Transformation of Content through Web Points of Presence

 

By Tom Bradford,

 

12/13/05 Forward and explanatory prologue emendations by:

 

Alan D. Wilensky, Analyst, Encompass Consulting

 

The Soul of a New Web

 

‘Social Networking’; at once an inscrutable term, is  redefining the future of the World Wide Web.  We are all destined to be bent to the will of innovation as the Web inexorably transitions from islands of content to a fully-meshed fabric. Web 1.0’s  model of agglomerations of sites we shared with friends or use at work, are constructs of a mental hierarchy, but not of a concrete fabric. This is changing as we speak.

The next web is currently under construction. The hyped Web 2.0 is a mystery in embryo, for any concept that cannot be clearly defined in a few short paragraphs must be suspect. However, we are living vividly in the crossover of Web2.0 times. Social bookmarks, tagging, and blogs are the mere infancy of this semantic web. Even words used to describe the revolution are obscure, for outside of academia, where is the vocabulary of semiotics so bandied about?. The definition of semantic is, ‘relating to meaning or the differences between meanings of words or symbols’. So far so good. Web 2.0 will be content with meanings (tags) attached, and an architecture to liberate this semantic content into cyberspace (via RSS and other XML systems) so that it may be shared, marshaled, syndicated, and subscribed to.

 

Some great thinkers have coined this the ‘executable web’; Kingsley Idehen, OpenLinks CEO, a thinker if ever there was one, endeavoring to clear my Web 2.0 fogginess, said, “Web 2.0 is a system of ‘points of presence’ on the executable web – the web is the new operating system.”  Taking my usual three months to digest Kingsley’s thoughts, I became dimly aware of the potential for this ‘meshed fabric’ of active content.

Web 2.0 is Delicious and More
”delicious-delicious”, Kingsley echoed to me during many conversations, but I thought he meant the vegan cupcakes I had brought the OpenLink staff. It did not occur to me that Kingsley meant del.icio.us, a social book marking and tagging site that has changed the way I organize my incisive web-based research materials. Mr. Idehen did not lead me by the hand to del.icio.us – he suggested that I submit my conference research reports via the company blog and configure for ‘tagging’ services.

I was so lost; the immaturity of Web 2.0 shows in the strangeness of the tools and settings – but guiding me in a Zen-like way, Kingsley had me dutifully obtain an account on del.icio.us, configure my OpenLink Virtuoso blog, and add tags to my Virtuoso blogger profile. Viola, my blog article was now on del.icio.us, classified according to the tags I had added to my original post. Huh!

As I latter learned there are a great many social book marking services and content collecting engines in the Web 2.0 cloud. The Virtuoso blog engine has account settings for configuring specific upstream targets for your blog – but I also discovered that Virtuoso pings (notifies) well known blog aggregation engines, like Technorati, Moreover, and others, without the need for specific upstream setting other than the addition of tags to the blog account holder’s settings. So be careful what you write in your blog – the isolated ranting of luminary or lunatic may be instantly broadcast into the Bloggosphere.

Virtuoso Syndication is Bloggolicious
What do people have to say, really now? The blog is today’s best example of Social Networking on the Web.  Blogging is PERSONAL publishing as a series with the addition of syndication. Blogs are composed of public diaries, articles, commentary, and reporting on a variety of subjects.  Diversity of subject matter is what makes this a thriving, popular medium, while free and low cost Blogging accounts are as easy to obtain. Why the fuss? Haven’t personal web sites been available for years? What’s the difference between Web Content and Blogging content? In a nutshell – simplicity, syndication, semantics, and aggregation.

Simplicity of enrollment, posting, and commentary management. These attributes have not been a   solution set in the personal web services space.

 

Syndication is the magic of RSS, Real Simple Syndication, and other XML protocols that are largely transparent to the blog user. There may be subtle differences as to how these strange settings and attributes affect availability of future ‘social networking’ functions and publishing options. It must be underlined that XML protocols used in Blogging are easily transmutable into almost any other type of  syndication protocol – for this is magic of XML – separation of content from presentation and structure.

 

Semantics is the ability to add ‘tags’ to your blog posts. Tags are words that confer meaning to you or your social network. Sites like del.icio.us or Technorati will use these tags to aggregate your blog and help others find it. Clouds of tags and semantically tagged content is automatically built by an increasing number of Web 2.0 sites; not all of these are blog related, some are business oriented.

Aggregation is the act of blog engines pushing to popular collection points, or the reverse, content pulled from your blog to the aggregator. An upstream is an explicit destination that the blog account user configures with credentials, but many blog engines automatically ping popular aggregation sites. There is almost always a way to enable posts to be marked as private., and excluded from entering the Bloggosphere.

 

Blog systems provide a simple publication interface, for push-button publishing capabilities.  Blog posts are usually retained for archival purposes, affording readers the opportunity to digest content entries dating back to the beginning of that particular blog. Blogs often allow the readers to contribute to the content entries via commenting systems, and allow author’s to have administrative control of the comment stream.

 

Traditional web sites required authors to publish content using web authoring tools and the use of presentation markup, making sites hard to maintain, difficult to extend, and requiring the author to manually manage the article publishing in series format. There were, and still are I’m sure, on-line Web authoring tools that allow Newsletter publishing, comment management, and even email notification of new postings – but these systems have been supplanted by a maelstrom of blog tools, and the furor that has engulfed the Blogging phenomenon.

 

Blog Support in Virtuoso








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Now that you understand the value of Web Logs, you may ask yourself, why Virtuoso? The answer is simple, but deserves a bit of explanation. After all, Virtuoso is a Super Server, an integration platform, and a content services powerhouse; what’s the deal, baby? We shall see how this article’s original author, the eminent Tom Bradford, sets the scene:

 

“Virtuoso facilitates effective flow of enterprise information. All is information within the global InfoBase.  A mere fraction of enterprise information is stored in the database proper, while the majority remains untapped and ‘in the wilds of the file system’.  A compelling argument if ever there was one for Virtuoso's mission of leveraging disparate information in a source independent fashion.
 

Information stored as blog content may be important to an organization, particularly if subscriptions or publications contain information vital to the business.  Blogs become a knowledge base for organizing content and an atomic representation of that knowledge."

Conclusion

The most basic, yet perhaps important and enduring aspect of Web 2.0’s social networking face is and will be the Web Log, or Blog, for quite some time. The democratizing influences of the Bloggosphere have already changed our society, launched scandals, and toppled once mighty news organs from their Apollonian perch. We have not seen the end of the blog; not by a long shot.

Virtuoso provides a powerful Social Networking foundation, a full-featured Blogging engine as an integral part of your organization's ability to leverage its entire breadth of information. From this point of departure, we have no idea where Virtuoso, with its vast panoply of content syndicating features, will take us.