09.20.07

Semantic Web, please go away

Posted in Uncategorized at 11:32 pm by David Kellogg

I’m tired of hearing how the semantic web is the big thing, the meta-web, the solution to all things. It’s not. It likely will never get off the ground, and if it does, it will be of very little use. Here’s why.

Read-write has an article about how the semantic web failed so far and how should it change to gain traction. I largely agree with it. While eggheads support the semantic web, real people are getting things done without it.

The semantic web cannot succeed. I will use Read-write to prove it.

Read-write uses three HTML meta tags for this article written by Alex Iskold. One is author, which is listed as Richard MacManus. The other is description, which has a Digg link, hardly a description of anything. The third is copyright, which goes to MacManus, but not Iskold. I’ll trust the last is correct. This is typical of the web.

Unlike most semantic web supporters, I have crawled the web for 4 years, now. The first thing you learn when crawling is not to trust servers. If it says UTF-8, don’t trust it. It says it is written in Chinese, you better test it against a real language detection module. The same is true for Read-write, here. Two out of three fields are incorrect due to copying by machines.

The semantic web suffers from malice. We have a long tradition of keyword stuffing, cloaking, gateway pages and other malicious devices. Web spammers will only use the semantic web to spread disinformation. It may list Brittney Spears ringtones in the description, but the page offers viagra.

The semantic web requires a network to exist before anything else starts. Crawlers and indexers will not spend time parsing semantic web information until there is a critical mass of correctly formated pages. Site owners will not move until the indexing makes use of the semantic information.

Usually when someone trashes the semantic web, microfomat goons come out of the woodwork to sing its praises. Yet, microformats suffer from the same fraud and incompetence as the semantic web. Plus the network has to appear out of whole cloth.

So what is good, if microformats and the semantic web are doomed to failure? Freedom. Someone should have the freedom to create whatever page he wants using any method (Flash, JS, AJAX), and guys like me will have to divine its purpose. No one should have to try hard to describe a page’s purpose. Finding the purpose is the hard work that keeps me employed.

Permalink 22 Comments

08.25.07

Minekey widget

Posted in Uncategorized at 9:41 pm by David Kellogg

Here’s my minekey widget.
There’s no magic here. I added my Stumbleupon favorites stream, Boing Boing and TechCrunch, and a nice cheery widget was created for me. These guys want to host a Lunch 2.0. I was looking for something like this.

Permalink 1 Comment

08.03.07

Lunch 2.0 on Scoble on CNET

Posted in Uncategorized at 9:04 am by David Kellogg

Rumors galore showed up about Plaxo via the Lunch 2.0 event at Facebook. The ball keeps rolling for our little lunch hour.

Scoble talked to the vice president of marketing, John McCrea, about
Plaxo’s upcoming social network. This is a good move for Plaxo in an obvious direction. I’m glad to hear they found a way to make the leap.

I love leaks. I always see them as well-planned, intending to produce a good buzz. In this case the leak occurred at the number one live social network in Silicon Valley, Lunch 2.0.

Permalink Comments

07.24.07

Will the Internet save Business 2.0?

Posted in Uncategorized at 10:27 pm by David Kellogg

I have a sick feeling for helping to kill paper publications. On the Internet, I work to bring information to the masses. The hoi polloi get what they want when they want it. Yet, I have a soft spot for great paper publications like Business 2.0. I subscribed for a meager $10 and fell in love with it very quickly. The writing is witty. They follow ideas and companies long before they are ripe. Business 2.0 covers my industry quickly, whereas Fortune covers only what already made money.

Today, I joined a Facebook group to show my support. It has grown to 1500 members in 4 days. I hope it works. Hopeful like Democrats, we may fail knowing we did the right thing.

Unfortunately, all paper publications are feeling the advertising pinch. I prefer at times not to choose my news but to have others choose it for me. I want to sit down and read an article end to end and see another perspective. Business 2.0 gives me the startup point of view. I would miss it.

Permalink 1 Comment

07.15.07

Design Patterns died today. RIP

Posted in Uncategorized at 12:54 pm by David Kellogg

SILICON VALLEY, California - Design Patterns (1995-2007) met its untimely demise during a code freeze today. A post by Slashdot user MillionthMonkey shot Design Patterns through the heart. Design Patterns, rest in peace. Design Patterns are survived by Algorithms and Anti Patterns.

I must admit in my 11 years of paid coding, I never used a single Pattern. Yet as I wrote code, I wondered if there was some order to it all. Design Patterns attempts to explain well written code and turn messiness into order. Unfortunately, the explanation was turned on its head, as trend-seeking professors encouraged their students to inject patterns into their code. It sounds like inserting great lines of COBOL into your C program. Sometimes the cure is not right for the disease.

Design Patterns attempt to take the art and science of writing code and turn it into an engineering discipline. Despite arguments to the contrary, computer science is not engineering. Engineering involves applying the same rules (gravity, chemistry, physics) to a large number of experiments and testing their results. Engineers can make predictions based upon scant evidence, like testing a few i-beams or wafers to test the whole, to make assumptions about the quality of a product.

Computer science is not yet engineering. The closest I have seen to real engineering is at Google, where statistics play a role in what they do. At many companies, they test several web page designs on the users to see which one works for the user. This is heading in the right direction. Engineering has little to do with writing code. Writing code in the right way enables good engineering to occur outside the code.

Adding design Patterns to working code to impress your boss creates code bloat. This leads to my favorite Anti Pattern: writing too many design patterns in your code.

Permalink 1 Comment

05.25.07

Lunch 2.0 on Chronicle’s front page

Posted in Uncategorized at 2:38 pm by David Kellogg

A group I helped start, Lunch 2.0, is shown in the San Francisco Chronicle today. What is Lunch 2.0? Terry has a good description in The Lunch 2.0 story so far. It is a group of Silicon Valley workers and students that get together at each other’s companies for free food and great conversation. The party at Linked In drew around 250 people, a huge turnout. Terry and I wanted to sneak into corporate cafeterias back in 2000, but we did not get far.

We tried to start a networking event called a Junto, but that failed out of only being an intellectual networking event. The Lunch 2.0 concept created by Mark, Joseph, Terry and me, was only about trying to get a few free meals. We got good publicity through Mark, and it stuck. I’m happy the Chronicle article was written. Maybe we can hope for a few more lunches in the next year.

Dave

Permalink 2 Comments