In Praise of Google Groups

Although people are rightly suspicous of Google's huge power these days, it is also important to remember those actions that are praiseworthy by any measure. One of them was acquiring a company originally called DejaNews, which had the biggest collection of Usenet postings, and making them freely available. Had Google not done so, it is quite possible that great swathes of Internet, computing and indeed modern history would have been lost forever.

To get some idea of the treasures this trove contains, take a look at the Usenet timeline that Google has put together. Highlights include:

* Stallman's announcement of the GNU project

* Tim Berners-Lee's announcement of the World Wide Web

* Linus's famous "Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?" posting, made exactly 15 years ago today.

* Marc Andreessen's announcement of Mosaic

* The first commercial spam (ah, I remember it well)

* The first mention of Google

and several hundred million more.

Google has just announced a beta version of its new Google Groups service, but the main interest will always be the old stuff. Thanks, Google.

Knight is Right

Nothing new here, but Sir Tim's wise words on Net neutrality have a weight that few others can match. Pass them on to your favourite telecoms company.

Happy OneWebDay

Thanks, Tim.

CERN Re-invents Publishing - Again

The Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee while he was working at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. Now the boys and girls at CERN are at it again, with a radical proposal that will re-invent scientific publishing in their field.

Essentially, they suggest that enough of the big particle physics establishments get together to sponsor the publication of most of the main titles in their field for the next few years as part of a transition to an open access approach, funded in part by savings on subscriptions. At a stroke this solves the biggest problem with OA - getting there.

Major laboratories such as CERN will have to take a lead initially in steering the community through the OA transition – both politically and financially – but ultimately the particle physics funding agencies will have to provide the lion’s share of the financial support. This accounts in particular for the fact that about 80% of the original research articles in particle physics are theory papers.

Tentatively, the task force envisages a transition period of five years to establish a ‘fair share’ scenario between funding agencies and other partners, to allow time for funding agencies to redirect budgets from journal subscriptions to OA sponsoring, and to allow time for more publishers to convert journals to OA. At the end of this period, the vast majority of particle physics literature should be available under an OA scheme.

The sums involved are big for publishing, but puny compared to the cost of your average accelerator, so it's a good mix. And they're thinking strategically too:

With about 10,000 practising scientists worldwide, particle physicists represent a medium-sized community that is small enough for publishers and funding agencies not to take incalculable risks, yet big enough to provide a representative test bed and to set a visible precedent for other fields of science and humanities.

In other words, if this works, the hope is everything else will come tumbling down too. This is one experiment I'll follow with interest. (Via Open Access News.)

Open Tools for the Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is a kind of intelligent Web, one that consists not just of contextless numbers and meaningless words but of data that means something:

The Semantic Web is a web of data. There is lots of data we all use every day, and its not part of the web. I can see my bank statements on the web, and my photographs, and I can see my appointments in a calendar. But can I see my photos in a calendar to see what I was doing when I took them? Can I see bank statement lines in a calendar?

Why not? Because we don't have a web of data. Because data is controlled by applications, and each application keeps it to itself.

The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for interchange of data, where on the original Web we only had interchange of documents. Also it is about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.

Tim thinks it's going to be really big, which is good enough for me.

But to use all this richness, we're going to need tools, so it's good to seem some open source ones coming along. Doubly good, because they're from a company, Aduna, that has seen the free software light. (Via Enterprise Open Source Magazine.)

The Nitty-Gritty of Net Neutrality

Net neutrality - the idea that the underlying technologies of the Internet should never care or even know about the details of who you are or what you are doing with the data packets it is conveying - is much in the news lately, what with outrageous demands from telecommunications companies to be allowed to charge different rates for different traffic. If you ever had any doubts that we need Net neutrality, here's someone who might convince you, since he knows a thing or two about this area.

W(h)ither Sun?

McNealy leaving Sun is certainly the end of an era. But the big question is: what follows?

As far as Jonathan Schwartz is concerned, too much is being made (a) of his ponytail, and (b) of his blog. Perhaps the clearest indication of his thinking is this panegyric:

There is no single individual who has created more jobs around the world than you. And ... I'm not talking hundreds or thousands of jobs, I'm talking millions. They ended up in America and India, Indonesia and Antarctica, Madagascar, Mexico, Brazil and Finland. They ended up everywhere. Everywhere the network travels.

No single individual has spawned so many startups, fueled so much venture investment, or raised so much capital without actually trying - just with a vision of the future that gets more obvious by the day.

No single individual has so effectively created and promoted the technologies at the heart of a new world emerging around us. A world in which the demand for network computing technology will never decline - as we share more family photos, watch more digital movies, do more banking on-line, build more communities on line, run our supply chains, automate our governments or educate our kids.

Unfortunately, Schwartz is not talking about Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who did all these things, and did them entirely out of altruism, but supposedly about McNealy, who did nothing on the same scale, and did it for the dosh. If this is the quality of analysis we can expect from the new head of Sun, it's probably time to find some comfortable chairs, order a dry sherry, and to enjoy the imminent sunset.

The Blogification of the Cyber Union

I suppose it was inevitable that Google would go from being regarded as quite the dog's danglies to being written off as a real dog's breakfast, but I think that people are rather missing the point of the latest service, Google Page Creator.

Despite what many think, Google is not about ultra-cool, Ajaxic, Javascripty, XMLifluous Web 2.0 mashups: the company just wants to make it as easy as possible for people to do things online. Because the easier it is, the more people will turn to Google to do these things - and the more the advertising revenue will follow.

Google's search engine is a case in point, and Blogger is another. As Blogger's home page explains, you can:

Create a blog in 3 easy steps: (1) Create an account (2) Name your blog (3) Choose a template

and then start typing.

Google Page Creator is just the same - you don't even have to choose a name, you just start typing into the Web page template. In other words, it has brought the blog's ease of use to the creation of Web sites.

This blogification of the Internet is a by-product of the extraordinary recent rise of blogs. As we know, new blogs are popping up every second (and old ones popping their clogs only slightly more slowly). This means that for many people, the blog is the new face of the Web. There is a certain poetic justice in this, since the original WorldWideWeb created by Tim Berners-Lee was a browser-editor, not simply a read-only application.

For many Net users, then, the grammar of the blog - the way you move round it and interact with its content - is replacing the older grammar of traditional Web pages. These still exist, but they are being shadowed and complemented by a new set of Web 2.0 pages - the blogs that are being bolted on by sites everywhere. They function as a kind of gloss explaining the old, rather incomprehensible language of Web 1.0 to the inhabitants of the brave new blogosphere.

Even books are being blogified. For example, Go It Alone!, by Bruce Judson, is freely available online, and supported by Google Ads alongside the text (like a blog) that is broken up into small post-like chunks. The only thing missing is the ability to leave comments, and I'm sure that future blogified books (bloks? blooks?) will offer this and many other blog-standard features.

Update: Seems that it's "blook" - and there's even a "Blooker Prize" - about which, more anon.

Blogging Avant la Lettre

As I have written elsewhere, blogging is as old as the Web itself. In fact, as a perceptive comment on that page remarks, the first blog was written by none other than Tim Berners-Lee.

This makes the recent posting of (Sir) Tim's first official blog entry deeply ironic. Of course, this is not lost on the man himself, and he gently points out that the first browser, called confusingly WorldWideWeb, was fully able to write as well as read Web pages. In other words, it was a blogging tool as much as a browser.

The otherwise amusing sight of Sir Tim re-joining something he'd invented a decade and a half ago is indicative of a rather more worrying fact: that the organisation he heads, the World Wide Web Consortium (which at least managed to snag one of the coolest URLs for its own), is almost unknown today outside the immediate circle of Webheads.

This shows how marginalised it has become, since originally it was set up to provide technical oversight of the Web's development. But it suffered badly during the browser wars, when both Netscape and Micosoft pretty much ignored, and went on adding non-standard elements to their browsers in an attempt to gain the upper hand. Indeed, it is only now, thanks largely to the rise of Firefox, that W3C standards are finally becoming not just widespread, but accepted as real standards.

Nonetheless, the W3C still has much work to do if it is to succeed in moving back to the centre of today's Web. As proof, consider that fact that a W3C document with a title as ell-embracing as "Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One" caused nary a ripple on the surface of the Great Cyberpond. Let's hope that Sir Tim's blog will help the sterling work of the W3C to reach a wider audience.