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April 15, 2003
Content Pipelines
Clemens Vasters is talking about content pipelines. Clemens envisions a system for processing RSS feeds, Exchange folders, public websites and other information that pushes this content through a series of stages in a pipeline that processes the information in specific ways. For example, one stage might add Google search results to the content and another might annotate it with relevant books from Amazon. Still others might perform language translation or dictionary links. Clemens sees this as an open architecture that allows stages in the pipeline to be written by anyone and routed to as necessary. In other words, this is a set of web services for RSS feeds. This is a cool idea that generalizes the Mockerybird Book Watch. Clemens says:
So,Êif such a distributed infrastructure existed, and you'd aggregate this entry "backrouted" through a pipeline of filters provided by Weather.com, Google.com, Dictionary.com and Amazon.com, you'd have the weather for Athens and Madrid, all relevant Google links and books onÊ"content" and/orÊ"pipelines" and WS-Routing, andÊlinks toÊexplanations of all non-trivial words in this text. How's that?
The lesson here is that its the links to related information that are adding value. For example, for most of the words in a typical post, I don't need an artificial link to the definition, because my brain has already made that link internally. For some words though, it would be helpful. One of the interesting aspects of this project would be the user interface issues to ensure all this information make sense once it gets to the user.
09:32 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Hacked
I got hacked this morning. If you happened to tune in, you saw an uninteresting message from someone demanding money. This wasn't the first time either. Turns out my page had been hacked at least two other times during the last week, but Radio just overwrote it when I publihsed new stuff. That's one advantage of posting frequently and really shows the benefit of a content management system. The site can be recreated with relative ease. The problem was a known security hole in Gallery 1.3.2. I was able to fix that using information on the Gallery site and, I hope, plug the hole.
05:03 PM | Recommend This | Print This
The Modern University?
Philip Greenspun asks why Universities don't provide more for group learning and keep students in school 45-50 weeks out of the year so that they can finish in 2.5 years instead of 4. Northface Learning is a company that thinks they can do just that for Computer Science students. They also think they can make money at it. I've seen the progress they've made over the last year and they might just pull it off.
08:46 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Jabber Gets Liberty Enabled
Jabber, the open source instant messaging platform and PingID, have announced that Jabber will use PingID's SourceID gateway to allow Jabber users to allow federated single sign-on to Jabber services. SourceID is an open source implementation of the Liberty alliance specification. SourceID is still a pretty well-kept secret, but partnerships like this will help it get out into the sun.