As promised, here is the second interview with Salim Ismail – Salim is chairman & co-founder of PubSub and he very kindly agreed to come back on the show to follow-up on some of the things we talked about in the last podcast – if you haven’t listened to the first interview I did with Salim, I would strongly advise you to listen to that podcast before listening to this one.
In this podcast Salim outlines his thesis that businesses will move away from being data and report driven towards an event driven model – using a publish and subscribe event server and event aware client software. It makes for absolutely compelling listening.
The audio on this podcast was quite poor at my end – there was a horrible echo so I had to delete and re-record many of my questions.
Here are the questions i asked and the times in the interview at which I asked them:
What kinds of content will be and should be structured in structured blogging? – 1:30
What other kinds of applications do you see for structured blogging [apart from book reviews]? – 4:49
Is structured blogging going to be primarily a commercial tool? – 8:35
When you talk about Event Management, do you mean the Financial Controller being alerted whenever an invoice goes over 30 days, for example? – 16:07
Will you need a smart RSS reader to receive this data? – 21:33
Currently there is no event management server software available, is this all in the realm of speculation? – 23:17
If a company wanted to roll this out tomorrow, what would they need to do? – 27:24
I can’t go down to my local software store and ask for an Event Server and 5 client access licences though… – 28:37
So are PubSub offering their event routing engine for sale to companies? – 31:49
Will Ebay and Craigslist come along and aggregate the content of structured blogs? – 35:33
Download the interview here 8.5mb mp3.
very good. give me more. fred
Fred, more?
more podcasts, no problem, I’ll be publishing the podcast with Matt Mullenweg on Friday – I presume that’s what you mean and that you don’t mean more Salim?
Thanks Tom, thanks Salim… really enjoyed the follow up. I´ll be interested to check out the launch stuff when I get back from Holidays – listened to podcast while on plane to Spain 🙂
I am particularly interested in the user interface for structured blogging now. I am having trouble visualising how it works… can users define their own feeds, if so how do we standardise structures, if not how do we cater for new categories of structured blogging etc…
Many thanks for the two enjoyable podcasts, and for asking/answering my questions!
Enjoy the holiday Frank!
I thought I had “got it” after the first interview, and – though impressed – I wondered why you were doing a second. But if the first one was informative, the second was downright exciting! Salim is right: enterprises want to be event-driven, and databases aren’t really designed for that. Also, look at the email inbox of an employee in a large organisation. 99% of it is useless to that employee, yet those who send that mail have no idea who might need the information, so they CC him just in case. For the same reasons, the employee spends hours reading emails which are of no relevance to him, but which he is afraid to delete without reading – “just in case”. So much better if people (and machines) could simply “publish” and “subscribe”. From a corporate culture point of view this would be revolutionary. Instead of the initiator of an event sending out mass mails of the “cover your ass” type, some of the responsibility gets re-distributed to those who want the information. Provided the publisher has structured the information properly it is then up to everyone else to subscribe to events which they need to know about.
Of course, as blogging becomes more structured and machine-readable, so is the opportunity increased for spam and gaming. Already we see splogs show up in Technorati searches. This isn’t a reason not to move to structured blogging, but it will be a challenge to overcome.
I’m lagging a bit behind in my listening Tom, but this is fantastic stuff! Keep it up! By the way, the sound quality is very impressive. Any chance of a Skype recording tutorial?
I’m on the Mac so I use an application called WireTap Pro – it is a cinch – one click Skype recording. If you are on PC, I’m afraid I can’t help you – 🙁