Ankh: I'd definitely be interested in
getting in touch with some people with similar goals. I
think that it is ultimately essential to the health of the
Internet that public domain works are made easily available,
and also that searching is vastly improved.
I'll take this opportunity to rant a bit. First, I am
becoming increasingly disillusioned by the world wide web.
I used to think that it was the coolest thing since sliced
bread. But, overcommercialization is killing it. It is
becoming harder and harder to find the actual information
that I want, because searching was tacked on as an
afterthought. I think that the world-wide web can be broken
down into 4 categories:
- Community sites: Things like Advogato, Slashdot,
K5, etc. Sites that are too broad or with too great a
userbase are really showing it. Slashdot used to be great,
but now it is barely worth going to, except that it is
habit. Advogato in my mind strikes a great balance. I
think the 2 big reasons for that are that it has a focus
(free software developers), and the trust metric. The trust
metric is great, and has a ton of uses.
- Services: Things like expedia.com,
ticketmaster.com, and buy.com are all pushing a "web
application" and are pretty useful. But I think that they
can probably be revised in terms of metadata to be much
cooler.
- News sites: salon.com, cnn.com, etc. These are
all useful, but it is annoying that I have to go to the
front page to see if there are even any articles I want to
read. Another candidate for metadata magic, or client
pull.
- Research Material/Public domain works:This stuff
was the original purpose of the WWW. It is really lacking
though, because the nature of research is that you have to
be able to find it. But, as I said before, searching is
kind of weak right now. This is also a huge candidate for
metadata magic.
The problem is that people are trying to make the desktop
more like the web, where I think the opposite should be
true. Web sites should be seen like any document or
application. Mozilla should not be an evironment for me to
do anything. It should be a rendering engine for the
content that I asked for. I think that a nice unified
search system should be how I find what content I want.
Same with things I want to buy. News should be
client-pulled for me and put into my desktop environment
(like a "News" subdirectory in the gnome menu). Why
"browse" unless I'm trying to kill time? It seems kind of dumb.
Now my rant will break out from just technological
complaints to general intellectual property complaints. I
completely agree with Ankh that people should be focusing
their investments on Museums, Libraries, and other public
repositories, rather than hogging important works to
themselves. I can understand the joy of owning an original
painting, or a first edition (and would definitely love to
be in a position to be able to afford such things one day),
but I'd like to think that it would be better to give or
loan such things to museums, and just buy the print for my
own enjoyment. Some things are too important to be held
privately. However, Museums and libraries need to shape up.
They don't display anywhere near 20% of their holdings.
What isn't on display is packed in crates where no one can
enjoy it, research it, or do anything with it. This isn't
in line with the function of a museum. I think that they
have an obligation to supply electronic versions of
everything they have. Imagine the boon to research that
this would represent. Or even just personal enrichment. It
would be an admittedly enormous task, but even doing things
piece by piece would be beneficial. The arguments that this
would discourage people from actually seeing the real thing
is foolish. I am thrilled that I can go to webmuseum and
look at Van Gogh's amazing paintings, but that just makes me
want to see the real things even more. And, when I do get
the chance to see them, I appreciate it that much more. All
of this stuff should be readily available.
I am thrilled to see organizations fund projects like
ibiblio.org - it is an excellent collection of knowledge.
But, while browsing it yesterday, I couldn't help but think
how great it would be if all of that information had
accompanying metadata. And then the development of a
distributed filesharing system that has places like
ibiblio.org as permenant nodes. It would be truly great.
It frustrates me that the technology is there, but it is
just not happening yet. Hopefully I can help make it happen
a bit faster. Incidentally, a filesharing system that uses
servers like ibiblio.org as permenant nodes would be
virtually impossible to stop - the government couldn't help
but fund such an effort eventually. It would be a quantum
leap in the usefulness of computers and the internet. Being
able to do crossreferencing on the fly would be cool as
well, but I could live if that were a later feature. All a
project like this needs is a lot of people willing to spend
a little time adding metadata to things. After a while, it
will be easy to maintain. To some extend, computers would
be able to generate some of the metadata for us, leaving us
to fill in the blanks as we have time. A guy can dream. ;-)