Gnodal Journal

At c|net news, Paul Festa writes Dancing around Web services, which focuses on this little storm cloud:

“There’s this division of labor that’s emerging between those who can develop (Web) services and those that can put them together to make an application,” said Eric Newcomer, chief technology officer at Iona Technologies and a member of the W3C’s Web Services Architecture committee. “Choreography (is) about getting business analysts to put Web services together to build an application.”
But questions about the intentions of some high-profile W3C members–Microsoft, IBM and BEA Systems–threaten to derail the possibility of an industrywide standard, said analysts and other observers.”

Standards are bullshit. XHTML is a crock. The W3C is irrelevant. yaa yaa yaa …

Dan Bricklin and the SMBmeta project should be interested in this: SKICal – Structured Knowledge Initiative – Calendar

“The Structured Knowledge Initiative Calendar – SKICal – aims to improve the information infrastructure concerned with public events (concerts, sports competitions, conferences etc.)
SKICal is working towards this goal by promoting the new international standard specification for the exchange of calendar information which is known as iCalendar.
SKICal work is coordinated by Metamatrix in Stockholm, which has recieved sponsorship from NUTEK – Sweden`s central public authority for matters concerning the growth and renewal of industry.”

Anything new under the sun? This certainly isn’t the dustiest document I’ve found this evening, but still … it’s at least 6 years old … and it still rings sweet! From UMichDearborn, by Marcy Bauman: Networked Hypertext (reads in part) “This essay is an attempt to answer those questions. It is my central contention that the writing being done in new environments — on listservs, MUDs and MOOs, and the world wide web — is essentially a new form of hypertext …”

Whooo-boy! Yessir, nothing like reading old files to get a sense of how one has come to be the person one has come to be! If my old collection of HyperNews related items was not enough of a chocker *waves and shouts to Daniel LaLiberte; may he always drink deep and prosper*, I found another directory full of items relating to *what else?* topoi. What is this about? Well, let me tell you about my theory of how strange attractors play a role in the cognitive processes of conceptualization. !now. Okay, instead, let me share this with you … I had a local copy of this item, which is still alive on the web!

This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 68) – October 29, 1995, by John Baez

Okay, now the time has come to speak of many things: of topoi, glueballs, communication between branches in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory, knots, and quantum gravity.

1) Robert Goldblatt, Topoi, the Categorial Analysis of Logic, Studies in logic and the foundations of mathematics vol. 98, North-Holland, New York, 1984.

If you’ve ever been interested in logic, you’ve got to read this book. Unless you learn a bit about topoi, you are really missing lots of the fun. The basic idea is simple and profound: abstract the basic concepts of set theory, so as to define the notion of a “topos”, a kind of universe like the world of classical logic and set theory, but far more general!”

Isn’t that wonderful?! I feel like I’ve discovered that my clansmen have not all died off! *blush*

Now, it’s just a matter of relating this back to BPML/N and SMBmetta.

What a hoot! I noticed an old directory in the faculty account that Dalhousie University has very kindly allowed me to keep active (given a dual-boot box, I really and truly would be making more progress on my “VRML in Ethology” project, honest!) … this dates back to early ’97. In among the dusty links I found this sweetheart:

Taking the High Road to Institutional Self-Promotion
Many organizations are coming to see the Worldwide Web’s revolutionary potential for presenting accurate and useful
information about themselves — data, for example, on their missions, businesses, cultures, and competencies — to
key audiences that can directly influence their continued success and prosperity.

Plus ca change, plus ca reste la meme!

Following the “copyright” thread [1, 2, and 3 good links thanks to Doc Searls], I came across this bit of RealAudio, an NPR column by David Weinberger that could well be entitled “It’s just email. Point being, of course, that it isn’t just email … it’s something like discourse!

* A Wittgensteinian Approach to Discourse Analysis
* Roland Barthes – The Discourse of History
* The Internet and Public Discourse by Phil Agre at FirstMonday
* Technologies of the Self: Foucault and Internet Discourse

WebReference posted a short update on 9JAN that slipped past me: Safari Roundup / Usability ROI