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.

It can play games. It can play your Movies. It can play your music. It can view photos. It can read Ebooks. It runs on just 2 AA batteries - And it can do all this in the palm of your hand or on your TV screen. GP2X is a linux handheld with two 200mhz CPU’s with 64meg of RAM, custom graphics hardware and decoding chips and a slot for SD cards. Price? $189 US! (preorder).

The US National Security Agency (NSA) is planning to build a secure wireless PDA that also does voice and data communications over public networks, including CDMA, GSM and 802.11. Dubbed SME-PDA (for “secure mobile environment - portable electronic device” — boy do they need better marketing!), it’s rumored to support voice and data communications up to Top Secret and email up to Secret. The device will be developed for NSA by L-3 Communications and another, not yet named company. Earlier reports named General Dynamics C4 Systems as being involved. …more…

Local governments and agencies are waking up with a start — could it happen here? If first responders cannot communicate with each other in the first 72 hours — how do they do their job?

The New Orleans tragedy manifested the worst communication nightmares imaginable — underground communication lines were disabled due to flooding, cell towers were blown over, backup generators ran out of fuel — or filled up with water. Radios of police, firefighters, ER couldn’t talk to each other. In some cases first responders were simply walking over to each other to talk!

Ad hoc networks boast of working in especially such situations … after more than 10 years and millions of $$ in research … where is the first deployed/working ad hoc network?

Baltimore Sun:

No sooner had a 46-truck convoy of Baltimore first-responders and equipment left for Louisiana on Sunday than it received an education in emergency communications: Even state-of-the-art systems can fail.

Grand Rapids Press:

“The lessons we can learn from the Katrina disaster is what happens to those with mobility and transportation issues. If there is a need for a mass evacuation, how would we get those without transportation?” 1st Ward Commissioner James Jendrasiak asked.

Eyewitness News:

The Nevada Homeland Security Department is taking up the issue of disaster response. From their own experience and what they’ve seen with Hurricane Katrina relief, they’ve determined the channels of communication are broken.

UMBC is designing a new home page, about to be unvealed by the end of September. What was interested to note was the use of blogging as a mechanism to solicit user input. UMBC’s Webteam blog notes -

UMBC is providing a “sneak peek” of its new homepage, which begins the process of redesigning UMBC’s entire web presence by summer 2006. If you’d like to comment on the new homepage or the process for developing the site to follow, use the comment form below.

However I must add, I agree with many of the comments on the blog. It would be nice to see atleast some of these comments incorporated into the new design.

On a similar note, I wonder when UMBC will host blogs of students on the same lines as many other universities.

This new automatic door from Japan creates a minimal opening for an object to pass through. The door is composed of a series of strips which open when activated by the infrared sensors on their edges. It’s said that the door also can identify people (RFID?) for security. Such doors can help manage energy loss in a a room, garage or freezer and protect a space from unwanted dust, pollen, bugs, and germs. Plus, they are cooler than the doors on Star Trek. See this video.

Here’s a marketing tip: get the door to occasionally say “Gee, you’ve lost weight, haven’t you?” and it will sell like hotcakes.

BlackDog is a a USB powerd linux server that’s about the size of an iPod mini. Plug it in to a host computer’s USB port and it takes over the monitor, keyboard, mouse, and network connections. Remove it and everything on the host is returned to its original state. It’s powered by a 400Mhz PPC running Debian with 64M RAM and 256 or 512 MB of flash memory. Cost? $240 for the 512M version.

Google finally adds RSS/Atom support for Google News.

The new feature will allow Google News users to set up RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or Atom content syndication feeds for specific Google News sections, such as entertainment, business or world news, and for specific terms users search for on Google News, such as “George Bush,” “diabetes” or “space shuttle.

More..

I am more interested in “specific terms” and how good(fast) a job Google does on it. Very soon its going to cross paths with Technorati’s Watchlist.

(Via Andrew Lark)

Flickr delivers a new ranking mechanism. Results at Flickr Explore. A very good example of what social+technology can do — building on PageRank.

There are lots of things that make a photo ‘interesting’ (or not) in the Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing. Interestingness changes over time, as more and more fantastic photos and stories are added to Flickr.

More ..

A listing of top uploads in the last 24 hours is impressive. Explore / Interestingness / Last 24 Hours is surely worth a bookmark (del.icio.us count).

(Via John Battelle)

Technorati launches Technorati Mobile.

(Via The Blog Herald).

Recently both Yahoo! and Google released their Map APIs. Both have interesting and unique features - while Google map is easy to customize and embed in your website or application, all you need to do with Yahoo Map API is provide it with the XML formatted data for
plotting information on the map. The nice thing about Yahoo API vs Google API is that you do not need to specify the exact latitude and longitude information and it does the geocoding for you using the address.

Having played with both a little, I hacked up an application that would extract the latest news from Yahoo! US News website and display on the map. You can view it in action here and it has also been added on the yahoo developer network’s featured application list here.

These APIs provide a simple way for anyone to visualize geospatial information and I hope that such nifty applications would motivate people to provide metadata information such as OPML or geocoding in images.

Following up on RSS Readers: Narrowing Down Your Choices and Danny Ayers’s post on blogging hosts — here’s our attempt at ranking blog hosting websites. These statistics are based on Technorati’s index. Software used (MT, WordPress etc.) are not part of the statistic.

Technorati API allows 500 queries per day. We picked query words randomly from an english dictionary. We then collected the top 100 results (most live blogs) between 9:00 AM and 1:00 PM EST over a period of the last 18 days. We eliminated duplicate blog home pages to create a list of 173192 unique blogs.

Note: Technorati ranks results by freshness — our statistics are hence for the “Live Blogosphere”.

We do not claim our statistics to be representative. These are the biases –

1. Technorati index.
2. US Blogs, given our query time-frame.
3. Blogger — spam blogs are very live.
4. Self hosted blogs. Our numbers only use URLs to classify blogs. For instance, a blogger weblog hosted at a personal website is not classified with blogger. Blogger blog’s are identified by “blogspot.com” being part of the URL.

Even with these biases, our numbers should give a good estimate of blogging host popularity.

Based on our collection here’s how blog hosts compare.

Technorati API also provides inlink information of blogs. We normalized inlink for these blog hosts to find the the number of inlinks/blog for each of these hosts. Total inbound links in our collection is 1.8 Million. The mean inlink/blog is 10.64

The impact rating - inlinks/blog

The Rest .. includes many blogs which are self-hosted. Self-hosted blogs, as is evident are the most popular.

Thanks to Jim Mayfield for suggesting the use of technorati.