My Dad used to say that he had an unparalleled skill at creating errors on “those Web forms” which he didn’t even realize were called forms.

Cliff and I used to produce a bunch of securities trading applications for clients – first at Wells Fargo (an early, heck, maybe the first “Wells Trade site) then later a couple for WRH+Co. People were always tempted by “wireless solutions”, that is, transporting all those fields and buttons onto a screen the size of a match book. Cliff was fond of saying “our customers already have a wireless interface, and it works quite well; It’s called a Cel Phone and their human voice. When they want to make a trade, they call their broker and make a trade”.

Now, blogs, or micro-content distribution systems are getting into the voice game. Utterz let’s you call in a plog cast by phone… you dial the phone, you speak your mind, your voice shows up on their site – for now, without wanting to investigate their version of an interface, I’m going to assume these files can be accessed, syndicated and sliced and diced at will, like any well behaved pile of web content.

What could be really interesting out of this is to be able to post-facto reassemble a conversation, perhaps including multiple people. To be able to follow the train of thought that get’s spread out over time… perhaps months, and follow an articulate thread… from your iPod, from your networked audio player as you drive across country.

Return to English (or, insert your preferred native language here).

/Joe

It gets even better, when a programmer and a designer discuss working Agile methodologies, and gets even better when they have varying appreciations of what exactly agility is.

Designers love to have an open canvas to paint on. They hate to define requirements if it’s going to constrain their designs in any way. They seek agility so they can say “well, we’ll through some stuff up now, and refactor it later.”

Programmers of course see the aspects like “stories are agreements between business and production” ideal places to get formal definition of what they should spend their time on. They do need that… we all need that. Spending your time on low value things isn’t pleasant for anyone, and one of the big contributors to dissatisfaction.

Business folks tend to think of agility as the ability to add and change requirements whenever they want with little to no impact on dates, quality or resource commitment… the eternal “pick any two” triangle. Nothing’s changed.

Of course, there’s a balance to this. Those who have balanced agility with structure have done so after hard knocks in dealing with the different perspectives of business, design and business. One of the inevitable benefits of Agile Methods is getting these all too often separated groups talking together, sharing goals and speaking in English together earlier in the process, before it comes to blows at QA time!

First off, I’m not in the business of providing custom solutions anymore: that site really showed the range of services I had been providing my clients for over a decade and was intended to bring in new clients. As I’m currently employed I’m not really looking for clients, and my focus has narrowed from being a full service integrator to living up at the “Fuzzy Front End” of the development practice, where I start at the strategic planning point and pretty much back off once concepts have been approved.

The plan is to make it so computer programs can make logical assumptions and relationships between resources on the Web based on the semantics of their content. It is referred to as the Semantic Web.

The links that follow provide a gentle, if not brief, introduction to this initiative.

EXECUTIVE GUIDE

First, there’s an audio interview with Tim Berners-Lee which isn’t strictly about the Semantic Web, but it’s an easy listen and gets some key concepts across:
Interview with Tim Berner-Lee

Next, Scientific American has a somewhat long but engaging piece explaining the Semantic Web in lay terms:
NPR: Scientific American: The Semantic Web

The incomparable Peter Moreville has a very readable account of his peering into the bubble of Social Network Analysis which has a set of “See Also” links which are enough to keep the average person busy into the next millennia.
Semantic Studios: Social Network Analysis

and Discover Mag Online has a lay persons look at software which makes similar inferences based on your Email inbox:
Discover: Emerging Technology: Who Loves Ya, Baby?

On the software front, a company called Creo has a product called “Six Degrees” which promises to semantically link files on your desktop in a meaningful way.

Finally, Big Blue has a couple article on using this stuff to unite and network your chain of friends – kind of “six degrees of separation” concept.

IBM: XML Watch: Finding friends with XML and RDF

and

IBM: XML Watch: Support online communities with FOAF

There’s got to be something after that, but I’m not sure what. FOAF-Naut is about the graphically coolest thing I’ve seen. Requires the Adobe SVG plug-in though. Might be fun to improve in Flash.
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DEVELOPERS GUIDE

After that it leaves the ground rather abruptly, so if you want to dive in the deep end (if that’s not a train wreck of metaphors) then pop over to:

The WWW Consortium is the holder of the official Semantic Web torch:
W3C: The Semantic Web

RDF Web
is the home of lots of Friend of a Friend (FOAF) information

This guy
has many interesting links around this stuff

RDF Tutorial – Part I: basic syntax and containers