September 23, 2005
The Recovery 2.0 litmus test
Jeff Jarvis has been flogging an excellent idea for a couple of weeks: Recovery 2.0. Lots of people did lots of great things on the Net to help victims of Katrina. In fact, so many sites went up, particularly ones to help people find lost relatives, that there were too many places to look, which spurred a round of consolidation efforts. This is stuff the Web should be proud of. But Jeff’s point is that the distributed nature of the Web, so crucial to its strength, can also be a weakness. Recovery 2.0 — which is more a call to action than a plan of action — is his name for the need to better coordinate ahead of time.
How you think that coordination should happen says a lot about your view of the Web.
A Semantic Web approach would create an ontology of victims, relatives, disasters, relief efforts, locations, threats, supplies, routes, relief agencies, medical records, doctor appointment books, local bus schedules, and stock market data.
A Web 2.0 approach would create APIs among recovery services offered on the Web and wait for hackers to build something useful. Whatever the hackers create would include plotting something on Google Maps, a requirement for all Web 2.0 apps.
A microformats approach would spend a weekend coming up with a quick-and-dirty set of useful metadata, preferably modeled on Amazon.
The regulatory approach would ask the pharmaceutical, transportation and recording industries to come up with a set of guidelines for the distribution of relief supplies with the primary objective of making sure that they do not fall into the hands of terrorists.
(I kid but I think Recovery 2.0 is a terrific idea.) [Tags: recovery JeffJarvis semanticweb microformats]
