Cause for Optimism
I have an additional cause for optimism even beyond the euphoria
some of us expressed at BloggerCon, that blogging can revolutionize the
world. That's because I see blogging as an intermediate step toward a richer
metadata
protocol linking blogs about me to blogs about you and describing in detail
how successfully we do business. The aim is to do more business, increasing
money velocity,
and hence prosperity. But the secret sauce is to create a conversation about
quality in our economic life.
Xpertweb equips its users to add transaction data to their
private permission-free publishing (blogging) environment. If two such bloggers
trade with each other, they can agree to expose their progress to their audiences
in real time. At the end of the transaction, they can give each other a 1-99%
grade and a written comment. Their metadata archive can then inform others
as to their reliability, as rated by trusted bloggers. Just as bloggers despise
broken links, so will Xpertweb bloggers disparage erosion of transactional
data. However, by mirroring transaction data, the sting of lost Xpertweb
metadata is salved.
Prior to BloggerCon, Doc had suggested I post an Xpertweb
description, so I wrote Blogging
for Business. The suggestion then was that the Xpertweb protocols provide
a specialized kind of trackback that's highly explicit about the universal
data types that describe all transactions. In fact, Roland believes that
it might be possible to use the trackback mechanism as a way to propagate
Xpertweb data.
I describe Xpertweb as if it will be a site you can go to
and which has a proprietary hold on the "system." But that's just a way of
describing
the protocols, just as we describe cyberspace as a place when it's really
just an agreement.
Agreeing to Agree
Agreement is a powerful force. Doctor
Weinberger and Doc Searls have
taught us that the
Internet is simply an agreement embedded
in our habits, software, firmware and hardware.
The Xpertweb protocol is a more abstract agreement dictating
how we'll deal with each other, and to publish the outcomes of our resulting
actions. Since it's about mo' money, it has the opportunity to be of mo' than
passing interest. Since the protocols reward the agree-ers hugely when they
get new people to adopt the agreement, it has a chance to be adopted quickly
and
enthusiastically. Its purpose is to terraform the
global economic desert as dramatically as any Star Trek visionary.
There's a high-level intro to Xpertweb here,
and a more detailed look here.
And there's a depiction of the shamelessly viral money-spreading meme here.
Some people will go to any length to invent a buck.
12:31:50 PM 
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