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  • From: "Michael D. Thomas" <mdthomas AT mindspring.com>
  • To: "'Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/'" <internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: RE: [internetworkers] Re: napkin technology --> WWW --> Semantic Web
  • Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2003 01:04:22 -0500


> too late it occurred to me that my response might appear to be rude.
my
> apologies for that; it wasn't meant to be. I just found your
comments,
> Sil, to be humorous and just had to respond with my own humor, quirky
as
> it might be.

Alan & Sil,

I think it is time for you to figure this problem out. Email is
constantly being mis-interpreted. Think of how much better the world
would be if all the humor that was intended was actually perceived?
Don't worry about the naysayers that say that email has intrinsic
communication problems -- they don't get it. I'm sure that the crux of
this email communication problem is very simple and easily solved. The
only reason we still have any issues at this point in history is that no
one has looked at it with a clear head -- that's where you come in. It
shouldn't take you more than an hour or two to solve it. You might have
to turn off the TV and really focus, though.

I personally think that that email needs some form of client-side
data/presentation transformations, i.e., client-side XSLT
transformations. Instead of just sending some text, you send two
documents: a data document and a presentation document. The data
document is the raw data of your argument -- facts and figures,
references and citations, hypotheses and deductions. The presentation is
how you want your argument perceived. Then the receiver of your email
will combine the two on the client side.

In any response to your message, the client-side processor that was used
to render the message should be noted. Some people are always going to
use their angry, defensive processors when reading email, while others
will tend to use their "assume goodwill" processors. By knowing what
processor was used in the generation of a response, you can
appropriately discount those that are close-minded and/or generally
ill-willed.

In a more advanced iteration of this messaging architecture, you could
use some kind of content negotiation. If you know someone is going to be
using their angry, defensive processor to interpret your message, go
ahead and send them a variation of the presentation that will really
tick them off. Their response probably won't be constructive anyway, and
the angrier responses would have more humorous value for everyone else.

Also, processors tend to have well-known bugs, e.g, tendencies not to
read or remember prior posts in the thread, to always take an attacking
tone even when the previous tone of the conversation was constructive,
to not be particularly concerned with technical accuracy and to focus on
undermining other processors by using various rhetorical tactics, such
as straw man arguments. In an ideal world, the source code of such
processors could be downloaded and examined. Unfortunately, you couldn't
hope to just upload some patches for troublesome processors -- humans
tend to be resistant to such uploads and such an upload could cause
problems to cascade through their entire being. But what you can do is
attempt to normalize messages from such errant processors. In some
cases, you can use a source code analysis to determine that all messages
from such processors should be ignored as noise.

Anyway, my ideas here have a variety of flaws, I'm sure. First and
foremost, human communication isn't as neatly layered and
self-identifying as computer communication.

I'm looking forward to seeing this problem solved and I'm glad that
you've volunteered your time and energies to uncover the solution. Just
remember that when you email us your solution, don't expect anyone to
understand what you are trying to do. Email is really bad for that kind
of thing.

Cheers!







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