Jeni's Musings

XTech was subtitled “the mobile web”, but one of the major themes for me was that of the distributed web. The first keynote, by Simon Wardley, gave a vision of a future in which hardware, frameworks and applications are services in the cloud rather than products on machines we own: where we use flickr to store our photographs, Google App Engine to host our applications, and Amazon S3 to store our data. In David Recordon’s keynote (written up by Jeremy Keith), he talked about small, specific services provided by sites that aren’t “destination sites”. The same picture was painted by Gareth Rushgrove in his talk on Design Strategies for a Distributed Web.

I finally have some time to write about XTech. What a great conference! I know that Edd would like it bigger, but its modest size gives it a family feel. Like a family gathering, there are pontificating oldsters whose wisdom goes largely unappreciated by young upstarts who themselves bring energy and innovation to the crowd. And a bunch in the middle trying to translate across the gap: to explain the vision to the old and the reality to the new.

Roughly ten years ago, I was attending KAW’98. I remember that conference as one of the best weeks of my life. I had great company. I saw scenery like I’d never seen before. I presented my PhD work for the first time to people who were (at least politely) interested in it. And I learned a lot, both from the presentations and less formal discussions.

(I remember driving back to Nottingham when we returned; a rainbow appeared in front of us, seeming to arch over our destination in a perfect finale.)

Looking back at that paper is like looking at my past generally is: much of it makes me cringe, but parts of it are surprisingly good. What’s interesting is that if you swap a few terms for modern buzzwords, it’s still a pretty neat idea. It’s also amazing how far we’ve come — how much has become common-place — in just ten years.

Rick Jelliffe has been writing recently about PRESTO, most recently about the design of URLs based on the PRESTO system. In his latest post, Rick talks about using XPath as the basis of a URL scheme:

The Xpath for accessing a particular part’s title would be /law/part[2]/title so the PRESTO URLs would need some kind of convention.

[snip]

Now, I am not sure I understand the issues well enough to say which system for indexing is absolutely best. But I think the advantage of http://www.eg.com/law/part2/title over http://www.eg.com/law/part2/title is that it is probably a more common case that your system is interested in /law/part[2]/title rather than all titles of parts /law/part/title. But it is a matter of the particular use case and the consequent virtual schema.

There were a couple of comments on my previous post about RDF and uncertainty in our Web 2.0 genealogy project concerning the problems of privacy in a genealogy app. My ideas about this aren’t fully thought-through, let alone implemented, but I thought I’d share them anyway.

First, the things we could restrict access to are:

• sources of information (eg birth records)
• personas (eg Charles Darwin) and assertions about them

Questions of identity and privacy are rather topical at the moment, especially here in Britain where last week a database dump including the names, addresses, bank details of half the country, along with our children’s names and dates of birth, got “lost in the post”.

So what better time to announce a new online identity metric? My PhD supervisor, Nigel Shadbolt is the CTO of Garlik, so earlier in the week I got an invite to the launch of QDOS.

Like the online identity calculator that I wrote about before, QDOS gives you a score based on your online presence. However, this score isn’t just based on a Google search. It has four components (which are each represented by a different colour, and are combined to give a very pretty pictorial “fingerprint”; check out Tim Berners-Lee’s QDOS, for example).

OK, so I can’t remain a Luddite for long. What’s a technological solution to the posterity problem, in particular in regard to web applications that tuck away all your data in their databases, just waiting to be forgotten?

Well, what if web applications accepted information as feeds rather than through forms? The original data would be distributed rather than centralised. Web applications would use the web as more than a distribution medium: they would be of the web rather than simply on the web.

We just had photos taken of the children, and it’s put me in a reflective mood. Norm posted the other day about his experience with information/task management products:

Then it hit me.

None of them, with the notable exception of Tinderbox, seem to store the data in any open format. I was seriously considering one of these commercial black boxes for an important chunk of the data that drives my day-to-day life. The little voice in my head reacted viscerally when the observation was made: “What the hell you thinking, man! Stop that!”

I (“Jeni Tennison”) manage to score 10/10 on the online identity calculator, thanks to having a pretty rare name and there being multiple archives of XSL-List, to which I was a prolific contributor in my early XML days. (I think I can also claim to be “Jenni Tennison”, “Jenny Tennison” less so, “Jenifer Tennison” is obviously the pre-XML me, and “Jennifer Tennison” not me at all, and quite rightly so.)

Anyway, I’ve just registered with claimID to get myself an OpenID, to lower the barrier to accessing certain sites. As well as getting a claimID URL (eg http://claimid.com/jenitennison) to use as an OpenID, you can also use the URL of your own web page as your OpenID identity URL which delegates to the claimID identity URL, by adding links to the claimID server in the head of the web page. (View the source of my home page to see what this looks like.) This provides some flexibility in the event that claimID stops functioning: I can move to another OpenID provider without changing my OpenID.

Norm Walsh invited me onto Dopplr, and like a fool I joined. Why, oh why, did I bother? I never leave home. All my “fellow travellers” know where I am. And it just makes me jealous knowing they’re jetting off to… let’s see… Montreal, Sebastapol, San Francisco, Redmond, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Limoges, San Jose, Toulouse, Berlin, Seattle, Monterey, Lahaina, Tokyo, Geneva, Naples, Prague, and so on.

Maybe I’ll pretend my immobility is a principled stance against superfluous air travel.