I talk a little about how I want to use Apocalypto for storytelling and
authoring to html5 based multimedia output engine by leveraging
interpretable hashtags and natural text instructions.
http://apocalyp.to/u/sull/profile/item/1325534232928
http://apocalyp.to/users/sull/feeds/profile/enclosures/1325534232928.mp3
I recently uploaded the rssgarden webapp to run on apocalyp.to for a small group of test users and anyone else who catches this post and is at all interested in testing a minimalist blogging, bookmarking, file sharing and feed aggregator tool.
This will be a good sandbox for the inReplyTo namespace as well. See http://xmlns.inreplyto.me for more info on that component.
Create a new user on apocalyp.to here: http://apocalyp.to/do/newUser
Why the name apocalyp.to? The Greek derivative “apokalypto” means: to uncover; disclose, reveal.
I had planned on using it for an experimental publishing engine that I was going to build and it would output a weekly or monthly digest of global news and art media. A cultural interactive mesh. With a web comic too 
. I decided that rssgarden could evolve into the aforementioned publishing system. So I installed it there and am hoping to get at least a few users to help me out with it.
Here is a thought. If it has been done or something similar is being done somewhere, maybe I will find out in reply to this post.
Reading Lists in the context of RSS feeds is an OPML (or RSS or RSS with OPML embedded or RDF or….) file that contains a list of feeds that someone is subscribed to and is meant to be shared as a suggested feed list for others to subscribe to. Or maybe its a subset of feeds that are of a specific category or a top list of feeds etc. Theoretically, this dynamic Reading List is pulled in by other people’s aggregator software and any changes to it would be reflected (synchronized) to all users who have subscribed to the list. This last part might not be a requirement since a user could just import the Reading List (i.e. static OPML file) into their feed reader. But the idea is more about letting someone else curate a list for you. New and/or removed feeds would be the decision of the trusted Reading List Curator. I don’t know what software currently supports this besides Dave Winer’s stuff.
Today, probably the most similar thing that exists on a major centralized service is Twitter Lists. Though this could be leveraged for what I am proposing, a Whitelist used to filter replies to blog posts, I am instead more focused on decentralized solutions and the more traditional open web blogosphere. So let’s put Twitter aside for now.
First, a brief explanation of the world of RSS that I am envisioning…
Blogging tools would only output RSS feeds which would get rendered by RSS readers, aggregators and other template-based web presentation engines. In other words, RSS is the first class citizen and primary output of blogging tools. The way it is normally done is in reverse. RSS is generated as a secondary dynamic XML source that usually pulls content from a database (i.e. mysql) and outputs the latest x posts. The content is displayed on the web using database queries (and cached copies of HTML in some cases) and templates from themes. I have built things that run in a different order and priority and rely more heavily on static files both locally and archives in the cloud (i.e. Amazon S3). My most recent blogging tool, rssgarden.com, uses XSLT to render RSS feeds in the client-side browser with HTML/Javascript/CSS templates. The web server is only distributing static (and sometimes dynamic) xml files to the users web browser and the web browser’s own engine transforms that raw XML into the familiar styling of an HTML web page. This offsets some of the processing load from the web server and onto the users powerful machine.
With my vision of this stuff and the way I have developed my tools, everything is RSS. So, comments are RSS feeds as well. They are pulled in and included with other feeds that are being presented on a page via the XSLT stylesheets (document() function). Their is no comment plugin from a 3rd party company (i.e. disqus.com) or native commenting module that requires a database connection. Comment threads are just another smart RSS feed. Smart because I have added some experimental enhancements using the inReplyTo RSS namespace. Which leads me back to the topic of whitelists for replies.
Like Trackbacks, inReplyTo will suffer from spam if/when it ever catches on. The concept is similar but adapted more for the modern social web and my own interpretations of how everything works and connects together. Trackbacks have evolved in the form of federated protocols like Salmon. I may very well just support Salmon or the superset Zot!. But I am also on the fence thinking about simpler and maybe even more socially natural ways to accomplish anti-spam. So before I get all geeky and just evangelize and implement these other protocols for distributed messaging and notifications, I want to make sure that I have thought through the simpler side of it all and if something seems interesting enough, it might be worth another blog post or a prototype.
If inReplyTo is something I continue to work on and move forward, alone or with others, then fighting spam is going to be the priority otherwise the whole thing is moot. Being different than Trackback buys time but eventually, the spammers will come. So outside of the world of crypto, what can be done? The obvious thing is Whitelists (and Blacklists). This is what blogging tools natively build into their products to handle spam from comments and trackbacks. The blog author has to moderate and mark comments as spam and rely on some other optional algorithm engines such as WordPress’s Akismat technology. But what if their was a smart reference point unique to the blog author that can automate the creation of a Whitelist? That is where the idea of Reading Lists as Whitelists for blog comments comes into play.
I’m thinking that if people started making a Reading List available online somewhere, ideally within their own hosted website directory but truly it could be any public URL and even a Google Docs URL (more on that later), then that would be the basis for of a trusted network of people, of bloggers, that can be leveraged as the distributed reply system’s Whitelist (optionally). If you want to leverage this trust network, you would enable the feature in your software that supports this system and once enabled, you would ONLY receive @replies and @mentions from those who are within the trusted network formed by Reading Lists. Notice I said ListS (plural). That is because this system would take advantage of a network of linked Reading Lists. As a user of supporting software, you could create or enable a “List of Lists” that consists of many trusted Reading Lists and this could also provide something like “Inherited Trust” where you can pick a list and choose to trust all lists discovered within that list. In other words, you want to trust those who are trusted by who you trust yourself. All of these trusted sources combined would make up the master Whitelist which is used to control where distributed messaging (private, public replies, random mentions) can be received from. All other incoming messages would go into an “Untrusted” queue which you can browse at will and manually trust sources or keep as untrusted by doing nothing.
It would help if more users had their own domain names but technically, a trusted source is a trusted URL of any blog or website that is participating in this system. Occasionally, all URLs should be checked for validity and purge out deadlinks or suspected as spam (expired domains registered by spammers)
A spammer will be detected quickly and once removed from one list, it propagates and gets removed from all. This could also be a problem as soon as some trigger-happy people start marking sources as spammers and affecting others who may disagree. In this case, it might need to go through a ripple process where the change needs consensus by x sources before it automatically get labeled as legitimate spam. This ripple would start at the closest related source of the questionable source and move outward to a proper pre-determined level at which point consensus is either made and source is marked as spam or it fails and source is not deleted. Whatever the solutions are, it feels like they can be feasible solutions within the concept of this People-Powered system that circumvents (or maybe coexists with?) algorithmic-centric solutions.
I’ll be doing some research on this to find similar thinking or experiments that exist and the results etc. I doubt this is a unique idea but it does seem interesting enough to think about and warranted a blog post. Please let me know what you think. Oh and regarding Twitter Lists, i’ll write about that another time. But I am reminded of some very cool experiments that I am following and probably, now that I think of it, has inspired some of these thoughts today.
Check out punkmoney.org and GiftPunk.
This post is a response to:
http://scripting.com/stories/2011/11/29/whatDoesItTakeToBeAnEntrep.html
entrepreneurs (especially the tech-focused) who “get lucky” usually need to: have great timing; fill a void (that should be filled); sacrifice a normal healthy lifestyle; be surrounded by more willing and able bodies.
in a sense, doing this when you are young (putting college aside) is smart since the above criteria are more easily met. these young adults can either go through 4-10 years of college, be tight on money and incur large amounts of debt, hope to get a job and still have a passion for whatever it was that they just spent the last several years of academia life focused on and in general… hope for the best.
entrepreneurism should be discouraged by pointing out the severe failure rates and common inevitability of shifting to plan B (see above). at the same time, failure is good, especially rapid failure. but you can only fail so much before the towel gets thrown in the ring and you go home.
entrepreneurism should be encouraged by pointing out the horrid state of the economy and the job market, the variety of opportunities and new industries that are still evolving despite (and because of) these “interesting times” that we live in, and that being an entrepreneur is a very american way of life and we should exercise those freedoms. it is also interesting to see the possibilities around crowdfunding for micro-investing in new companies/technologies/ideas/products.
either way, the harder of the two paths should be noted as being the path of the entrepreneur (imo). so with that said, i agree that this should be reiterated by mentors, career counselors, parents etc.
oh and… nobody gets out alive
@mentions compared to @replies… I was thinking about this last night in relation to the proposed inReplyTo RSS Namespace. As we know, if we look at Twitter as just a protocol (and ignore the corporate profit ambitions) their are a set of social actions/gestures that have become standardized. Replying directly to something/someone, mentioning someone within the context of something written (i.e a long-form article or shorter status update/short public message or even private messages), sharing what someone posted (reblog, retweet, share), and saving/bookmarking/favoriting something someone posted. Their are other gestures too.
I have also been reviewing the Salmon Protocol again and more interestingly, a superset of it called Zot!. It is designed to handle all of these actions in an open and distributed way.
While I am not sure where I will end up on my own implementations of FSW projects and how to best add a simple social layer on top of RSS feeds, I am also entertaining some ideas around being a 3rd party web service for facilitating certain aspects of Federated Social Web Protocols. I suppose the correct terms here are “Relying Party (RP)” and external “Identity Provider (IdP)” or “Attribute Provider (AtP)” for what I am referring to. inreplyto.me was used for this purpose while I developed rssgarden.com with the inReplyTo Namespace integrated for comments. And I am now interested in doing something similar but for “@mentions” and will deploy at whoMentioned.me.
More info soon.
If interested, go here:
http://xmlns.inreplyto.me/
TechCrunch recently posted an article titled “Twitter, There’s Nothing Wrong With Being A Social Network”. Here is the link. Robert Scoble left a comment and reposted on G+ here and I decided to add a comment to Robert’s G+ post. I cannot see a comment permalink to share so like I often do, I repost my noteworthy comments here on my vocal.ly blog.
“It sounds like Gourley actually wants a curated experience where new users only see elitist content. That’s cool that he’s explaining that. I think it leaves open a market opportunity for Google+ and Facebook.”
This is probably the key observation that you made in your comment.
It bleeds into the business of the SUL (Suggested User Lists). Twitter can monetize premium content streams more so than regular user content streams so highlighting such channels from news organizations, brands, celebs, politicians and A list bloggers etc. makes sense from a business standpoint.All the rest of it, the social networky stuff from the 99%… thats the services back channel in a way. The noise, the pulse that matters less. The flow that has gems but those are the exception and gems can be pulled into the 1% as a featured/suggested source to follow. This also means that innovation on enhancing the experience and utility of Twitter’s back channel may be limited. It’s also possible that Twitter is unable to easily add new features to their platform due to the sheer volume of real-time data and the vulnerabilities to destabilizing the network. For example, some of the noise controls you want Twitter to have could be a real technical challenge on such a vast network. Simple modifications to queries can lead to disaster. It requires long periods of testing and QA on an equivalent test environment and then trickle roll-outs on production env. Unfortunately, mass adoption can stifle innovation.
I think it’s a mistake for Twitter to not continue down the path of becoming the type of “new media company” that FB and G+ are becoming. This is an identity complex for them. They don’t want to follow and copy, they want to pioneer and originate. The concern here is that if they lose focus on the 99% users, then they may devalue their product by losing the audience to other services that are serving users social sharing needs AND content consumption needs. I have gone out on a limb before to say that Twitter needs to continue to become more like FB and G+ and even offer a separate long-form blogging service that seamlessly integrates with the Tweet timelines among other features for media storage/galleries etc.
Interesting domain news on Techcrunch about the domain local.ly which sold, apparently, for $100k.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/09/domain-name-local-ly-sold-for-100000/
It does raise my curiosity a bit being that vocal.ly is different by a single letter character. But i’m also reminded that a lotto ticket off my a single digit is usually worthless But I won’t be selling vocal.ly for a pittance either.
Maybe Hulu should be renamed Halo. As I have been observing for years, Hulu, the “front” for a multi-owner Online Video Entertainment Destination, has been a very deceptive success story. That is to say, its success is manufactured from its owner’s exclusive content libraries. Beyond that, I always gave Hulu credit for implementing a clean design and user experience but that alone is certainly not where the company’s value comes from. It also did a nice job with branding itself. Again, so what. Users care about those things but in this market, obviously, content is king.
Knowing this, the Hulu owners tried to sell Hulu as the pretty wrapping paper around its content/licenses with a few years exclusivity added into the deal. Though their was interest, their was no company gullible enough to fall for this and essentially over-pay for Hulu.
The future of Hulu will probably end up with the owners separating the relationship and if anything, one or more of the owners could utilize any useful technology for their own backends running on their other different Internet properties. “Hulu”, as a consumer-facing brand, may go away or may be used in the same vein as a TV Guide or some other Online TV/Entertainment Portal concept. But I don’t see Hulu being a Netflix type of competitor after 2-5 years or sooner. Pushing Hulu forward in its current form will not make sense long-term even if it can sustain itself (on paper). Hulu was born to challenge YouTube on TV content and the piracy issues and it did that well. But beyond that narrow goal in 2007, it has not been able to become much more and exists in a crowded and difficult market to proper in. Their are still too many players and revenue control concerns to provide the kind of a la carte TV experience that people truly want to have.
This post is inReplyTo http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/13/why-hulus-owners-couldnt-find-a-buyer/
I was there. I listened. I Spread The Message!
#DontVoteForCorporateCandidates
#DV4CC
Back in October 2008, when Wall Street was crashing on American investors, workers and taxpayers -in that order – our independent presidential campaign held a major rally at Wall Street. Addressing the New York Stock Exchange, with our participators and their signs, I proposed specific recommendations for law enforcement, a financial transaction tax and accountability for those handling “other peoples’ money.” Few listened.
InReplyTo Dave Winer’s piece entitiled “The message of Occupy“.
Supporting the Occupy Movement is supporting a mass expression of frustration and an open platform for discussion which could lead to clear demands and actionable grassroot initiatives. As long as it stays non-violent, I see no reason not to support its temporary legal existence. Surely, the participants do not all support all of each others ideas and opinions surrounding the core issues that are driving them to occupy in protest.
I am not usually a big supporter or protests unless those who are protesting are willing and able to move onward and do the more mundane boring tasks that are required to make change happen within the current system. You know, the hard and slow stuff. But I do recognize the importance of physical presence and vocal outrage in order to give the issues a pulse.
The Occupy Movement is also significant purely based on the context of polls showing barely any support for Congress (essentially our government) and following recent… dare i say successes… of other ongoing revolutions around the world. Our act of revolution was painfully absent these past few years when you would think that if their ever was a time for a revolt of some sort, it would be now. And suddenly, just when you might think that Americans are soft whiners and confortable enough with our gadgets and crap entertainment to actually formulate a true Movement against the abuses of Corporatism… a small group of people manage to create the ripple.
So yeah, I support it, even if I am still learning wtf it is. You should too.
InReplyTo: http://www.gravity7.com/blog/media/2011/08/death-of-the-checkin-1-0.html
This sums up my view perfectly. I declared foursquare a failure so long ago based on this line of thought. Sure, they have had success and may have more success but in the grand scheme of it, they (and most other prominent location based services) have failed. Its possible the failure was intentional and the path they took was the public pre-pivot pitch used to gain traction from early adopters and inve$tor$ and eventually formulate some new more sensible and monetizable product developements. In other words, a way to buy time before posts like this start appearing and rightly announcing the death of checkins (for checkins sake).
The question moving forward is how to find a balance of what is best on an academic level and what is best for a typical user wanting to engage simply yet thoroughly with their social circles and/or beyond them. Something normative must come out of all of this. A new wave of innovation. Hopefully their are many, like myself, who chose to observe this space from the sidelines and/or tinker with advanced concepts as a hobbyist and not as an entrepreneur building a startup company to (prematurely?) capitalize on trends and hype and early touches of innovation around social and activity/action streams. Fresh eyes are needed from the unstuck stock of visionary technologists.
With social networks becoming more localized, for my Masters Thesis at NYU, I am focusing on location-based services (LBS). The study aims to understand how the three key factors—practical functions, fun & games, privacy risk—affect the adoption of location-based services applications. Please do a good deed, fill out this short and completely anonymous survey (https://www.113.vovici.net/se.ashx?s=13B2588B58E0782D). Please email me if you like a copy of this study. Thanks. Will Lee (wkl209@nyu.edu)
A while ago, I did an interview for Inventors Digest Magazine.
The online version of the article written can be found here:
How to Find Funding | Raising Money
Will Lee is discussing.
Boris Mann 12:57 AM on December 15, 2011 Permalink |
I created a new user. But I’m not sure what to do next?
BTW, my account on that inReplyTo forum never got approved, either??
sull 1:08 AM on December 15, 2011 Permalink |
hey Boris. thanks for taking a peak.
you could create a newItem to post something.
i don’t know. part of user testing is to catch the confusion, bugs and feedback and think on it
btw, i checked xmlns.inreplyto.me and you should be able to login.
i think it was initially set to moderate new users and locked the user account but i unlocked it a while ago and disabled that setting for future users.
how’s rsshero going? i will provide feedback at some point. it seemed to work well with my goog reader import.