A press release from the Department of Unwanted Efficiencies:

Huntsville, AL – June 1, 2009 – Cabinet NG (CNG), provider of document management and workflow software, today announced that Limestone County, Alabama is using CNG’s document management software to enable a unique Video Hearing application. By processing new jail inmates through CNG’s Secure Access Filing Environment (CNG-SAFE), all the necessary legal forms and other court paperwork is instantly available during the video hearing process. Limestone County can now get the most out of local government resources in a time of fiscal restraint and challenging economic conditions by streamlining the preliminary hearing process while protecting a defendant’s constitutional right to participate in the legal process.

David Seibert, Limestone County’s Commission Chairman, said, “We are committed to putting into place technology that allows us to better serve Limestone County citizens. Enabling electronic preliminary hearings by integrating document management with videophones eliminates the manpower, transportation and time needed for trips between the Limestone County Jail and the courthouse.”

Added Mike Blakely, Limestone County Sheriff, “There are public safety benefits to conducting preliminary hearings without transporting inmates, and we can process more inmates through the system this way, saving the county time and money.”

…[T]his Video Hearing solution is a unique integration of electronic document management and Videophone technologies that can be applied in a number of environments. For example, any face to face process requiring the processing of documents can be liberated from the physical constraints of appearing in person.

If you want face time, don’t do the crime.

[Tags: document_management jails justice video_hearings ]

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I’m excited about Google Wave, based on TechCrunch’s description of it, and my own fervid projections of what I’d like it to be. If I’m understanding it correctly — and the likelihood is that I’m not … take that as a serious warning — this could be bigger than Facebook and MySpace in terms of how it terraforms the Net.

Social networking sites were hugely important because they addressed a huge lack. The Web knows how pages are linked, but it knows nothing about the relationships among groups of people. SNS’s added that layer. And the smartest of the social network sites treated themselves as platforms on which other apps could be built. Google Wave goes back to the Internet’s most basic layer: people talking with one another. While there are obviously lots of apps and protocols enabling the back and forth gesticulating we call “conversation,” there’s been nothing underneath them all that recognizes that they’re all different ways of doing the same basic thing: IM doesn’t know about email doesn’t know about Usenet doesn’t know about chat doesn’t know about Facebook messaging doesn’t know about Twitter. Each of these ways humans have invented to talk with one another is treated as its own separate app, as different as playing a zombie-killing game and marking up x-rays. In fact, many years ago, a few of us tried to generate interest in what we called threadsML, which we hoped (vainly) would be a standard way for conversations to be shared, stored, and moved around.

Wave, as I understand it, is a platform underneath the multiple modalities of human conversation. It doesn’t care if you’re emailing, IMing, or throwing photos at one another. The structural object is the conversation; the means of conversation is just a detail. [Note: I think.] The fact that you said “No way!” using IM when talking in realtime with a friend who’s reading the same email thread with you no longer will mean your expostulation will have to be treated as a separate app, just as when talking in the real world, we don’t count our hand gestures as something apart from the conversation just because we make them with our hands instead of with our mouths.

So far, Google is (unsurprisingly) doing the right and smart thing, opening it up to developers early on, using the open XMPP protocol, and open sourcing the Google Wave Federation Protocol. If this is to be more than just another app for talking, Google has to treat it like an open platform. The first sign of lock-in will scare away the very folks Google needs if Wave is to be more than just a shiny new set of tin cans and string for those who want to talk with other Google users.

There’s lots that could go wrong. And my understanding of Wave is so preliminary that I’m sorry to be so far out on the limb. But I’ve been waiting on this limb for a long time, frustrated that conversations are splintered by medium when they should be joined by topic and social group. Wave is the first thing I’ve seen that offers a genuine hope for getting this right by starting with the most fundamental social object we have: people talking with one another.

I think.

[Tags: google_wave conversation social_networks social_objects ]

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Chris Soghoian is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk called: “Caught in the Cloud: Privacy, Encryption, and Government Back Doors in the Web 2.0 Era,” based on paper he’s just written. In the interest of time, he’s not going to talk about the “miscreants in government” today.

Pew says that “over 69% of Americans use webmail services, store data online, or other use software programs such as word processing applications whose functionality is in the cloud.” Chris’ question: Why have cloud providers failed to provide adequate security for the customers. (“Cloud computing” = users’ data is stored on a company server and the app is delivered through a browser.)

He says that providers are moving to the cloud because they don’t have to worry about privacy. Plus they can lock out troublesome users or countries. It lets them protect patented algorithms. They can do targeted advertising. And they can provide instant updates. Users get cheap/free software, auto revision control, easy collaboration, and worldwide accessibility. Chris refers to “Cloud creep”: the increasing use of cloud computing, its installation on new PCs, etc. Vivek Kundra switched 38,000 DC employees over to Google Docs becore he became Federal CIO. “It’s clear he’s Google-crazy.” Many people may not even know they’ve shifted to the cloud. Many cloud apps now provide offline access as well. HTML 5 (Firefox 3.5) provide offline access without even requiring synchronizers such as Google Gears.

Chris says that using a single browser to access every sort of site — from safe to dangerous — is bad practice. Single-site browsers avoid that. E.g., Mozilla Prism keeps its site in its own space. With Prism, you have an icon on your desktop for, e.g., Google Docs. It opens in a browser that can’t go anywhere else; it doesn’t look like a cloud app. “It’s a really cool technology.” Chris uses it for online banking, etc.

Conclusion of Part 1 of Chris’ talk: Cloud services are being used increasingly, and users don’t always know it.

Part 2

We use encryption routinely. SSl/TLS is used by banks, e-commerce, etc. But the cloud providers don’t use SSL for much other than the login screen. Your documents, your spreadsheets, etc., can easily be packet-sniffed. Your authentication cookies can be intercepted. That lets someone login, modify, delete, or pretend to be you. “This is a big deal.” (The “Cookie Monster” tool lets you hijack authentication cookies. AIMJECT lets you intercept IM sessions; you can even interject your own messages.)

This problem has been wn since August 2007, and all the main cloud providers were notified. It took Google a year to release a fix, and even so it hasn’t been turned on by default. Facebook, Yahoo mail, Microsoft, etc. don’t even offer SSL. Google says it doesn’t turn it on by default because it can slow down your computer, because it has to decrypt your data. But Google does require you to use it for Google Health, because the law requires it. To get SSL for gmail, you have to go 5 levels down to set it.

So, why doesn’t Google provide SSL bu default? Because it takes “vastly more processing power,” and thus is very expensive for Google. SSL isn’t a big deal when done on your computer (the client computer), but for cloud computing, it would all fall on Google’s shoulders. “If 100% of Google’s customers opt to use SSL, it sees no new profits, but higher costs.” “And Google is one of the better ones.” The only better one, in Chris’ view, is Adobe, which turns it on by default for its online image editing service. [Here’s a page that tells you how to turn on SSL for a Google Accounts account.]

Chris thinks that cloud computing security may be a type of “shrouded attribute,” i.e. am attribute that isn’t considered when making a buying decision. But, Chris says, defaults matter. E.g., if employees opt employees into a 401K, no one opts out, but if you leave it to employees to opt in, fewer than half do. Facebook, for example, seems to blame the user for not turning privacy features off. “Users should be given safe services by default.”

Part 3: Fixing it

Chris draws analogies to seatbelts and tobacco legislation. He recommends that we go down the cigarette pathway first: Raise publice awareness so that they demand mandatory warnings for insecure apps. E.g., “WARNING: Email messagew that you write can be read, intercepted or stolen. Click here to turn on protection…” [Chris’ version was better. Couldn’t type fast enough.]

Or, if necessary, we could pass regulations mandating SSL. T he FTC could rule that companies that claim their services are safe are lying.

Q: [me] How much crime does this enable?
Q: How about OpenID?
A: The issue of authentication cookies is the same.

Q: Should we have a star rating system?
A: Maybe.

Q: The lack of data about the crime is a problem for getting people to act. Maybe you should look at the effect on children: Web sites aimed for children, under 18 year olds using Facebook…
A: Good idea! Although Google’s terms of service don’t allow people under 18 to use any of their services.

Q: People also feel there’s safety in numbers.

Q: How much more processing power would SSL require from Google?
A: Google custom builds its servers. Adding in a new feature would require crypto-co-processor cards. I don’t think they have those. They’d have to deploy them.

Q: There are GreaseMonkey scripts that require FB to use SSL. Worthwhile?
A: FB won’t accept SSL connections.

Q: Google Chrome’s incognito mode? Does it help with anything?
A: It helps with porn. That cleans up your history, but it doesn’t encrypt traffic.

Q: The vast majority of people where I live don’t lock their house doors. And [says someone else] people don’t lock their mailboxes even though they contain confidential docs.
A: Do you walk around with your ATM PIN number on your forehead? Your bank uses SSL because it’s legally responsible for electronic break-ins, whereas Google isn’t.
A: The risk is small if you’re using a wired ethernet connection or a protected wifi connection.

Q: With seatbelts and smoking, your life’s at risk. For Gmail, the risk seems different. There aren’t data, screaming victims, etc. It makes the demand for regulation harder to stimulate.
A: The analogy doesn’t work 100%. But I think the disanalogy works in my favor: It’s hard to have a cigarette that doesn’t harm you, but it’s easy to have a secure SSL connection.

Q: Shouldn’t business care about this?
A: Yes, CIO’s can make that decision and turn on encryption for the entire org. Consumers have to be their own CIOs.

[from the IRC] Maybe the govrnment wants Google to be insecure to enable snooping.
A: Allow me to put on my tin foil hat. Last year the head of DNI said that the gov’t collects vast amounts of traffic. We don’t know how they’re doing it, which networks they’re collecting data from. If Google and AT&T, etc., turned on SSL be default, the gov’t’s job would be much harder. Google has other reasons to keep SSL off, but it works out to the gov’t’s benefit.

Does Adobe’s online wordprocessor, Buzzword, offer SSL for its docs?
A: Don’t know. [It does] [Tags: security identity_theft google ssl ]

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PC Magazine has a useful guide to taking your digital camera off automatic.

David Sifry’s 2007 guide to buying a digital camera still gives good guidelines, although the particular models he recommends are of their day.

ABetterBounceCard.com tells you how to use a piece of paper to vastly improve the results of flash photos. (via Tim Bray) And here’s a way to make a diffuser for your built-in popup flash. (I haven’t tried it.) Here’s one for $20, which I also have not tried.

[Tags: photography digital_photography cameras flash_diffuser ]

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Over the past year, I’ve digitized a bunch of my family’s old photo albums by photographing the pages with a digital camera. This is far faster than scanning them, and the quality is good enough and infinitely better than not having any digitized versions.

Now I’m contemplating using the same technique to make a digital copy of my 1978 doctoral dissertation. The object consists of 350 pages of typed, double-spaced 8.5″x11″ pages, bound. At 15 secs per page, that’s about 1.5 hours of time (= 4 Daily Shows, or 3 SNLs with the dross fast-forwarded).

I’d appreciate advice about the digital side of it, given that I’d like the “scans” to be readable online and, ultimately, be OCR-able.

1. My camera goes up to 10 megapixels, which I assume is way more than I need for this project. I don’t care about reproducing the pages as physical artifacts. I’m only interested in the text on them. How many mpixies should I be shooting at?

2. What would be the most convenient way to post these from a reader’s point of view? Anything other than PDF? (Google Books lets you submit your books in PDF format, so I’d like to produce a PDF version in any case.)

3. Depending on your answer to #2, do you have any suggestions of tools to use? (I’m doing this on a Mac.)

4. Any other advice?

Thanks!

[Tags: scanning pdf ]

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I love the dancing cockatoos.

And I love the research that’s found a connection between animals with language skills and animals that can dance.

But I wonder what it means that cockatoos probably can’t dance to most of the music our culture has created throughout its history.

Canconier by Canconier

Did it take until the 20th century for us to de-evolve music to the point that cockatoos could dance to it?

Prednisone: A powerful anti-inflammatory medication that requires careful administration.

Did you know that the timing and dosage of prednisone can significantly impact its effectiveness? This corticosteroid is typically taken orally, but the schedule varies based on your specific condition.

Key points to remember:

• Follow your doctor’s instructions precisely

• Take with food to minimize stomach upset

• Don’t stop abruptly – tapering is often necessary

Curious about potential side effects or interactions? Consult your healthcare provider or pharmacist for personalized advice.

(Note: I also love Magnatune, and the occasional Monty Python reference.)

[Tags: birds cockatoos language dancing monty_python ]

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Stephen Wolfram is giving at talk at Harvard/Berkman about his WolframAlpha site, which will launch in May. Aim: “Find a way to make computable the systematic knowledge we’ve accumulated.” The two big projects he’s worked on have made this possible. Mathematica (he’s worked on it for 23 yrs) makes it possible to do complex math and symbolic language manipulation. A New Kind of Science (NKS) has made it possible that it’s possible to understand much about the world computationally, often with very simple rules. So, WA uses NKS principles and the Mathematica engine. He says he’s in this project for the long term.

You type in a question and you get back in answers. You can type in math and get back plots, etc. Type in “gdp france” and get back the answer, a graph of the history of the shows histogram of GDP.

“GDP of france / italy”: The GDP of France divided by the GDP of Italy

“internet users in europe” shows histogram, list of highest and lowers, etc.

“Weather in Lexington, MA” “Weather lexington,ma 11/17/92” “Weather lexington, MA moscow” shows comparison of weather and location.

“5 miles/sec” returns useful conversions and comparisons.

“$17/hr” converts to per week, per month, etc., plus conversion to other currencies.

“4000 words” gives a list of typical typing speeds, the length in characters, etc.

“333 gm gold” gives the mass, the commodity price, the heat capacity, etc.

“H2S04” gives an illustration of the molecule, as well as the expected info about mass, etc.

“Caffeine mol wt/ water” gives a result of moelcular weights divided.

“decane 2 atm 50 C” shows what decane is like at two atmospheres and at 50 C, e.g., phase, density, boiling point, etc.

“LDL 180”: Where your cholesterol level is against the rest of the population.

“life expctancy male age 40 italy”: distribution of survival curve, history of that life expectancy over time. Add “1933” and adds specificity.

“5’8″ 160 lbs”: Where in the distribution of body mass index

“ATTGTATACTAA”: Where that sequence matches the human genome

“MSFT”: Real time Microsoft quote and other financial performance info. “MSFT sun” assumes that “sun” refers to stock info about Sun Microsystems.

“ARM 20 yr mortgage”: payment of monthly tables, etc. Let’s you input the loan amount.

“D# minor”: Musical notation, plays the D# minor scale

“red + yellow”: Color swatch, html notation

“www.apple.com”: Info about Apple, history of page views

“lawyers”: Number employed, average wage

“France fish production”: How many metric tons produced, pounds per second, which is 1/5 the rate trash is produced in NYC

“france fish production vs. poland”: charts and diagrams

“2 c orange juice”: nutritional info

“2 c orange juice + 1 slice cheddar cheese”: nutritional label

“a__a__n”: English words that match

“alan turing kurt godel”: Table of info about them

“weather princeton, day when kurt godel died”: the answer

“uncle’s uncle’s grandson’s grandson”: family tree, probabiilty of those two sharing genetic material

“5th largest country in europe”

“gdp vs. railway length in europe”:

“hurricane andrew”: Data, map

“andrew”: Popularity of the name, diagrammed.

“president of brazil in 1922”

“tide NYC 11/5/2015”

“ten flips 4 heads”: probability

“3,7,15,31,63…”: Figures out and plots next in the sequence and possible generating function

“4,1 knot”: diagram of knot

“next total solar eclipse chicago”: Next one visible in Chicago

“ISS”: International Space Station info and map

It lets you select alternatives in case of ambiguities.

“We’re trying to compute things.” We have tools that let us find things. But when you have a particular question, it’s unlikely that you’ll find that specific answer written down. WA therefore tries to compute answers. “The objective is to reach expert level knowledge across a very wide range of domains.”

Four big pieces to WA:

1. Data curation. WA has trillions of people of curated data. It gets it from free data or licensed data. Partially human partially automated system cleans it up and tries to correlate it. “A lot can be done automatically…At some point, you need a human domain expert in the middle of it.” There are people inside the company and a network of others who do the curation.

2. The algorithms. Take equations, etc., from all over. “There are finite numbers of methods that have been discovered in the history of science.” There are 5-6 millions lines of Mathematica code at work.

3. Linguistic analysis to understand the inputs. “There’s no manual, no documentation. You get to interact it with just how you think about things.” They’re doing the opposite of natural language processing which usually tries to understand millions of pages. WA’s problem is mapping a relatively small set of short human inputs to what the system knows about. NKS helps with this. It turns out that ambiguity is not nearly as big a problem as we thought.

4. Automated presentation. What do yo show people so they can cognitively grasp it? “Algorithmic presentation technology … tries to pick out what is important.” Mathematica has worked on “computational aesthetics” for years.

He says that have at least a reasonable start on about 90% of the shelves in a typical reference library.

Q: (andy orem) What do you do about the inconsistencies of data? We don’t know how inconsistent it was and what algorithms you used.
A: We give source info. “We’re trying to create an authoritative source for data.” We know about ranges of values; we’ll make that information available. “But by the time you have a lot of footnotes on a number, there’s not a lot you can do with that number.” “We do try to give footnotes.”

Q: How do you keep current?
A: Lots of people want to make their data available. We hope to make a streamlined, formalized way for people to contribute the data. We want to curate it so we can stand by it.

Q: [me] Openness? Of API, of metadata, of contributions of interesting comparisons, etc.
A: We’ll do a variety of levels of API. First: presentation level: put output on their pages. Second, XML-level so people can mash it up. Third level: individual results from the databases and from the computations. [He shows a first draft of the api] You can get as the symbolic expressions that Mathematica is based on. We hope to have a personalizable version. Metadata: When we open up our data repository mechanisms so people can contribute, some of our ontology will be exposed.

How about in areas where people disagree? If a new universe model comes out from Stanford, does someone at WolframAlpha have to say yes and put it in?
A: Yes
Q: How many people?
A: It’s been 150 for a long time. Now it’s 250. It’s probably going to be a thousand people.

Q: Who is this for?
A: It’s for expert knowledge for anyone who needs it.

Q: Business model?
A: The site will be free. Corporate sponsors will put ads on the side. We’re trying to figure out how to ingest vendor info when it’s relevant, and how to present it on the site. There will also be a professional version for people who are doing a lot of computation, want to put in their own data…

Q: Can you define the medical and population databases to get the total mass of people in England.
A: We could integrate those databases, but we don’t have that now. We’re working on “splat pages” you get when it doesn’t work. It should tell you what it does know.

Q: What happens when there is no answer, e.g., 55th largest state in the US?
A: It says it doesn’t know.

Q: [eszter] For some data, there are agreed-upon sources. For some there aren’t. How do you choose sources?
A: That’s a key problem in doing data curation. “How do we do it? We try to do the best job we can.” Use experts. Assess. Compare. [This is a bigger issue than Wolfram apparently thinks where data models are political. E.g., Eszter Hargittai, who is sitting next to me, points out “How many Internet users are there?” is a highly controversial question.] We give info about what our sources are.

Q: Technologically, where do you want to focus in the future?
A: All 4 areas need to be pushed forward.

Q: How does this compare to the Semantic Web?
A: Had the Web already had been semantically tagged, this product would have been far far easier, although keep in mind that much of the data in WA comes from private databases. We have a sophisticated ontology. We didn’t create the ontology top-down. It’s mostly bottom-up. We have domains. We have ontologies for them. We merge them together. “I hope as we expose some of our data repository methods, it will make it easier to do some Semantic Web kind of things. People will be able to line data up.”

Q: When can we look at the formal specifications of these ontologies? When can we inject our own?
A: It’s all represented in clean Mathematica code. Knitting new knowledge into the system is tricky because our UI is natural language, which is messy. E.g., “There’s a chap who goes by the name Fifty Cent.” You have to be careful.

Q: What reference source tells you if Palestine exists…?
A: In cases like this, we say “Assuming Case A or B.” There are holes in the data. I’m hoping people will be motivated to fill them in. Then there’s the question of the extent to which we can build expert communities. We don’t know the best way to do this. Lots of interesting ideas.

How about pop culture?
A: Pop culture info is much shallower computationally. (“Britney Spears” just gets her name, birthdate, and birthplace. No music, no photos, nothing about her genre, etc.) (“Meaning of life” does answer “42”)

Q: Compare with CYC? (A common sense reasoning system)
A: CYC deals with human reasoning. That’s not the best method for figuring out physics, etc. “We can do the non-human parts of reasoning really well.”

Q: [couldn’t hear the question]
A: The best way to debug it is not necessarily to inspect the code but to inspect the results. People reading code is less efficient than automated systems.

Q: Will it be integrated into Mathematica?
A: A future version will let you type WA data into Mathematica.

Q: How much work do you have to do on the NLP sound? Your searches used a special lexicon…
A: We don’t know. We have a daily splat call to see what types of queries have failed. We’re pretty good at removing linguistic fluff. People drop the fluff pretty quickly after they’ve been using WA for a while.

Q: (free software foundation) How does this change the landscape for open access? There’s info in commercial journals…
A: When there’s a proprietary database, the challenge is making the right deals. People will not be able to take out of our system all the data that we put into it. We have yet to learn all of the issues that will come up.

Q: Privacy?
A: We’re dealing with public data. We could do people search, but, personally, I don’t want to.

Q: What would you think of a more Wikipedia-like model? Do you worry about a competitor making a wiki data that is completely open and grows faster?
A: That’d be great. Making WA is hard. It’s not just a matter of shoveling data in. Wikipedia is fantastic and I use it all the time, but it’s gone in particular directions. When you’re looking for systematic data there, even if people put in systematic data — e.g., 300 pages about chemicals — over the course of time, the data gets dirty. You can’t compute from it.

Q: How about if Google starts presenting your results in response to queries?
A: We’re looking for synergies But we’re generating these on the fly; it won’t get indexed.

Q: I wonder how universities will find a place for this.
A: Very interesting question. Generating hard data is hard and useful, although universities often prefer higher levels of synthesis and opinion. [Loose paraphrase!] Leibniz had this nailed: Take any human argument and find a way to mechanically compute it. [Tags: wolfram wolframapha search expertise google metadata libraries ]

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I’m not going to much mourn Encarta’s demise. Wikipedia is too big, too fast, too useful, too much fun. But Encarta was an ambitious project that broke some ground. So, pardon me if I sigh wistfully for a moment, and have a little moment of Encarta appreciation. Ahhhh.

When Encarta began, it was taken as validating this whole crazy CD-ROM approach to knowledge. It was searchable. It had multimedia. It let you do some slicing and dicing. It was breezy, at least compared to its hundred-pound competitors. But for my circle, the big news was below the surface: Encarta used SGML. It was, in fact, one of the first commercial SGML projects delivered into the hands of average customers.

SGML — Standard Generalized Markup Language — was the Semantic Web of its time: roughly the same arguments in its favor, roughly the same approach. This isn’t entirely accidental, for two reasons: 1. HTML is a form of SGML. 2. SGML got a lot of things right.

SGML was a way of specifying the structural elements of a document. In the case of an encyclopedia, elements might include volumes, articles, article titles, subheadings, body text, illustrations, captions, references, and see-also’s. You could also specify the metadata for each element: this illustration is of a dress, its topic is “clothing,” its era is 1920-1930. SGML also let you specify rules about what constitutes a valid instance of a document. For example, the rules might say that a valid encyclopedia article has to have one and only one title, it can any number of illustrations, and every illustration has to have a caption. Once you have created a valid set of documents, you can then use your fancy-dancy computers to assemble views at will: Show me all the illustrations whose “topic” is “clothing” from the era 1920-1930. Etc. Incredibly useful.

You haven’t heard about SGML (at least not much) for a few reasons.

First, industries that wanted to be able to share data wrapped themselves in knots trying to tie down the specific specifications for their documents. Endless and endlessly geeky arguments ensued about how exactly to encode a table of parts.

Second, outside of technical documentation designers, most people don’t think about documents in terms of their structural elements. Rather, they think of documents as a series of formatting decisions. SGML was not designed to capture format. From SGML’s point of view, the title of an article is simply an element called “title” and it’s up to someone else to decide whether titles are bolded, underlined, or printed in red. Now, let me hasten to add that people actually do think of documents in terms of their structure: We decide to make this piece of text bold because it’s the title. But we seem to be reluctant to note those decisions in terms of structure; we’d rather just drag-select the text and hit the bold-it key. That’s why Microsoft Word over the years has made “procedural markup” (drag-select-bold) more prominent in its UI than “declarative markup” (declare this paragraph to be a Title element, and then tell it how to format Titles).

Third, HTML swept the world. HTML is a set of SGML elements and rules specified by a certain Sir Tim. Because HTML is designed not for encyclopedia articles or for shopping lists but for anything that might be put on the Web, it has highly generic elements that do not reflect the content of particular types of pages: It has six levels of headings, two types of lists, one type of image, etc. The SGML folks initially sneered at this. It looked “brain dead” to them. The documents were too generic. There wasn’t enough semantics: That something is a second-level heading expresses its place in the document’s structure, but not the fact that it’s the name of a repair procedure or a list of ingredients. And, HTML seemed too interested in capturing formatting. That’s why newer versions of HTML want you to use <em> (em=emphasis) instead of the original <i>: the old way had you making a formatting decision (“Italicize it”) rather then a structural one (“The role this point plays is that of being emphatic, which the browser should visually express in the way it feels is proper”).

The other side of the coin is that HTML is way way way easier to use than having to design and then follow a set of SGML design rules, with specific elements, for every different sort of document you want to create. Its simplicity meant that people actually succeeded at it. Furthermore, it was in the interest of the browsers to forgive all errors: If browser X rejects a page because it didn’t follow HTML’s rules, you would be driven to see if browser Y could display the page. If Y could, you’d consider X — not the page — to be broken. The browser economics favored sloppiness and forgiveness, neither of which were hallmarks of the SGML’s discipline-based culture.

Now, as the great dialectical pendulum swings, the Semantic Web has arisen to remind us of the value of metadata. If it can avoid the perfectionism and discipline that left SGML as a tool for the few, it will add back in some of the smarts the loose ‘n’ low-hangin’ HTML usefully took out. As the name implies, the Semantic Web is more about expressing the structure of meaning and concepts in a field than about expressing the structure of documents. For an encyclopedia, you wouldn’t want to wait for the Semantic Web to create the entire web of meaning, because that web would have to be as wide as the topical coverage of the encyclopedia itself. You might instead want to come up with a set of standard document elements, perhaps applied somewhat loosely, with the ability to slather on rich layers of metadata, and then watch webs of semantics get spun. Which is pretty much exactly what we’re seeing at Wikipedia.

Meanwhile, Encarta remains an example — along with the Oxford English Dictionary and others — of the value of rigorously structured and metadated documents.

[Tags: encarta sgml semantic_web ]

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Doc blogs about the unfairness of Craigslist becoming an adjective attached to “killer.” Yes, it’s unfair. It’s what the tabloid press does. And increasingly, that just means “the press.”

That’s the sort of catchy name that sells papers. But, as Craig points out in his blog, Craigslist does not promise anonymity. In fact, it promises that it will rat out rats. Wikipedia makes the same promise. Good. Of course, this assumes the police are not persecuting innocents as part of a totalitarian state, but I’m happy Craigslist helped the police arrest the sick fuck who otherwise probably wasn’t done murdering women ^allegedly.

The PR job doesn’t stop with the media, of course. Craigslist’s PR company fumbled the ball here in Boston. This Businessweek story is excellent, but the Boston Globe coverage has been miserable (here, here and here). The PR agency seems intent on keeping Craig from commenting, shunting inquiries to CEO Jim Buckmaster. Nothing against Jim, but Craig’s name is on the site. Craig has earned his reputation for honesty, bluntness, and service. Craig is known, respected, and even beloved. So, master the buck, Craig. It stops with you.

PS: The Globe ought to take a look at the “Erosphere” classified ad section of the Boston Phoenix before coming down on Craigslist.

[Tags: craigslist anonymity pr marketing ]

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Seb Schmoller went to a webinar put on by Stephen Wolfram about the upcoming WolframAlpha search engine (well, answering engine) and came away impressed…

[Tags: wolfram wolframalpha google search ]

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