The Third Order of Order

alexbarnett — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:45:00 GMT

I'm thoroughly enjoying David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous (The Power of the New Digital Disorder).

Weinberger has a canny knack for taking a subject matter I feel I'm already familiar with and yet illuminating and expressing facets of it in such a way as to greatly further and deepen my understanding of it. I'm storing the following quote from the chapters "Lumps and Splits" as I'm sure I'll want to reference it again - a great description of how knowledge and information is being transformed in its organization and interface:

"In the third order of order, a leaf can hang on many branches, it can hang on different branches for different people, and it can change branches for the same person if she decides to look at the subject differently. It's not that our knowledge of the world is taking some shape other than a tree or becoming some impossible-to-envision four-dimensional tree. In the third order of order, knowledge doesn't have a shape. There are just too many useful, powerful, and beautiful ways to make sense of our world."

If you haven't already done so, I recommend reading Weinberger's two other books, Small Pieces Loosely Joined and (co-authored) The Cluetrain Manifesto. And that reminds me, I need to update my LibraryThing.

Reading Lists and OPML Podcast

admin — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 19:33:00 GMT

Last year Dave Winer started to push the idea of Reading Lists for RSS. More recently, the idea of Dynamic Reading Lists and Feed Grazing (or Grazing Lists / Glists) has been kicking around.

Its likely that Reading Lists support will become a common feature of Feed Readers / Aggregators.

I think this space is getting interesting, so does Joshua Porter. So we thought we'd invite two people who've been giving plenty of thought to this area, Danny Ayers (I can spell his surname correctly these days) and Adam Green to join us for a podcast on the topic (.mp3 43 mins, 11mb) . We also invite James Corbett, who's been doing a great deal with Readings Lists and Feed Grazing, but unfortunately could not join us.

I've been following Danny Ayers' blog (Raw) for some time. Danny is a Semantic Web developer and technical author and co-author of Beginning RSS and ATOM Programming (which you'll find at practically every bookstore that has a Computers / Software section). We touched on the Semantic Web in the podcast.

Adam Green started programming in 1980, is co-founder and CTO at Andover.Net (later acquired by VA Linux in 2000 - hey Adam, buy me a beer...;-) and now a full time technical blogger at Darwinian Web. Thanks to Danny and Adam for their time today.

As usual, notes and links to related stuff below. Enjoy.

Reading Lists (OPML) podcast : Danny Ayers and Adam Green with Joshua Porter and Alex Barnett

download (.mp3 43 mins, 11mb)

.Notes:

What are Reading Lists?
Why are we getting excited about Reading Lists (04:23)
Dynamic Reading Lists (06:50)
Feed Grazing and River of Feeds model (08:30)
Danny on OPML - here under false pretences
Feed Readers as Data Browsers (12;20)
Dynamic Reading Lists and Feed Grazing based on Attention data - Attention intersection has to come soon (14:15)
Dynamic Reading Lists and Grazing Lists are the same thing (but different) (16:35)
Hierarchies, feed lists in RDF and the Semantic Web (Let's re-invent Gopher!) (18:50)
OPML Sampling: J Wynia's OPML Sampler (23:30)
Reading Lists as programmed content by others - Top 10 Sources (25:00??)
Dynamic Reading Lists as Attention-based recommendation system (27:30)
The Web as a data web, Semantic Web
RSS readers/aggregators as Semantic Data Web browser (SPARQL / RDF) (33:00)
OPML, RSS, Reading Lists and simplicity (35:30)
Where's the Semantic Web Demo? (37:30)
Summing up (41:00)
Bonus links: It's going to be a big year for OPML and It's going to be a big year for HTML.
End (45:30)

(I didn't cut the bit at the end of the session as I got a chance to ask Danny about Italy and Derbyshire - these two places rarely mentioned in the same sentence so I thought I'd keep for posterity ;-)

Update: Joshua has blogged it.

Tags: RSS, OPML, Reading Lists, Semantic Web, RDF, Attention, Web 2.0, podcast, web, tech

Alex Barnett blog : readinglists

The Third Order of Order

Reading Lists and OPML Podcast