Tag Archives: google

Imagemap magic

I’ve always found HTML imagemaps to be a curiously neglected technology. They seem somehow to evoke the Web of the mid-to-late 90s, to be terribly ‘1.0’. But there’s glue in the old horse yet… A client-side HTML imagemap lets you associate links (and via Javascript, behaviour) with regions of an image. As such, they’re a […]

Chocolate Teapot

Michael Sparks in the BBC Backstage permathread on DRM: However any arguments based on open standards do need to take facts into account though. Such as this one: The BBC is currently required by the rights holders to use DRM. Tell me how you can have a DRM system that’s completely free software, and I’ll […]

“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 […]

Who, what, where, when?

A “Who? what? where? when?” of the Semantic Web is taking shape nicely. Danny Ayers shows some work with FOAF and the hCard microformat, picking up a theme first explored by Dan Connolly back in 2000: inter-conversion between RDF and HTML person descriptions. Danny generates hCards from SPARQL queries of FOAF, an approach which would […]

Democracy Now! debate on “The New Pearl Harbor”

Democracy Now! | The New Pearl Harbor: A Debate On A New Book That Alleges The Bush Administration Was Behind The 9/11 Attacks AMY GOODMAN: You saying that the way you did your research was to do a Google search and you couldn’t find his name? DAVID RAY GRIFFIN: No, no, no. Worth a read, […]

Google boost Jabber + VOIP, Skype releases IM toolkit, Jabber for P2P SPARQL?

Interesting times for the personal Semantic Web: “Any client that supports Jabber/XMPP can connect to the Google Talk service” Google Talk and Open Communications. It does voice calls too, using “a custom XMPP-based signaling protocol and peer-to-peer communication mechanism. We will fully document this protocol. In the near future, we plan to support SIP signaling.” […]

GIS and Spatial Extensions with MySQL

GIS and Spatial Extensions with MySQL. MySQL 4.1 introduces spatial functionality in MySQL. This article describes some of the uses of spatial extensions in a relational database, how it can be implemented in a relational database, what features are present in MySQL and some simple examples. I’m hoping to understand the commonalities between this and […]

Profiling GML for RSS/Atom, RDF and Web developers

I spent some time yesterday talking with Ron Lake about GML, RDF, RSS and other acronyms. GML was originally an RDF application, and various RDFisms can still be seen in the design. I learned a fair bit about GML, and about its extensibility and profiling mechanisms. We discussed some possibilities for sharing data between GML, […]

geobloggers: “Network Link” in Google Earth

This is the hidden gem of Google Earth. Adding a “Network Link” allows you to fetch KML data from remote servers. It does this in two ways, Time Based or Location Based. So *anyone* can add dynamic data to Google Maps. Apparently KML is based on GML. I don’t know Keyhole/Google’s work differs. There seems […]

geo/photo raw materials from a walk around Bristol

I’ve just been for a walk around town, taking a few photos on the way, with the camera’s clock sync’d to that of my new GPS. I’ve not yet figured out the best tool to use (other than write my own) for hooking up the photo and location metadata. It’s easy enough to get the […]

Conspiracy Theory?

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t. –Robert Benchley, Benchley’s Law of Distinction From a recent Guardian article, “Police scrutinise extremist Islamist websites“: Among the sites causing concern is Jihadunspun (JUS), a highly professional website which claims […]