be ascribing the accumulated power of communications technology to the very specific and ephemeral idea-of-the-minute.

Blogs aren't revolutionizing the world, they're just becoming more mainstream.

(The medium being the web, the internet in general, or even the writen word in general, depending on how you want to look at it. The point is that each builds upon the former in evolutionary, not revolutionary, fashion.)

The tone of the article is unfortunate. But it's also too bad that really good technology gets dissed by the tech community if it's well marketed. mSpace is a rather sophisticated system for storing and relating arbitrary unstructured information in meaningful ways. The interface doesn't do it full justice.

McGuffin and Schraefel's paper of mSpaces, polyarchies and zzStructures won the ACM Hypertext Conference's award for "Special Research Distinction for Excellent Presentation of Theoretical Concepts."

Schraefel is not only a good programmer, doing very cutting edge information technology stuff, but she and her team have managed to design a useful piece of software that uses it. Since when can the Academic world do this kind of thing?

*sigh* People diss Nelson when he comes up with incredibly good ideas and quality computer science. And now, when people like Schraefel produce a usable product, they get dissed too. Before you go snarking about how the Semantic Web won't come down from heaven and die on a cross for us, make sure you know what the Semantic Web is. Just like Harpers, this is a perfectly cool example.

What do I think about the Semantic Web? I will admit, I sometimes wonder if it's safe.

Actually the concept of Google finally moving on the semantic web has been mentioned a few times. If you look at it, the browser is really the last step in really making that happen. Sure you can surf through a google proxy (like you do everytime you use Google images) and Google can watch what you follow to help rank things, but imagine if you where creating relevance data with every link you followed. It's big brotherish, yes, but would be gold as far as ranking things.

Course there are other nice things you could do like define your own request types for pulling meta-data, etc.

Let's face it. Google is in the position that Micro$oft has been in for a while, only in the web space as opposed to the OS space. (Case in Point) They could finally convince people to get on board the semantic express

If Google just sticks to their motto, they'll be fine.

Bloggers: 43 Folders, Kris Dresden, Diane Duane, Paul Ford, Neil Gaiman, Michael Hanscom, Jason Kottke, Anne Murphy, Jessamyn North, Alia Phibes, Quentin Tarantino, and Wil Wheaton.

Linklogs: Anil Dash, Best of Craigslist, Boing Boing, CoolGov, Daze Reader, Fazed, Kottke Remainders, LinkMachineGo, MetaJournal, Michael Hanscom's Linklog, Museum of Hoaxes, NewYorkish, Paul Ford's Linklog, Snopes: New, SubText, and UFies.org.

Chicago: Chicagoist, jamas.org, CHICAGO.Metroblogging, Chicago Snapshot, CTA Tattler, Gapers' Block, and L or El.

Miscellaneous: Ask Slashdot, Citying, Cult of the One-Eyed Cat, Good Plastic Surgery, I Work With Fools, Schmo Blog, TeeVee, This Is Broken, Today In Alternate History, and x-entertainment.

Apple Bloggers: Buzz Andersen, Bill Bumgarner, Todd Dominey, Folklore, Steven Frank, John Gruber, Dave Hyatt, Brent Simmons,

Bloggers: 43 Folders, Kris Dresden, Diane Duane, Paul Ford, Neil Gaiman, Michael Hanscom, Jason Kottke, Anne Murphy, Jessamyn North, Alia Phibes, Quentin Tarantino, and Wil Wheaton.

Linklogs: Anil Dash, Best of Craigslist, Boing Boing, CoolGov, Daze Reader, Fazed, Kottke Remainders, LinkMachineGo, MetaJournal, Michael Hanscom's Linklog, Museum of Hoaxes, NewYorkish, Paul Ford's Linklog, Snopes: New, SubText, and UFies.org.

Chicago: Chicagoist, jamas.org, CHICAGO.Metroblogging, Chicago Snapshot, CTA Tattler, Gapers' Block, and L or El.

Miscellaneous: Ask Slashdot, Citying, Cult of the One-Eyed Cat, Good Plastic Surgery, I Work With Fools, Schmo Blog, TeeVee, This Is Broken, Today In Alternate History, and x-entertainment.

Apple Bloggers: Buzz Andersen, Bill Bumgarner, Todd Dominey, Folklore, Steven Frank, John Gruber, Dave Hyatt, Brent Simmons,

... as pointed out by the incomparable Paul Ford.

Don't believe everything you read - this Slashdot story is a great example.

Here is an account that predicts that Google will leverage its search results to create a Semantic Web. I see this as a distinct possibility. Especially Google leveraging its search results to help people buy and sell stuff.

Web pundits like Clay Shirky live in the present. Their entire relevance is based on the way the web looks today. They have no interest in anything being any different than exactly the way it is now.

For a more forward-looking view of this issue, see this essay on the real potential of the Semantic web.

To get a glimpse of what sort of evil is at work here, just look into the history of actuaries being accused of "discrimination".

As the author of TFA mentions in his further commentary, the technology he describes already exists. It just hasn't been implemented yet in the way he describes, although there are certainly trends in that direction, and overall, metadata is becoming more and more important.

Speculating on the future and trying to spot trends might seem silly to you, but without it, Harlan Elison wouldn't be able to make car commercials.

I recently started playing around with Jena, a Java API for writing Semantic Web applications. W3C's Resource Desciption Framework (RDF) page has RDF specs, a means for storing semantic information.

Incidentally, Paul Ford is a regular writer on these sorts of topics. He has a collection of writings on the web and semantics.

Tim

Shirky's peice on the Semantic Web is far below his normal quality. It's poorly researched and poorly considered. (Speaking as someone misquoted in the article...)

For good responses see Peter Van Dijck or Paul Ford.

Give me animal outsourcing, any day of the week.

Get ready for the future: http://ftrain.com/TheWorkers.html

A 1% phony reply rate is barely going to hurt at all, unfortunately.

I think you've missed out on what the parent was advocating. If "we" reply to 1% of our spam with phoney data, it will (easily?) outweigh the real replies (which I pray is less than 1%) and thus pollute the stream, driving down the rate that the legitimate companies are willing to pay. For more thinking along this line check out this googled karma-whoring link. Automate this idea with a Mozilla plug-in and I'll bet all of us lazy Slashdotters (its not just me right?) will install and escalate things a bit.

I wonder how long it will take before non-Christian religious holidays start getting the same treatment. I can see it now: Buy Ramadanorade, the only fluid replacement you can trust for your fasting needs! ;)

The adaptation of non-christian spiritual practices for shallow western purposes has been going on for a while...

..."Saddam Hussein is alive and well in a bunker on the moon, Mr. President."

Polar Night? It sounds like Nasa's been playing with the Military Operation Name Generator.

It seems that in 10 years, google will take it all due to the semantic web control over frogle, etc.

This describles the scenario.

---
Google stole my mind.

Speaking of level of trust.

Perhaps the things mentioned here will come true one day.

--

nich

Here's the problem with personal blogging. Most of the people keeping "journal" style sites (referred to as "notebooks" above in the review) don't understand the difference between a well-written personal narrative and letting the world know that you went to the bathroom, just talked to Suzie, or stepped in dog crap. I agree that reading those kind of blogs are about as interesting as listening to a standard cell phone conversation. You don't learn anything.

But some of the personal narrative sites can be amusing, moving, and occasionally wise. I've really enjoyed reading this one and this one over the last year or two. You're missing out on some great writing, story telling, and even an odd discussion about the semantic web if you don't read them.

(And don't forget my own merely semi-pitiful narratives. I promise there is only one mention of attending to bodily functions on the whole site, and that's only in the context of a "wackiness ensues" story. I'd say that was a shameless plug, but I'm now somewhat ashamed. Ah, well.)

As for "link style" blogging -- I haven't figured out what makes the difference between the good and the bad. It's not necessarily focus -- Metafilter and even Slashdot are both all over the map. It's not even necessarily commentary... weak commentary or no commentary and a collection of links can still be interesting. Near as I can tell, it's interesting if the person/people collecting them have interesting trains of thought. Whatever that means.

Heh, I laughed out loud. Thanks.

Aside from the truth factor, your post reminded me of this article. Thought I'd share it.

Paul Ford wrote a hilarious piece on what life might be like if google tried to index the world.

Me, I think that the reason that the Harry Potter film ended up looking uncannily like what was in everybody's head is because Google can index the brain.

Just a theory.

Undocumented Google Commands

Google Time Bombs

Google Science-Fiction

Better watch out for those new fangled Google boxes

Check out Ftrain for a review that trashes Microsoft Word.