Blog entries by Manuel Vila

Once again, the main idea behind the social network comes from a reversal process. We're dealing with an approach focused on the people (user-centric) and not on the applications allowing us to produce various data (text with blogs, pictures on Flickr, videos on YouTube, etc.). Rather than indicate to our contacts the numerous RSS feeds representing our "digital life", we are going to point at a unique address (our OpenID) whereby they will have access to any shared data. Even better, they will be able to add us in their contact list in order to automatically receive our new data (our "lifestreams"). To draw a parallel between an existing tool, adding an RSS feed to an aggregator like Google Reader comes down to adding a contact in our social network. But there is a major difference because this new approach simplifies things a lot while introducing many new fascinating possibilities.

Continue reading The Object Oriented Web - Part 3 - Social Networks

To begin with, there is a very simple idea: Websites should themselves indicate their changes to the search engines. I've already touched upon the subject in the previous part of this series, right now search engines have a reversed approach which consists of crawling the Web constantly looking for the slightest modification. Don't you think it's silly? Think about the number of Web pages to visit, imagine the cost to get the lowest frequency between each visit. Consequently, it seems difficult to consider the development of new search engines today. Nevertheless, the advent of the Semantic Web should lead to their multiplication, in a vertical way, while search engines are getting specialized more and more in specific fields.

Continue reading The Object Oriented Web - Part 2 - Datahubs

The more we use the Internet, the more we realize the necessity of finding new solutions to better organize the growing mass of information. Today we actually have a certain number of tools to add meaning to the information that we drop all over the Web. Adding a comprehensible meaning to computers, allowing them to help us better organize things. That's the big idea behind the Semantic Web, an idea which appears more and more obvious to us everyday. In this field, we already have many advanced technologies, starting with those offered by the W3C itself: XML, RDF, OWL, etc.

Continue reading The Object Oriented Web - Part 1 - Backlinks