Jeremy Gossett has posted a fab-o interview he did with our co-colleague Matthew Russell.
In it, Matthew talks about Dojo, how he started writing for O’Reilly, his upcoming OSCON talk on using Dojo’s GFX graphics project, and other things.
If you are involved with Web development, especially Ajax, check out the interview and Matthew’s book. Recommended.
Digital Reasoning Systems CEO Tim Estes recently launched our new blog with his post on “Web 3.0 and its discontents“.
As Tim notes in the opening to his inaugural post:
For my first post to our new blog, I thought I would jump into an area that is of great and timely interest: The emerging “Semantic Web” and the technologies and solutions proposed to enable it.
There has been a lot of “Web 3.0″ buzz in the last year. See for example this MIT “Technology Review” article, Business 2.0’s piece on Radar Networks, the New York Times’ Metaweb article, and John Markoff’s original Web 3.0 article from the NY Times in late 2006. The reaction in the blogsphere has been equally interesting. There appears to be a combination of believers and advocates, both Web 2.0 players who are mad at the hype being stolen and those who are skeptics. If I were to put myself in a camp, I’d have to say I’m an “optimistic skeptic”.
I believe something like this vision of Web 3.0 will play out, but it might take the market six or seven “attempters” before we find a Google of Web 3.0.
Whoever eventually gets it right must overcome at least three critical issues to make the Web 3.0 vision reality. I’ll lay them out here.
I would highly recommend that anyone interested in the semantic web and where things are headed read this post. It clarifies a number of issues that are commonly confused or skipped over. Highly recommended.
And while you’re there, btw, why not subscribe to our feed to automagically get future updates?
#Awesome and sad at the same time. A must watch if you’re even vaguely involved with tech.
Makes me very happy that we’ve built our company on revenue, not hype.
Tip o’ the hat to The Richter Scales for such a fine piece of work and to Don Dodge for bringing this to my attention.
I find Twitter and ShareThis useful, and I’m finally getting around to adding direct support to my site for both of them.
Today I’ve installed the Twitter Tools and ShareThis Wordpress plugins on BillDay.com.
You now have the option to follow my thoughts and notes via Twitter directly if you want to read each item as I post it. Alternatively, you can just continue reading my site feed to see a single, daily digest of my tweets. If you want the lower volume option, stay here; if you want to drink from the firehose, go there. Choose one or both, whatever you prefer.
You can also use the new ShareThis link at the bottom of my posts to share them via your favorite social sites and email, as you like. Enjoy!
My latest Geekdad post: “Attire for Geeklings”
I also want to send a tip of the hat to Dan Olson for picking my “Stumped by a three year old” post to discuss on the Geekdad podcast. Thanks Dan!
Russ Beattie’s excellent “Personal SMS Business Cards via TextMarks” post inspired me to create my own text-able biz card.
To get my contact info (email, cell, and Web), text the keyword ‘BILLDAY‘ to TextMarks at shortcode 41411. This service only works in the US at this point, but I’ll update my blog for other shortcodes if/when TextMark supports international marks.
As Russ notes in his post, there are a number of interesting viral possibilities with this service. Create your own mark and you can receive the cell number of anyone texting that mark to the service, and more importantly if the requester chooses to subscribe to your mark they’ll automatically receive any future mobile updates from you straight to their cell. Add a widget (see mine in the right gutter) and you can enable people to request info and subscribe to your mark via their Web browser. More information on using marks including commands and a simulator are available from the TextMarks Help page and if you want to dig deeper into integrating your mark into your own site and services, TextMarks even offers a developer API.
You also have the option of using TextMark’s Reactee to create a wearable teaser tee (see tshirt at right). Reactee even has an “Expose Me” Facebook application which you can use to share your mark and info with Facebook friends, too. (If you’re interested in ordering a Reactee tshirt, be sure you search for coupon codes; you can save as much as 20% depending on which ones are still valid as you read this.)
Great idea for a personal mobile business card, thanks Russ! Yet another tool to use as you build “The Brand Called You” (or a product brand, your company, a favorite cause, political position, etc.).
I’m very happy to report that I’ve joined Wired’s Geekdad.com blog-squad and made my first post this evening on “The Oklahoma Centennial for Geeklets“.
The idea of the site and my posts there is to find, discuss, hack, and play with geeky things, places, and ideas. It’s a free-time gig and I don’t know how often I’ll contribute, but I’m going to give it a go and have fun doing it.
To follow me and the other geek dads and a geek mom who contribute there, subscribe to Wired’s Geekdad blog feed. You may also be interested in the Geekdad podcast; click here for the podcast in iTunes or here to subscribe with your favorite podcatcher.
Carnival of the Mobilists #67 is out just in time to revisit (yet again) the iTunes juggernaut. Click here to read some of last week’s best coverage of wireless technology, business, and cultural developments.
My “Apple’s three screens opportunity” got the nod with Wap Review commenting:
Apple has become a content distribution powerhouse with iTunes. Can they leverage that into IPTV and mobile dominance too?
Yesterday’s news that EMI will offer its catalog DRM-free and iTunes will be the first to market with the unlocked EMI music has me wondering if Apple didn’t just ratchet things up yet another big notch. Microsoft and other music services may be forced to respond, pending the EMI-Apple details.
Will this be “the beginning of the end of DRM” as many are claiming? Time will tell. But whether it is or not, it’s definitely more little metal rings in the iTunes-for-everyone armor.
Reader comments to Tim O’Reilly’s recent “History, Digitized and Abridged” Radar post are spot-on in noting that digitizing old books, films, and related content are illustrating just how much media was previously dying a slow death out of mind of most people.
Take, for example, my alma mater’s wonderful History of Science Collection. It contains amazing tomes dating back to the 15th century. Its copies of rare works of Copernicus and Galileo are particularly impressive. An autographed copy of Galileo’s “Sidereus nuncius“, the first scientific treatise based on observations made through a telescope, for example. Who knew a collection of world class scientific manuscripts such as this existed in Norman, Oklahoma?
The answer until recently: Not many people. Even most OU students weren’t aware of it when I was there as an undergraduate in the 90s. Thankfully I accidentally bumped into its existence and was able to visit, but for all those that haven’t heard of it, digitization project may prove just the ticket to raise it to their attention.
OU is now digitizing images from rare and historically important materials and posting the images online for free. Click here to browse through previously posted imagery.
Not find images of something you’re looking for? You can ask to have them scanned in here. (Of course you have to know what you’re asking for, and thankfully they’ve provided instructions for searching the catalog of available materials, though if you’re not affiliated with the university you may need to contact someone for assistance.) One can even subscribe to a RSS feed to receive updates when new images of particular value or broad interest are posted. Click here to grab the RSS feed.
While this particular image scanning effort is not the same as a word-for-word transcription into text and therefore doesn’t offer all the searchability and indexing that one might like, it’s a start. A baby step, but a baby step in the right direction, and a great way to share the wealth of humanity’s book-based knowledge. I hope to see OU go much farther and scan entire books, even better if they’re scanned as images and their contents captured into searchable, linkable text, too.
BTW, if you’re ever in the central Oklahoma area, you should really try to visit the Collection. For me, an engineer and history buff, it was an amazing experience.
Yahoo! Pipes launched last night, opening up an interesting new Unix pipes-like capability for mixing, processing, and using feeds. According to Y!, Pipes allow one to “rewire the web” (their words) by combining, filtering, sorting, truncating, translating, geocoding, etc. user defined feeds. Click here to try out Pipes yourself.
(Note that as I type this the site is overwhelmed with traffic and returning the error message “Our Pipes are clogged! We’ve called the plumbers!”)
O’Reilly published an introduction and overview of the promise of pipes, followed by additional Radar posts providing a technical overview and short deconstruction of one of the example Y! pipes.
Tim O’Reilly started his introduction with high praise indeed:
Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet
A lot of possibilities for consuming pipes.yahoo output come to mind. And I find the use of a visual metaphor for indicating user intent very interesting: It’s not new by any means, but nonetheless another informative example of how we can think about empowering users to orchestrate complex operations through simple indications.
It must be asked: Is Senator Ted Stevens a mad genius?
Replace “tubes” with “pipes” and you be the judge…
OK, OK, so he’s not Einstein Jr. But wouldn’t it have been great if Y! had named their new Pipes service “Yahoo! Tubes”?
I would love to see tubes.yahoo.com link to a humorous version of Pipes! 
Imagine what we can do as we the people build off our systems, and vice versa, in the ever deepening and broadening echo chamber of the Web:
[Thanks to Chris Anderson of The Long Tail for bringing this video to my attention]
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