OK - so I've been studying and watching the successful efforts of others (
Userland,
iCommune,
Google,
PingID,
Chandler,
LiveJournal,
Ryze,
HotorNot,
Blogger) at establishing new kinds of 'web services' - which are part tool, part service, start off being free, but give you a way to pay and help build a new kind of on-line economy. These new kind of tools are the foundation of a whole new way to enable folks to build dynamic, on-the-fly, moblogging kinds of on-line communities.
If you could imagine a tool that created and managed these new kinds of communities - then you'd know what we're doing. These new kind of tools connect stand alone islands - currently categorized as the worlds of entertainment, communications, messaging, on-line storage, mobile services and personal publishing - together into a meshed universe - somewhat resembling the real universe.
I really think we're on the brink of going beyond just 'linking', where the intertwined mesh that connects data, editors, routers, layout programs, membership servers, information repositories, schedules, channels, feeds, objects, APIs, data structures, compound document architectures and dynamic data - all coalesce in the mesh.
That mesh is being formed by a loosely coupled conflagration of an open source community of developers building something great. It's a decentralized infrastructure, currently based on nothing but chutzpah and instinct. It's at this mesh level - that crucial standards building can enable an entire generation of 'openness.'
And I really think that the mesh is one level above the web. That we gotta think bigger. The IPv6 efforts are going nowhere and they don't give us semantics, structure or anything - but bigger numbers. We've got the opportunity of establishing proxy servers NOW that can establish object models to build on, that our great-great-grandchildren can use!
There's a beginnning of that in Chandler. It's baked into XML-RPC and RSS. It's part of all our souls and dreams.
I posted a first status report yesterday - which planted my Digital ID, my past and current efforts into cyberpsace. Today I bring all that with me, and add in reference points to other efforts, actual proposals and efforts by others and post a Status Report #2.
This is all going on the same week that Mitch Kapor is reporting on the status of the OSAF's efforts - at Stanford, Jim Speth is promoting the concept of private clouds, Dave Winer is showing how to use namespace extensions within RSS and attach enclosures to an RSS feed, and gets to work on new kinds of outliners, things are heating up!
The Open Content Network was announced, Kazaa sued the RIAA, the Alwayson-network launched and Doc talked about the local Barber shop in his home town (and started to discover the importance of having an integrated media management system and being able to aggregate media from anywhere on the web - into one place.) And AOL lost $100B in value.
I meet with folks from the Internet Archive next week and several other efforts that make sense to tie into 'the mesh'.
Here's my Topic Channel I created for 'TheMatrix'. Phil Pearson's Internet Topic Exchange is one of the five servers I've identified we need. Perhaps Ryze or Ascio's code base could be the open source digital identity solution, compatible with PingID - of course. And of course - these public servers will leverage as much GPL open source code as possible including Jabber, Zope, Chandler, SourceID, Apache Cocoon, etc.
Unfortunately I can only attach so many topics to this post - as in reality I want to use this post as a central anchor point for ricocheting all my poiinters, references, links, posts or discussions on where all these trends, efforts and status - are coming together. So I'd want ALL current links to me and this open standard proposal - to hit THIS permalink, but guess what?
I need to update the status and create new reports - so what do I do? A new kind of link- which connects to a link proxy server - that's NOT tied to URLs at all! Maybe we should call it an anchornode. Anway - as I make more status reports - I'll update the main information and status of our efforts, point to the archived/previous status reports and move on.
But for now - we're stuck with using the good old fashioned blog microcontent type (with permalinks and embedded <img tags) - which will have to suffice. I also use LiveTopics topics as well, but that ain't standard - by any means - yet. Hopefully Phil and Matt will help change that - soon enough.
So there you have it folks - Status Report #2 - chronicling the journey towards 'the mesh'. But first - the Matrix.
A lot of all this was inspired by Doc's Infrastructure Presentation - which caused me to present my own rap at WebBuilder '02 - with thanks to Scoble for pulling that off! And of course none of this would be possible without RSS, XML-RPC, OPML and Dave Winer. Here's my Ryze location and my Technorati status.
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It's true that AOL's end-user's experiences have been far from compelling - but they actually did that on purpose. They didn't want to provide anything too advanced - or else their customers would get confused. But ever since versions 5 or 6 of AOL, it's become a cluttered mess.
