eekim.com: EEK Speaks

Wed, Jul 07, 2004

The Future of Purple: Distributed Transclusions #

One of my main interests is collaborative tool interoperability. In that vein, I've participated in many conversations, but I've been actively involved in two initiatives: PurpleNumbers and IdentityCommons. On the surface, these two technologies solve different problems, but when you dig a bit deeper, you can actually combine the two to do some very interesting things. (1N1)

PurpleNumbers enable granular addressability, which enables you to attach metadata to finer-grained chunks of data. Instead of having an author of a document, you have authors for each paragraph of a document. This is an especially useful concept for collaborative authoring tools, such as Wikis (hence PurpleWiki). (1N2)

If you can address granular chunks of data, you can also transclude them. This is generally more useful than transcluding an entire document. (You are more likely to want to quote a sentence from a paper than the entire paper.) So, one consequence of tools that support PurpleNumbers is that they also support granular transclusions. (1N3)

One of the limitations of PurpleNumbers as currently implemented is that addresses are only unique in a local context. What we really want are globally unique, persistent PurpleNumbers. That would allow me to transclude a paragraph from another blog into this one. If that paragraph moves, the transclusion should still work. (1N4)

Guess what. XRIs are globally unique, persistent addresses. In fact, they were specifically designed to address data. (See the excellent whitepaper, "The Dataweb: An Introduction to XDI" for more on this.) In other words, we can use XRIs for PurpleNumbers. (1N5)

See more....

/tech/purple | Posted at 5:32pm

Freecycling #

Earlier this year, I caught up with my old friend, AaronLiepman, who's currently a plant biology postdoc at MichiganStateUniversity. Aaron told me about this nationwide phenomenon known as FreeCycle. He started two chapters in Michigan, including the first and largest in Detroit. (1MN)

Here's how it works: (1MO)

Someone starts up a mailing list in their local community (often a Yahoo! Groups list). (1MP)
People post offers on the list. Everything must be free (and legal). (1MQ)
People respond to offers directly to the poster. When an item is claimed, the poster emails a notice to the list again. (1MR)

You can also post items that you want. Aaron told me that one person posted on one of his lists asking for a DVD player. He scoffed at the post when he saw it, but sure enough, someone had a DVD player to spare and gave it to the poster. (1MS)

I'm a reforming packrat, and I'm always trying to get rid of old stuff, so I subscribed to the Palo Alto freecycle soon thereafter. Since I recently replaced my laptop, I decided to give it a shot. This morning, I posted my offer. Literally a few seconds later, I got seven responses. This is for a seven year old laptop running Windows 95! If I hadn't emailed a taken notice immediately thereafter, who knows how many responses I would have received? (1MT)

What I love about FreeCycle -- other than the obvious environmental benefits -- is that it's a wonderful example of patterns trumping tools. First, it's an innovative and efficient use of mailing lists. Someone could certainly design a custom tool to handle this exchange, but it's not clear that the gains would be significant. Second, it's easily replicable. Aaron heard about it and just did it. So did a thousand other cities. Third, it's a community-builder, just like eBay -- a way to discover folks close by with similar interests. (1MU)

More articles about Aaron and FreeCycle: (1MV)