[rdfweb-dev] Plink – plink.org is going down due to the inability for FOAF to be expired. Lack of control of proliferation of personal information is one of the major hurdles (a subset of the larger question of publishing control [see: Towards Semi-Permeable Blogging] and data control/faceting [see: Capabilities Theory]) in moving towards larger (hopefully open) identity management and relationship management systems.

Certainly, one way to do it is along the lines of using PKI and encryption to create classes of data encrypted on per-user, per-group bases. Keys could then be directly managed and revoked to limit continued availability within the system regardless of the distribution of the encrypted data (spread it over Freenet or other P2P for caching!). There are also other ways of expiring data, but those should remain in confidence for now.

  • Carnegie Foundation: Knowledge Media Laboratory – The Knowledge Media Laboratory (KML) develops tools and resources to exchange information, share knowledge and produce innovations that can transform teaching and learning at many levels.
  • KEEP Toolkit – one of the KML’s projects
  • XWiki – Radeox-based Java Wiki
  • PARC: Sparrow – The current state of the web is strongly biased towards reading previously authored documents. Changes and additions to Web pages are solely the purview of the original author. Sparrow Web promotes a different genre of web page: the community-shared page. Like any web page, a community-shared page is originally crafted by a single author, who defines the initial content and scope of the document. But unlike other web pages, a community-shared page can be modified or added to by any interested contributor, and the barriers for doing so are lessened by allowing changes to be made in a lightweight manner. Community-shared pages increase the collaborative capability of the web — interesting, by Bay-Wei Chang (publications, CiteSeer), whom I met last week
  • Google eyes Sparrow to simplify Web collaboration
  • Metawiki – hmm, this I haven’t seen before. Wish I could read French (yeah, yeah, yeah systrans)

You Call That a Major Policy Address? – at this point, is anyone surprised? The only policy that the Bush administration has is about keeping power.

Did CNN and MSNBC get hoodwinked this morning? Yesterday, the White House announced that President Bush would be delivering a “major policy address” on terrorism today. The cable news networks broadcast it live and in full. Yet the “address ” turned out to be a standard campaign stump speech before a Pennsylvania crowd that seemed pumped on peyote, cheering, screaming, or whooping at every sentence.

The president announced no new policy, uttered not one new word about terrorism, foreign policy, or anything else. He did all the things he wanted to do in last Thursday’s debate, accuse his opponent of weakness, bad judgment, vacillation, and other forms of flip-floppery, though this time without a moderator to hush the audience, much less an opponent to bite back. And Bush loved it, smiling, smirking, raising his eyebrows, as if to say, “How ’bout that zinger?”

The rest of the column is quite good btw, and does discuss policy.

4 more years of Bush will be a validation both of Rove’s underhanded campaign tactics, and of the idea that the Presidential office is now fair game purely for power grabs and cronyism. That’s not the America I want.

So, worth writing down, even while still buzzed (K10K housewarming — good stuff), but jwz has definitely lost touch. We couldn’t get into DNA Lounge because my flat pants and my Rod Lavers weren’t good enough apparently. Obviously the geeks are no longer his peoples… Well, such is such and all that.