Christopher Warner "So, it's not like the code is my brain; keep it"

Adaptive Blue

Last week thursday I was over at Hearst where I saw a lot of familiar faces. The meeting was on something called Glue which is currently a plug-in for firefox and machine learning. It uses something called AB Meta which is a RDFa-based format for annotating pages that are about things/objects.  Alex Iskold the CEO over at AB started the presentation with one of the quotes everyone has been referring back to often recently. Said by Tim Berners-Lee:

“It’s not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important”

They’ve already added New York Magazine’s content to an object network they are hosting themselves. Instead of waiting for New York Magazine to expose it’s information beyond static html; they’ve parsed the html meta tags and apply it to their own system by converting the html page into an object or thing via ABmeta and letting their own network of users commit actions on books/movies/restaurants on the website.

An example would be visiting the restaurant Scopello. When I visit with Glue installed (plugin only works with Firefox although they are working on an Internet Explorer option now) it lets me know that I am the first person to visit this restaurant and then allows to me commit actions on the object, see a summary, or see what other visitors using Glue has said about this restaurant.

Glue Summary

Here we see the actual fleshed out summary of the restaurant w/intro from New York Magazine

Full Summary for Scopello

and if I actually had any friends that visited with Glue we would see them here with specific commentary. Since I have none then I can invite some:

What have my friends said?

The piece about this that is interesting is that it works across New York Magazine and Menupages a like; in-fact it works across many sites and there is an iphone app as well.

Restaurants

Books

Movies

So this is a very interesting take on the whole the semantic web database model. They are actually using it as such by just creating their own objects and coming up with their own metadata schemes. Instead of waiting for the content publishers to get their acts together they are creating a layer on-top of the HTML and bypassing them all together! The profit piece eventually comes in from their user network and according to Alex they are using Amazon EC2 for this all which makes it even more interesting because they aren’t using any standard dye-in-the-wool methods for this new network of users and commentary they are creating. Definitely a company to keep an eye on.

Technically speaking at New York Magazine it would be possible to join the AB Meta spec by changing the web pages to publish according to the spec. I’m not exactly sure how feasible that is though because at the end of the day it doesn’t make it easier so to speak, or provide any value to New York Magazine but if AB (Adapative Blue) have already figured out what it thinks are consider objects; not much that can be done. Well except for New York Magazine and all of those other content providers to only provide their object content via API like the New York Times is doing. It just so happens that they’ve done a very good job here for their own purposes with nothing but HTML markup. Anyway very interesting stuff and an exceptional use of RDF and the semantic web in general!

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