Zach Beauvais

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I have begun to see that we may be entering a new age of polymaths, and I’m happy to be involved in a part of the business world which seems to sustain some of the best brains on the planet.

I remember reading about the beginners of industry—the pioneers of technology and science. I remember reading how Robert Fulton came up against problems in life, and simply invented new ways of doing things, leading eventually to the development of steam-powered paddle-wheel-boats. I remember, vaguely, from my propagandistically pro-industrial schooling that as a child, Fulton had invented or improved on the lead pencil, because the one he was using in school wasn’t up to scratch. The same story is reflected through many of the West’s inventors of what we’ve retrospectively come to call the Industrial Revolution: when opportunity or difficulty forced their hands, they changed the situation.

Now, aside from natural romanticism, I like to look to the past with neither rose-tinted glasses nor “isn’t-everything-better-now” short-sightedness. I’m sure that for every changer, there were crowds of followers in every age, and I’m sure many of you could point easily to both an earth-changer and a follower without too much effort. Besides, history pays scant attention to followers.

No, what I’m talking about is the seeming ease with which many of my colleagues in the web industry switch between impressively diverse tasks. Some I know make impressive presenters, and happen to hold PhD’s in fields more or less unrelated to what they do now… and can code Java and know a bit of CSS on the side.

After my trial implementation of  AdaptiveBlue’s Smartlink technology on this very site, I was contacted by Director of Business Development, Fraser Kelton, who agreed to a Questions and Answers session about Adaptive Blue’s new technology. For a quick introduction, I have been trying out AdaptiveBlue’s Blue Organiser for a few weeks and found their semantic features helpful and intuitive for finding and retreiving changing information, and decided to try out the Smartlink code to offer this to readers of my blog:

• What makes a link Smart?

  Traditional links are not smart, they’re simple pointers to pages. When we write about a book and link to the book’s page on Amazon we mean to link to the thing but the link points to the page.

  A link is smart when it’s capable of automatically identifying and understanding what the thing is on the page. Once the link is identified to mean a thing a lot of valuable information can be automatically presented to the user that’s contextually correct for the thing.

After my trial implementation of AdaptiveBlue’s Smartlink technology on this very site, I was contacted by Director of Business Development, Fraser Kelton, who agreed to a Questions and Answers session about Adaptive Blue’s new technology. For a quick introduction, I have been trying out AdaptiveBlue’s Blue Organiser for a few weeks and found their semantic features helpful and intuitive for finding and retreiving changing information, and decided to try out the Smartlink code to offer this to readers of my blog:

• What makes a link Smart?

  Traditional links are not smart, they’re simple pointers to pages. When we write about a book and link to the book’s page on Amazon we mean to link to the thing but the link points to the page.

  A link is smart when it’s capable of automatically identifying and understanding what the thing is on the page. Once the link is identified to mean a thing a lot of valuable information can be automatically presented to the user that’s contextually correct for the thing.

In a bid to test a bit of the Semantic Web, I have inserted a little line of Java script into my blog which should automatically turn many of my links Smart. Not 8 hours after I had inserted the script, I was contacted by Fraser at AdaptiveBlue, the creaters of the Smartlink technology, who asked how I was finding the new links. After offering me some advice about ‘Turning on Smartlinks in my Blog’, Fraser also agreed to a Question and Answer post about AdaptiveBlue (watch this space…)

Because I have been trialling BlueOrganiser for a few weeks, I am somewhat familiar with the technology, and do find it useful. I have not, however, noticed any of my links becoming ‘Smart’ of their own accord. I did manage to manually make a couple of links smart by adding a bit of HTML to the blog article (<smartlink="yes") which enabled AdaptiveBlue’s flashy menu with information on Apple and the iPhone. However, the automatic tech doesn’t seem to have worked with my Drupal website (after inserting the code in the page.tpl.php file–just like Google Analytics’ Urchin code). Fraser suggested I create the following link, to test out the smartness of my placement.

Is it Smart?

It does indeed appear to be Smart but is displaying the following error message:

"Rats! The Smart isn’t connecting to this Link…"

Oh well, it’s a step in the right direction for the Semantic Web. More on this later!