The DARPA Grand Challenge site has a great map which shows the routes and posaitions of the bots in real time. I’m impressed.

Brooks, T.A. (2004). “The Nature of Meaning in the Age of Google”, Information Research, 9(3) has an interesting take on things.

“The characteristic tension of the culture of lay indexing is between genuine information and spam. Google’s success requires maintaining the secrecy of its parsing algorithm despite the efforts of Web authors to gain advantage over the Googlebot. Legacy methods of asserting meaning such as the META keywords tag and Dublin Core are inappropriate in the lawless meaning space of the open Web. A writing guide is urged as a necessary aid for Web authors who must balance enhancing expression versus the use of technologies that limit the aggregation of their work.”

Was it ever so? In the world of an earlier generation, of every earlier generation, was there also this tension between those with information to promote and the mediators, publishers and gatekeepers? Does it matter that the mediator is an automaton, as foreshadowed in Metropolis?

Recent posts on Planet RDF blogs (ora, danbri) about erdös numbers lead me to offer up this path that others can build on:

Paul Erdös, Aviezri Fraenkel, Yaacov Yesha, Yelena Yesha, Tim Finin.

Google has released a new RSS reader. Spotted via Google Weblog. It looks really neat and you can also search for information on other blogs and subscribe to new feeds. Ajax and Gmail like look and feel and labels are major plus points!

UMBC website now publishes RSS for news and Podcasts.
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Good move - subscribed!
Atleast now I will follow what should have been regularly checked by all students at UMBC.

Not that this is the semantic web’s 15 minutes of fame exactly, but I found it amusing that memepool has a post referencing an RDF ontology for ” describing relationships between people” developed by Ian Davis and Eric Vitiello. Memepool scoffed:

“Various obsessive maniacs have attempted to create a vocabulary for describing interpersonal relationships”

Over the years I’ve enjoyed visiting memepool and laughing with them at the silly things they reveal people to do. But this one is a little too close for comfort.

Altova, the maker of popular XML editor XMLSpy, annouced the release of Altova SemanticWorks.

Altova SemanticWorksâ„¢ 2006 is the ground-breaking visual RDF/OWL editor from the creators of XMLSpy. Visually design Semantic Web instance documents, vocabularies, and ontologies then output them in either RDF/XML or N-triples formats. SemanticWorksâ„¢ 2006 makes the job easy with tabs for instances, properties, classes, etc., context-sensitive entry helpers, and automatic format checking. It is the sensible way to put the Semantic Web to work for you.

This is a good sign for the Semantic Web research and development community. It’s a sign that semantics is getting commericial attention. I remember seeing a similar pattern back in the old days when XML was a new term that not everyone knows. Altova released their XMLSpy in a time when many people are skeptical about the use of XML. Could this mean that one or two years from now, RDF & OWL will be the key languages for building smart applications? I surely hope so.

This is an interesting and accessible article on the DDoS extortion business and companies that offer protection services.

The Zombie Hunters — On the trail of cyberextortionists, Evan Ratliff, The New Yorker, 10 October 2005

“One afternoon this spring, a half-dozen young computer engineers sat in the headquarters of Prolexic, an Internet-security company in Hollywood, Florida, puzzling over an attack on one of the company’s clients, a penile enhancement business called MensNiche.com. The engineers, gathered in the company’s network operations center, or noc, on the fourth floor of a new office building, were monitoring Internet traffic on fifty-inch wall-mounted screens. Anna Claiborne, one of the company’s senior network engineers, wandered into the noc in jeans and a T-shirt. The MensNiche attacker had launched an assault on the company’s Web site at 4 a.m., and Claiborne had spent the night in the office fending it off. “Hence,” she said, “I look like hell today.”"
…more…

VC Dan Grossman picks his Top ten Ajax applications:

“Following are my picks for the 10 best Ajax applications. Selection criteria: (1) an appropriate combination of simplicity and rich functionality, (2) somehow compelling (hard to define, but I know it when I see it), (3) the more interactive, the better, and (4) free. Also, in this exercise, I’m focused on startups, so I’m not including anything from Google (maps, Suggest), Microsoft (Kahuna), or Yahoo (Flickr).”

and folled up with 12 more “Ajax gems that are worth checking out”.

I was not familiar with most of these and it’s darned interesting to see what people are doing.

The Web 2.0 concept is all the rage and Tim O’Rielly has a good high-level article on it: What Is Web 2.0 — Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. I like his comment about why it’s important to come to an understanding about what underlies the new generation of successful web applications.

“But what was it that made us identify one application or approach as “Web 1.0″ and another as “Web 2.0″? (The question is particularly urgent because the Web 2.0 meme has become so widespread that companies are now pasting it on as a marketing buzzword, with no real understanding of just what it means. The question is particularly difficult because many of those buzzword-addicted startups are definitely not Web 2.0, while some of the applications we identified as Web 2.0, like Napster and BitTorrent, are not even properly web applications!) We began trying to tease out the principles that are demonstrated in one way or another by the success stories of web 1.0 and by the most interesting of the new applications.”

While the use of RDF is not part of the consensus Web 2.0 model, I think it will develop a key role, at least for some classes of web applications. One of the Web 2.0 slogans is “Data is the Next Intel Inside”. The current consensus Web 2.0 model makes use of data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT and asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest and that will pave the way for use of RDF. POXML (Plain Old XML) is ok for many narrow applications, but more sophisticated data rich ones, especially those that cooperate with and share information with other web applications, will benefit from RDF.

The W3C’s ESW wiki has a page (Large RDF triple stores) with

“references to quotes of deployment of large triples stores rather than predictions of what some software might scale to.”

Mentioned are reports of systems using MySQL, Kowari, Postgress and other systems including some applications with over 200M triples. (Spotted on the SWIG scratchpad)