Movable Type 4.2 and TypePad AntiSpam

We publish several blogs on the Movable Type platform: Urban Semiotic concerns matters wrenching the city core; RelationShaping examines how technology pierces the body in situ; and WordPunk wrangles words in the wilds.

Yesterday, Six Apart announced the impending release of Movable Type 4.2 and that news was exciting because there will be many enhancements that will make publishing our work faster and easier to read. Everybody wins!

The rise of the TypePad AntiSpam service -- to be embedded in Movable Type 4.2 -- is a fascinating product aimed directly at the heart of killing Akismet and Automattic.

Everyone loathes Spam, and the first AntiSpam product to market that is wholly end-user customizable, and can tackle blog Spam without bunches of false-positives -- or mysterious, automatic, deletions -- will win the niche and earn the world.

Creating a Semiotic Web Through Enchanted Learning

The "inventor of the Internet," Tim Berners-Lee, argues Google's days ruling the web are numbered by claiming the future is a "semantic web" functional interface:

"Using the semantic web, you can build applications that are much more powerful than anything on the regular web," Mr Berners-Lee said. "Imagine if two completely separate things — your bank statements and your calendar — spoke the same language and could share information with one another. You could drag one on top of the other and a whole bunch of dots would appear showing you when you spent your money.

"If you still weren't sure of where you were when you made a particular transaction, you could then drag your photo album on top of the calendar, and be reminded that you used your credit card at the same time you were taking pictures of your kids at a theme park. So you would know not to claim it as a tax deduction.

"It's about creating a seamless web of all the data in your life."

If we are to move beyond Google hyperlinking and a contextual indexing of our current "semantic web" -- the future is a "semiotic web" and not a "semantic web" because we're already in the midst of the Google text revolution -- we must begin to think in terms of images and ideas instead of characters and phrases.

A semiotic web requires enchanted learning and we get there by encouraging colleges and universities to revalue the Arts and the Humanities are part of their core course of educating minds.

We require writing and math but few schools honor the covenant of inspiration and the need for creating beauty in the world.