May 23, 2003

The RDF Challenge

I’ve been intrigued by the promise of RDF and followed the history from Guha’s MCF HotSauce application, through Tim Berners-Lee’s Semantic Web

Although, like Tim Bray, I too have been looking for the RDF killer App. At one time I even had aspirations of what it could be.

It’s been a long time coming for RDF and as Tim rightly puts it, “… the killer [RDF] app that would make you want to View Source hasn’t arrived.”

May 22, 2003

Personal and Enterprise Search

For some reason I missed this post from last week by Jon Udell about Indexing and searching Outlook email, but I thought his concluding paragraphs had a much broader impact on Enterprise Search in general.

… The Web has trained us, rightly, to expect that we just type in a word or two and get the “right” answer. I don’t know what the stats are on use of Google’s advanced search, or any advanced search, but my gut tells me such features are rarely used.

May 22, 2003

Change Today

Some good quotes from Kevin Werbach article on CNet titled, “Anticipating a post-Web, post-PC world”

“If you want to know where you are, you don’t study a map to determine where you’re going. You trace back the steps from where you’ve been. Over the past several years, “where we’ve been” in the technology world has changed. While we were all focused on the dot-com bubble and the subsequent bust, “yesterday” shifted. It used to be the PC revolution and client-server computing in the enterprise; now it’s the Web.”

May 21, 2003

Knoppix Bootable Linux CD

I needed to do some quick testing in Linux today, but I didn’t have immediate root access to a Linux distro. That’s when I popped the
Knoppix Bootable Linux CD into my drive, restarted and POOF!! …
my laptop is now running a complete Debian-based Linux distro including OpenOffice, Mozilla, KDE, and more. I could even get to the local file system.

Awesome!

Don’t leave home without it! It’s a great recovery CD as well.

May 20, 2003

NewsGator 1.2 New Posting Interface

If this works, I’ll be posting this via NewsGator
1.2’s new Outlook posting interface! Congratulations Greg!
Update: Well, the post arrived, but it had no title and the HTML was a bit mangled. I think in part because of Outlook 2003’s HTML formatting and the fact that I used the Blogger API plug-in. I think I need to update my b2/cafelog to support the MetaWeblog API

May 19, 2003

Topic-Sensitive page rankings feasible

A new paper by a Stanford group claims substantial increase in calculating Page Rank performance (used by Google), which could make room for personalized topical searches.

“Computer science researchers at Stanford University have developed several new techniques that together may make it possible to calculate Web page rankings as used in the Google search engine up to five times faster. The speed-ups to Google’s method may make it realistic to calculate page rankings personalized for an individual’s interests or customized to a particular topic.” (via BoingBoing)

May 16, 2003

Mature Music Mag?

Catherine just sent me a link to this
article in the NY Post about TRACKS, which is the name of a
new music magazine that will hit this fall from the Good Music Media…

“This magazine is the antidote to the hype and gloss of the
youth music marketing machine,” … “Tracks will deliberately pursue the
30-to-45 year old audience.”

Perhaps it’s a sign that I’m getting older in that the announcement of a
magazine targeted at the 30-to-45 year old audience appeals to me, but what
else is out there for a retro-punk with a revived interest in jazz? I
suppose a Jazz magazine, but that’s to niche for me.

May 15, 2003

I can see the “WiFi”

A very slick hack was posted over at O’Reilly that combines power-line
Ethernet, with a wireless access point and a fluorescent light bulb to
create “a weatherproof
wireless access point integrated into a light-fixture” (via BoingBoing and Futurismic)

May 14, 2003

Top 15 things my dog has taught me

Catherine has just posted (well, yesterday actually) the top things our dog Pinto has taught us

(I’m including myself because, well, I’ve learned these things too and it’s better than just saying “Ditto” :-)

May 13, 2003

Verizon launches Wi-Fi service with 150 hot spots

John just sent me a link to this Reuters story about Verizon’s launch of new Wi-Fi hot spots in phone
booths through out NYC:

Verizon Communications today launched its new Wi-Fi service by lighting up150 hot spots in New York City, with plans to activate another 850 by theend of the year. Verizon said its deployment marks the largest such initiative by an Internet service provider in a single U.S. city. Verizon’s hot spots will be inside pay phones located throughout New York and will have a range of 300 feet.