Blank (Media) Slate

Testing out the new jott features. Jason Kolb told me about jott and I’m giving it a try, seems like it is working pretty well, the question is how the transcription looks when it gets to the blog site. Let’s give it a try. listen

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There is a lot of focus in the DataPortability Project about making it easier to access user data. Another aspect to data portability, in general, is an analogous set of activities around enabling other data on the web to be more machine accessible. A few groups have been approaching this issue in various ways, many of whom work under the umbrella of the Semantic Web community. One subset of people focusing their efforts on this are taking what they call the Linked Data approach.

At a recent Cambridge SemWeb Gathering at MIT, Kingsley Idehen, CEO of OpenLink Software and a founder of the DBPedia project, had a great term for where he sees himself within the greater context of people working on these issues:

I like to say that I belong to the Semantic Web Community, but I’m a member of the Linked Data Tribe.

I found this concept of a tiered relationship and allegiance illuminating. Talking about it with him, he makes a distinction between the community as a whole and the fact that he focuses on a specific set of actionable efforts. It has been this sense of “what can be done right now” that has helped build upon what others are doing to move toward the goals of the community as a whole.

For example, I recently discussed how microformat markup could benefit the Semantic Web with Danny Ayers, an RDF/SemWeb guru working for Talis. Similarly, Ivan Herman gave a talk at the gathering about how to leverage RDFa within the context of an existing XHTML web page. Both examples are stepping stones in the direction of truly portable data on the web, and something that Kingsley considers the “data substrate” upon which Linked Data representations can be built.

To that end, I’m on a mini crusade to encourage developers to take the extra few minutes required to consider how their display layers can expose their content with effective markup. Rather than everyone having to learn OWL, RDF, and SPARQL before any progress can be made, there are some simple steps that will catalyze further steps. It’s really not that hard, and even if you’re not a developer you can mark up your own blogs and pages with microformats to provide search engines with much-needed context to describe your content.

To learn more:

1. Linked Data Links
2. Microformats Overview
3. RDFa Primer

NOTE: I’m purposefully not diving too deep here into the real “meat” of Linked Data. Instead, I hope you’ll spend a couple clicks checking out the simplicity of what can be done to help build the “data substrate”.

After finishing “Double Negative” by David Carkeet, a good off-beat mystery, I wondered about other books for comparison when recommending it to people. It definitely has a hard-edged, acerbically humorous “flavor” that is hard to describe. I often like to frame books in context with others, trying to convey something of a “if you like that, you might like this” kind of thing. This case is a bit more difficult, though, and I’ve tried to come up with an apt comparison.

The nearest thematic neighbor to it I have in my own library would be “The Woman Who Knew Too Much” by Bett Reece Johnson. While that’s a relatively easy connection for me as they’re sitting near each other on my shelf, they’re generally placed across the room from each other in your favorite big bookstore. In fact, when looking for it in Borders as well as Barnes & Nobel, you’ll find it in the Gay/Lesbian Literature sections, an aisle not generally frequented by the mainstream mystery reader.

I was initially turned onto Johnson’s book while browsing a small bookstore in New Mexico. She was a featured local author, and from the jacket cover it seemed like it’d be worth a try. The blurb sketched the main character as a renegade espionage agent, Cordelia Morgan, who was tired of the game and left her unnamed employers to strike out on her own. The plot is about how she helps solve a local murder mystery.

The story turned out to be well written, and filled with interesting, earthy characters. As I’ll often do with books I’ve enjoyed, I looked for copies to give as gifts to friends. It was a surprise, then, when I’d query the bookstore staff and found where it was shelved. Apparently, they’d been told by the corporate office where it belongs, and it wasn’t with the other mysteries.

The book’s classification is the real mystery here. As far as I can tell, there’s one character who we learn (in flash-back) was a feminist, and may possibly have been a lesbian. Knowing where I pulled it from the shelf, I suppose I could infer some ambiguous sexuality in the main character, but it’s by no means overt (and I’d have to squint when reading between the lines to find it). At the end of the day, the only clue I’ve been able to uncover is that fact that the publisher, Cleis Press, puts out a number of (by and about) lesbian books. My guess, then, is that Johnson is missing out on a much wider potential audience being categorized outside the genre of the story itself.

In short: These are two fun, slightly offbeat murder mysteries I recommend. You’ll probably be able to find “Double Negative” easily enough, but you might need to wander into the Gay/Lesbian section for “The Woman Who Knew Too Much.”

Other Books I Recommend:

We kick off episode 7 of the DataPortability: In-Motion Podcast with the news of the week that MySpace launched “Data Availability” with Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter. Following immediately on their heels was the announcement that Facebook is releasing “Facebook Connect”, an extension of their 3rd party API providing deeper access to their user’s data.

We’re also joined by Brady Brim-Deforest, founder of Human Global Media, talking about the DataPortability Legal Entity Taskforce. He provides a good overview and update on the process underway to formalize the the project under a recognized legal banner.

The featured interview segment is with Danny Ayers, Semantic Web Developer at Talis. He touches on moving from document linking, through microformats, to feature-rich RDF modeling to identify portable data. Contrary to popular belief, he dispels the myth that it’s hard to migrate from a standard SQL data representation into addressable semantic objects.

Danny regularly posts on the following sites:

• Talis: N2 Blog
• Talis: Nodalities Blog
• This Week’s Semantic Web
• DannyAyers.com
• DataPortability & Me Video

Also mentioned in the episode:

• Semantic Tech Conference (Danny is speaking)
• Talis: Semantic Platform
• Tim Berners-Lee’s Giant Global Graph post
• Tabulator data browser
• Planet RDF

BONUS: We bring back Danny Ayer’s “Get Your Data Out” DataPortability Project anthem to close out the episode.

Episode 7: Listen | Comment
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Episode Length: 0:45:47

Joining us in episode 6 of the DataPortability: In-Motion Podcast is Paul Trevithick, CEO of Parity and the Founder of the Higgins Project. Higgins is an incredibly well thought-out open identity framework that’s designed to integrate identity, profile and social relationship information across multiple sites, applications and devices.

We were excited to talk with Paul about Higgins, especially since they released version 1.0 of their complete identify framework in late February. As it’s been a few years in the making, it might seem like the system wouldn’t play friendly with latecomers like some of the solutions being promoted by the DataPortability Project. Not so, however, as Paul talks through how they’ll plug into OpenID and newcomers Project VRM.

We’re often asked what the DataPortability Project is doing to help the development community, and this is a prime example. We’re helping tie the pieces together of existing solutions and promoting their utility. To that point, I circled back with Joe Andrieu to get his take on VRM hooking in with Higgins:

Higgins plus CardSpace means we have both a soup-to-nuts, open source Identity stack and a built-in client application on every .Net 3 machine. With that breadth, it’s just a matter of adoption time before the Identity-enabled net, and THAT will make VRM possible across the board.

NOTE: For more about VRM, check out In-Motion episode 2.

Before getting into the meat of the podcast, however, we hit some relevant news points:

1. Yahoo! Rewires for the Social Graph and Data Portability
2. Microsoft Announces Live Mesh
3. SocialDevCamp coming up in Baltimore
4. DataPortability DIY Project for May: “rel=me”
5. New DataPortability Logo Challenged (again)

Episode 6: Listen | Comment
Subscribe: iTunes | Feedburner | Via Email

Episode Length: 0:31:45