I play around with a lot of new widgets as they hit the scene, and of the zillion or so I’ve encountered, only a couple seem to have lasting value. Generally, I’m not a personal fan of the time-wasting variety of widgets, but I like the ones that seem to add to effective communication. For example, you can check out the about me page to see the LibraryThing widgets I use to show my reading interests (you can actually browse my complete library, if you’re so inclined). Similarly, each page of this site includes a couple other widgets for illustrating my interests as a tag cloud as well as my LastFM info.
I was recently playing around with the wealth of Amazon widgets you can create. If you haven’t already checked ‘em out, I recommend popping in and seeing what they’ve got cooking. There’s just about every type you can possibly imagine slicing-and-dicing any way you’d probably want. While checking it out, I played with their embedded store widget where you can sell anything you want on your site.
In order to try it out, I looked around my office for something I could sell. My eye landed on the one-of-a kind “J. Trent Adams Modern Man of Action” action figure. My brother made it for me a few years back, and I thought this’d be the perfect thing to sell though this kind of widget. Of course, I’d really rather not let it go, but then again, who’s gonna’ pay me US$500 for something like this?
Now, the reason for this post is that I found another widget from iTunes I’m playing with and I needed the Amazon real estate for it. Rather than toss out the Modern Man of Action one-of-a-kind opportunity, I moved it into this post. At least now it’ll live somewhere in case I want to refer to it in the future… or someone found a hefty chunk of change laying around they want to parlay into something hip.
This may not be a totally revolutionary idea, but it’s something I’d love to see implemented. The end state of the proposed application would be to deploy what I call a “Semantic Servant” that provide guidance for searching and indexing. I’m terming it a “servant” rather than a “server” for the basic reason that I see it as a “helper tool” to existing servers rather than serving up content itself.
Without getting into it too deeply, the concept is that the Semantic Servant (via a new “Semantic Servant Index Protocol”) would reply on a specified port to provide a machine readable summary of the content available from another server. For example, if a web site is available at “http://www.contentsite.com”, the servant would reply on the same URL via something like “ssip://www.contentsite.com”. The results would be an XML packet including rules for leveraging the content on the sister site.
Keep in mind that this is a totally half-baked idea. My goal in this concept would be to empower a website developer with a tool that would, with a few minor configuration clicks, tell spiders/bots/indexers/etc. more about the associated site. In order for this to work, the servant application would have to be incredibly light weight and easy to use out-of-the-box. Assuming the servant defaults to a standard OWL, RDF, etc. standard configuration, the administrator could select from some pre-canned configurations and let it go.
The more time the administrator spends customizing the configuration, of course, the more fine-tuned it could be to the content of the specific site. In this way, though, indexers visiting the site would (a) have more information about the content of the site than is currently (easily) available, and (b) changes to the site would be more forgiving.
This is, of course, assuming that producers of web content want their information to be aggregated more freely. If a site producer wants to force all of it’s users to it’s front gate, this isn’t the solution for them. As I think we’re moving to an “All Content Everywhere” model, though, whereby there are multiple ways to experience the same content, I see something like this as an eventual must-have.
