Flashes of Panic

Some bullet points from the talk:

• Philosophical engineering: the semantic web is about logic, and that means that philosophy gets involved. It’s “experimental philosophy—the kind you can create by poking things, and dropping things, etc.” It’s about microscopic rules that control macroscopic behavior—something like weblog software, which creates a whole new way of communicating. Physics does this, of course. Math ties it together, and that’s where something like Google comes in: studying the matrix of links on the web and extracting data about what you’re searching for.

• It’s not just technical rules that make the web work: there’s social rules as well. See email: it works well in an academic environment, but doesn’t scale in a commercial environment. He notes that he knows people thinking of going back to the phone, and thinks it’s appalling that we haven’t created both technical and social rules to make spam impractical.

• If you think things are important, you give it a URI (social rule: you actually serve something at that URI.) Another social rule: not only should you serve useful stuff, you should make useful links. Google works from the pattern of links.

• “This is not a lecture about the Semantic Web. I could talk for hours about the Semantic Web.” We should have a URI, and pages with data about ourselves: the University, the program we’re in, the classes we’re taking. (I have something like that, but not quite in the format he wants.) The exciting thing is connecting your data to other people’s data; you don’t know where others will make connections.

• “The web is a big function: give it a URI, and it gives you information.”

• “The Bank of America seems to have made a decision to cater to people with six-inch-wide screens. I’m sure this decision was made at the highest level.” He resizes the browser screen showing his lecture notes; it makes a very slick resize changing the typeface. I’m impressed, but he does note that there’s a working group at the W3C agonizing over the best way to make content work both on very small screens (like cell phones) and very large screens.

• “If you meet standards, you don’t have to test on zillions of browsers. Don’t send anything down the wire which doesn’t meet standards.” Then he cites browser wars… and says, “Don’t get involved. Use standards.”

• “I don’t know if Michael Moore was in a legal position to say, ‘Go and download Farenheit 9/11,’ but he did, so I downloaded it and watched it on my laptop. If I’d waited for it to show on cable, I’d still be waiting. As a geek, it is my right to run different protocols on the internet. It is your right as a geek to invent new protocols to run on the internet. Don’t let anyone tell you what you can use on the net.”

• “It’s important that the web not represent Washington D.C.’s view of what is right and what is wrong. … maybe on the web we have a chance to build systems which balance the power of the authority with the power of the underdog. People who come in to the system can see who’s the mainstream and who is the underdog. … These are things that you need to do. Fix them in the next few months, please.”

• The independence of disability slide is interesting: Microsoft says 50% of users are making some kind of adaptation, whether that’s a screen layout change (bigger fonts, different colors, custom stylesheet) or throwing out the mouse and getting a trackball (like I did.)

• The Semantic Web is actually the Data Web. “We should’ve called it this in the first place.” You can publish things as easily in RDF as HTML using PHP. He talks about SPARQL and querying the data web: the aim is for serendipitous reuse, the people you didn’t expect to use it. “Publish your data.”

• The net is tree-like: the last mile is a single connection, not a multi-homed connection. Can you get cable, have your neighbor get DSL, then switch back and forth if one goes off? He describes how he and his neighbor are on different electrical circuits, and if one of them loses power they’ll throw a cable across to keep the fridge running.

• He explains how it is actually easy to get toothpaste back in the tube.

• “Magazines used to redesign their websites every few months. You’d follow a link to the old page, and get a blank page saying, ‘we’ve redesigned, use the search feature to find what you’re looking for.’ That’s really insulting.”

Questions: What’s pushing people to put data on the web? Take product data. You can find out what tires work on your fleet of vans, for example, but it will take you an afternoon. If that data was on the manufacturer’s website, it would be possible to find this out in a few minutes. If the data is available from three garages, you might ignore the fourth garage with a better price.

What are the social/technical issues around the NSA wiretapping program? The data out there is such that preventing data getting out is nearly impossible. We need then to make the systems transparent—so the government must explain where it gets its information. Why are there few calls for the same kind of accountability of big business? They can abuse information just as easily: insurance companies, credit card companies.

What are your favorite websites? “I never answer that question; it’s like asking which are my favorite children.”