Category Archives: Politics

Twitter Iran RT chaos

By danbri | Published: 2009-6-16

From Twitter in the last few minutes, a chaos of echo’d posts about army moves. Just a few excerpts here by copy/paste, mostly without the all-important timestamps. Without tools to trace reports to their source, to claims about their source from credible intermediaries, or evidence, this isn’t directly useful. Even grassroots journalists needs evidence. I [...]

Also posted in Activism, Conspiracy Theory, FOAF, Project ideas, SKOS, The Web at War, ggg, openid, privacy | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

The House that Jack Built

By danbri | Published: 2009-3-7

<Farmer> <sowed> <Corn> <kept> <Cock> <woke> <Priest> <married> <Man> <kissed> <Maiden> <milked> <Cow> <tossed> <Dog> <worried> <Cat> <killed> <Rat> <ate> <Malt> <in> <House> <builtBy> <Person foaf:name=”Jack” /> </builtBy> </House> </in> </Malt> </ate> </Rat> </killed> </Cat> </worried> </Dog> </tossed> </Cow> </milked> </Maiden> </kissed> </Man> </married> </Priest> </woke> </Cock> </kept> </Corn> </sowed> </Farmer>
FOAF super-connectivity daydreams from 2002.
“indirectly [...]

Also posted in Activism, FOAF, Project ideas, Technology, ggg | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Obama for middle-managers

By danbri | Published: 2009-1-20

(inspired by the ‘Yes we can’ powerpoint slides…)
We Will…

act – not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth
build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together
restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s [...]

Also posted in History | Leave a comment

Family trees, Gedcom::FOAF in CPAN, and provenance

By danbri | Published: 2009-1-18

Every wondered who the mother(s) of Adam and Eve’s grand-children were? Me too. But don’t expect SPARQL or the Semantic Web to answer that one! Meanwhile, …

You might nevetheless care to try the Gedcom::FOAF CPAN module from Brian Cassidy. It can read Gedcom, a popular ‘family history’ file format, and turn it into RDF (using [...]

Also posted in Essays, FOAF, History, Semantic Web, Technology, foaf4lib, ggg | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Sharking the vote

By danbri | Published: 2008-10-26
Also posted in Activism, Us | Tagged | Leave a comment

Problem statement

By danbri | Published: 2008-9-22

A Pew Research Center survey released a few days ago found that only half of Americans correctly know that Mr. Obama is a Christian. Meanwhile, 13 percent of registered voters say that he is a Muslim, compared with 12 percent in June and 10 percent in March.
More ominously, a rising share — now 16 percent [...]

Also posted in Activism, Conspiracy Theory, FOAF, Project ideas, Rating and Filtering, Semantic Web, SocialWeb, Technology, The Web at War, Web Technology, ggg | Leave a comment

Nokiana: the one about the CIA, Syria, and the N95

By danbri | Published: 2008-4-30

Matt Kane resurfaced on Bristol’s underscore mailing list  with this intriguing snippet, after some travels around the middle-east: ” … discovered N95s (not mine) cannot be taken into Syria”.
I asked for the backstory, which goes like this:
Quite a palaver. Got the train from Istanbul to Syria (amazing trip!). At the border they didn’t search [...]

Also posted in Conspiracy Theory, Technology, War, Web Technology, World, coding, privacy | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Obama

By danbri | Published: 2008-3-20

I was really very impressed by Obama’s speech this week. And somewhat suprised to hear a major US politician speak on complex, subtle issues in thoughtful, nuanced terms. For non USAmericans, I think it’s often hard to empathise with US-style patriotism; in particular, the seeming impossibility of seeing the US as anything other than a [...]

Also posted in World | 1 Comment

Google Social Graph API, privacy and the public record

By danbri | Published: 2008-2-5

I’m digesting some of the reactions to Google’s recently announced Social Graph API. ReadWriteWeb ask whether this is a creeping privacy violation, and danah boyd has a thoughtful post raising concerns about whether the privileged tech elite have any right to experiment in this way with the online lives of those who are lack status, [...]

Also posted in Activism, Essays, FOAF, Jabber/XMPP, RDF, Semantic Web, Technology, Web Technology, ggg, privacy | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments