1 Silo, 2 Silos, 3 Silos, 4 ....
posted Monday, December 17, 2007 at 11:54 am MST*DRAFT*
By way of context (as good as any; better than most): Where Is AJAX Headed? Discussing the Future of the Rich Web" at AJAXWorld asks, "What are the most burning AJAX, rich web applications, and Web 2.0 questions need to be answered in 2008?". (Parenthetically, at BusinessWeek.com magazine, "The Two Flavors of Google" ... Hadoop search and OpenSource.)
Thinking about "silos" ... grappling for an over-arching metaphor ... references to glasperlenspiel only go so far! ;-)
How about this: Buddy has written a fine short essay on leveraging information. (Or maybe on how children living in poverty is actually criminal assault!) Let's say Buddy doesn't know about OpenOffice and has created a M$ .DOC. How does he share it?
Let's say he creates an HTML version. Then what? He posts it as a page on his site ... maybe using the "page" function in WordPress, so he can receive comments. Maybe as a blog post, to the same effect. Maybe as a doc in docs.google ... maybe in 1 or several different collab systems. Maybe even as a wiki page. Or maybe he emails it to a list ... or a few lists (assuming he's converted away from DOC). Or maybe he uploads it as a file to yahoo or google groups.
Great! He's broadcast his work!
But: each one of those is its own silo. (My point: "DAV" is still primitive.)
I'm sure you've seen blog posts that have received lots of comments ... horrid. Ghastly. With all my surveying I've seen a total of 1 blog system that makes any effort to thread those (apart from the threading mechanism at LiveJournal), and that's the system Jack came up with at EXTJS. But it's exceptional.
So instead of a solitary document sitting on his HD he has perhaps a dozen versions ... each one of them subject to the silo mechanism of whatever platform he has used.
A vast improvement: 12 silos instead of 1.
"Synchronized web" is the newest buzz phrase I've found. But the need remains ... the holy grail of semantic web ... how do we order (i.e. index and access) loosely related documents?
That's what I've derived with my thinking on "participatory deliberation": a mechanism to address (c/w on-page discourse) canonical versions of documents.
HeyHo ... it's so much more fun to play with sites like MyBlogLog than to hoe in with the work! *grin*
Also of interest. "The Awesome Potential of the Semantic Web", Marshall Kirkpatrick on an interview with BYU Phd student Yihong Ding. see also "Top-Down; a New Approach to Semantic Web" at ReadWriteWeb
p.s. http://www.netsquared.org ... http://www.techsoup.org ... http://openconcept.ca ... nice to see folk doing good work.
