I have a new graduate course this semester, Semantic Web Technologies and the readings for next week are what I hope provide a good overview about what I call User-driven Semantics.
Take a look and tell me what you like or what I’ve missed.
It looks like TiVo has given Mac users a Valentine’s Gift: TiVo Desktop 1.9.2.
From the Web page:
TiVo Desktop for Mac v1.9.2 Updated February 14, 2006. This update provides compatability with Mac OS X 10.4: Tiger.
I have been a Macintosh user for almost 15 years (give or take a lapse or two) and I have never wanted to copy and then paste text from one application to another with fonts, style or other formatting information. In order to work around this “feature”, I often have to keep a text editor open just to paste the text into it and then copy and paste it in the application document I originally intended.
There has got to be a better way.
I’m sure there are all manner of utilities that will clear the text formatting or an OSX Service that will do the same. What I’m asking is for is a way to make the system default not use the formatting information when I either use the Cut, Copy or Paste from the Edit menu, or more truly, when my long-trained muscle memory uses the keyboard for such a task.
I will be wonderfully happy if someone can point me to an application that can help. Even better, if there is some system setting that I can tweak that has been hidden from me all these years.
Here’s a posting of the names and the panels at this year’s upcoming SXSW Interactive conferece. SXSW Panels Schedule.
Prentiss Riddle just blogged about his efforts to seed a canonical set of tags with the team at shadows .com for the upcoming South by SouthWest conference and festival.
I think this is a good set of tags, especially the huge list of band names and their tags even if I don’t know and never will know all but a few of the bands that are possible to see during the music part of SXSW. I suspect it is possible that if I actually did learn of the band via the tags, I’d be more likely to still remember them by their tag instead of their complete name. I wonder what that says about the primacy in learned vocabularies. What I do like is that many of the tags I clicked on already have more than a few links to the band’s own Web sites, fan sites and even some (hopefully legal) downloads. That seems to be a great way to bootstrap both getting people to use the offered tags and also to discover some new bands to go and see while they’re here in Austin.
In terms of (ha!) what I call “tag grammar” it is also interesting to debate the use of date information like “2006″ or “06″ on the end of the main sxsw conference tags as in sxsw2006 vs. sxsw . Thankfully, the year as part of a tag might not be supremely important as most tagging systems show links with the newest first, making it pretty easy to see all the tagged items from the current year first. (Note to all tagging system UI designers – how about some real time sorting options for tags lists and tag clouds? Sorting by date, type and kind could truly transform tagging from a backstop for retrieval to something more essential to the overall information seeking process.) The good thing to help achieve some consensus is that on most pages (within shadows.com at least) you can see related tags or drill down into combinations of tags (a “narrow results” option).
The SPIRE 2006 (String Processing and Information Retrieval) confernce looks great, it’s like a giant grep-fest.
Since my all-time favorite O’Reilly book is Mastering Regular Expressions, this has got to be my kind of conference.
Calling all the Web designers, Information Architects, Usability experts, Bloggers and just about anyone else here in Austin doing Web-related work. Let’s all get together at Nuevo Leon on 1501 East 6th Street from 5pm-7pm this Wednesday, January the 25th.
This is one of the recurring events co-sponsored by the UT Austin School of Information and the UT Austin chapter of the American Society of Information Science and Technology.
Tell your friends, bring your colleagues (or vice-versa).
Tonight (Wednesday January 18th, 2006) at 7pm is another Austin Bloggers get together, this time we’re at Mangia Pizza on 8012 Mesa Drive.
See you there.
What a great idea Alexa (Amazon.com): the Alexa Web Search Platform, computing and storage resources for rent to analyze large percentages of the entire Web. The opening of this to anyone with an analytics or business idea is certainly a Web 2.0-kind of thing. Outsource your data collection and hardware to analyze it.
Now why not a program for academic research access to the data stores?
Manage your temperature from anywhere (with an internet connection):Proliphix NT10e Network Thermostat