Grid Thinking

For the past year i'm loaded with thoughts due to what’s happening with internet standards and innovations. It seems that the most important standards are in place. We got webservices, RSS and applications that can publish and subscribe to RSS Feeds like blogging tools and podcasting studio's to publish feeds with content and RSS Aggregators and podcasting clients to subscripe to content.

Two big parts

• The first part is creating new methods to realize efficient ways to share ideas and have realtime brainstorming sessions with large amounts of people.
  A part of this could focus on new and better (structured) methods to connect publications and comments. This could be done by using tags and topics, but also based on a ‘Mindmaps way’ of connecting publications (text, audio/video). 

• This second part of the idea basically comes down to realizing new ways for connecting and sorting publications, but now based on a combination of 'social tagging and rating' and using algorithms in software (business intelligence) to do the tagging and rating. This system could also be used form monitoring the topics and trends in a (corporate) blogosphere.

I seems like a good idea to find new ways for adding posts and comments on blogs as 'branches of a mindmap'. This way conversations, discussions and related items can get connected based on the contents. Like this you will have structured commenting and you would be able to navigate trought comments on a post, based on your deeper interest and directions you take within the branches (in the comments or added facts).

If you want to add comments or participate in a discussion, it would be very easy to directly publish your input (like text, media or other files) and also connect to multiple existing 'information branches' in other mindmap structured discussions. When all of this would be done wih the same standards, you will get a very interesting three dimensional connected representation of topics and comments.

Yes, in a big way this is already happing in the form of blogging, comments, permalinks, tagging, folksonomy, social networks and services like Technorati, Bloglines, Newsgator, Del.isio.us and more.

The technology that these services are based on are extremely interesting, because they ad the 'community aspects' we know in 'real life socializing' like direct suggestions, shared interests and opinion leaders.  The aspect of 'mass communication' add the 'human factor' to clustered publications. And things will really become interesting when information will automatically be sorted and formatted in a way that it best fits you information need.

We need to think of more effective ways of structuring and consuming information.

Gridthinking  is about the key technology behind the first version of a Computer Network that realizes Collective Thinking between the community of internet connected people who wish to share information and thoughts on all kind of subjects and interests. (related blogs)
 
Gridthinking could be about the Google Grid. But is more that this alone.  Yes it's about recorded media (EPIC?), but it's also about people and the possibility to real-time share thoughts with the rest of the world no matter where you are. And GridThinking is connecting al related thoughts and finding the right thoughts, ideas and facts just at the moment you need them (or even didn’t know you needed them).
GridThinking is about a new evolution in collaboration and communication and large parts of it can be build with technology that's available today (the web 2.0)....
 

By connecting data based on tags, topics, auto search and (datamining) clusters you get a layer of data concerning the same type of information. To sort this flat data layer, we will need and extra system to rate the quality for this data, this realizes the Fourth dimension in the grid.

The value of the data in a data layer can be rated based on the background of the person or organisation who published it. This means that the fourth dimension consist of a system where data like the age of the person who published it, the work experience of a person on particular subject or the credibility of a media company must be stored together with a unique profile of every person, organisation or webservice on the internet. With virtually unlimited parameters, and enough people working on it (like Wikipedia), you could build really objective ratings…

So we have to design tags for publishing entities, to rate them on knowledge on a specific subject. We need this to rate a post from a 60 year old math professor above that of a first year math student. So that if a maths professor post a item on the web about  math, this item could get a 8 out of 10 (weighing) for 'quality of data', this could be based on: the rating on the university he works for , a rating given by all his former students, rating based on the performance of students concerning maths after they left the school, rating of colleges, friends, etc.

You want a thought question?  We need a central system and organisation who checks the integrity of the data profiles of publishing entities…  But which organisation do we trust with this hard to stay 100% objected and limited affected by commerce?
Could we build a system for this?  Just a combination of algorithms, tags and

Webspiders (searchbots). Or should it be a collective system, where the profiles and published items are checked by all the people using the system, like an advanced e-bay or the Internet Movie database system?

That thing are changing can be noticed, in the form of new groundbreaking software design standards like XML, webservices and SOA architectures. But also the development suites supporting webservices and SOA architectures. The news in June 2005 about the deep adoption of RSS in Operating systems of Microsoft and Apple will probably are going to play a huge roll in this all….

The at the moment, important new use of standards are formed on the area of:

RSS, (audio/video) Blog , tags, Folksonomy,  social networking,  Semantic Web,  WS-AllYouCanThinkOff.

SHARE unlimited files and ideas on a way that almost everybody know how to use it. Add a publication model, based on a model where people who delved parts for a idea, product or media file get automatically paid based on the importance of there role in the end result. This could be done in simple XML formatted contracts where global percentages can be set on how thing ar diveded.

Using RSS on the desktop there are lot's of advantages for programmers..

The good thing is that on the desktop you (as a company or individual) only have to administer the RSS link (xml file) to sync with the people you are exchanging information or transactions with.

Because the link can always stay the same (if you don’t change domain name) your subscribers will never loose the connection with you information (XML).

So when a node (desktop, server or service) chooses to (manually) add your hyperlink to his list of RSS Subscriptions, you have a local pointer at the node and you control the contents of this XML file!  (this at a refresh rate configured by the node).

This way you can simply change parameters at desktop anytime time, anywhere. The node only needs a (permanent) connection to internet (like ADSL, GPRS, UMTS, WIFI or another four letter standard).
It would be a good thing if we could set the refresh rate of a specific RSS feeds by the RSS publisher, and that the subscriber would have to expect or decline this refresh rate. This way you could have multiple transaction to agree on a RSS Refresh rate.

Now you have a agree refresh rate on a XML file that is stored locally on a desktop and you thereby have an real interesting interface. You can exchange (structured) information and (mutually agreed) file types. What else do we need?

Well different ways of formatting would be nice.. (XML stylesheet definitions, like DTDs, XML-Data, XDR, RDF, SOX, DCDs, XSchema and DDML) 

I can think of more, but i like to free up everybody’s imagination…

What about ONE RSS FEED to synch all TAGS for all users?

• This list hold all Tags used on the Internet.
• This RSS feed will be managed by a Standardisation organisation (like w3) for formatting of the XML and to standardised tag names.
• This list will eventually exist for every language and culture (frame of reference models)
• This list can be used by Internet clients (like Grease monkey and Technoproxy or for Microsoft Office SmartTags in Office Documents).

This is a summary of the most important goals for this project:

• To realize more useful and effective ways to collaborate, share and reflect on ideas that help us solve the problems in our world.

•  How can it be that often you didn’t hear about things that could be very important to you.
  (The answer mostly is: You didn’t know it was there, you didn’t know where to look or didn’t how how it was named). A part of this problem is realized with web search.
  
  
• How can it be that often a small group of people is working on projects where large groups of people can benefit from?

• We have to stay ahead on 'computer power'. There are solid predictions that processor power will reach 'human brain power' as soon as 2020.  And where shall webservices and grid computing take us? People have to keep up with computers..or..

• Often people with good ideas have no time to realize them themselves. We need a good place where these projects can be designed by online brainstorming and managed by virtual teams.

Lists – Projects

These are three (sub) projects for realizig the ThinkGrid, where I see opportunities for today:

1. A Project to realize the Grid Thinking Interaction model (or Web Forum 2.0):

• The platform is based on people, organisations and companies publishing RSS feeds
  
• Mindmap structure treads to organize and navigate publications
  
• Multi Format posts (the ability to easily add foto, video and document RSS Streams)
  
• Real time Forums integration   Live meetings, application sharing>
  
• Skype meeting that automatically become podcast
  
• Applications sharing that automatically become screencasts
  
• Webservices and other transaction systems that synch to other systems
  
• Use XML and AJAX for quick rendering of the updates in (list) pages (Realtime browser presentation)

• Build interfaces and services on top of existing web solutions for online communities like Communityserver or PHP Forum. 

2. A project for Building The gridThinking Integration model

The following things can be done on site, community or internet wide spectrum.

http://maartenvisser.com/recordings/GridThinking_Sharedv02.doc

This was My first document on GridThinking (November 2004)

On 8 November 2004 I listened to the Trade secrets Podacst from Dave Winer and Adam Curry on my way home. This was the monday after Bloggercon 3 and the podcast was a reflection from Dave and Adom on Bloggercon.

During the podcast I realised there isn’t a good way of combining an ONLINE and a OFFLINE event. And there are no good tools to logically sort, collect and connect all the ideas and feedback that would take place at the event (where a speaker and an audience sits) and from all the people in the world who are participating online.

I wrote this document in 15 minutes as soon as I came home..

Audio test

http://maartenvisser.com/recordings/whyus.wav