Interesting stuff I listened to this week

I listen to a lot of audio during the week, much of it from The Conversations Network. Here are a few shows I found especially interesting this week.

Jeff Jonas on Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness

I didn’t expect to find this one so interesting (being based on casino security), but it turned out to be fascinating. Interesting similarities to this Rich Skrenta talk about Topix.

Main points:

  • Put all your data in one place. New correlations and ways to analyse the data will emerge.
  • With separate data spaces, you will miss important, valuable relations.
  • Save queries (again, in the same space) and notify of changes and updates.
  • Stored queries can connect to other queries.
  • Stream data into the system and learn and fix errors (repair history) along the way.
  • Sequence neutrality. End state is the same regardless of the order the data arrives.

Interesting quotes:

  • “… when you dream, you’re doing deep recontextualization … to remedy some things you actually have to go offline for.”

Jon Udell interviews Stefano Mazzocchi

Mandating coherence and structure doesn’t work.

Main points:

  • “Valid” means different things to different people and groups.
  • Imposing structure in separate realms can and does work, but designing for interoperability between realms creates all kinds of new value.
  • Just get all your data together and let structure emerge/evolve/develop.
  • Don’t throw structure away, defer it until you really know what you need.
  • RDF and graphs. I’ll admit right here that I don’t really understand these (yet :-) ), but I may have to look into them more.
  • Use peer pressure and self-interest to build interesting, valuable, open data sets. It’s the only way to make this stuff happen.

Interesting quotes:

  • “There’s no such thing as quality of metadata.”
  • “… there’s that perception that coherence is quality.”
  • “Data first, instead of structure first.”
  • “Just start off, and write down whatever you want, and then you can incrementally add structure to it, and make value out of the structure as you build.”
  • “There’s a lot of structure in email, if you want, it just depends on what kind of structure you want to look at.”
  • “A lot of the semantic web research was based on the big hypothesis that was ‘If whatever, then we could do this.’”
  • “… when they show up, we can party.”
  • “It’s clear now that it’s all about data and loose pieces connected together than it is about uber ontologies …”

Scott Kveton on OpenID

Nice overview of open web/social stuff like OpenID, OAuth and DiSo.

Main points:

  • Keep things really simple to start. Just get basics working so we can build on them.
  • The potential of OpenID endpoints for service discovery. I hadn’t thought about this, but it’s really obvious once you hear it.
  • These technologies are actually great for big companies. They can make use of them without having to be the initiator and deal with the suspicion and other associated problems
  • OpenID takes a big load off of developers by handling their whole authentication system for them.
  • Interesting balance between design-by-committee and just-build-some-stuff with DataPortability and DiSo.
  • Keep things loosely joined. Don’t depend on one tech for a task, make it all swappable.
  • Being the repository for “master profiles” is valuable.
  • Focus on people who already get it (to whatever degree), and build momentum. You can’t convince other people without that base.
  • Building a personal reputation based on trust of opinions and knowledge is extremely valuable.
  • Monetizing too early can be dangerously limiting. Tough balance.

Interesting quotes:

  • “Simple usually wins in the long term.”
  • “Help people discover new things.”

There’s definitely a theme there. Some other stuff:

Comments Posted by nathan on Monday, February 4, 2008 at 12:09 am.

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