Monday, August 13, 2007

Feeding memes

I've got some memes stuck in my brain, and it's really frustrating to try to get them out, so they can live:
  • External annotation of web sites as the basis of VRM, and the future of the web.
  • Layered annotated source code as the basis for a far more productive method of programming
  • A dirt simple programmable logic array which wastes gates in the name of ultimate flexibility
I've also got some ideas I really wish I could just let die:
  • We're running out of oil, and our nation is one big clusterf*ck
  • Democracy is around only for show in the US, and has been subverted
  • We're about to relive the stock market crash of 1929
  • Computers as they are currently conceived in the market, can't be made secure.
The first set is frustrating because of my inability to make a case for them in a manner which others can grasp. The latter set is ones that I worry too much about, but unfortunately for me, seem to be grounded in a very hard reality.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Regarding your second set -- I certainly hope you're wrong (though perhaps we could use a good stock shellacking to know the concentrated power down a notch!)

Regarding your first set, annotation seems to be the central theme of the memes -- I have a little trouble wrapping my brain around that.

What do you mean when you say annotations? To me, annotation as a concept has no real semantic value. Sure, they can have human-parsable value, (though, I often find my handwritten comments hard enough for my own brain to parse a few months down the road)...

But an annotation is nothing more than a comment, right? Algorithmically, comments are useless. Of course, assertions aren't (per some of your previous ideas) -- and to my mind, an annotation is one layer under an assertion -- the assertion is that this *something* is a comment. Human-usable, but just a comment, similar to how a tag is just a datatype (the object type "tag") and a value (the actual tag value). Taken together, it makes an assertion about a piece of content.

Does that make any sense? I get the feeling I'm missing the mark with the definition of annotation. Could you elaborate?

Mike Warot said...

What I'm trying to do is to tie feedback about something (including comments, flags for good/spam) and the identity of the person leaving the feedback to the permalink of blog posts.

This could be used to provide hints to readers (and google if it gets widespread enough) about what is/isn't spam, etc.

Does that make sense?