Flock browser RDF: describing accounts
Flock is a mozilla-based browser that emphasises social and “web2″ themes. From a social-network-mobility thread, I’m reminded to take another look at Flock by Ian McKellar’s recent comments…
Monthly Archives: September 2007
“Moon River” (for UK Joost viewers)
“There was once a very lovely, very frightened girl. She lived alone except for a nameless cat.” (…) From Joost : Breakfast at Tiffany’s A young New York socialite becomes interested in a young man who has moved into her apartment building.
Begin again
There was an old man named Michael Finnegan
He went fishing with a pinnegan
Caught a fish and dropped it in again
Poor old Michael Finnegan
Begin again.
Let me clear something up. Danny mentions a discussion with Tim O’Reilly about SemWeb themes.
Much as I generally agree with Danny, I’m reaching for a ten-foot bargepole on this one point:
While Facebook may have achieved pretty major adoption for their approach, it’s only very marginally useful because of their overly simplistic treatment of relationships.
Facebook, despite the trivia, the endless wars between the ninja zombies and the pirate vampires; despite being centralised, despite [insert grumble] is massively useful. Proof of that pudding: it is massively used. “Marginal” doesn’t come into it. The real question is: what happens next?
Loosly joined
find . -name danbri-\*.rdf -exec rapper –count {} \; rapper: Parsing file ./facebook/danbri-fb.rdf rapper: Parsing returned 2155 statements rapper: Parsing file ./orkut/danbri-orkut.rdf rapper: Parsing returned 848 statements rapper: Parsing file ./dopplr/danbri-dopplr.rdf rapper: Parsing returned 346 statements rapper: Parsing file ./tribe.net/danbri-tribe.rdf rapper: Parsing returned 71 statements rapper: Parsing file ./my.opera.com/danbri-opera.rdf rapper: Parsing returned 123 statements rapper: [...]
Querying Facebook in SPARQL
A fair few people have been asking about FOAF exporters from Facebook. I’m not entirely sure what else is out there, but Matthew Rowe has just announced a Facebook FOAF generator. It doesn’t dump all 35 million records into your Web browser, thankfully. But it will export a minimal description of you and your Facebook [...]
Symbol languages and the Semantic Web
OK so I just stumbled upon this… …via Jonathan Chetwynd’s ever-inventive and SVG-happy Peepo.com. The “Car Bomb in Baghdad” story is from a site created by Widgit Software, and explains itself as follows: Symbolworld has been set up to provide a web site with material suitable for symbol readers of all ages. The internet is [...]
History time
From the O’Reilly Factor, Sept 12. Ron Paul: … so I see the Iranians as acting logically and defensively. We’ve been fighting the Iranians since 1953. We overthrew their government through the CIA in 1953. We were allies with Saddam Hussein in the 1980s and we encouraged him to invade Iran… Bill O’Reilly: Allright, so [...]
“The World is now closed”
Facebook in many ways is pretty open for a ‘social networking’ site. It gives extension apps a good amount of access to both data and UI. But the closed world language employed in their UI betrays the immodest assumption “Facebook knows all”. Eric Childress and Stuart Weibel are now friends with Charles McCathienevile. John Doe [...]
Google Earth touring via KML
While I’m writing up old hacks, here’s one that I really enjoyed, even if it was a bit clunky. A couple of years ago Mikel Maron implemented (on my urging in irc.oftc.net #geo IRC :) a PHP-based Google Earth touring service, which interconnects a “tour guide” user with “tourists”. This site facilitates collaborative, realtime exploration [...]