B. Mann Consulting

I'm glad to finally see that the news about PubSub 2.0 is out there (see Om, TechCrunch, and the view on both from local Vancouver founder Ian Bell). One more great addition to the Vancouver tech scene that will be watched world wide.

One of these days I will tell the story of mine / Bryght's early involvement with PubSub 1.0. Looking at the Something Simpler about page, the bio for Lance Tracey outs him as our initial angel investor. It's good to see him being acknowledged.

I am (still) a big believer in the core technology of PubSub. The new tagline of "find the future" makes it very clear what the strengths are. Now, how to expose that in a user friendly way. That has always been the challenge since day one. Today, in a future where engines like Google News Alerts / Blog Search and Technorati are still not performing as well as the "old" PubSub engine, and we have many more orders of magnitude more "real time" sources of information, the need for filtering, reporting, and notification is that much greater.

I look forward to working with the PubSub team and seeing what they come up with. Beyond Ian and Lance, there are great people there already and they're looking for more.

Go, Vancouver, go! :P

Personal Info Cloud. That's the closest I can come to for what I'm thinking, and as I search a bit I see that PersonalInfoCloud.com is one of the faces of Thomas Vander Wal, perhaps best known for coining the term "folksonomy". We don't say that so much anymore, having devolved into tagging madness.

It seems to be that, even with the "aids" of RSS to more quickly skim through information, and tagging to perhaps help winnow through the particular areas we are interested in, we are reaching a kind of nexus point of signal to noise. I need my filters back. The information -- now in podcasting, photosharing, video blogging goodness in HD quality with surround sound -- is rolling towards us and we are being crushed. I probably shouldn't add something about spam (splogs, etc. etc.).

I had hoped that PubSub.com would be the foundation for something that could help solve this. In part, because its technology¹ was based on a real time infrastructure -- publish and subscribe -- instead of this polling and pinging mess we are faced with "regular" RSS. In my ideal world, PubSub's rich boolean search interface would be available, to easily create field-level searches trawling the entire web -- e.g. return all blog posts with the word "Drupal" in the <title> field. That's an incoming stream that could be vast indeed, but it's what PubSub did best: search the future.

And next is feedback. I would tag, or bookmark, or favourite or "Shift-S" for Google Reader fans, and stick it in my Personal Info Cloud. That could then become the basis for retrospective search aka what Google does really well right now, but filtered by my own sources of information. Ideally, I could expand my cloud to a Local region (geographically, my Placeblogger friends) or my trusted network (tie into the public sources exposed by my communities). I say communities rather than the simpler family, friends, colleagues, etc., because I want to stress that there are going to be more than one cloud connected in.

It's all overlapping networks of networks.

Sure, we've got bits and pieces around. Rollyo and Eurekster's Swicki are little bits of this, allowing people to create curated, pre-populated search collections based on domains. Even Wikipedia is getting in the game with Wikia / WikiSearch².

I keep tumbling a littler deeper into this rabbit hole. Lijit, on my list of "really must dig into this deeper", has a map your world page with...surprise! a picture of a Personal Info Cloud. That ties back into discussions with Ton Ziljstra at BarCamp Brussels.

And here I am, manually re-entering my little bits of identity into different services, looking for the Holy Grail. Perhaps convincing some friends that this time, maybe just this once, won't they also please sign up and enter their information into just one more system, 'cause then it'll be better for everyone.

So. Info Clouds. Personal, Local, Community. Search between communities, each member a pivot into another cloud. Maybe aggregating searches. I didn't really cover ratings and feedback loops, as well as the magic nature-vs-nurture algorithm that gives you a serendipity feed, that will always be magically full of things outside your echo chamber, and you can decide whether to let them in or "thumbs down" them away.

Welcome to 2007. I'm still excited by what's out there. Lots of day-to-day get-stuff-done work that needs to be done. But let's keep talking about and building the big stuff. 

I'm looking forward to the Google "Behind the scenes" presentation put on by the Vancouver HPC Users Group (note: not a permalink; added to Upcoming.org). It's being given by Narayanan Shivakumar ('Shiva'), a Google Distinguished Entrepreneur and the founding Director of the Google Seattle-Kirkland R&D center. The abstract is as follows:

Google deals with large amounts of data and millions of users. We'll take a behind-the-scenes look at some of the distributed systems and computing platform that power Google's various products, and make the products scalable and reliable.

The bio says that Shiva is currently "excited about a variety of search and webcrawling technologies (including Google Sitemaps)".

I see the challenge for Google and all search engines to be "how to search the live web". One of the things I often explain is that I firmly believe that all static web pages will eventually be replaced by dynamic web pages. Another way to say this is that much of the content on the web, especially much of it which is being updated often, is actually being created by web apps.

So, uh, until Google posted Never browse outdated posts again, I forgot they even *had* blog search...

I still use Technorati for "instant" blog search, and all my future search feeds are using PubSub.

I saw this first via Om -- Google has launched it's own feed-only BlogSearch. Feed-only is important, as Niall explains:

I think feed search is just another type of search restricted to a group of MIME types, as previously stated, and as the types of content made available via a feed continue to grow I think a feed-specific search tool will become much more than just blog search.

Niall also talks about how Technorati indexes the entire blog page HTML, not just feed. This is actually less valuable for me -- all I ever get that way are blogroll hits and other irrelevant matches.

In exploring microformats, I actually was checking out Google's support for filetype restrictions. For instance, here is a search for the phrase "test", restricted to vCards (.vcf is the extension). Very interesting...

So, the space continues to evolve. In my TV spot, I demo'd how searches for London Bombing at the time showed results from the 1940's blitz in Google, and realtime results in blog search engines. Google had to respond at some point. This current release is decidedly uninteresting -- the results aren't that great. I do like the hinted-at capabilities of the advanced blog search page, but PubSub's boolean operators are already as powerful or more so.

Aside: Hey, are PubSub SiteStats new? here are the ones for this site.

So, Google, welcome to the community. I'm hoping you'll grow a Zawodny soon...you're starting to feel a bit big and corporate (translation: it doesn't feel like you're engaging your community)