Sunday, January 23, 2005

yesterday

With the elements I have presented a few days ago, I tried to imagine the whole system working. Many small problems remained, essentially the need to simplify the process.
On the road to meet some friends [all of them bloggers] I wanted to propose them an experiment about the Semantic Internet and I was seeking something so easy that they wouldn't have to work about it. Then a more appealing schema for the Semantic Internet emerged.

What I wanted:
A central place where a log of everyones production would be accessible. Dated, with the documents title, a small description, abstract like, a link to grab it, with an identification of the author(s) and the mention of the CC
Were people would be able to comment.
A way to use keywords to find everyones files talking about it
A way to follow reactions to an opinion and links proposed by the author of the document.

Two things gave me hard time: The author profile; it should have different views depending who's looking at it: anonymous, family, friend, contact etc. The management of the links proposed by people who visit.

As the main idea was to obtain the desired result with a minimum of development (even without any, if possible) and I was attached to my initial schema, I had some hard time. Then I tried to make sense out of the different acquisitions of Google, imagining that every element should fit.
:-)

The solution came easily enough as I reconsidered the existing tools.

A central place: a blog
This is dated, signed, can carry the documents name at the place of the Title, present a short description as the Post, admit as much Tags as necessary representing the keywords, may have Comment enabled and should have Trackbacks also, and either every element is under the same CC license, or particular ones may be attributed to each post.
If a document is multi-authors, then it is present at each ones blog.
The only element missing is the link to the document, and it could be prepared manually even today.

If the blog is generated automatically each time a document is placed in the Public Folder then the job is done.
If the blog is based in blogspot the search function (within the production of a person/entity) is available.

The essential changes to make concern the "Comments". Now, there is the new "nofollow" attribute avoiding misuse of comments to promote an URL. That would be restricted to any anonymous commenter, while logged in people, could provide somehow trusted links. Maybe people added in "Contacts", the same way as in Flickr, would have the privilege to get access to different versions of the author's Profile, according to there declared status as Friends, Family, Contact etc.
And that's all...



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