It may be time for me to write a paper, if only to find referers from people who are working/thinking about interesting things within the space.

  • While I’ve been zoned out, Eric’s been writing good stuff and getting boku linkpop on the DSS. w00t w00t
  • Xanadu Redux: Citizen Kane, Deep Hypertext & Interactive Authoring – April 22 @ DML, USC
  • How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think
  • procrastination diagram – blog of Karl Ramm, MetaCarta employee; interesting thoughts on social networking software
  • WiredReachthe world’s first decentralized social networking software – have they done everything already?
  • The Circle – australian P2P dark-net w/ decentralized hashtable (Chord), DRM privacy
  • The Augmented Social Network: Building identity and trust into the next-generation Internet

    This paper proposes the creation of an Augmented Social Network (ASN) that would build identity and trust into the architecture of the Internet, in the public interest, in order to facilitate introductions between people who share affinities or complementary capabilities across social networks. The ASN has three main objectives: 1) To create an Internet-wide system that enables more efficient and effective knowledge sharing between people across institutional, geographic, and social boundaries; 2) To establish a form of persistent online identity that supports the public commons and the values of civil society; and, 3) To enhance the ability of citizens to form relationships and self-organize around shared interests in communities of practice in order to better engage in the process of democratic governance. In effect, the ASN proposes a form of “online citizenship” for the Information Age.

  • Tree Hash EXchange format (THEX) – still toread
  • The case for generating URIs by hashing RDF content (PDF)
  • Hashing Spatial Content over Peer-to-Peer Networks (PDF)
  • Ivy: A Read/Write Peer-to-Peer File System (PDF)
  • [Csci551-talk] content-hashing in p2p nets
  • Google: Merkle Hash Trees
  • A distributed approach to high-performance information retrieval

    A distributed architecture and indexing algorithm for high-performance information retrieval has been developed. A prototype system has been built that achieves a throughput of 500 queries per second with a response time of less than one second on an 8-node network of workstations. The algorithm is robust in the presence of lost and duplicated messages as well as failures of nodes of the network. The architecture can be scaled up to larger networks and higher levels of service. The retrieval model allows for semantically rich queries and information objects.

  • Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia – by Cory Doctorow, Aug 2001, on why metadata is intractible
  • Social Bookmarks Manager Right-Click Context Menu

    Last night I hacked together a bit of JavaScript to add a right-click context menu posting option to Joshua Schachter’s Social Bookmarks Manager.

  • How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web

    This follows Putting Facets on the
    Web: An Annotated Bibliography
    , and is the second paper I wrote for
    Prof. Clare Beghtol of the Faculty of
    Information Studies
    at the University of Toronto, who led me in a
    reading course named “Applying Faceted Classification in an Online World.”
    (It’s also available as a PDF (215K)
    which is formatted for printing.)

  • PubSub

    PubSub Concepts provides real-time, content based publish and subscribe systems at internet scale. This site is a Beta version of our home page, which will provide a PubSub interface for weblogs and other information sources.

  • Ontology, Metadata, and Semiotics

    The Internet is a giant semiotic system. It is a massive collection of Peirce’s three kinds of signs: icons, which show the form of something; indices, which point to something; and symbols, which represent something according to some convention. But current proposals for ontologies and metadata have overlooked some of the most important features of signs. A sign has three aspects: it is (1) an entity that represents (2) another entity to (3) an agent. By looking only at the signs themselves, some metadata proposals have lost sight of the entities they represent and the agents ¾ human, animal, or robot ¾ which interpret them. With its three branches of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, semiotics provides guidelines for organizing and using signs to represent something to someone for some purpose. Besides representation, semiotics also supports methods for translating patterns of signs intended for one purpose to other patterns intended for different but related purposes. This article shows how the fundamental semiotic primitives are represented in semantically equivalent notations for logic, including controlled natural languages and various computer languages.