Software Voices

I have written previously on Adam Bosworth's talk at the MySQL Users Conference. At that time Google Base had not yet been revealed to the public. I now have had a chance to play with Google Base, have listened to the Bosworth's talk again and I have some opinions on how his vision of Google Base as the "http and html" of information access is playing out.

Adam believes that the success of HTML is attributable to its having one schema and the fact that browsers handle badly formatted HTML without barfing -- it is inherently a "sloppy" format and user-friendly. He says RSS 2.0 and Atom are similarly sloppy formats that can express information in a reusable way.

In other words, the formats that Google defines for bulk uploading (RSS 2.0, Atom) are intended to be nothing less than a new universal schema for all data. While these are uploaded to Google today, Adam imagines a world where these files are produced as the result of a query ala Open Search. Adam goes so far as to say that Google will publish their data in this manner.

What I wonder is whether Dave Winer will beat them to the punch in making this a reality. A robots.txt or <link> tag seems to be all that is necessary for publishers to make this data available to all comers. Alternatively, the developers of A9's Open Search could adopt Google's upload format for results. Either step would bring us one step closer to Adam's grand vision of the democratization of information.

Click to see an screenshot of Amazon's new tagging interface. I have to run out to dinner, so I haven't taken any screenshots (or even tried) the exploration interface, but I was so excited I had to blog it immediately.

From Amazon's help:

What are tags ?
Tags provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify any item on the Amazon site for later recall. For example, you might be shopping for holiday gifts and tag items with the names of the people on your shopping list. At any time, you can review the items you've tagged and make final gift decisions. You might also want to tag items you've purchased in the past. This allows you to organize your collection in any way you wish. You can also use tags to help you remember items you're considering for purchase, e.g. if you are planning to buy a digital camera, you might tag several makes and models so that you can look at them side by side, organized the way you wish. Don't like the way Amazon has organized its science fiction or cookbooks? Tag the items you care about with the categories that matter to you. Because people's tags are (by default) visible to others, a great side effect of tagging is that you can navigate among items through other people's tags. What items have people tagged "gift" or "Tuscany" or "robot?"