PostNuke was one of the first systems to pick up on the topics of accessibility and web-standards. While other systems still struggle to get rid off layout tables and invalid
HTML,
PostNuke is long beyond that. There are some hot issues for "Web 3.0" that we all should have an eye on:
1. Sharing
2. Rights
3. Semantics
Ad 1: The Web 2.0 has done a lot in the field of sharing. It's easier to publish, cooperate on content
ASO. You have Blogs, Flickr, Wikis
ASO. But most content is still enclosed in its own domain. Some services offer APIs for example for the inclusion of Flickr images in other sites. But
IMHO initiatives like OpenSocial point into another direction.
The borders between websites will vanish more and more and the Internet will become more an more convergent. The result is an internet that resembles reality:
e.g. you can always carry your address book around with all you friends, family, and business contacts in it - no matter if you walk into a pet shop or go to the doctors. And you are also able to have the same multiple personalities that you have in real life: The Mark West who is sensible Administrator at the university or the Forrest
fan Mark West who's standing singing along in the stadium.
PostNuke will have to be part of this development as the webmasters will want to take part in it.
Ad 2: The current copyright laws stem from an age where copyrights where only needed in corporate environments: companies buying rights to publish books, records
ASO. Nowadays everybody is able to use other people's content and remix it with their own idea. But there is no way for you to do that legally. Big cooperations won't even answer your request to use some scenes from one of their movies for a youtube video.
This will change in future as these laws block a lot of the economic creativity in the net. It is like Lawrence Lessig told about the fact that until airplanes were invented, nobody was allowed to trespass you premise and that was not only the ground you walk on but everything above. So when farmers sued pilots for trespassing, the laws were changed. But I think there is not much in this for
PostNuke. We should only keep in mind that we might have to save and display the license with some content. This is most interesting for galleries or media repositories: Sometimes it is only allowed to use images for some days (for daily news) or according to some licenses you have to display the photographer's name or the image's origin. So these modules have to be aware of different licenses and handle content differently.
IMHO this resembles work flows a bit.
Ad 3: Semantics will be another hot topic: Millions of sites produce billions of articles, photos
ASO. These pieces of information have to be findable. On the long run this can only be possible with semantically enriched content. There are W3C specifications for RDF and OWL which seem not to be very practical as long as no real tools exists to support their use. And there are DIY solutions on the minimal scale with microformats and tagging.
There's an interesting article about the semantic web and the obstacles on the practic side: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/semantic_web_authoring_tools.php
PostNuke modules will have to support easy way of using semantics. That is pretty easy when you organize data that fits microformats like hCard, hCalendar
ASO. So every displayed address should always be a hCard. This is only a matter of templating - not of user interaction. We should have are close look on other tools that emerge in this area and try to learn from them.
I am sure that
PostNuke has the right technological basis to also include these new ideas and clever enough developers to even find our own solutions.
--
best regards from Kiel, sailing city
Steffen Voss
Member of the
PostNuke Steering Committee
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