Standards as social contracts: "Looking at Dave Winer's efforts
in evangelizing OPML, I try to draw some rough lines into what
makes a de-facto standard. De Facto standards are made and seldom
happen on their own. In this entry, I look back at the history of
HTML, RSS, the open source movement and try to draw some lines as
to what makes a standard.
"
(Via Tristan Louis.)
I posted a comment to the Tristan Louis' post along the
following lines:
Analysis is spot on re. the link between de facto
standardization and bootstrapping. Likewise, the clear linkage
between boostrapping and connected communities (a variation of the
social networking paradigm).
Dave built a community around a XML content syndication and
subscription usecase demo that we know today as the blogosphere.
Superficially, one may conclude that Semantic Web vision has
suffered to date from a lack a similar bootstrap effort. Whereas in
reality, we are dealing with "time and context" issues that are
critical to the base understanding upon which a "Dave Winer" style
bootstrap for the Semantic Web would occur.
Personally, I see the emergence of Web 2.0 (esp. the mashups
phenomenon) as the "time and context" seeds from which the Semantic
Web bootstrap will sprout. I see shared ontologies such as FOAF and SIOC leading the way (they are the RSS
2.0's of the Semantic Web IMHO).