Here's a very detailed beginner level look at XML and the semantic web. Basically no previous knowledge is expected, and that's hard to claim for most of this type of writing. Probably I've said it before about some other article, but this is a good one to start with.
thought you might appreciate the perils of ev. no rest for weary blogmasters.
Yikes. I can imagine that a 3 gig database would be a nightmare to work with, although I have no experience in that size range. Ours is around 10 megs ;-) And there is no way my system could ever scale up. It is much more resource intensive than something like blogger, because here the system keeps track of exactly which posts have and have not been read by each member. This would never work on a very large dataset (well, it would work with a big enough computer, but I think you'd quickly be talking about something totally unrealistic in terms of power needs.) It might be interesting to hear why I don't think this is a real problem. Or maybe it's better to start with what I think is wrong with (for lack of a better phrase) the blogger model. Basically it boils down to the same argument I try to make about file system hierarchy depth. In terms of blogs, there is basically no depth. You have blogger, or manilla, or something like that on top, and then right under that, you have a flat expanse consisting of every blog. This is akin to the problem of having a folder on your computer named photos, and then just dumping ever photo you ever take into that one file. Past a certain number of photos this turns into a very bad idea. Same thing with blogs. There needs to be more levels in the hierarchy. And I think the way to do this is to allow blogs to naturally group themselves together (like we do here) by replicating the blogging tool. It would be much better if there were hundreds of people running blogger type tools, each one serving a small (to medium) group of like minded bloggers. This would get around the problem of one person having a 3 gigabyte database to deal with. Instead there'd be a hundred 30 meg databases (or whatever.) And there wouldn't be a single point of failure like there is now when blogger goes down.
And this would be better from the surfers point of view as well. How useful is the eatonweb portal (or weblogs.com) now that it has so many blogs listed? Again, this is the same problem as the single folder photo problem. Instead of a flat listing of 10,000 or 100,000 or 1,000,000 blogs, wouldn't it be better if the top level portals listed a few hundred smaller portals (self arranged by topic, although this could be sort of vague, as is our case here) each of which had one to several hundred web logs.
Distribute the load. Maintain interoperation.
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- jim 3-29-2001 3:27 pm
thought you might appreciate the perils of ev. no rest for weary blogmasters.
- dave 3-30-2001 4:37 pm
Yikes. I can imagine that a 3 gig database would be a nightmare to work with, although I have no experience in that size range. Ours is around 10 megs ;-) And there is no way my system could ever scale up. It is much more resource intensive than something like blogger, because here the system keeps track of exactly which posts have and have not been read by each member. This would never work on a very large dataset (well, it would work with a big enough computer, but I think you'd quickly be talking about something totally unrealistic in terms of power needs.) It might be interesting to hear why I don't think this is a real problem. Or maybe it's better to start with what I think is wrong with (for lack of a better phrase) the blogger model. Basically it boils down to the same argument I try to make about file system hierarchy depth. In terms of blogs, there is basically no depth. You have blogger, or manilla, or something like that on top, and then right under that, you have a flat expanse consisting of every blog. This is akin to the problem of having a folder on your computer named photos, and then just dumping ever photo you ever take into that one file. Past a certain number of photos this turns into a very bad idea. Same thing with blogs. There needs to be more levels in the hierarchy. And I think the way to do this is to allow blogs to naturally group themselves together (like we do here) by replicating the blogging tool. It would be much better if there were hundreds of people running blogger type tools, each one serving a small (to medium) group of like minded bloggers. This would get around the problem of one person having a 3 gigabyte database to deal with. Instead there'd be a hundred 30 meg databases (or whatever.) And there wouldn't be a single point of failure like there is now when blogger goes down.
And this would be better from the surfers point of view as well. How useful is the eatonweb portal (or weblogs.com) now that it has so many blogs listed? Again, this is the same problem as the single folder photo problem. Instead of a flat listing of 10,000 or 100,000 or 1,000,000 blogs, wouldn't it be better if the top level portals listed a few hundred smaller portals (self arranged by topic, although this could be sort of vague, as is our case here) each of which had one to several hundred web logs.
Distribute the load. Maintain interoperation.
- jim 3-30-2001 8:06 pm