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Restarting this Blog

Maarten Visser — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 02:03:00 GMT

Yes, you are seeing this right.
A blog post after almost 2 years of silence..
Things have changed, technology has reached antother level. It's time to pick up this trail.

For some reason 1-2-2008 is an interesting date.

TODAY:
Google launched the “Social Graph API' and Microsoft Proposes Acquisition of Yahoo! for $31 per Share
Both news items could have a big impact on the internet in 2008.

Because I'm changing my personal strategy at the moment, I feel this could have impact on my choices (I will write about this later).
The new Internet ripple that has formed in the last couple of months could be a full new wave of (semantic web) innovations.

I wanne be part of it when the Semantic web (for the version freaks: WEB 3.0) really starts rolling...

Forget about the Web2.0

Maarten Visser — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 00:20:00 GMT

Let me start the new year with a promise to myself.

I will stop using the term ‘web2.0’. For the last weeks I saw this term wrongly used most of the time. There are a lot of bloggers and journalists who just don’t have any idea where there writing about… Most of the time, you can’t blame them.

The future of the internet can’t be tagged by one word and a version number (read my last post why).

In my opinion only experienced developers have the knowledge and the ‘frame of reference’ to imagine the possibilities of the latest internet developments. This isn’t something that can easily be understood (or described). You need a deep understanding of the technology behind the internet, you need understanding of the new web standards and you got to have the creativity to imagine the near future possibilities..

I have spoken with a lot of people about new concepts for using the internet, and I noticed that even people with a IT background or people with a high IQ (but without IT knowledge) have problems with understanding these concepts…

When I think of the potential of the new web standards, I get a very powerful and energetic feeling in my stomach. When I start imagining the possibilities, I always get exited because of the unlimited ways in how to use this technologies.

And I know one thing… 2006 will be a great year for the internet!

Does the Web has version management?

Maarten Visser — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 00:17:00 GMT

Does the Internet has some kind of overall big change management process J hah! No!

I don't think so....

Then why are we talking about the Web 2.0?

The internet can be ‘controlled’ from a technical infrastructure perspective, but the application (TCP/IP) layer and the data that is communicated can’t be controlled. For all non ‘IT Internet specialists’.. The internet has no system to globally control content or webapplications. You got protocols and development languages, but almost no ways to control the internet…. That’s the beauty.

So, today we have unlimited human readable content publications methods (web sites).. Nice!

We got millions of pages that are linked together.. We can access this content by using ‘human keyword operated giant computer scripts… Aka Search Engines. .. hmmm
This are computer applications that follow all links on the internet (from many different starting points) and ’spider’ the (HTML based) information on web servers. The content found by the search engine ‘spiders’ is examined by (data mining) software, that uses computer search algorithms to sort, group and rank the information.

Is this working? .. well, it nice, but… is this really effective? .. No

So what’s this new phase for the internet that we have entered?

The technology on which the internet is based has evolved in the last couple of years. What this technology will bring is hard to predict, not even the smartest people could do this. One thing is for sure, we haven’t seen 1% of it in action yet…

The internet of today can be used to do (human configured) publications and subscription services (webservices). These services can find other services based on a machine readable yellow pages (UDDI) or by a pointers set by the programmer. Webservices can also make contact to other webservices and make ‘data exchange agreements’ and share information based on models.

What’s happening in 2006?

We will continue building (machine readable) information publication and subscription services. These services will bring us new ways to efficiently consume and share information (using RSS and SSE). And this will help us solving our daily problems and needs.

It would be nice if everybody did some thinking in how we can use this in our international advantages. I wish everybody a great, inspired and networking 2006.

Maarten Visser

PS.

Many people see the whole ‘web 2.0' thing wrong.. This isn’t yet another Buzz or Hype.. It’s just the momentum in the mind of (internet) developers.. And the potential we feel….

And no! This isn’t about start-ups that want money from VC’s.. This is about developers and entrepreneurs who can imagine the extremely exciting future we are facing…

We people are lazy. We do our ‘one plus one is two’ based on history and own experiences. This is why people talk about another bubble and other negative things….Sorry people, this is your wake-up call. Everything will be different for the coming years! J

The Wisdom of Crowds

Maarten Visser — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 18:51:00 GMT

I was reading a great interview with Ray Ozzie today, and i came across a part that I had to publish here. This is totally in line with my vision on what gridthinking could archive..

WK
Large-scale collaboration is one of the most interesting emerging kinds of technologies. Broadcast messaging, the ability to reach out across your enterprise and ask questions or interrupt people, is probably just the tip of the iceberg here. I’m reading The Wisdom of Crowds (Doubleday, 2004) by James Surowiecki, who talks about the long-recognized phenomenon that if you ask a lot of people a question where there’s a lot of uncertainty and then look at the mean tendency of the answer, it tends to be correct.

It’s like the audience lifeline in “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” Ask a question of the audience and let them vote on the answer. So the question here is, can technology help a large collective of people cooperate with each other, maybe pool their abilities and knowledge, to make more intelligent decisions? And, really, would we want it to if it could?

RO
It’s an intriguing question. What we already know is that MSN Search and Google and others like that have proven that the long tail of the Internet has answers to many questions. Many of us pose questions in the form of queries to these engines and we get back answers that you would never expect given the size of the corpus out there.

There have been several attempts to build systems where you pay people to answer interesting questions. I don’t think that they have done what you’re suggesting in terms of collecting the answer from a number of people and taking the mean. I haven’t seen that kind of thing, at least on the public Internet, succeed anywhere near the degree of the pure information-based one.

WK
The data-mining approach?

RO
Yes. I’m still more focused on the data-mining approach, particularly within enterprises, because I think one of the big promises of all of this technology is to make it easy for people to leave trails of artifacts that can be used later when you don’t really expect it. Groove Networks did quite a bit of work with the government, particularly in the realm of post-9/11 information-sharing across agencies. Again, the problem is that people hold information close to the vest. The promise is that we can develop systems where people create artifacts and query engines that can get relevant answers to questions at a time disconnected from when the information was produced. I think there’s a lot of promise in this area. I just don’t know what form it’s going to take.

Ray Ozzie is a great IT pioneer and visionary.

I have never been a real fan of Lotus Notes, but 'his' Groove software is really good and I love SSE!

Defragmentation of the mind

Maarten Visser — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 14:49:00 GMT

It has been six weeks since I last posted here…

But this doesn’t mean this the project stood still …..

I’ve had some weeks of vacation and I also spend less time online. This gave me the possibility to clear my head and do some defragmentation, or in human language, I sorted things out. One of the things that I sorted out, is this project. Two months ago I started writing about this concept that I have, which I named GridThinking. This ‘vision of the near future’ that I have, needs to be sliced and served in ‘eatable’ (chunk) sizes. This is what I will try to do from today..

In the next weeks I will free time and I will start building some real working concepts. I will get myself some extra time by taking the train to work in stead of my car. The train takes round 70 minutes to get there, and I can spend them writing and posting on the internet by using my UMTS/GPRS /WLAN card and my laptop.

I'm looking forward to it...

We are the web

Maarten Visser — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 00:35:00 GMT

I want to point you to this article on Wired, called 'We are the web'
In this article the author (Kevin Kelly) writes about a meeting he had with Ted Nelson.
This guy already tried to build the first 'hyperlinked pages' based on his own envisioned scheme in 1965!

This is what Kevin writes about this meeting with Ted Nelson in a dark pub in 1984:

Although Nelson was polite, charming, and smooth, I was too slow for his fast talk. But I got an aha! from his marvelous notion of hypertext. He was certain that every document in the world should be a footnote to some other document, and computers could make the links between them visible and permanent. But that was just the beginning! Scribbling on index cards, he sketched out complicated notions of transferring authorship back to creators and tracking payments as readers hopped along networks of documents, what he called the docuverse. He spoke of "transclusion" and "intertwingularity" as he described the grand utopian benefits of his embedded structure. It was going to save the world from stupidity.

I believed him. Despite his quirks, it was clear to me that a hyperlinked world was inevitable - someday. But looking back now, after 10 years of living online, what surprises me about the genesis of the Web is how much was missing from Vannevar Bush's vision, Nelson's docuverse, and my own expectations. We all missed the big story. The revolution launched by Netscape's IPO was only marginally about hypertext and human knowledge. At its heart was a new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing. And the ways of participating unleashed by hyperlinks are creating a new type of thinking - part human and part machine - found nowhere else on the planet or in history.

Not only did we fail to imagine what the Web would become, we still don't see it today! We are blind to the miracle it has blossomed into. And as a result of ignoring what the Web really is, we are likely to miss what it will grow into over the next 10 years. Any hope of discerning the state of the Web in 2015 requires that we own up to how wrong we were 10 years ago.

This guy was way ahead of his time! The docuverse.. hmmm. Bad name, but such great ideas, more that 20 years ago… Il love the rest of the article to. Worth reading if your interested in the history and the future of the internet..

OPML Filtering and Notification

Maarten Visser — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 20:51:00 GMT

An OPML file is a XML based file that holds a collection of RSS Feeds.
OPML files can be created and managed by individuals, organisations or software to collect all RSS feeds about a specific topic or common goal.

It would be nice when a user could add a OPML file to the desktop and use custom or predefined filters based on parameters like your background, news interests, work, projects and hobbies. New items based on your filters will result in a (popup) notification as soon as they are published. A popup in a specific filter will only be shown when the status on your desktop is set to a particular mode. For example, when you build a filter with the category ‘WORK – Research”, new items will only be show when your desktop is in the ‘Work-Reseach Status’. This mode can be set in the same way this is done with Instant Messaging (IM) clients.

This software will automatically filter out all interesting RSS items you would like to know about and will present this at the moment you are working on this specific subject.

Here are some images on this idea:
OPML-FilteringNotification
Filtering2
OPML-StatusFiltering

a Collective Interaction Network?

Maarten Visser — Wed, 13 Jul 2005 01:23:00 GMT

When I was thinking about names for describing this technology I write about, I thought about a 'Collective Interaction Network'.
So like always, I tried it on the search engines.. And then i found something really interesting ....

I found a site about a 'Collective Intelligence Network project, called RU3. This project has some really cool content!

As with most ideas, for some reason multiple people think about the same (direction of) ideas!

This is just where this whole concept came from in the first place! There always multiple people working on the same kind of ideas, without knowing it.

Ideas and projects are shared using channels which have a very limited reach.
Finding a solution for a complex problem on the internet is very hard, when you don't know how to describe your problem. In every language or culture you could describe and spell out the same idea or problem in at least 10 different ways. This is why we need a system that really connects our ideas, and realize automated naming (based on your own concepts). Another good thing could be the ability to format, sort (slice and dice) or group (data mining) all available publications (like ideas), information and media in a way that it will fit you personal knowledge and experience (frame of reference). Yeah. That would be great! he Web 2.0 will start making this difference... The personal and 2 way internet experiance.

Today I found more great information here. It’s about using Wikipedia’s as a Collaboration and Brainstorming tool..

I found this at the OpenBC Social Capital & Collective Intelligence Forum. A place where only 59 people can currently access the content. This content should be open to everybody. This forum holds very interesting stuff!

I hope that (in the near future), when you think of something, you would be able to find EVERYTHING that is ever written on that subject. This then should be ordered in a way, where the most important publications (for you) are on top and you will have differtent approaches to easaly resort all information...
Can't wait for that to happen...

Introduction of two big parts

Maarten Visser — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 02:35:00 GMT

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.

Some Basics and the Fourth dimension in the grid

Maarten Visser — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 02:02:00 GMT

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.