LarryRoth.net

An interesting news item disclosed a discussion between Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and the Director of Search at Google, Peter Norvig. Mr. Norvig presented what he felt are very tangible road blocks to the usefulness of the Semantic Web. His concerns are:

• Incompetent content providers
• A lack of support for standardization
• Deliberate deception[1]

These are all valid points, and specifically, I think we are already seeing quite a bit of deception. Some content owners deliberately provide false metadata in order to improve their ranking. Tag spam and keyword stuffing are just a couple examples of this.

What was Berners-Lee’s response? He feels that the Semantic Web can increase relevance by identifying the content’s originator and why the content can be trusted.[2]

[1] Google exec challenges Berners-Lee, http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Google_exec_challenges_Berners_Lee/0,2000061733,39263931,00.htm, posted July 19, 2006, viewed July 19, 2006
[2] ibid.

If you are in the market for a new Web server, Sun has announced a new 4U Web server, the Sun Fire x4500 that you may be interested in. WARNING: it is only capable of housing 2 dual core x64 AMD processors and can only accommodate 24GB of storage. Think that will be enough?

Ok, to be fair, it does start at ~$33,000. That’s a little more that I paid for our last XServe, but—MAN—it sure looks sweet…

If you manage an Apache based Web site that requires user authentication you may be familiar with using htaccess and the following in your site configuration file.

<Location /private >

   AuthType Basic

   AuthName “Realm name”

   AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/users

   Require valid-user

</Location>

If you are not familiar with this nomenclature, it will cause a pop-up username/password box to appear and grant access only if the username and password exist in the htaccess file. The downside to this approach is user management. Each user needs to be entered via command line or through one of a few available Web apps that help automate the process. In addition, you don’t have any information about the user except a name.

You can of course use application layer authentication and authorization, but it requires lots of extra code, you need to manage the data yourself, and can’t easily protect all your Web assets such as images.

I have been using a third approach—authentication against an LDAP server. The benefits are:

• More available options and application for account management
• More information available about users
• Standardized account information can be shared with other apps

It was easy to setup. All I had to do was enable the Apache mod_auth_ldap module, and add the following to my configuration file:

<Location /private >

   AuthType Basic

   AuthName “Realm name”

   AuthLDAPURL ldaps://www.foo.com:636/cn=users,dc=foo,dc=com?uid

   Require valid-user

</Location>

Actually, you can see it’s only a one line change over the htaccess approach. I should mention that the above ldap url format works with Open Directory running on Mac OS X server. The ldap url you use will depend on your particular LDAP server and setup. The uid is used by Apache to map to the server variable: username.

For my use—in-house Web apps—it’s been great to start authenticating users against the internal LDAP we use for our mail server. It’s not exactly a single sign-on solution like Kerberos or NTLM—the user still has to enter their username and password for each site—but at least they don’t have to have a separate username for each site.

The hardest part is getting the ldap connection string correct. Once you have that figured out, the rest is easy!

Henning von Vogelsang has written what I felt is a great article about The difference between categories and tags. Besides being a very concise comparison of tags and categories and when to use each, he has a fantastic real world example.

From the article:

Take a simple walk to a clothing store. Maybe you are entering the store with the idea to buy a pair of jeans. Chances are, you will leave the store with a pair of jeans, and a jacket, some socks, briefs, or two plain t-shirts. Why? Because you were surrounded with offerings that were not sorted by category but by association. You were allured by visual suggestions. That is the same like tags can work on a web site. They can draw you into something. Not because you were looking for it, but maybe out of curiosity.

What I like about this section of the article is that it helps me to overcome the idea that tags are simply a flat organizational structure for classifying information. They are indeed that, but when used appropriately can be much more. I must admit, I am often hung up on the fact that tagging can only be as good as the tagger, but isn’t the same true about an information architecture? I really like the notion of being inspired by a tag. Can you say the same thing about a categorized list? I can see a lot of situations where tags can not only help to create new information relationships, but also tie in an emotional attraction that quite frankly would be hard to create with an organized, categorized list.

The trick is to find the right tags, which are most universally understood and evoke the correct emotional response. This really makes me wonder where they can fit in the corporate world. For instance, should IBM tag their product page for Websphere application server community edition? Maybe so. It could be a great way to expose people to a lot more of what they have to offer. Having the tag community edition would be one-click to all of their free product offerings. Or java, leading to their expansive knowledge and offerings in that arena. What a great way to make a sticky site!