I imagine that Scott McCloud would be pleased

to see other people, like the Zope gods, talking about the "space in between" content. "Lately Rael [Dornfest] has been talking about doing P2P for syndication. P2P could be the kind of transformative breakthrough for DC and RDF. Without a standard vocabularly across verticals (music, etc.), P2P will be another thousand islands, which dramatically lowers the utility. Unlike web pages, which generally wants content to be broadcast and rendered, P2P wants to content to be exchanged. This model demands interoperable content." One of the things we talked about at the last gathering of the YULbloggers was the categorization system used at aaronland. A neat idea that was tossed out, technical and design implementations aside, was creating a dynamic, network based category system to which users could subscribe and contribute. Instead of [insert weblog administrative interface here] pulling a list of categories out of some kind of local data-store, the application makes an xml-rpc call to a remote server that returns an associative array containing the most recently compiled list of categories submitted by all the users. Remember, you are still setting aside technical and design issues for the time being. If nothing seems like an suitable match for whatever you're writing about, you create a new category which your application duly notes and sends to the remote server. And so on and so on. Maybe you create a special category subscription page that you consult every n days instead of slurping the list every time you post something, but you get the idea. I can think of a lot of reasons, good and bad, why people are trying to create definitive standards to which we all subscribe but taken to its logical conclusion, when you apply this kind of instutional thinking outside of a limited or specific application the end result is pretty much soul-crushing. Standardized interpretation is still just the tyranny of the majority dressed up in buzzword-bingo. From my point of view, it would be more interesting to see all the new and different ways that people create to describe what they are thinking and watch that influence what I'm thinking. After all, the street still finds its own use for things... see also : Scott McCloud and Scott McCloud talking about the space between content (quicktime) and then The XML-Meta Architecture.

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