Introduce yourself to the Group
Chris Saad
about APML and how you see it evolving and emerging!
David P. Novakovic
working with a couple of startups on the Gold Coast, Australia and
full time researcher (computational linguistics) at QUT Brisbane.
Interested in blogging/social networking/e-commerce/personalised content
APML has the potential to make nearly everything we view online
relevant, and gives the power to users. much love :)
David
CleverClogs
Great to see this group lift off.
I'm a technology writer from the Netherlands with a focus on RSS-
related technologies. Actually I do most of my work behind the scenes:
I try out new services to see where they fit in, connect to vendors to
provide them with feedback and point my friends to stuff they might
like. This is exactly how I got in touch with Chris Saad about two
years ago, when I discovered his desktop notificaiton tool Touchstone
Live (now Particls).
I like to create live reading lists on all kinds of topics and use my
knowledge about the various tools on the market to enhance them. Some
of my projects turn into sophisticated applications. My most recent
one focuses on podcasting professionals.
I'm interested in APML because I can just *sense* that it's the next
big thing for software on the market today: APML connects a consumer's
favorite tools and services through their attention profile. I'm still
learning myself about all the aspects and implications involved:
there's the technological one of course, about formats, namespaces and
implementation strategies. There's the awareness and expectations
aspect: RSS hasn't exactly reached the wide adoption that e-mail did
achieve.
How to advocate the importance of APML to consumers without scaring
them off with concerns about privacy and without making it sound too
geeky? It seems the two notions of privacy and ownership of attention
data are recurring topics wherever I introduce the concept of
attention profiling. I'm so glad there's a FAQ page now that I can
point to ( http://engagd.pbwiki.com/Frequently+Asked+Questions ).
Looking forward to hear about your motivations and interests very
much.
Marjolein
Gabor Ratky
I'm a software engineer / architect and I currently reside in
Budapest, Hungary (which happens to be my hometown). I am heavily
invested in up and coming Microsoft technologies (WPF, Silverlight,
LINQ, etc) and I'm always on the watch to leverage the new wave of
technologies to come up with ideas that could not be realized before
(and blow people's minds away in the process ;)
I got to know Chris and the idea of APML after I was blown away by the
simplicity and effectiveness of Particls. The idea of applying the
APML to disparate sources and the effort to make this super simple is
the right direction and I'll be following Particls/Engagd and the APML
group closely.
Let me know if any of you show up in Budapest ;)
Gabor
danielabarbosa
I am also a member of the APML Workgroup and i am glad to see this
conversation expand. I have been at Dow Jones/Factiva for the last
eight years in the Client Solutions group as a Solutions Architect
focused on information delivery solutions in the Enterprise.
My background is in Library & Information Science so obviously i am
very interested in the delivery of information and new technologies
and standards around it. With the ever growing content overload issues
we are constantly dealing with we are certainly seeing a lot of
content consumption tools being enhanced with filter technologies-
from Web 2.0 features to great analytics and visualizations. The
problem is that those filters are still sitting on top of the tools-
users must learn to use each unique tool to suite their personalize
needs and don't really control them. I think one of the things APML
can do is turn that model upside down with user ownership and
portabilty and then the tools would just need to learn how to play
along with a standard.
For the last 8 years i have been fortunate enough to work with a lot
of Fortune 500 companies and have come to learn that things that
appear in the consumer world eventually creep into the enterprise.
Knowledge cataloging and sharing is a topic that comes up all the time
and I have to admit that i have been talking about the concept of APML
with some of my customers lately and the message is resonating (i will
have to get some of them to join the group!).
I am very excited to be part of this group and look forward to
engaging with all of you on this topic.
-daniela
Dow Jones Client Solutions
daniela...@dowjones.com
415.321.9502
www.danielabarbosa.blogspot.com
Elias Bizannes
My name is Elias Bizannes and it takes people a while to learn my name
but once you do you will never forget it! (It's pronounced ee-lee-ass
biz-ar-knees). I reside in Sydney Australia, my hometown, and have
been at PricewaterhouseCoopers for the last two years. At PwC I work
on Technology & media clients, and I am also involved in an internal
business development role that has me evangelising the technology and
the culture of what we regard as web2.0.
I joined the APML workgroup soon after I heard about it at BarCamp
Sydney in March 2006. To me, it seemed like a brilliantly simply but
powerful idea to deal with privacy. Years earlier, I had spent a
considerable about of time researching the issues with advertising on
the net and identified the problem with privacy. APML to me, kicks the
goals for what I thought were the issues.
My interests are varied and I tend to keep an open mind. Although I
have a finance and accounting background, I have more than once found
myself deep into computer science literature trying to understand
things I have no hope of understanding! I have considerable experience
with implementing wiki's, RSS, and blogs within enterprise and
exposure to research in knowledge management that links to
contemporary theory about social networking. My interest in the
internet was a natural progression from a background in media, which
had me realise the potential the web had for a newer form of media. As
such, I have come into the Internet from an Information angle rather
than a technology background, although I now fully embrace the
technology of the web and the internet as things I am passionate
about. If I was identify what my main interests are currently, it
would be new media, online advertising, and the semantic web.
I look forward to engaging with all of you in the future!
Regards,
Elias
http://liako.biz
kelly abbott
Briefly, I'm Kelly Abbott, the founder of Dandelife.com. I'm American,
based out of San Diego, CA. I came to APML by way of seeing how APML
could help the members of Dandelife.com get more utility out of their
lifecasting/lifestreaming data that Dandelife helps one record. I
haven't yet begun to scratch the surface on what APML can empower in
people who indeed live life connected in the way Dandelifers do, but I
am convinced that APML is one of the most important elements in truly
"extending" one's presence online.
Thrive,
K
dccrowley
than 20 years. I work as a fulltime webdesigner/ developer for
Cinnamon Interactive BV and parttime tech blogger. I see a huge need
for attention economy services. While I don't suffer from constant
'information overload' I think that APML might be a really great way
to focus attention on what we need and want to know/ follow.
Cinnamon Interactive is specialist in web design and accessibility
with an international reputation.
On Oct 12, 5:29 am, Chris Saad <chris.s...@gmail.com> wrote:
cubic...@gmail.com
I'm Ian Forrester also known as cubicgarden.
I was interested in APML from using Particls/Touchstone but moved to
GNU/Linux a while ago so had to drop it.
Anyhow, I loved the idea and concept of APML and started suggesting
its wider use elsewhere. Then after a couple of presentations at
BarCamp's, one in front of Tantek of the Microformats group. After
some discussion and thinking, it made sense to have a light version of
APML for those who just wanted to describe what they like or don't
like in (X)HTML. This should provide another path forward into full
APML As the lightweight APML is parsable enough to create a subset of
APML.
There's examples and more thoughts on my blog - cubicgarden.com
http://www.cubicgarden.com/blojsom/blog/cubicgarden/xml/Semantic+web/?permalink=Lightweight-Attention-Preference-Markup.html
http://www.cubicgarden.com/blojsom/blog/cubicgarden/xml/Semantic+web/?permalink=APML-as-a-lightweight-Microformat.html
Ben Metcalfe
My name is Ben Metcalfe and I'm also a member of the APML Workgroup,
in addition to the Media2.0 Workgroup. I'm British, originally from
London but I currently live and work in San Francisco/Silicon Valley
here in USA.
I guess my interest in APML has a number of intersections. Firstly I
am particularly passionate about news and online media - I used to
work on the BBC News website (http://news.bbc.co.uk) as a web
developer, then software engineer and later on in more in more of a
higher-level product development capacity. Whilst I was working on
the BBC News Website I was part of the team that launched the first
RSS feeds (V0.9, wow, long time ago) and they were some of the first
examples of RSS adopted in the mainstream.
I also launched the BBC's developer network, backstage.bbc.co.uk,
which is about the BBC releasing feeds and API's (Ian Forrester/
Cubicgarden didn't mention it but he actually heads up
backstage.bbc.co.uk these days).
These days I am particularly interested in data exchange, platforms,
APIs, feed specification, etc - which is the other reason I'm
interested in APML. I provide consultancy to companies, helping them
create a platform strategy around their business or product - this
ranges from startups to Global 500 companies.
At the moment I am advising Orange on some web2.0 properties they are
developing, including Bubbletop (http://www.bubbletop.com) - which is
a personal homepage of the Netvibes variety. It looks as though
Orange are interested in supporting APML on Bubbletop, which is
particulary as Bubbletop is very keyword orientated (compared to its
competitors). Howeer, right now they are concentrating on a November
launch, so I see this as a project for Q1 2008.
Anyway, that's me. I blog at http://benmetcalfe.com/blog/ and you may
also see stuff by me under my alter-ego nickname 'dotBen'.
Thanks
Ben
Chris Saad
My name is Chris Saad and I am the Co-founder and Chairperson of the
APML Workgroup.
A little history that has never been published until now!...
It was a dark and stormy day (no really) and Ashley Angell (CTO,
Faraday Media) and I (CEO, Faraday media) were sitting in Ash's lounge-
room (Faraday Media headquarters at the time!) writing code and
designing interfaces for our first product - Touchstone (now called
Particls.com). All of a sudden, the power went out. No computers, no
Internet and no TV (we were most bummed about the TV part).
After the 5 stages of grief - Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression
and Acceptance - we finally found ourselves in one of our usual
discussions about abstract, conceptual and architectural questions.
One of those questions was "If you're going to build an all
encompassing notification pipeline for the whole world and everything
in it (which Particls is) - how can you possibly hope to empower the
user to tune into the signal and filter out the noise?".
That simple question lead to a series of discussions that resulted in
what is now called Attention Profiling Markup Language - APML.
Since then, we have had the help of, what seems like, the entire
industry.
And it all started with our team - Ash wrote the initial code, Michael
wrote a whole handler, Paul re-wrote the handler when the spec and
requirements changed (it is now open sourced on the Google Code
repository). Our friend Marty Wells from Tangler.com helped us refine
the message and our BDM Nik Seirlis helps us design and execute our
product internal strategy.
APML hit the airwaves with a big splash thanks to all our blogger
friends. It has since gone from strength to strength. I will be
blogging about the most recent activities on the Engagd.com blog
(http://blog.engagd.com) on Monday.
I don't don't want to name each of you who helped in some way because
I am bound to miss someone (probably a lot of people) - suffice to say
- thank you all for your efforts so far.
To the APML workgroup who has helped define the spec to-date - the fun
is just beginning!
To everyone else - particularly those who have joined this public
discussion - thanks for your interest and support. Look forward to
helping people capture, define and declare their personal Attention
Profiles.
Cheers,
Chris
Feel free to reach out to me via email (ch...@faradaymedia.com),
twitter (www.twitter.com/chrissaad), skype (chris.saad) or LinkedIn
(www.chrissaad.com).
> Anyway, that's me. I blog athttp://benmetcalfe.com/blog/and you may
> also see stuff by me under my alter-ego nickname 'dotBen'.
>
> Thanks
> Ben
>
> On Oct 11, 8:29 pm, Chris Saad <chris.s...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > Introduce yourself, your products/projects, your thoughts/feelings
> > about APML and how you see it evolving and emerging!- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
Ashley Angell
I were scribbling on a bit of paper over candle-light. It felt like
the 1400's. :)
Ash
> > Anyway, that's me. I blog athttp://benmetcalfe.com/blog/andyou may
Federico Bo
Ciao.
I'm software engineer and I live in Formia, little city near Rome and
Naples.
I want to define me a knowledge's explorer
I like to mashup scientific, technical and liberal cultures.
And I think the Web is one of the most attractive place to see and to
do these experiments.
APML is one of these, and I want to observe its evolution and, maybe
not, to participate and to contribute.
Federico
Richard Giles
My name is Richard Giles. I'm the CEO of Scouta, and a member of the
APML Workgroup.
Scouta is all about Attention. It allows members to keep the details
about what video and podcasts they watch and listen to, and then
provides personalized recommendations based on that behavior.
I place a huge importance on being able to all anyone to use their own
attention data, whether that be add, remove, or alter any of the
information. So, at Scouta we're working toward ensuring that this is
key to a member's experience.
APML is moving this in exactly that direction, so I am passionate
about it's future.
Cheers
Rich
Mitch Ratcliffe
attention and influence. I am chairman of Tetriad, which has not
announced its service yet, as well as working with SportsGist.com,
Jambaz (a stock-picking game) and Songslide (name-your-price music
site in which I recently invested).
Once Tetriad is out with its service, I'll have a lot to say about how
to selectively apply attention data to creating social and economic
value for oneself.
I've been involved with APML for about a year, if memory serves, and
it is great to see it getting traction.
Best,
Mitch
Francois Dongier
I am François Dongier, an Internet consultant, originally from Canada,
now based in Belgium, and a victim of information overload. Don't know
about you, but I rarely delete feeds from my aggregator... Just keep
adding new ones, about a couple a day on the average, more than 500
per year. These feeds bring me lots and lots of new stuff to read
about things I really like. But it's getting too abundant and it just
BEGS to be properly filtered. So, an efficient RSS-filtering scheme
(minimizing false positives and false negatives) is really what I am
after here. I am very interested in tools (like Particls and AideRSS)
that attempt to extract the good juice from the sea of news articles.
Good filtering will be hard to deliver until we have accurate user
profiles. I would like to see APML evolve into a format allowing a
RICH and accurate representation of a user's set of interests.
"Keeping it simple" may be a nice slogan, but I feel the current APML
schema (implicit concepts and sources + explicit concepts and sources,
all ranked from -1.0 to +1.0) is probably a bit over-simplistic for
appropriate news filtering purposes.
A couple of other things I am interested to push also:
1. We should find ways to connect APML concepts to real things in the
world. E.g., link concept "rugby" to the real thing (say, the
corresponding Freebase or DBpedia entry?)
2. Ideally, the user should be able to EDIT his rich profile and
enhance the description of his set of interests. I understand my set
of interests better than Amazon, Google and Particls together, and
although these tools can surely extract some interesting info from my
clickstream and overall behaviour, I am the best source of information
towards a fair representation of these interests.
3. We do need an accurate user profile format, but maybe we should
first agree upon an accurate format to describe topics of interests
(memes) and their interrelations.
Looking forward to the upcoming discussions on these and other
matters,
François
Nick Halstead
My Name is Nick Halstead, I am Co-Founder of fav.or.it (http://
fav.or.it) which is a new kind of Feed Reader, instead of choosing
particular feeds you read based upon category of content, tagging and
rankings. Our interest in APML is that we have a new form of Attention
Tracking, we base our attention data upon how long people look at the
article while they scroll through the content (we have a similar
stream view to google reader). We have lots of mathematic analysis of
how people scroll over the content to understand what they read/dont
read, we then take all that information and then apply it to the tags
associated with each article. This builds up an overall picture of
what the user likes.
I would like to start a discussion on how APML covers not just
particular 'concepts' but also the 'context' within which they like
those concepts.
We will be supporting APML (I havent had time to write a post about it
yet) and are very happy to engage with the group on how we promote it.
Regards,
Nick Halstead
Daniel Fuleki
I am Daniel Füleki, an assistant professor at Corvinus University of
Budapest, and I am busy with theories and some basic calculus of
Attention Economy. (In my approach AttEcon is rather like when social
psychology meets some principles of microeconomics, therefore it is
neither a computer based language, nor a development tool. It is about
how people allocate their scarce internal resources, e.g.
intellect/intellectual knowledge, emotions/knowledge of people,
movements/motor routines on their duties and enjoyable targets.)
On the other hand, I wrote my PhD about client side event logging and
data analysis (including offline data, recorded by a limited keylogger),
involving some long run time series data collected by our research team.
This methodology is quite new to social sciences, and I was really
having a hard time findig relevant literature for it.
That's all.
BTW, I have some comments on François Dongier's bullet points:
> 2. Ideally, the user should be able to EDIT his rich profile and
> enhance the description of his set of interests. I understand my set
> of interests better than Amazon, Google and Particls together, and
> although these tools can surely extract some interesting info from my
> clickstream and overall behaviour, I am the best source of information
> towards a fair representation of these interests.
>
>
We should treat a rich profile like a machine translation. It reflects
on our viewing preferences mechanically, given, that there is a pre-made
dictionary and grammar engine that is able to transmute habits into
profiles. The majority of users will be happy with the "machine
translation", but it's really necessary to offer some possibility to
fine-tune it.
best regards,
Dániel
Dallas Freeman
I've been a web developer for a little bit over 6 years now. I've
been involved in a fair few projects in the past, mainly e-commerce
types (shopping carts, ordering systems etc). The size of projects
range from the very small to large nationally used with clients
including Subway, Baskin & Robbins, and Eagle Boys Pizza.
Currently I'm working on a couple of projects on the side for my
personal interest, and to further develop my skills. I have a high
interest with APML and look forward to how it will change the way we
browse and shop on the Internet. APML has a huge potential and I see
it as a future standard along with RSS and Email.
I look forward to what comes out of the whole project and make sure
you keep me up to date!
- Dallas
Paul Lamere
My name is Paul Lamere. I'm a researcher at Sun Labs, the research
lab in Sun Microsystems. I am the principal investigator for a
project called "Search Inside the Music" where I am building tools for
music recommendation, exploration and discovery. You can read more
about it here:
http://research.sun.com/spotlight/2006/2006-06-28_search_inside_music.html
I am active in the Music Information Retrieval community, as well as
in the Recommender Systems community. I have strong connections with
many of the commercial music recommendation companies. I've also
served on a few specification standardization working groups including
the W3C Voice Working Group that created the VoiceXML standard, and
the Java Community Process JSAPI expert group that standardized the
Java Speech API - so I'm well aware of the pain involved in giving
birth to a standard.
I'm excited by the idea of a standard for making attention data
portable. I see one of the big barriers is getting adoption of such a
standard by the companies that hold the bulk of our attention data.
These companies that already have the data may not want to make it
easy for people to take their data elsewhere. This will be a
challenge for APML.
Seongchan Moon (Voceweb.com)
I go by Peter. I recently graduated from UC Berkeley, and came back to
my homeland, Korea,
to work for Voceweb.com, a multimodal programming firm based in
Seoul.
My boss has pointed me in APML's direction to keep up with 'the next
big thing' in web programming business,
and hopefully to contirbute something to the cause. I have been
reading the posts, and I am deeply intrigued by
the whole idea as well as how the developers are implementing the
language.
I look forward to seeing APML grow and evolve.
PMoon
n.maisonneuve
research project about the management of the attention in a virtual
community context.
My current research (since february) is about:
- the use of visual attention model as a ranking model for
information retrieval
- A customized perception of the activity of the community according
to the intention of the user.
- community orientation/ and user alignment, (+ for an organization at
different level (user/department/organization))
- social attention in the community (influence, impact)
- the dynamics in an attention networks (new research)
- etc..
See my blog http://nico.maisonneuve.free.fr for further information
And of course I was interested by this new format
Nicolas Maisonneuve