8/11/2006; 2:28:26 AM

An Open Source search engine ... for my FlowMining project ...
I have been looking around for a while for an Open Source search engine that can be used for my FlowMining project ... I'm thinking of giving this one a try.

ASPSeek 1.1.4 (Development). An Internet search engine. [freshmeat.net]

About three or four years ago, I was doing a lot of research into Proxy/Cache engines and the various applications that can be developed on top of them. Here at Novell we developed one of the most scalable Proxy/Cache engines available on Intel hardware - BorderManager - and then created an appliance version called ICS that has been licensed to a range of hardware vendors. Since then, we have spun off that division of the company as a company called Volera. Although many people had a focus on the 'bandwidth savings' that a Proxy/Cache might deliver, I really saw two core capabilites that excited me - content distribution networks and community services. I'll comment on content distribution networks laster ... this search engine relates to community services ...

One of my interests is in the areas of community, and leveraging the power of the humans operating in teams. All of this contributes to efficient and productive operation of communities and other organizations. When a Proxy/Cache is shared by numerous people in any particular organization or community, the Proxy/Cache could be enhanced with additional services that would provide value for the community. For myself, I would often find that as I cruised the net, I would later want to find the web page where I had seen a particular comment or statement made. This caused me to look for a solution where I had my own personal search engine ... something that would index the content that I was reading as I read it. I would then be able to go back and search through the pages that I had read ... not the entire Internet.

My leap to the concepts of FlowMining was when I realized that if a group of user were using a Proxy/Cache, we could have the content of that cache indexed automatically. So that as a team, we would now be populating the search engine with the web pages that our team had found and read. Doing this, we could leverage some our 'human web crawling' capabilites. If I implemented this in a Proxy/Cache engine, then we would actually be 'Mining' the 'Flow' of content through the Proxy ... FlowMining.

Articles like this one in KMWorld outline the issues related to the current trends and techniques for creating taxonomies of information. I'm thinking that a community of people might benefit from a taxonomy that they built. And so I now have found the search engine ... and am going to give it a try to hook it up to our Proxy/Cache engine and see what I can create ... this will be fun ...

8/11/2006; 2:28:11 AM

It's really not about Instant Messaging ...
I just wanted to rant a little here about the big talk about Instant Messaging ... it's not about Instant Messaging! IMHO, it's about communications, and people wanting to communicate effectivly and efficiently. Remember folks ... this is all about meme transfers and replication! All of this relates to our personal identity, and the fact that our identity is created by the conversations that we are a part of. If we evaluate the roots of personal identity, identity becomes the attributes of ourselves that we accumulate to describe ourselves, to ourselves and others. So there are several steps in personal identity which layer on top of each other.

The first of these is the accumulation of our personal identity. This accumulation then includes the people that we have in our lives ... our families, friends, co-workers, and other 'buddies'. This list of 'contacts' or 'buddies' then becomes our 'address book' ... the list of people that we converse with. What's powerful about AIM and ICQ is that we have this list, and also have their 'presence' information ... or their availability. This presence and availability is what really drives Instant Messaging. I could be launching e-mail, video conferencing, or any form of communication once I have located the 'presence' of the other person ... Instant Messaging is just one of these forms of communciations. Heck, Instant Messaging isn't much different from what SMTP mail protocols used to be!

I am a huge fan of Jabber ... it is a leading contenter in my mind, and provides a very flexible architecture for presence and communciations ... including Instant Messaging. This is a good article and Jabber continues to gain ground ...

Jabber As The Coming IM Standard? [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]

8/11/2006; 2:28:04 AM

Very good post on privacy and identity in the digital world ...
In our work on digitalme, we have done considerable research into digital identity, centralized storage, and various tracking techniques. This is a really good article which discusses some cool points. Mr. Smith has got it right ... must making people aware of the possibilities ...

digitalMASS: Preserving privacy. Data privacy has always been a topic that left me completely cold. Honestly, I just couldn't get my bile riled over the notion that someone was tracking what I do online, where I buy gas with my Mobil Speedpass, or what I listen to with my RealNetworks software. Then I met Richard M. Smith. [Tomalak's Realm]

8/11/2006; 2:27:45 AM

Interesting meeting with Hassan Fattah
Hassan Fattah writes for magazines like Red Herring and The Economist. Hassan came by Novell to talk with Dave Doane and myself about the peer to peer world, and how Novell relates to the current peer to peer revolution. Dave has been working on our OnDemand solutions, and I (as usual) have been researching all over the map ... from digital identity management to wearable computers. Hassan is a facinating person to talk with, and I look forward to future conversations ...

8/11/2006; 2:27:50 AM

Zoop is at the show!
My good friend John Pugh is at a show in New York (I think) and is finding all kinds of new partners for digitalme ...

When he gets back we are going to have all kinds of things going!