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SPAM was driving me crazy. Maybe it's fixed now.

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I have been doing a lot of things. I had not updated this blog in a while because maintenance had become close to impossible with a deluge of hundreds of SPAMS per day with at least 30 breaking through the SPAM filters and me having to go through and clean it on a blog by blog basis. I had considered updating to MT 3.2 for its vaunted SPAM fighting features but had been slowed by customizations I had done on some parts of this site and that were still being used by various parties.

Finally, there was a little break in the clouds, and I upgraded. Let's see how SPAM fighting works. At least there will only be one place to blat it out. Further, whatever I did to put myself on the SPAM blacklist has hopefully gone away making it possible to respond in commments again.

Bud posted this on May 16, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

West Coast Mini-Tour, June 26 – 30

If you'd like to meet me during the mini-tour, please drop me a line. Email link is in the post body.

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June 26 – 30, I'm going to be in the Bay Area (San Francisco, specifically) catching up with Tantek Çelik and “The” Ryan King on microformats, likely attending the Vertical Leap conference signaled to me by Dave McClure of simplyhired, and attending at least part of Where 2.0. It's going to be an exciting trip. As I signaled earlier this week, microformats have some real implications for distributed business models. Specialty search engines like technorati, simplyhired, and gataga would seem well positioned to take advantage of microformats in their business models.

If you would like to see me on this tour, drop me an email. I'm very interested in meeting readers. Please note that my geographic knowledge of the Bay Area is limited. For instance, I thought the SDForum where Vertical Leap will be held was in San Diego (SD, get it), so keep that in mind when suggesting meet-up locations. Fortunately, a quick phone call with Dave McClure cleared up the SDForum confusion before I booked a flight to San Diego.

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Bud posted this on June 18, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

xFolk: An xhtml microformat for folksonomy

xFolk is an open xhtml microformat that allows users to publish their own folksonomy classifications for aggregation by the services they choose. As such, it starts to give back users control of their own data. A side benefit of xFolk is that users may designate explicit semantics for their folksonomy tags, providing a link to the more formal practices of information architects.

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Folksonomy is an emerging practice on the Internet where people tag digital artifacts (e.g., pictures, bookmarks) with their own labels and then share them. Of course, people in the real world have been tagging and sharing collections for years; consider record and coin collections with tags like classical, rock, jazz, Merovingian, etc. One factor that makes tagging on the Internet different is that items and their tags can be shared with the world at large very easily, allowing for an emergent understanding of how common, tagged items are viewed by a large number of people. Further, folksonomy tagging with web-based tools (e.g., flickr and del.icio.us) is also very easy.

As a result of ease of tagging and sharing, folksonomy is spreading on the web like wild fire. Fickr, the folksonomy-based photo sharing service, has over 300,000 users, and Robert Scoble has signaled folksonomy tagging to Microsoft's senior management as an area requiring strategic investment.

Currently, all folksonomy data formats are proprietary and idiosyncratic to the service providing them, likely as a result of folksonomy's ad hoc development to date. There is no easy way to transfer one's data from one service to another. Further, there is currently no format for sharing or even expressing one's explicit understanding of the meaning of his/her own folksonomy tags. Tag and object tagged mutually and implicitly define each other without an explicit anchor point.

In this post I will motivate and sketch xFolk, a microformat for specifying and publishing folksonomies using components already part of xhtml. Since xhtml is already a well-established web standard, a compelling motivation for creating the xFolk microformat is that it will enable users to independently maintain their own folksonomy data while still being able to easily share it. A byproduct is that xFolk will allow those who wish to define explicit semantics for their folksonomy tags to do so, and these semantics will also be easily shared.

xFolk is inspired by Eric Meyer's and Tantek Çelik's panels at SXSW 2005 on emergent semantics and extending xhtml. My thoughts are at a very early stage and might even be termed a pre-proposal, but I am publishing them here because I think they are sufficiently developed to profit from community interaction.

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Bud posted this on March 22, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (2)

xFolk and Learning Blogosophere

Expect some interesting folksonomy and Learning Blogosphere posts.

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I've been a bit ambitious in my projects, and so my posting frequency has dropped off a bit. Sometime in the next day or two, you should see a post about xFolk. This is an exciting project born out of this year's IASummit and SXSW one-two punch. It really has the potential to help people trying to publish folksonomies in non-vendor specific formats.

I also have several more posts on the Learning Blogosphere work in process. It's all just a matter of getting the time to crank them out.

Bud posted this on March 22, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

New Client — Career Consulting Physicians

What makes an online community a community is interaction. People pay attention to you, and you pay attention to them. The trick is finding both a way to be compelling and attentive to others. Career Consulting Physicians provides an excellent opportunity to explore these points.

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I had lunch today with Ivo Drury who's launching a new business, Career Consulting Physicians, to help practicing physicians with the more complex medical career structure that has evolved over the last 20 years. Ivo's site is quite sophisticated, and it is clear that he has made an impressive start with blogging (5 posts a week without fail since October!). So, what does The Community Engine have to offer him? I think plenty, and we’ve agreed to work together.

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Bud posted this on January 25, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Launching The Community Engine

The community engine aims to help companies thrive in the information economy by developing electronic communities around their products and services.

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Companies derive value from online communities by using them to improve product development, facilitate customer service, increase customer loyalty, and attract new customers. This post marks the launch of The Community Engine. The Community Engine is dedicated to helping companies create thriving online communities.

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Bud posted this on January 11, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)