Super Mario Bros
David Weinberger is one of my favorite geeks. I met him in 1999 at Spring Internet World along with my friend, Richard Brodie. He's a lot like the Doc, and somewhat like the Boy. The other day, David sent me a link to one of his recent blog entries. Sadly, that's the only way I would have known about it; there's not enough time in the day to read everything. It's all about Dan Bricklin's Proposal. Now, I don't know Dan - and I don't believe we've ever been formally introduced - but he's got a killer idea up his sleeve. The “Small and Medium-sized Business meta” is set to be the next must-have XML document. Think of it as a way to keep the world up-to-date with your contact information without intervention. RSS took a few years to catch on, but his SMBmeta, if done properly, should be a great success. I'll do it, provided the specs stay truly simple.
This is the way address books should be, quite honestly. You should be able to subscribe to someone's vCard (much like you can subscribe to an iCal). I can't tell you how many Christmas Cards were returned to us this year.
7 Comments
Anonymous
January 13th, 2003
at 11:45pm
It's a great idea, so long as he can get developer support for it. RSS caught on because of the many RSS parsers that exist for both server-side and client-side (JavaScript) scripting.
The only “gotcha” is the fact that you'd have to know the whereabouts of the XML documents on different sites in order to build your own database. If you could “ping” a central SMBmeta server so that everyone can parse one giant XML database, that would REALLY be something special. Dan could recover the hosting/bandwidth costs by charging subscription fees from website owners before they could ping. Considering the potential, I'd pay.
Anonymous
January 14th, 2003
at 12:30pm
Personally I am a fan of “The Woz”, I am wanting to start coding again, but I lost my computer (pouts and cries LOL). So as you can Imagine it got put on hold for awhile. Any tips, tricks and tweaks you can share please do. I am thinking about changing over to linux, but for right now till I can get it all set up, I will be on a windows mechine. Thanks and Take Care
Anonymous
January 14th, 2003
at 9:28pm
The real trick would be allowing some information to some people, and encrypting the rest so that say, your friends get your full contact info, while your business partners only get your work contact info. A Good idea though.
Anonymous
January 17th, 2003
at 6:14am
I think this is a great initiative. But, *I* went and created one for my web site! You *should* have done the same!
Anonymous
January 17th, 2003
at 12:17pm
Not enough time. I know the feeling all to well. But since I discovered this:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0108247/categories/macMyDay/2002/12/18.html#a153
I'm finding I can at least to a daily quick scan of headlines in a few minutes. It's made my blog following and news reading immensely more productive. You may be already there, but thought I'd drop the tip….allan
Anonymous
January 18th, 2003
at 9:45am
The SMBmeta idea looks interesting, but while considering this for my own small, online mail order site, I remembered something I'd read about an outfit known as PanIP, which thinks it has a patent on basically all forms of onlne ordering (see http://www.youmaybenext.com/). Wouldn't SMBmeta make it easier for people like this to troll the Internet looking for small fry to file suit against? (PanIP wouldn't go after outfits like eBay or Amazon, who could actually afford to fight them in court and win, as of course they would).
Rod
Anonymous
January 18th, 2003
at 12:41pm
SMBmeta is basically META keywords/description tags on steroids.
Unfortunatly, the two areas where it falls short are…
1) You MUST have a unique domain name. If your business is located at http://www.somedomain.com/~bricklinsbats/ then you cannot have a SMBmeta tag.
2) There is nothing to support the system that it is valid information. It does not have the validity of something like an SSL certificate, so the SMBmeta search engines are going to only be as good as the data input and it will be spammed.
As far as trolling for Small Businesses for the PanIP fiasco, you just look up some basic keywords on the net already (like Visa, MasterCard, Shop, Cart, Checkout) and you get a nice list of ones to target. (I worked for one of the first companies to be targeted… unfortunatly, it was cheaper to pay then to defend since no one wanted to help out the little guys while PanIP was building up their successes and bank account to go after the bigger guys. (BTW, eBay would probably not be a target for PanIP as much as Amazon, BestBuy, LockerGnome since places like LockerGnome are using a cart system. This is as bad as the group that is filing suit to any company using streaming media.)