Nova Spivack – Minding the Planet

I post articles about things all over the Net. But many of those pages that I link to probably won’t be there in 5 or 10 years so the links will be dead. I would like my Weblog provider to automatically cache a copy of any page I link to, and provide the cached copy [...]

I have a friend who is a poet, mother and journalist in Norway. Her name is Aina Gerner-Mathisen. She recently emailed me trying to figure out who was posting in her name on various sites. I looked into it and discovered that she is a victim of comment-spam identity-theft. Comment-spam is a new type of [...]

This article is actually a Web page that I have created to help my good friend Aina Gerner-Mathisen dig out from a major identity-theft problem she recently experienced. It seems that some evil comment-spammer has posted spam comments onto a number of weblogs in her name. Now these comments appear higher in Google search results [...]

I like blogging. Everyone I know likes blogging. But let’s face it, we are all a bunch of geeks. The question is, will blogging ever go “mainstream”? Will consumers want to post their thoughts and ideas on the Web for all to see, or is blogging really just for exhibitionists, intellectual impressarios, and voyeurs? Are [...]

Jim Wissner, as well as sending me the previous link, also found this fascinating proposal for an “RSS Algebra” that would enable set operations on RSS feeds. Could be very useful! Related Posts:

Here is a very useful and interesting article about how new communications mediums evolve through six stages of evolution. According to the author, Mayer Spivack, who happens to be my father, Weblogs as a medium are still in stage 1. I think this article presents a very good description of the general pattern or arc [...]

Microcontent technologies such as Weblogs and RSS, and indeed the HTTP Web itself, are pull-based. Users poll for information when and if they want it, from sources they choose, with total privacy. I don’t have to give you my address to pull microcontent from your node. Contrast this with e-mail and other “push” technologies and [...]

Microcontent is modular content. Each item of microcontent is an unique, individually addressible chunk of content defined by metadata focused around a particular idea or small set of related ideas. Macrocontent is any collection of organized microcontent objects that form a publication. A weblog is actually “macrocontent” — it is a published, temporally organized collection [...]

One of the many cool things about the Metaweb is that it functions as a vast bottom-up collaborative filtering system. RSS feeds represent perspectives of publishers. Because feed publishers can automatically or manually include content from other feeds they can “republish,” annotate and filter content. Every feed is effectively a switch, routing content to and [...]

At Radar Networks we refer to pieces of microcontent as “Memes.” A Weblog posting is a Meme (pronounced “meem”), so is any RSS item. The classic definition of a meme is “a replicating unit of culture.” There is quite a bit of debate among memeticists about what constitutes replication and what constitutes a replicator. But [...]

The Metaweb is not just the set of all Weblog posts, it is much more than that. As much as I love to blog I think many old-timers would have us view the entire Net through “blog colored glasses.” But Weblog postings are just one kind of microcontent. There will be many others. Related Posts:New [...]

I’ve just been asked to find out how many people use Typepad at this point. Does anyone know? Related Posts:

If RSS is ever going to go mainstream, we need a name for this movement that is more consumer-friendly than “the Blogosphere” — and also a name that is not particularly tied to Blogs. RSS and emerging metadata technologies including XML, RDF, DAML+OIL, OWL, etc. should not be linked only to Weblogs. In fact these [...]

Originally developed at Netscape, a new technology called RSS has risen from the dead to ignite the next-evolution of the Net. RSS represents the first step in a major new paradigm shift — the birth of “The Metaweb.” The Metaweb is the next evolution of the Web — a new layer of the Web in [...]