As forewarned in my last blog post, I’ve submitted a first draft of our Knight News Challenge proposal at their site; you can read and, more importantly, comment upon the proposal here. I welcome your feedback. And as I mentioned last time, if you’re interested in being one of our Guinea pigs, step right up—especially [...]
One thing was clear in the comments of many industry-facing participants of ISWC 2010: a big impediment to adoption of semantic web technologies is the lack of an off-the-shelf triplestore that “just works.” There are many other problems, of course: RDF an awkward format when it comes to real world programming because the graph model [...]
People who visit a toothpaste isle with only 4 products walk away much happier than those who visit the typical supermarket isle crammed with 40 variants of Colgate. Why? Because they don’t get overwhelmed by a tsunami of possibilities that leaves them wondering if they made the wrong choice. When it comes to a large [...]
Datapress is a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to enhance your WordPress blog posts with rich interactive visualizations such as maps, timelines, various charts, and sortable lists, all with interactive filtering and faceted browsing. Datapress uses the Exhibit framework to offer a collection of rich structured data visualization elements that can be dropped [...]
Some time ago we began simmering a system called Tipsy that helps web users make voluntary micro-contributions to the content creators whose work they consume. It picked up steam when we started sharing ideas with Doc Searls. Since Doc mentioned it in a blog post yesterday, I thought it worth providing a bit more detail [...]
My last few posts have discussed structured data for end users. Given the glaringly obvious (at least to me) benefits of structured data, there must be some barrier in place that is preventing its pervasive use by end-users. Identifying the barrier is the crucial first step to breaking through it. I’ve argued that the (technical) [...]
In a post last week I argued that the key to making structured data pervasive on the web was tools that make it easy for people to create interesting data visualizations that share their data by default, without adding effort. This prompted a pair of responses that I’d like to address here. One, from Glen [...]
I just ran into a lovely and frustrating open-government-style map of stimulus funding put together in Colorado. The same tool is used in a number of other states, listed in Brady Forest’s blog post at O’reilly Radar. Lovely because its always nice to look at maps; frustrating because that’s all I can do. Where’s the [...]
I’ll be hosting a Semantic Mediawiki workshop at MIT this upcoming Saturday and Sunday May 22/23 and invite you to attend. Semantic Mediawiki has made some significant progress on a topic I consider vital—helping end-users manage structured information. Semantic Mediawiki tackles this problem by adding a database to the Mediawiki platform (which runs Wikipedia) and [...]
This past week at WWW 2010 has resulted in quite the spread of Twitter papers. Topic included systems, novel uses, and studies of tweets and users. I’ve made an attempt to provide a taste of each paper/presentation I experienced. Feel free to comment if I missed anything! At the web science conference on Monday, we [...]