chmod 777 Web

As I was quickly browsing through the Oct 06 issue of IEEE Spectrum the other day, I came across a column at the very last page that talked about new words/terms being created and used on the Web. I had never come across the “chmod 777 web” one. From my many years of Unix-related work, it immediately made sense to me. It’s about writing on the Web. Very very clever and geeky. No need for the “Web 2.0” marketing nonsense.

I searched for the source of the term and I think it started by IBM‘s James Snell. It was more than a year ago. It shows how far away from the blogging community I’ve been lately 🙁

I am a firm believer of supporting users on the Internet as producers of information. We have an excellent infrastructure, the Web, which allows us to consume information. We have started seeing technologies and approaches that enable users produce content that can be aggregated. Now, we need to have more technologies in place so that it’d be possible for users to produce even more content, perhaps even automatically, without them knowing (with the appropriate policies in place of course). The content should be machine processable (interpretation and perhaps reasoning), minable, and in a form that can be easily aggregated, queried, and consumed.

Note to self: Must deliver on my promise related to Web overlays.