iPALS - Identity, Presence, Attention, Location, Status

Sam Sethi posts a fantastic post about Twitter, Attention and Information Overload.

He refers to Twitter as a great conversation tool to help reduce the friction and increase the pace of innovation by bringing participants closer together.

Some, however, have given Twitter credit for killing the aggregator and becoming the ultimate tool for incoming alerts and information.

Both Sam and I disagree.

He writes:

I think we are getting closer to the point in time where our social networks, search & discovery engines and the semantic web combine to provide us with said relevant timely information based on our current location, attention and status.

Sadly Twitter is not the answer, it is just another example of us trying to acquire better information faster from our trusted social network. In fact Twitter is just another disorganised stream of information for us to manage.

While Twitter helps to lower the barrier to getting a message out fast, it does not help you route incoming messages particularly effectively.

Think of Twitter as the outgoing pipeline. What's needed is an incoming pipleine. One into which we can put our Twitter stream, our friend's lifestreams, our favorite authors and the applications we track and through which we can route messages based on a number of criteria.

Sam describes these criteria as iPALS:

In the future to help us manage this vast array of data that has overloaded us with information, I envisage us trusting online services where we share our identity, presence, attention, location and status - i.e iPALS in exchange for timely relevant information

Well I’m Sam Sethi (identity) sat at my desk using my PC (Presence), whilst listening to Paul Weller, (Attention) writing this post, at home in sunny Cookham Dean (Location), but I’m busy so don’t disturb me (status). i.e iPALS

I love it. The pieces are emerging. It is now time to stitch them all together.

• Identity = OpenID + hCard
• Presence = Does anyone know a definitive Presence service?
• Attention = Jaiku (An aggregation of all your Attention data from Twitter and beyond)
• Location = Plazes
• Status = Anyone know a definitive status service?

So if we combine these services, we have what Sam calls an iPALS application. I call it Attention Management. Whatever it's called - it's the personalized incoming pipeline of your life.

We also like to call it Particls.

Announcement: APML Open Source Libraries in C#

In yet another milestone for the APML Workgroup and the APML format, we have published the first open source libraries for loading and manipulating APML files.

From the site:

APML will allow users to export and use their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows them to export their reading lists from Feed Readers.

The idea is to boil down all forms of Attention Data – including Browser History, OPML, Attention.XML, Email etc – to a portable file format containing a description of ranked user interests.

These libraries are a result of months of R&D and iteration by the Faraday Media development team and we donate them to the community in the spirit of open collaboration and mutual benefit. They are released under the extremely liberal Apache 2.0 license.

We encourage anyone who would like to support or modify the libraries to get in touch so we can help in any way we can.

My thanks to Ashley our CTO and Mike and Paul the two ninja programmers who have been involved with the library and the APML workgroup who's input has helped to create the 0.6 spec.

We look forward to seeing what new and interesting projects get created with this resource.

The repository can be found on Google Code.

Maybe professional journalism is dead?

The Scobleizer is once again (for the 495th time by his count) launched an attack against partial text feeds.

The most interesting part of his post, however, is the comments - in which he tells the guys at ZDNet that their content is good, but he would rather read coverage elsewhere because of their partial feeds.

The ZDNet guys claim they can't make money from full text - they need the traffic back to their page.

This comes back to a more long term question - how does one make money from the long tail.

In my post on the subject I quoted Chris Anderson who wrote:

Producers. Effect: Largely non-economic. I responded to a good Nick Carr post on this last year with the following: "For producers, Long Tail benefits are not primarily about direct revenues. Sure, Google Adsense on the average blog will generate risible returns, and the average band on MySpace probably won't sell enough CDs to pay back their recording costs, much less quit their day jobs. But the ability to unitize such microcelebrity can be significant elsewhere. A blog is a great personal branding vehicle, leading to anything from job offers to consulting gigs. And most band's MySpace pages are intended to bring fans to live shows, which are the market most bands care most about. When you look at the non-monetary economy of reputation, the Long Tail looks a lot more inviting for its inhabitants."

So four questions arise from this statement in the context of ZDNet and partial feeds.

1. Are ZDNet part of the long tail? After all, they publish mainstream IT news. Perhaps the long tail can be seen as replacing the head?
   
   
2. Is the Publishing/Advertising model dead as long as content, in its full form, is syndicated and repackaged by an aggregator resulting in little need for users to head back to the source and generate page views?
   
   
3. Will we tolerate (and can we monetize) ads in the feed? The ZDNet guys say feed ads do not pay the bills.
   
   
4. Do Aggregators have a social responsibility to somehow give back to producers?
   

This ties into another debate that has sprung up on Brian Oberkich's blog about his feed being used as part of a collective newspaper. He claims that it was OK with him until it seemed like the newspaper was running ads (which was against his CC) and he was being grouped with commentators he did not want to be associated with.

That page is, in essence, a single topic aggregator. What responsibility does it have to the publisher?

If professional publishing can't be monetized to sustainable levels, are we biting the hand that feeds us (as aggregators)? Or are we 'all the media' now and we don't need professional journalism?

Update: Brian says that the "Edge is not about content".

"You could always publish something to the Web. Now someone can acutally find it in real-time, relay it through their own attention signal systems (blogs (including link and tumblelogs), email, bookmarking services, social news sites, twitta, etc.) and help the collective swarm around things it finds useful."

Announcement: Track the Web 2.0 Expo using Particls

Can't make it to the Web 2.0 Expo? Keep in touch with a special Web 2.0 Expo edition of the Particls Client.

It has a special skin and is pre-set with all the feeds and the right Attention Profile so you can great real-time coverage of the event while you work.

The download is actually the full featured Particls client so you can re-skin it back to the standard skin or add-remove your own feeds and OPML after the expo is over.

More about Particls
Particls is an Attention Management Engine. Check out the screencasts to learn more how it works or check out the website.

Wondering how we did it? Watch a video of Particls (then Touchstone) being reskinned and pre-set in 4 mins here

Web 3.0 - Attention Management

I've written a few times about Web 3.0 before. I have been pretty dismissive to say the least. The definitions keep shifting and none of them particularly convince me that the paradigm change is sufficient enough to justify a version number change.

In recognition of that confusion, there has been a fun competition run by Read/Write Web for a one line description. As part of the converage, James Brown claims that Web 3.0 is actually about better metadata and smart agent-side filtering.

As an example - he cites Particls:

"But perhaps the next step is for it to analyse attention data, like which articles I delete and which I click through; then apply some clever filters appropriately. It looks like Google is on the way to doing this.

And then there's tools like Particls. Formerly called Touchstone, this is a "personalised news and alert service" which monitors the internet, your feeds and other information like your calendar and emails, learns which are important to you, and alerts you in different ways according to their importance."

I do think that intelligent filtering on the agent-side is important (what a surprise hey!) but I am not sure it's called web 3.0. It's called Personalized Aggregation, or Personal Relevancy or Attention Management - and it can fit neatly into the current web.

And next... it needs to move into Media 2.0

Conversation Economy

There is a fantastic post about the Conversation Economy on BusinessWeek by David Armano.

There is really nothing more I can add to it. It is beautifully written.

Here's an excerpt:

"Conversation architects move marketing beyond the idea of one-way messaging. Traditional marketing efforts were founded on this tried-and-true format and are still prevalent within the industry. Consider the example of a typical creative brief template, which usually says something like, "What are we trying to communicate?" Can you can see the old-world residue in the word "communicate"? It lacks the dimensions of experiencing something and having an ongoing two-way dialogue. "What are we trying to communicate?" implies a one-way conversation. Maybe we should ask ourselves: "How can we facilitate?""

Announcement: Particls Private Beta released

Hi everyone,

We would like to announce that the first full private release of Particls Beta has been distributed. If you signed up to our mailing list your invite should be in your inbox.

All those months of locking Ashley in the programming box have paid off!

On behalf of all the team I would like to thank all the people who have made this milestone possible. You all know who you are but if I may highlight a few below (in no particular order!):

• Ashley Angell
• Nik Seirlis
• Stephen Kelly
• Cody Robb
• Paul Jones
• Michael McNeil
• Michael Starky
• Julie Angell
• Marty Wells
• Michael Liubinskas
  
• Marjolein Hoekstra
  
• Ben Metcalfe
• Daniela Barbosa
  
• Marianne Richmond
• The Alpha and Beta testers of Touchstone and Particls

Thanks everyone

We look forward to your feedback.

Missed out? Drop me a line and the next 50 requests get an instant invite.

Update: The 50 Slots have been filled. But keep paying attention.

Announcement: Touchstone renamed to Particls

In anticipation of a wider release of the Application, we are excited to announce a new name for Touchstone. Introducing... Particls.

And, of course, a new domain at www.particls.com. Please update your links!

Why the name change?
We feel that Particls better reflects our future plans for the product as it evolves into the definitive tool to manage and filter your incoming personal information.

Stay tuned... more updates soon!

Twitter vs. Jaiku vs. Loopnote

I avoided writing about twitter for a long time - everyone has posted how wonderful it is. Even mainstream media including the local Australian Financial Review (in which I was quoted).

There are two main reasons why Twitter is so great.

1. It's dead simple
2. It has lots of great people on it.

As Robert said in one of his Twitters:

"theuer: well, Jaiku is reacting slower than Twitter. It requires more clicks to see your messages than Twitter. And is more complicated. I never knew of it until today, which isn't saying much. What's cool about both of these is the people on them. NOT the technology."

The success of Twitter, though, makes me both happy (to see something grow so quickly and succeed so much - we should all be so lucky) and sad (to see two other services in the same space loose out on all the hype just because the 'right' people were using the competition).

Both Leo (TWiT fame) and Scoble got into Twitter around the same time and started a huge Twitter land rush. That, combined with a celebrity co-founder (Ev - of Blogger fame) made Twitter an instant success.

I actually posted about Twitter and Jaiku a long time before it became popular and actually said that Jaiku was better. But I think I made a mistake. A mistake the Robert Scoble repeated today in a discussion on Twitter itself.

Both he and I (much earlier) compared the two and equated them to the same thing.

I actually think they are quite different. Twitter is simpler, but Jaiku is attempting to be something more comprehensive and different than Twitter. The two can actually co-exist and compliment each other.

While Twitter strives to answer one question "What are you doing", Jaiku asks a very different question (implicitly). It asks "Who are you".

Where Twitter has evolved into almost a chat room, Jaiku has evolved into a Lifestream.

What's the difference? Well what you chat about and 'do' is only part of the picture. There are also photos, bookmarks, blog posts, music selections and more - each of which are not found on your Twitter stream. In fact I have seen many argue that they should NEVER be found in Twitter. Twitter is for human updates about human things.

The advantage of a Lifestream is that it creates a living record of ALL your digital activities. Jaiku calls them Presence Streams - but they are the same thing.

My Jaiku Presence Stream has my blog posts, my Twitter stream and my Flickr photos. Others include their del.icio.us links and more. While there are hacks and mashups out there to make RSS imports into Twitter possible - I don't think it belongs there.

So now Leo is moving to Jaiku. Does this mean everyone else will follow him? Robert already has.

With all the Attention being paid to both these services, a little known service called Loopnote is being overlooked. In part this is because their team is not engaged in the conversation. If you read the comments on Robert's post about setting up a Jaiku account, Martin (who I presume is the CEO of Loopnote) is asking frantically why no one is paying attention to his product.

As Robert says - you have to join the conversation Martin.

Maybe Loopnote is not quite as good as Twitter (for example it seems to have more of a focus on announcements from groups to individuals rather than individuals to individuals), but it's also a little bit of luck. If Leo stumbled into Loopnote first, maybe the whole thing would have gone a different way.

This post is getting a little long.. but I'd also like to point out a very clever observation that Robert makes on this post about Twitter's potential for advertisers.

"You're missing the even bigger opportunity for marketers: people are telling us WHAT THEY USE and WHAT THEY LIKE.

If you can listen and learn to engage people on Twitter you'll find a marketing goldmine here. If I were really smart, I'd hire a team to categorize each Twitterer 24-hours-a-day. I'd start building a database of behaviors shared.

Someone say "changing the diapers." Well, now we know they have a newborn at home. What could marketers do with THAT? TONS!"

What you are actually talking about is 'Attention Data' Robert. I think that Jaiku does a better job at getting a complete picture of your Attention Data (considering you can stream all your personal RSS into it). But rather than give it to advertisers (yuk) there are opportunities to create personal filters out of the information to help reduce information overload.

See: APML and Touchstone. More on this later.

Controlling the message in Media 2.0

I am very late to the story where Microsoft’s PR agency sends its memo on a Wired journalist to the journalist himself (the dossier is here).

Read an insightful commentary on it by Jeremy Wagstaff from the Wall Street Journal.

To me this underscores the level of command and control large companies try to exhert over the message of the day in the Media. A level which, in the face of Media 2.0, has been severely diminished

While orchestrated media campaigns can still be waged by PR companies driving the message for mainstream media outlets and A-list bloggers (with B and C list bloggers following the Techmeme cluster) the great long tail means that something worthy of discussion is still discussed and covered - it still gets ink - somewhere.

Take the launch of Peepel yesterday. The coverage was huge. It seemed like every blog was talking about it (with notable exception of Techcrunch - I think Michael has something against Aussies from Brisbane).

I know that Peepel is a startup and I assume like all startups they don't have a Microsoft level PR firm pulling the strings. Yet they still managed to get plenty of coverage. Coverage that mainstream media would have never provided.

With feed readers and new content discovery/delivery tools like Touchstone, that coverage is being heard by people who are interested. We can now each have our message heard by people who want to hear it.

The leveling of the playing field and the increased diversity of voices can only be a good thing for innovation, understanding and the human race in general.

Attention Metric

Our friends over at Compete.com (fellow APML Workgroup members) have launched a new metric called 'Attention'

While I am not sure I 100% agree with the way they calculate it, it is yet another example of the value of Attention in the new media landscape.

Digg stuff from inside Touchstone

Right click on items on the Ticker or any Touchstone Alert and you can now Digg/Reddit/Del.icio.us/Etc it right there!

Developers can even add their own 'ActionExtensions' by writing a little bit of XML.

Have fun!

Want to see Touchstone in action?

Want a huge glimpse at Touchstone? Check out some screencasts I just posted... let us know what you think.

Touchstone Screencasts

Make sure you have your speakers on - some nice tunes in the background.

Announcing second intake of participants for the APML Workgroup

Today we are announcing a second intake of participants in the APML Workgroup. APML stands for Attention Profiling Markup Language.

From the website:

APML will allow users to export and use their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows them to export their reading lists from Feed Readers. The idea is to boil down all forms of Attention Data - including Browser History, OPML, Attention.XML, Email etc - to a portable file format containing a description of ranked user interests.

The new participants are:

• Sam Sethi (Vecosys)
• Daniel Winterstein (ThinkTank Maths)
• Steve Williams (Programmer, Digg)
• David Cancel (Co-Founder, Compete.com)
• Richard Giles/Graeme Sutherland (Co-Founders, Scouta.com)
• Elias Bizannes

They join the existing group:

• Chris Saad/Ashley Angell (Co-Founders, Faraday Media/Touchstone)
• Paul Jones (Senior Architect, Faraday Media/Touchstone)
• Mitch Ratcliffe (Co-Founder, Buzzlogic)
• Chris Messina (Citizen Agency)
• Daniela Barbosa (Solutions Architect, Dow Jones)
• Phil Morle (VP Attention, Yoick)
• Ben Metcalfe (Social Media Consultant)

The APML Workgroup is tasked with converting the current specification into an agreed standard.

It has already started its work with a revised spec. More information can be found on the APML website at www.apml.org

We invite all the players in or around the Attention Economy to join us in refining, implementing and evangelizing APML. To join the Workgroup please contact us with your qualifications.
Members of the general public are invited to join the mailing list (via the APML.org website) forums or blog to provide feedback.

More about APML
In a world where our online footprints (Attention Data) are measured, dissected, analyzed and used to better target us with content and advertising, APML represents a way for users to take back control of their own Attention Profile.

In order for the study of 'Attention' to evolve into the Attention Economy we must have a way to export, own, trade and assign value to our own Attention Profiles. APML promises to become an important part of the solution and we believe this announcement is a significant milestone in it's development.

Attention Profiles will become our digital fingerprints and will eventually have implications for all aspects of our lives including Media, Business and Lifestyle.

Stay tuned...

Web 2.0 - Nothing to see here... moving right along...

A lot of people are reading and writing about Web 3.0 again - Spurred by Alex's post on RRW.

I, myself, have written about Web 3.0 late last year. Here's an excerpt:

Web 3.0? Are you serious? Apparently a lot of people are. More than I imagined. It seems from the search results, though, Web 3.0 is some sort of Web 2.0 - except with more of everything. More mainstream users, more revenue (or finding a way to get revenue in the first place), more programmable etc.

To summarize - I thought it was a silly idea.

I was going to ignore the subject this time until I read a post by Peter Rip. I love this quote:

"VCs have always made money at finding the ideal point of friction between the Present and the Future. Profits accumulate in the gap between What Is and What Is Possible. Web 2.0 is now firmly in the category of What Is."

The quote caught my eye because one or two VCs I have spoken to (and an awful lot of investor types are always fishing around) make the statement "oh it's too early for this kind of thing" (this kind of thing being a focus on Attention as a consumer tool). It always makes me laugh.

I think Peter is spot on. I too am tired of all the 'me too' services out there. They are so unoriginal. In many cases the winners have been decided.

I do have a problem, however, with claiming that Web 3.0 is all about web services. Web services are an old idea and APIs are already part of the Web 2.0 evolution. So to claim that they are part of Web 3.0 is a bit like saying 'HTML is part of Web 2.0'.

APIs are here to stay. Screen scraping will reduce over time as apps either play nice or die. But I don't think that broader adoption of APIs is a sufficient paradigm change (at least on its own) to justify a new version number.

So to summarize:

• Web 0.5 was about communication - Chat/Email.
  
• Web 1.0 was about one way publishing - CMS/Portals - Corporates came first and they declared their message to us poor users. Community was relegated to a second class citizen on forums (if at all)
  
• Web 2.0 was about two way publishing - Blogs/YouTube/Digg - The community (specifically the individual acting as part of a community) become a first class citizen. The web became personal.

I am not sure Web 3.0 is coming. At least not any time soon. Instead I think the next big opportunity is Media 2.0.

I think that Web 2.0 was merely an overdue adjustment in our thinking. It was a realization that the web is not just another broadcast medium. That broadcasting radio/TV/print over TCP/IP was not the point or the promise of this new platform. It was a realization that interaction models that empowered the audience to become the most important part of the ecosystem was the actual point of the medium.

It's like when TV grew up and stopped doing radio plays and started doing lifelike drama.

I think the next revolution is the web transforming other forms of media. That is, creating interaction models that go beyond the web (or extend the web into more places and form factors). It's about the web transforming traditional TV, Radio and Print to become more interactive. It's about democratizing the mainstream - not just on the web - but everywhere.

Going Viral - By design

Interesting article was published in Ad week on the 19th called "Clients try to manipulate unpredictable viral Buzz" about clients asking ad agencies to create viral videos for them.

Ad agencies are spending a lot of time and creative juices trying to manufacture stuff that people should 'Pay Attention' to each time having mixed results. They are seeding blogs, commenting, creating content and faking YouTube stats all in an effort to get noticed.

From the article:

"The move to bring a measure of predictability to the still-unpredictable world of viral marketing is being driven by clients trying to balance the risks
inherent in a new marketing medium with the need to prove return on investment, said agency executives."

Some campaigns work - like the one below:

But many don't. While the video above got millions of impressions (and is still going - even getting linked on Blogs dedicated to the subject of Attention!) other videos that would (on paper) be expected to get a lot of attention don't.

"Then there's the seven-minute film by Leaving Las Vegas director Mike Figgis of Kate Moss in her underwear for Agent Provocateur, a lingerie maker that had what would appear to be the recipe for a viral sensation. But it was viewed fewer than 75,000 times in the three months after it was uploaded last September."

There is a fight going on out there. To win hearts and minds. And I am not talking about the War on Terror.

Actually what they are really fighting for is Attention. Once they have that - its yet another battle to actually convert Attention into Engagement.

In the mean time. I am having a very hard time uploading a screen-cast of Touchstone in action. Google Video and YouTube seem to compress the heck out of it so you can't read the screen! This should be easier.

Emerging Structure or Intelligent Design

Esther Dyson is one of the thought giants of the Internet. She thinks on such grand scales and puts them in such clear terms that it's a joy to read her stuff and hear her talk.

Her post about MetaWeb's Freebase is no different. I posted about Freebase earlier and I offhandedly mused that it was counter intuitive to the philosophy of Web 2.0 whereby we are creating an emerging structure of tagged/microformated/syndicated/user-centric/open content.

Esther has written a far more eloquent post about it. Although the creators of MetaWeb are her friends and she is decidedly for their approach she takes the time to put their efforts in context and frame the debate of 'Emerging Structure' (i.e. structure will emerge when most sites provide structured content and algorithms sort it out) vs. 'Intelligent Design' (where the structure comes from a given database architecture).

She writes:

"This all reflects a fundamental if still incoherent debate. There's one school of thought that says that if you just collect enough data and throw enough algorithms at it, the inherent structure - and the understanding of that structure - will emerge. After all, that's what happens with human beings, though it takes a decade or more. (And in some people, the process even continues into old age.) The recent explosion of tagging is taken as evidence of this: With their tags, users are creating implicit relationships among online objects, and indeed, complex webs of relationships are emerging, with nodes, clusters and other rich structures. But the relationships themselves are poorly defined, other than strong or weak - and possibly, links made by my friends or by trusted authorities, vs. links created by anyone.

By contrast, the opposing point of view says we have to hand-design the relationships and structures - like the complex database schema about cars."

Like everything she writes, it is well worth a read.a

Announcing support for Linkedin and Subscription Plugins

Imagine getting alerted instantly when your LinkedIn contacts have a job on offer or when they add a new contact you might want to know.

The latest build of Touchstone does just that. If you have your copy check it out in the Subscription Helper.

Now imagine doing it for MySpace, Facebook, Hi5 etc. The latest build of Touchstone also makes that possible!

Paul has added a feature called 'Subscription Plugins' that allows developers to quickly and easily write little XML files that add Touchstone subscription support to all sorts of services.

Combined with Dapper.net this sort of functionality can be taken to a whole new level - making it easy for users to get alerts from all your favorite web apps - even those that don't support RSS (without the need to write dedicated Input Adapters).

We have included support for LinkedIn already - we look forward to see what the community can come up with. Be sure to email us your plugins.

If you are developer: Read more about it here

Also, since this type of extensibility is a first in the Feed Reading space (as far as we know) we would be interested in collaborating with other feed readers out there to add universal support and working with app developers to build their own plugins for the Subscription Helper. Drop me a line.

Don't have an invite yet? Maybe you should pay more attention.

Imagine a world without Metadata. Now call it 'The mainstream...'

Recently I have observed that we, as early adopters, use an enormous amount of implicit and explicit Metadata when making feed reading decisions.

When skimming our thousands of items a day we are actually making value judgements based on who the author is, what the headline reads (and what we think the topic is based on the headline), if there are any pictures to catch our eye and so on and so on.

When we come across a blog, I think that most people look for the subscriber count and consider (at least at the back of their mind and as part of a larger value judgement) whether or not they should add the author to their subscription list based on how authoritative that number makes them. Adding someone to your feed list is a relatively big decision. So the 'subscriber count' metadata is important.

The problem though, is that mainstream users don't know this metadata. They don't know that engaget is the top gadget blog. They don't know that Chris Messina is an authority on OpenID and Microformats and they don't know what constitutes a small or large subscriber count. They also don't know about Technorati and therefore don't know how to check a blogs rank before consider the weight to place on the post.

R. Todd Stephens writes an article asking us to imagine a world without metadata. It's a fascinating prospect.

He gives the following real-world example:

"Now imagine walking into your local grocery store, and you notice all of the traditional taxonomies have been removed because product classifications are a form of metadata. The aisle signage has been removed. The only things you can see are the blank containers designed for the products themselves. Let's suppose you need soup to go with Saturday's dinner. You grab a can and begin to shake it in hopes that the weight and movement can provide you with some indication of the contents. Is it tomato soup or a can of beans? Perhaps it is a can of peaches or mixed vegetables. Or, maybe you're an experienced shopper who can distinguish between soup and other products. Is it chicken noodle soup, vegetable soup or clam chowder?"

He also talks about metadata without context using foreign travellers as an example.

"My wife and I ran across this in the Atlanta airport a few months ago when traveling overseas. A woman standing outside the train car that moved travelers from the concourse to the travel gates was having a problem understanding the metadata information that was all around her. She asked us if we knew any Spanish, to which my wife replied, "Un poquito," or just a little. She started to reel off sentence after sentence, trying to explain to us her issues. The best we could do was to hand her off to another couple that knew much more Spanish than we did. Here is the point: as a traveler, she was surrounded by all the information and metadata she needed to either get her luggage or head to the departure gate. She simply couldn't understand the information she needed to take action."

I think that mainstream users are just like foreign travellers. They lack the understanding to use all the metadata ques to filter information quickly in a flooded feed reader.

I think that if mainstream Media and business management want to reach their audience, then we need to give them a way of helping users get important content by making metadata

a. Easier to understand.
b. Collectively factored and contributory to a single Personal Relevancy rank.

Freebase - Centralized control of the distributed web?

There is a buzz about the launch of Freebase by Metaweb technologies on the web at the moment.

From the New York Times:

"The idea of a centralized database storing all of the world’s digital information is a fundamental shift away from today’s World Wide Web, which is akin to a library of linked digital documents stored separately on millions of computers where search engines serve as the equivalent of a card catalog."

Is it just me or does this seem completely antithetical to the entire point of the Web in general and the Web 2.0 philosophy specifically?

Are we not trying to create a distributed, democratic and user-centric reality where the right of self-expression trumps data silos?

So why would we all be rushing to contain all data in a single database?

Wouldn't it be a more effective solution to build a search engine that could aggregate content across the web by extracting and indexing it in a structured way. Something that can look for Microformats as well as try to extract structured data from unstructured pages using semantic analysis (similar to AdaptiveBlue).

It could even offer its index/database via APIs.

The difference with this scenario, though, is that we don't all have to play nice with a single database/API - they have to play nice with us. This is about shifting power from the few, to the many after all.

It seems to me to attempt otherwise is moving in the wrong direction.

Am I missing something here? Let me know what you think...