We can define a "dense JSON" encoding that uses structural and textual templates. The document is still a JSON document and can be parsed using a regular JSON parser in any environment. Fancy parsers would go directly from the dense format into their final output, while simpler parsers can apply a simple JSON -> JSON transform that would return the kind of JSON you would expect for a regular scenario, with plain objects with repeating property names and all that. This approach probably comes with less optimal results in size but great interoperability while having reasonable efficiency.

This essay forum strives to build an integrative discussion for what is a fragmented interdisciplinary field of study on the public sphere. It is meant to accompany a mapping project we are calling the Public Sphere Guide and is co-sponsored by NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge. The forum provides a platform for discussions around current or emerging projects in this area and serves as a gateway to ongoing conversations around sub-themes that have resulted in other stand-alone forums or blogs at the SSRC.

The Four Rules of Big Ideas: techniques the masters use to make that keynote more stimulating, that essay more likely to catch fire, all without doing too much thinking.
1. Tell stories and think by analogy.
2. Make the point catchy, but make it ambiguous.
3. Simplify and exaggerate.
4. Cast the anecdotes and your overarching theme in a rebellious and revolutionary light.

“Portable clouds” is a name for the idea that the “cloud” of the Internet is / can be made portable by copying portions of it onto your local networks, desktops and portable devices. Another way to say this is: really great replication and caching of the web.

This is the peril of hermetic rigorism and abject professionalization: if you believe that whatever it is you have chosen to hypostasize—truth in epistemology, the class structure in economics, the drive for status in social relations—is the only thing ultimately worthy of discussion, you stand a good chance of finding yourself on the defensive, with fewer and fewer people to talk to and increasingly occult things to talk about. Whenever a discipline becomes too self-congratulatorily reflexive, when it thinks, for example, that the corrections to the blind spots of sociology will be illuminated in an infinite regress of ever more sociology, that discipline has become moribund.

CSS is an external file that specifies how your document should look; RDF-EASE is an external file that specifies what your document means.

Proof-of-concept based on vacuuming every Wikipedia article into the Lucene open source search engine to build a text categorisation tool prototype.

A service model for personal transportation by car. Car's free, you pay for the (electric) network. Presumably other car-related services as well (maps + info, music, etc).

When critical thinking becomes a way to condemn the system of production we depend on, to cast both business and pleasure as "evil", it can indeed be a bad thing: a sort of judgement without discovery.

To the extent it or other search engines limit access to parts of their index, their public-spirited defenses of their archiving and indexing projects are suspect.

All the SVG elements are dynamically created based on colors sampled in whatever is the current header image.

Examines several possibilities for representing order in RDF, suggests criteria for evaluation and evaluates the different possibilities.

SVG fonts and animation are not on the development schedule for Firefox 3. Here are some thoughts about what would be needed to implement these features.

The semiotic square is a map of logical possibilities. As such, it can be used as a heuristic device, and in fact, attempting to fill it in stimulates the imagination.

Competence is our tacit, internalised knowledge of a language. Performance is external evidence of language competence, and is usage on particular occasions when factors other than our linguistic competence may affect its form.

Venture Communism is a proposed investment model and mode of production that is designed to allow labour to capture the value it creates.

Models are like kitchen utensils. You need a variety of them, and you should know when and how to use them.

Engage with production. We can only preserve the living, and the best time and place to preserve is when the connections exist and work and demonstrate the utility of their social value.

The editors would need good tools to create and manage all of the bibliographic and personal relationships, and the users would need a navigation and visualization system that gave them customizable views of the information.

It makes further information about a topic available at the end of a URL. It relieves people of having to create their own context and condensed background.

A better strategy would be to use all of Yahoo’s various content services and make them available to YPN publishers. Make it extremely easy for both technical and non-technical web publishers to pull content.

A new verb could be defined that accepted a list of resource representations, including any ID/IDREF attributes required to express the graph relationships over the elements in the XML document, and PUT each of them in turn.

The client can modify any part of the structure without concern for the origin server for that element, and the server can difference the PUT-back representation to discover changes, validate permissions, and commit permitted changes.

...one of the most important changes we're going to see in lots of professions over the next few years is the emergence of tools that close the gap between the middle and the top--that allow the decision-maker who is merely competent to avoid his errors a

GROUPTALK is an informal, student-run, participatory forum for addressing challenges in Berkeley research projects at the intersection of people and technology.

Screencasting can be an excellent way to transmit tacit knowledge.

Pheeder is a whole new way of using your cellphone: it lets you communicate with all of your friends simultaneously, with a single phone call.

In developing manual or semi-automatic approaches, however, careful consideration should be give to the interface between the processes for assigning words and for using words. More independent the two processes are, better the complete system will be.

A collection of video and audio recordings about the promises of the future.

If, for the better part of the 20th century, it was New York and its glistening imitations that symbolised the future, it is now the stacked-up, sprawling, impromptu city-countries of the third world.

The world suffers a silent phenomenon of "digital decay". This quirky realm is mostly populated by librarians, archivists and museum curators, plus the occasional anxious scientist and panicky megacorporate record clerk.

Movie Cards turns digital, abstract film material back into something tangible: paper cards.

Thoughts on designing an RDF transformation pipeline.

A series of parallel white paper competitions that will encourage student teams to propose the next generation of research, education, and service activities on the UC Berkeley campus.

Are there kinds of content that individuals can produce on their own - opinions, reactions, live conference reports, etc. - and are there different kinds of content that require the sort of coordination and investment that only institutions can provide?

With their common tools, the transversality of networks and the general transformation of activities, the public and the artist are potentially co-producers of the public sphere.

Don't innovate; extract value instead of creating it, by building iron curtains around the valeu chain; focus on synergies (read: marketing economies of scale and scope).

Yahoo is considering launching a program to reward people who make Yahoo their primary search engine.

Street teamers will receive perks and merchandise in exchange for their aid in putting up posters, referring new members, and letting us know about relevant events in their hometowns.

Content 360 is a brand new initiative encouraging multimedia and application developers to work on new content ideas in collaboration with world leading broadcasters.

As we move to an age of plug-and-play software, in which performance will be judged on the ease with which different programs can be assembled and disassembled, the barrier to close collaboration in the open-source model may turn out to be not a weakness

The semantic web has a lot of people working on the technological guts, but very few on the social practices that might make it happen.

At a high level the timeline might just show me activity summarised by tags. At a more detailed level, attached to the timeline will be actual photo thumbnails, blog entry titles, links, etc.

Proposes several themes for the study of the blogosphere: economic influence, the convergence of sender/receiver roles, class and cultural representation, the constitution of digital identity and the limitations imposed by a digital divide.

Maybe the hybrid approach is an iterative one based on iteration between rapid research and feature experimentation.

The problem is not in finding the number of links but in using the number of links joined to the seriousness of the assertion to create automatic notifications to interested parties.

Thoughts on transcribing and indexing podcasts.

Ruminations on how to create aural interfaces to interactive fiction.

We can build the substrate for an ecosystem of tagging that will lets us innovate and work toward the vision of an open tagosphere. I argue that ontology is core to this effect.

Type in a sentence, and hear it sung to you (using clips from various songs).

Users can organize their pictures into linear “photo-arcs” connected by textual narratives. Users can also view other narratives that use the same pictures, or perhaps similar pictures, which introduce a non-linear, interactive element.

Listening and looking are our most natural form of communication. As the internet becomes capable of running mainly on non-text forms like audio, video, and still pictures, text will be relegated to the same snooty ghetto online as it is offline.

A camera that allows focus adjustment *after* photos are captured.

Games and Resources on Storytelling Games and Improvisational Storytelling; Card Games, Board Games, and Role-Playing.

Each game must be made in less than 7 days.

Discussion of plans for a collaborative multimedia "wikimentary."

Storyboarding can be used to sense emergent patterns in our own life story and to envision the life experiences that we wish to welcome into our future.

Faceted tagclouds.

From Pixen Inc: Hang it on the strap of a cellphone, and it releases an odor for 5 seconds when you receive calls or emails.

"Instead of making a two-hour movie, we're going to make 150 hours worth of [TV] movies for the same amount of money."

This document describes a protocol and data format for exchange of "tags" in real-time.

The new interface displays galleries of possible end-states, each of which combine many formatting operations. From this gallery, you select the complete look of your target -- say an org chart or an entire document -- and watch it change shape as you mou

Here are some unsorted thoughts from a really interesting grouptalk discussion on Web 2.0 led by Dan Perkel.

The next step for this project is to stop working on infrastructure and start working on apps.

Understanding semantic relationships between concepts makes folksonomic tagging even more exciting.

Power in the Web 2.0 comes not from controlling the whole system, but in controlling the connections in a larger network of systems. It is the power of those who create not open systems, but semi-open systems, the power of API writers, network builders an

This paper suggests some best practice guidelines that developers can follow when creating new service interfaces for "social content" applications.

Mobcasting is groups of people using Internet-enabled mobile phones to create podcasts on a common subject.

A workshop under the theme of mobile photography - how camera phones have changed people's photography habits and created new social uses for the device as well as business, and now that this is happening what will the future look like.

Tinky is a simple tagging system that works using standard HTML style links.

Key issues for spoken word are: standardised repositories, supporting streaming, pointed to by blogs/wikis/etc, pointed to by software for annotation/quotation/reference, formation of secondary repositories of specialist metadata and user-metadata.

A non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the basic rights of attention owners

It is becoming popular in our affluent society to rank income in attention above money income.

I want to help level the playing field and expose the free, open attention marketplace that is latent within the public Internet. I believe that people have the right to themselves and all of their associated data.

This one-day conference brings together archivists, educators, technologists, entrepreneurs, producers, legal experts, and investors to explore the enormous promise offered by the availability of online video and television content.

The cinema of 21st Century is going to be produced and consumed a lot like online multiplayer video games.

Multiple attempts at services that want to be Flickr 2.0, and tools that want to be iTunes for video, seem to me to be missing the mark.

Clickless navigation.

Malleable modules can be as convenient as ringtones to purchase, while the Social Remixes that are created with them are dynamic, connection-based services.

"If we are to encourage new kinds of creative expression, we have to accept that this will only happen if we allow our content to degrade into dust. Remix culture requires flexibility – the ability to reduce content to the single atom."