These go to eleven

Just for Dave

beobal — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 09:56:53 +0000

Where it all happens

Flickr & Twitter On Asynchronicity

beobal — Wed, 16 May 2007 15:59:08 +0000

This morning I sat in a couple of sessions focussed on XMPP, Jabber: Social Software for Robots & Jaiku - rich presence. While Ralph’s overview of Jaiku and the way it can exploit XMPP’s notion of presence was interesting, Kellan & Blaine’s really caught my attention. They talked about how Flickr & Twitter are using asynchronous message passing with Jabber to help decouple the components in their systems as they tackle their very well documented scaling issues.
A lot of my day to day is concerned with enabling our own platform to scale out effectively, and one of the emergent features I’m seeing is exactly this - by relaxing the constraint of synchroncity you can make great savings during development, deployment and at runtime.
Of course, as with everything there are downsides to this approach and trade offs to be made but its always nice validation to see people taking similar steps to us.

XTech

beobal — Wed, 16 May 2007 15:54:33 +0000

I’m in Paris for XTech - hardly seems feasible that its a year since this. Yesterday was Ubiquitous Web day, but I spent most of the day in a tutorial on XQuery. The conference proper starts today, there’s lots of cool things going on & lots of interesting people about. Nice to catch up with Elias and Damian - folks who I normally only ever see online.
There are loads of us here from Talis including our own David Baileys, mmmmmRob & Paul_Miller

Flickr Machine Tags

beobal — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 20:15:20 +0000

Flickr have added an interesting new feature to their query API, Machine Tags. In one way, this is really a formalisation of what people were already doing to a certain extent informally. What is seems like to me is a step toward RDF (at the moment there’s only support for literal values as objects)

# Can I define another machine tag as the value of a machine tag?
Sure, but it will not be processed as a machine tag itself.

and Dan Catt of Flickr says

It’s sort of, but Not Quite RDF forced into tags. (NQRDF)

via Danny

Five whole things?

beobal — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 14:52:57 +0000

So, as the meme peters out, the bottom of the barrel is truly being scraped and I’ve been tagged by Ian.

My all time favourite on-screen detective is Columbo. By a country mile.
In my youth, I was a fairly dedicated racing cyclist. I used to ride around 250 miles every week and competed regularly. Just writing that down makes me out of breath now.
I never have, and intend never to, sat through a film featuring Vin Diesel.
I live with my girlfriend of 12 years Vic, our 14 month old daughter Carys and our Jack Russell Terrier, Ripley (though she says we live with her).
My cousin Neil Sykes, is captain of the current champions of New Zealand, Auckland City F.C.

Also, I really, really, really don’t know five people who blog (and who haven’t also been tagged), so my list includes some people I don’t strictly know.
Apologies in advance if this offends/annoys/makes you feel stalked in any way.
Jim, Dave, Ed, Danny & Richard.

IBM Adtech Group release RDF Repository

beobal — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 08:25:03 +0000

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the IBM Advanced Technology Group we visited at Cambridge have been putting some serious development effort into their Semantic Layered Research Platform.
Wing reported yesterday that Boca, an RDF repository built atop DB2, has gone public in the platform’s first OS release. I’ve already downloaded, can’t wait to clear some time and start playing with Boca.

Under the Radar

beobal — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 22:34:06 +0000

On Saturday, wrapping up our time in San Francisco, Ian and I had a great informal meet up with Nova Spivack and some of his team at Radar Networks. We showed them some the things we’ve been working on and demoing for the past few months, talked a bit about the Talis Community Licence and heard a bit more about some of the exciting things they’re doing.
Something that I’ve noticed over the course of the last few weeks / months of sharing our ideas and work with people is that there really seems to be some kind of consensus and community emerging around how the web is evolving. Its good validation to know others are thinking along broadly the same lines as we are and besides, its always nice to connect with like minds.

By the way, their offices are in an amazing location right in the heart of the city.

Geeking with Greg

beobal — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 17:19:21 +0000

One of the first blogs I look to when I fire up my aggregator is Greg Linden’s, so it was cool to bump into him at dinner last night. See here for Greg’s take on Ask.com’s Jim Lanzone and Microsoft’s Steve Berkowitz session yesterday.

Ning

beobal — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 20:25:27 +0000

Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini from Ning are up now. Gina says they launched their first products a couple of months ago, but I remember checking out Ning at least a year ago.
Oh dear, they’ve ground to a halt, looks like the presenters aren’t immune from the connectivity problems either.

Enterprise 2.0 Mashups

beobal — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 20:16:35 +0000

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com is on stage now. He makes the claim that Salesforce are doing for enterprise services what Amazon is doing for infrastructure, i.e. removing the “muck” and enabling innovation. He characterises one aspect of salesforce as an “Elastic Database, that scales” and in that regard, I can see a lot of overlap with some facets of the platform we’re building. If I were in hyphen overdrive, I might describe Bigfoot, as ultimately-flexible-data-storage-discovery-and-retrieval-as-a-service (but with added semantic goodness, of course).
AppExchange is a marketplace for business services built on the salesforce platform, and I see parallels between it and the Content Orchestration components of our platform, like Silkworm and Symphony. These sorts of components are all really about making it easy to compose applications by plugging together bits of data and functionality from all over the web.
In closing, Marc mentions the new AppExchange Incubator, a kind of Brill Building for Salesforce.com mashups, interesting.