Error: I'm afraid this is the first I've heard of a "writeback" flavoured Blosxom. Try dropping the "/+writeback" bit from the end of the URL.

Wed, 19 Nov 2003

Under construction
I'm getting ready to flip the switch on a new weblog. All the major bits are in place and the only thing left to do is tidying up. Um, and figuring out how to get all the old entries to work. And finding the bugs.

Battle Royal

Brett stepped up to the turntables and knocked out some untouchable low key hip hop:

Wu-Tang Tuesday

It looked like a sure thing, until Alf came right back with the monstrous:

Goldie Lookin' Chain

Ew

(thanks, kev)

I don't think Michael Jackson molested anybody. He's such a creep that he's an easy victim, and he's so rich that he's an appealing target. He has everything to lose by molesting, while kids' parents have nothing to lose by saying that he molested.

RDF

As I wander through the valley of playlist formats, I'm finding that RDF in general and Creative Commons RDF in particular have already supplied answers to many outstanding problems. rdf:Bag is equivalent to the SMIL <par> contruct, for example. A Really Good manifest schema would look almost exactly like Creative Commons metadata. The problem is RDF.

Nobody in their right mind wants to embed an RDF parser in their application. RDF parsers are way too immature and complex. Application developers will do XML, but that's it.

Creative Commons needs XML. There should be a canonical XML serialization of Creative Commons metadata, so that application developers can avoid the need for an RDF parser.

More than that -- Creative Commons has to deal with this, because what developers are doing in the real world is assuming that the XML serialization of RDF will always take a certain form, and what they're not doing is building RDF parsers into their apps.

More than that -- all RDF schemas have to deal with this, because the same phenomenon is happening wherever you find useful data trapped in an unusable RDF shell. The RDF folks have done a huge service by delivering a well debugged ontology; that's the value of their work.