Posts filed under 'Various Other'
Nicholas Bentley said:
I am not sure I have got the concept of ‘proxy server approaches to dynamically annotate on-line content’ in my head yet so I am off to read more.
Nicholas, to save or supplement your and others’ off-site research, here’s a quick explanation of proxy servers and how they can be used for dynamic linking.
In today’s everybody’s watching and malicious folks are stalking you world, we’re most likely to know about proxy servers as a layer of indirection or prophylaxis to provide anonymous or infection-safe access to the Internet.
The basic idea of a proxy server is that it is a server running a program that takes your request from you for something (usually a page to view) on another server, and runs it through the proxy server’s program before handing the processed page off to you to complete your original request. In the case of a kid-safe firewall, a proxy server might ensure that only kid-friendly sites can be accessed or that certain ‘bad’ words get filtered out of the pages returned to the user.
When the proxy server runs a link annotation program we have a non-invasive way to add hypertext links and pop-up comments to documents viewed on the web. By non-invasive we mean that you don’t need write-access to change the source document (at some URL). By passing the document through a back-linking proxy server, the link server’s database maintains a mapping between the source document and the collection of annotation links that folks contribute into the link database. So before sending you the page you requested, the proxy’s back-link program processes the page and inserts the link annotations.
By way of example, to read a hypothetical (non-existent) page directly, you might go to this URL:
http://omidyar.net/nowhere/29/
If O.net had a CRITLink back-link proxy server running on this sub-domain:
http://crit.omidyar.net
then you could read the link-annotated version of this hypothetical page by going to this URL:
http://crit.omidyar.net?http://omidyar.net/nowhere/29/
The most convenient way that this was done in the CRIT.org days was for the source page author to include a ‘CRIT this page’ image/link inviting folks to redirect through the proxy server to see and contribute to the link annotations.
This additional description may help to explain our original suggestion that a link annotation proxy server is a convenient way to make real and dynamic Nicholas’ metaphor about our minds being active link containers.
–Sohodojo Timlynn and Jim–
March 6th, 2005
Nicholas Bentley said (emphasis added):
At a higher level I tend to see o.net as a ‘link container’, my brain as another, yours as another, etc. Fruitful communication between these containers seems to require a dynamic exchange not static mapping. How to achieve this dynamic ‘HTML’ I don’t know.
Am I straying off the topic? I don’t know.
Not off-topic at all, Nicholas.
In the mid-nineties, we were fans/users of the CRITLink system that, in many ways, implemented the people’s minds and on-line content as inter-linked link-containers model that you have described above.
With all the increased bandwidth we have these days, it is amazing that we don’t use more proxy server approaches to dynamically annotate on-line content. Proxy servers are a readily available technology to do the kind of link annotation and sharing that Nicholas describes.
During the boom-boom days of the Bubble, there were some commercial attempts to ‘tribalize’ dynamic tagging. Third Voice was probably the most memorable. As Big Money made the scene, intellectual property rights to on-line content got hot and third party tagging of others’ content found its way into the crosshairs, not unlike the stink over rappers sampling riffs from past hit records. (See Third Voice Trails Off…. for the backstory.)
The most prominent and now defunct non-commercial attempt to do ‘back-linking’ was by the Web Enhancement group at the Foresight Institute. The Foresight folks had a public domain (pre Open Source) project called CRITLink. The primary tech/though driver of this work was Ka-Ping Yee. Here’s a very interesting article, CritLink: Advanced Hyperlinks Enable Public Annotation on the Web, that details CRITLink and compares it to other link annotating systems.
In the mid-nineties when there was a CRIT.org web site/community (the domain is now used by an Internet security company). Using the CRIT.org’s proxy server, folks could annotate and carry on comment-annotation conversations for any URL on the web! The idea was great, but we just didn’t have the bandwidth and horsepower of today. So the CRIT proxy servers were up and down a lot. It was really cool, however, when it worked.
Of course there wasn’t anything like the O.net going on at the time, mostly static web pages and mailing lists. It would be really cool to see if we could chase down a copy of CRITLink and get it going so we could test its utility for dynamically adding the inter-linked link container feature to O.net. The interesting thing is that as a proxy server we don’t have to change a thing at O.net, only point to it via the link-adding proxy.
In closing, there’s a Small World interconnection between Yee and Englebart and CRITLink and Augment. See these pics to make the connection.
–Sohodojo Timlynn and Jim–
March 5th, 2005
Sohodojo is an independent, non-profit applied R&D lab supporting solo and family-based entrepreneurs collaborating in microenterprise and small business networks. These networks live in the parallel Universe of the Small Is Good World. The function of the Small Is Good World is to act as a governor or moderator to the excesses of the Big Is Good World.
There are many potential entry points into the Small Is Good World. However, we’ve picked one article that we feel is particularly relevant to the focus of this group and to the ‘pay it forward’ dynamic that inspired the creation of the Omidyar Network.
We invite you to read ‘The Yin-Yang of e-Commerce Engines’. The subtitle of this article is ‘How Small is Good Business Webs Will Compete in the Story-driven Marketplaces of the 21st Century’. By way of a teaser, here are the opening paragraphs:
In the first installment of The Nanocorp Primer, we described the challenge of extending the ride on Spaceship Earth as that of finding an effective balance between Small is Good and Big is Good network organizing principles. Neither approach being right nor wrong, just different. Each fulfilling a value-proposition ensuring its survival.
Big is Good dominance throughout the Industrial Era economy has diverted attention from Small is Good economic network dynamics. Big is Good thinking, in other words, has become the ‘common sense’ of how we do business. This unquestioned assumption has given us a blindspot when it comes to designing the e-Commerce engines underlying our web-based business ventures….
We welcome your comments and questions in response to reading this article.
–Sohodojo Timlynn and Jim–
Sohodojo, Home of the nanocorp and small business revolutionaries
March 5th, 2005
Sue,
We absolutely second your take on Don The Idea Guy!
If you scroll down his home page, you’ll see that Don the Idea Guy is a proud member of the Webring of Small Business Revolutionaries.
He was one of the very first folks to open an e-mail thread with us at Sohodojo back in ‘98 when we were just beginning to articulate our mission. He’s been a member of the Small Is Good World kindred spirits ever since.
Where are you now Don? More than ever we need Bright Ideas that will help change the world.
Sohodojo Timlynn and Jim
March 4th, 2005
As a convenient reference to any reader wanting a little relevant background on power laws and this network dynamic’s impact on the Internet and its on-line communities, we recommend this article, Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, at Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet blog.
March 3rd, 2005
Hello Sonny,
We resonate as kindred spirits in your efforts to envision and develop alternative markets for the ACE (arts, crafts and entertainment) domain. At Sohodojo we refer to this domain as the Small Is Good World where ’small’ isn’t just about size. Small Is Good is a collection of organizing principles that empower individuals to be less dependent on conventional organizations and the tyranny of impersonal markets. The creative spirits that populate your ACE world are mostly de facto citizens of the Small Is Good World.
Sohodojo is an independent, non-profit applied R&D lab working on Open Source software technologies and Open Content educational and business development materials to support solo and family-based microenterprise and small business networks in rural and distressed urban communities.
The stuff Sohodojo is working on, social business ecosystems, essentially intersects with all the design points you so astutely enumerate in your opening statement. Here’s a link to a two-page PDF document that includes an input-output diagram and a sources/distribution of capital diagram for a Small Is Good World Marketplace that may have application to your vision.
If you see the connection and are interested, let’s explore potential collaboration.
–Sohodojo Timlynn and Jim–
March 3rd, 2005
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