A taste of development

Robert Rebholz is not but my boss*, he is besides my muse, ideologic sparring partner, change ego, and mentor. Bob is possesed by a extra kind of genius, with a sort of Jeffersonian breadth and intensity that haves it a pleasure and honor to collaborate with him, on a day-to-day basis. In my opinion, Bob is one of two people on Earth who can speak around the BIG idea that is Claimspace , with out-and-out confidence, competence, and credibility. If you have yet a reaching interest in on-line communities of practice, folksonomies , reputation systems, credibility, identity, recommendation systems, rewards, “course”, collaborative filtering, “societal search”, & interrelated areas, I promote you to sign to my RSS feed and Bob’s RSS feed.

Yesterday, Bob mailed an fantabulous post about Claimspace  that wades into the wide river of uses that it might one day support, for both users and “community owners”, across the Web. He quotes the coming after potential utilizes:

• “Tenacious tail recognition system”
• Solution to the “Who can I swear? issue”
• “Vulgarized canvassing mechanism” (and portable)

• “A bare REST API gives everyone (and I intend everyone — the mashup possibilities are exactly floundering — caveat, preserve the crawl, walk, execute idea in mind) the ability habituate the data in a manner best suited to their needs: community (MVP or other influencer) reward programs, product design input, product feature voting, taping prioritization, and on and on and on, all without a ton of custom code. Any Digg-like application would enjoy this kind of data. Can you envisage – red-hotest claims, red-hotest people cooking claims, most employed claims, novelest claims, by product, by solution area, by geographic region, and the list runs on.”

• Finally but not leastly… Bob describes the possibility of utilizing Claimspace as a bizarro substitute for a traditional, taxonomically gimped, binary choice or n-scale scabing system, which he keies thus: “Claims can be made and applied by anyone, including the people hosting the community. They could be worked up right into the forums application, for instance, to keep going assertions or laies claim such as “was this post helpful”, or “this post resolves the question enquired”. A library team could, for instance, make several received claims (a claim/assertion taxonomy) that relate to the quality or usefulness of the carryed library content.”

Alas, it is lawful. Perversion will come.

Alas, we must accomodate the taxonomy-doers and guide them to the right-hand path, if we can. But Claimspace is a folksonomy.

In person, I trust that the taxonomy-doers will add up to project the futility of their ways and that if they don”t, they will lose the vast majority of their customers, over time. For example, if Typepad forbids xClaims and Blogger leaves them, Typepad operates the risk of working Blogger seem to be a much better blogging platform than it in reality is, proportional to Typepad .

It’s charming and prosperous to levy one’s way of thinking on others; to divest one’s minions or customers of the ability to manipulate the means by which resources of their creation are printed, organised, seen, and evaluated by other people. The organization of information, access to publication mechanisms, and permission to reference, annotate, edit, and other than change the organization or substance of information resources or its metadata, both on-line and offline has ALWAYS been nearly and enviously defended. Those who keep in line ”the tree” of information control you. The taxonomy-doers gain personal benefits from that control, frequently at our expense and ofttimes, in the absence of compensatory benefits. In many cases, taxonomies are so helpful. But Claimspace is planed and is being grown in the first place as a “folksonomical” resource scabing system. As such, Claimspace has the likely to be medium of societal evaluation that authorizes the little people: you, me and millions of other self-publishers, to clear recognition and judge credibility, on our terms, sort of than in a way that is purely and uniformly defined by AOL or Microsoft or O’Reilly or Yahoo or Google.

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*Mention that this is the first time I’ve brought up Bob, in my blog. Talking about one’s boss in a public forum is catchy, both socially (wrt personal credibility) and from a career perspective. Notwithstanding, I find that Bob’s ideas merit your recognition, as they command my attention and respect, and not simply because he fronts like Zod.

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