Another good blog-related cartoon from XKCD, spotted on Language Log.

• BBC NEWS | Business | US ‘no longer technology king’
  The US has lost its position as the world’s primary engine of technology innovation, according to a report by the World Economic Forum.

The International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media is using its ICWSM blog in an interesting and potentially useful way. Each paper has a post with an abstract, picture and link to the full content. The chronological aspect of blogs are exploited as posts are added as the papers are presented. Conference participants, or any blog visitors, can ask questions, give feedback or add notes via the post’s comments. Here’s a paper chosen at random, On the Structure, Properties and Utility of Internal Corporate Blogs, that illustrates how it works.

We had used a blog, AAAI-05 Blog, to highlight how students experienced the AAAI 2005 conference. One of our goals was to demonstrate to AI students the benefits of joining AAAI and attending the conference.

I think the ICWSM model is a good one for small to medium workshops and conferences. For large conferences, with 100s of papers, the model may have to be modified. I am sure there are new ideas that can be explored to see how blogs can be used to support conferences an workshops, before, during and after they take place.

Harry Chen of Image Matters LLC gave an invited lecture in my semantic web class yesterday. His topic was An introduction to Geospatial Semantic Web technology.

This presentation covers key issues related to Geospatial Semantic Web: (1) extracting hidden knowledge from unstructured and structured data, (2) knowledge fusion over heterogeneous data sources, (3) ontology sharing and (4) building user-friendly Semantic Web applications. It also describes state-of-the-art technologies that attempt to solve these problems. This discussion covers upper-case Semantic Web vs. lower-case semantic web, GeoRSS, W3C Geo ontology, GML, Flickr machine tags, geonames and Google Maps mashups.

I was away on travel, but am familiar with the work, which is great, as are his slides, which are available here. Harry runs the Geospatial Semantic Web Blog which is an excellent resource on the topic.

• Numenta – Has Artificial Intelligence Arrived?
  Jeff Hawkins formed a company dedicated to developing algorithms and software based on the ideas put forward in the book “On Intelligence”.

Twitter’s Evan Williams is giving and invited talk at ICWSM and just showed a great quote from Leisa Reichelt.

Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they’ve redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they’re hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re having drinks with tonight.

• Nodalities
  A podcast interview with Radar Networks’ Founder Nova Spivack. Radar Networks is a stealth-mode Bay Area technology startup closely associated with the pragmatic implementation of the Semantic Web.
• Google and the deep web
  Geeking with Greg: A few new papers out of Google cover some of their work on indexing the deep web.
• Suspicious?: Report Links, Users, URIs. Be a Spam Cop!
  tag web spam, phishing sites, spam doorways, splogs and other forms of suspicious information at SUS.PICIOUS.INFO
  (tags: spam, splogs, phishing, splot, trojans)
• Is Google a Semantic Search Engine?
• Google Operating System: Why People Link to Wikipedia

The International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media made some shoes for its own children, who now get to eat their own dog food. If you think that metaphor mashup is bad, I was trying to also fit in putting sauce on the gander, but couldn’t.

ICWSM has a blog and a flickr photo pool. One ideal I like is that as the talks are presented, the bloggers add a new item for each one. Conference attendees are invited to add their comments about the paper to the posts and use them to carry out conversations about them. This is a good idea and it will be interesting to see if the participants do use it.

Users of the Swoogle Semantic Web search engine users may notice that the system suddenly seems to know about more semantic web documents. For some months now (more than I want to admit) we’ve not rebuilt the Lucene index that we use to retrieve classes, properties and documents based on key words in their URIs. Swoogle has continued to find new documents and revisions to old ones, add them to the archive, extract their metadata and add it to its database. It just didn’t index the data in the IR component. The reason was that we were perilously close to being out of space on Swoogle’s main storage system. We’ve added a new disk and this has allowed us to rebuild the index. So, you may see more and newer results for simple Swoogle queries.

• Coding Horror: Top 6 List of Programming Top 10 Lists
  Jeff Atwood shares his favories
• Semantic web as social enjoyment (Jon Udell)
  “The authors of the semantic web are going to be people, not machines. And people will only want to play the game if it’s easy, natural, and fun.”

• Current Mashup and API Trends
  Read/write web on remixing the web
• BusinessWeek: Where Is Microsoft Search?
  “ts stumbles on the Web could open the door for rivals to come after its core business “
• Google Maps supports GeoRSS – GSWB
  GeoRSS is a set of vocabularies for encoding location objects in RSS feeds.
• Web 3.0
  PC Magazine: “Tomorrow’s Web, Today”
• Hakia Takes On Google With Semantic Technologies
  “Hakia is one of the more promising Alt Search Engines around, with a focus on natural language processing methods to try and deliver ‘meaningful’ search results.”

• Economist: Watching the web grow up
  “Tim Berners-Lee created the web in 1991. Now people are talking about Web 2.0—but he is more excited by other things”
• Matt Cutts: Google Flair: Blog Buzz on Google Video
  Google identifies buzzy videos — those people are linking to and talking about
• If you’re happy, the robot knows it (New Scientist Tech)
  MIT’s RoCo is “the world’s first expressive computer”.
• Quicktime of MIT’s ROCO robot
  It reminds me of the Pixar Luxo Jr. short
• Crowdsourcing: A Million Heads is Better than One
  A good read/write article featuring a hnadfull of sites in the crowdsourcing space.
• American Express Addresses RFID People Tracking Plans
  AMERICAN EXPRESS ADDRESSES RFID PEOPLE TRACKING PLANS
• Micro Persuasion: Blogspot is 75% Spam