Re: A Distributed Economy -- A blog involving Linked Data

On 1/5/13 1:31 AM, Brent Shambaugh wrote:
> Where could this be launched? Small groups. Perhaps a HackerSpace, 
> Fablab, or MakerSpace. These people seem to crave something different, 
> and since they tend to try to be Renaissance people it just might fly. 
> Of course, you still have the selling problem. I've had this problem, 
> but it was mostly due to a lack of full understanding of the subject 
> area. So, narrowing down, as Eric Ries might suggest, was a bit of a 
> problem. I saw on this mailing list that Kingsley Idenhen was trying 
> to convice people to use turtle. It's true. It seems a little bit 
> easier to understand than RDF/XML. 
The key point, as you eluded to in your initial post, is being able to 
make connections. Circa. 2000 blogging became an official phenomenon 
(note. TimBL started blogging unofficially the day he had a functional 
HTTP server [1] ) and it did so by simplifying the process of producing, 
syndicating, and subscribing to content. Thus, all we need to do is 
tweak this bootstrap pattern by demonstrating to others that the art of 
creating, publishing, and consuming Linked Data goes something like this:

1. Create documents that describe items of interest (personal profiles, 
stuff you like, resumes, job postings etc..) up using an RDF model based 
syntax of choice -- for time and attention challenged end-users this has 
to be Turtle since this effort doesn't get any easier than: <> a 
<#Document>. <#Document> <#topic> <#someTopic> . etc ..

2. Save the document to a local folder

3. Copy the document from a local folder to a Web accessible folder -- 
or you can skip this step and just save to a mounted folder from some 
Web accessible location

4. Make others aware of your document via services like Twitter, 
Facebook, LinkedIn, G+ etc.. posts

5. Back to step 1.

You can't pull this off using an RDBMS system since its a black-box 
designed with a completely different usage pattern for working with data.

Yes, its all about the connections. Hyperlinks are today's connectors, 
so using them to enhance structured data representation is a powerful 
capability that just needs a simpler bootstrap pattern than what's been 
pushed (sorta) in the passed.

 From my view point, the Web exploded because of the "view source" 
pattern that was baked into Web browsers. End-users didn't care about 
HTML markup per se., they just learned to copy and paste the markup 
behind the rendered HTML pages presented by browsers.

Links:

1. http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/ -- the blog collection about the Web 
vision and architecture
2. 
http://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisperry/2012/06/01/mary-meekers-2012-trends-take-away-get-ready-to-re-imagine-business/ 
-- note the section of SEO and why its a relic of the past etc..

-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	
Founder & CEO
OpenLink Software
Company Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Personal Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca handle: @kidehen
Google+ Profile: https://plus.google.com/112399767740508618350/about
LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kidehen