David Duey

Auto-Homing Data

Last week I’d had a little bit of an epiphany while reading one of Brad Feld’s posts.  I made the following comment to his post:

When I read your paragraph about legacy data, I started thinking about your Glue theme and the bad Terminator (T-1000) in the movie Terminator 2. When the bad Terminator was torn apart, its various pieces would return to collective (for lack of a better description). Wouldn't it be cool if your data could automagically find its way home?

Since then, the possibility of auto-homing data has been rolling around in my head.  The basic idea is to have your data return home to a central repository regardless of the original entry point for the data. 

For example, I typed the comment above into Brad Feld’s blog, but I would like to have a copy of the comment along with the comment’s context (date, blog etc.) for my own personal data store.  Currently, Brad Feld has my data; I can copy it and paste it into a document or a database, but I have to do that myself, there’s nothing that will do it for me.

With auto-homing data, I want my data to automatically find my data store and incorporate itself into the collective.  This may seem a little strange at first, but in many ways it’s similar to email.  With email, content is created and sent to an address; the content did not have to be created at a specific place or within a specific application, it just has to be sent to the correct address.

I think we have all of the technologies we need to make auto-homing data happen.  Something as simple as an html tag or a microformat could be used to demarcate data for auto-homing.  We have the transport protocols, POP, XMPP and other standards to help move data around.  Almost all data storage systems (i.e. databases) can interact with XML and JSON formatted data.  And, there’s a ping service, Gnip Central, that could be used to notify a system that new and updated auto-homing data is available.

Of course, there are a number of obstacles to overcome such as walled gardens and data spam (yep!), but I think those obstacles could be overcome.  I think it’ll happen; I think I’ll see the day when my data will automagically appear in the collective and I want to be a part of making that happen.

Intense Debate Coolness

Mark Sampson (co-founder of MyBlogLog) wrote about some Intense Debate magic and tells how it was implemented.  It may not be semantic, but it is implicit.  Cool stuff!

Money and Microformats

By coincidence, I came across a couple of good posts from members of the of the Judy’s Book team.  (Sadly, Judy’s Book is winding-down.)

• Money.  Andy Sack, co-founder of Judy’s Book, has a brief post about raising money.  “Try as hard as you can not to raise money.”
• Microformats.  Dave Naffziger, Vice President of Engineering at Judy’s Book has a good analysis that explains why microformats have a number of challenges ahead.  It’s worth a ready if you’re into semantic web stuff.

Complementary Products

Free RSS Readers
Not long ago, NewsGator announced that all of its client RSS readers would be free.  Someone asked me why they’d do that.  My response was that NewsGator’s management probably decided that free RSS readers would help drive demand for their more profitable enterprise services.  But, Joel Spolsky, in his Strategy Letter V, explains the complementary product thing much better than I can:

Demand for a product increases when the prices of its complements decrease.

In fact, Greg Reinacker explicitly states NewsGator’s goal in one of his blog posts, ”What we’re working to do is to saturate the market with our clients.”

The Chicken or the Egg?
I think it’s kind of interesting that years ago a small software company actually used the proliferation of its complementary product as the vision for the company, “a computer on every desk and in every home.”  Regardless of what you think of Microsoft, in the early days of the company, I think they did a great job of communicating their “change the world” vision by emphasizing their complementary product.

I suspect that most new technologies face the same chicken and egg problem that micro software faced 30 years ago.  I’ve been working with semantic markup (microformats and RDFa) lately and I see the same sort of problem with the semantic web stuff.  In order for semantic markup to be useful, there has to be content made available as semantic markup.  In addition, users (or computers) need something that can “read” and possibly interpret semantic markup.  I’m seeing signs of life in both areas; Technorati and Yahoo seem to be leaders with semantic content and there are several Firefox add-ons for micoformats.  Also, according to rumors, IE8 will be able to recognize microformats.

Not Implicit Enough
Currently, most semantic markup is “read” by a browser plugin, and once the markup is identified, it’s up to the user to do something about it (i.e. add an hCard to your list of contacts).  But I don’t think content and reader are enough for the semantic stuff to work well.  And, I think that’s one of the problems with the current state of the semantic web, it’s not implicit enough; users have to take some action.  Semantic markup is certainly better than nothing, but there’s still a wide, gaping void between providing content that a computer can recognize and process (i.e. semantic markup) and improving the user experience by implicitly using and consuming semantic markup. 

I think the killer complementary product or service for semantic markup will be a tool (add-in, application, web service, whatever) that not only recognizes semantic markup, but also interprets and processes the information on the users’ behalf.  I don’t think that capability requires artificial intelligence; I think it can be something as simple as tracking attention and user preferences much like RSS readers do today.  Twine is probably a good start.

Automate Stupid Things

Nova Spivak has an interesting post titled "Artificial Stupidity: The Next Big Thing." 

I need software that will automate all the stupid things I presently have to waste far too much of my valuable time on. I need something to do all the stupid tasks -- like organizing email, filing documents, organizing folders, remembering things, coordinating schedules, finding things that are of interest, filtering out things that are not of interest, responding to routine messages, re-organizing things, linking things, tracking things, researching prices and deals, and the many other rote information tasks I deal with every day.

It sounds a lot like Brad Feld's Implicit Web.  There's lots of good stuff there for anyone searching for good startup ideas.

Email Triage

I’ve never given much thought to improving my email system until I watched a video of a lecture on time management given by Randy Pausch where he lambasted email systems.  Everyone is concerned about filtering spam, but amazingly it seems like little has been done to filter and categorize all incoming email.

Microsoft has an interesting research project named Snarf (I like that name) that addresses some of the email triage issues.

SNARF was built around the notion that social network information that is already available to the computer system can be usefully reflected to the user: a message from a manager might be seen differently than a message from a stranger, for example. SNARF applies this idea to email triage: handling the flow of messages when time is short and mail is long.

Other good email triage information can be found here.

Apps Following Data

Brad Feld mentioned something on his blog that I can't get out of head...

The dynamics this time around are pretty interesting to me.  Usually data follows apps.  This time the apps are following the data.  And the data is proliferating very quickly.

More interseting stuff here.

OpenSocial: Entreprenerial Opportunities

If you're a techie, you'd probably have to be a techie without a pulse if you haven't already heard about OpenSocial, Google's API for social networks.  If the Facebook API is any indicator, then OpenSocial will provide a lot of opportunities for entrepreneurs to create new and interesting applications.

I think it's a hugely exciting time to be an entrepreneur; there's certainly no lack of opportunity.  With all of the new and cool stuff going on, I think the big issue for entrepreneurs is finding something to focus on and remaining focused.

TechCrunch coverage of OpenSocial is here. 

Measuring and Categorizing Attention

A while ago, I’d read some stuff that Dave Winer wrote about attention, but I didn’t give it much thought.  Today, Brad Feld posted an entry about attention and APML that got my brain juices flowing. 

One question that came to mind with regard to attention is, “How do you measure attention?”  It may seem obvious how attention would be measured within the context of a feed aggregator, but I wonder how attention would be best measured within other contexts, like surfing the web.  One site I came across said, “Attention is a time-based measure…”  But, I wonder if that’s always true; if we spend more time on something does that always mean that particular “something” should rank higher on our attention scale?

Also, I wonder how you categorize attention.  Do you use tags or word frequency or words in a title?  Can you analyze links to help determine category or taxonomy?  Is there an “attention graph”?  When does content create the need for its own category?

Intense Debate

I've installed the Intense Debate comment system on my blog.  It was an easy and painless installation, and it's a much more functional that plain vanilla system that I had.  The Intense Debate system is one of those great ideas; I didn't realize how dysfunctional the old style comments were until I'd used the Intense Debate system.  In addition to improving the commenting functionality, Intense Debate adds a bunch of other functionality including statistics (check out their site for details and sign-up for the beta). 

Intense Debate was one of the startups that graduated from TechStars this past summer.  Very cool stuff!