Deadlines for submissions to the Fifth International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2006) for the research track, semantic web in use track and doctorial consortium have been extended to 11:59pm Hawaii Time on 22 May 2006. ISWC 2006 will be held 5-9 November in Athens GA, USA.

Google News Cloud is an experimental site that shows a clowd of tags associated with articles from Google News. The developer, Fernando Serboncini, doesn’t say what techniques he uses to assigns tags to stories, but he does have an interesting interface. When you hover over a tag, it is highlighted along with all of the related tags, i.e., other taqs that appear with it in at least one story. It is surprising how well seeing the set of highlighted tags gives you an instant sense of the stories. The stories almost write themselves, a bit badly, perhaps, but you quickly get an idea of what’s going on.

How do you say ‘tag’ in Japanese?

David Sifry’s State of the Blogosphere Part 2 makes two interesting and significant observations: (1) the Blogosphere’s language diversity is increasing with Enlgish now accounting for less than one third of posts and Japanese and Chinese on the rise; (2) the adoption of tagging continues, with nearly half of the posts now carrying author-assigned tags.

ComputerWorld has a short article, Computer Science Looks for a Remake, in which a handful of US academics talk about how to make studying Computer Science more interesting and relevant to today’s students.

“MAY 01, 2006 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Two of the world’s premier facilities for research and education in computer science are celebrating big birthdays this spring. Stanford University’s CS department observed its 40th birthday in March, and Carnegie Mellon University’s school of CS passed the half-century mark last month.

Despite the celebrations on both campuses, there is a deep malaise in computer science these days. Professors bemoan falling enrollments, a decline in prestige and a lack of attention to real-world problems. But, paradoxically, they say the future of CS has never been brighter, both within the discipline and in fields that computer technology will increasingly influence. Computerworld’s Gary Anthes recently asked six CS professors what lies ahead for the field.”