Marc Canter links to Peter Van Dijck’s excellent illustrated semantic web debate. This is a really captivating interface idea.

Basically it is a set of quotes in the endless pedantic [sic] web debate next to pictures of people. It reads very much like a cartoon with speech bubbles next to faces and somehow comes to life much better than a threaded discussion.

I would like to see the inclusion of a picture (and one-line-bio) of someone next to a trackback item so that you could better follow a distributed discussion that linked to an original posting via trackback.

Microsoft is working on search integrated into the OS:

“The tools could also permit Microsoft to undermine the utility of commercial search engines such as Google by making its own software the easiest place to initiate an investigation. Spell-checkers, after all, were once independent applications too.”

This is no surprise, building search into the desktop is something that Microsoft will allways have an advantage with. But it does raise an important issue: given that documents on your hard drive contain personal and sometimes confidential data, it would be alarming to see ads based upon the contents of these documents served alongside searches results on your hard drive.

Without an ad based revenue model for desktop search, Microsoft would have to either make web search separate with a Google competitor via MSN or subsidise a hybrid web/desktop search as part of the OS. Google would be up against a free product and this is all too reminiscent of Netscape vs. IE.

The silver lining is that Google’s advertisers pay not searchers and Google ads, clearly marked as such, are a benefit to users which actually enhances the service.

Clay Shirky is continuing to set himself up as the anti-semantic web guy. Its an easy target and good for spin. But, after all, what is anti-semantic if it isn’t meaningless.

Clay on the Yahoo ontology: “it sucked. Sucked sucked sucked. We didn’t even know how bad it sucked until Google came along and (its hard to remember this even five years later) saved the Web from drowning in its own waste.”

Well, three things:

Google is a search engine, and does pretty much what Altavista did 5 years ago, before they stopped being just a search engine. They sensibly ignore meta tags, but that was largely to do with people deliberately entering false information. Yahoo’s category search (Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle) is becoming a search engine ‘Yase’ because its difficult to impose ontologies on the web as a whole.

Things that aren’t really search engines, like Amazon and Ebay, or the classification of species for that matter, would be useless without some kind of ontology.

Even without a complete hierarchical system for classification, metadata is useful where pure full text search fails. Try searching for a cheap flight on Google, you can’t - unless they scrape the metadata.

Ken Rinaldo’s amazing ‘augmented reality robotic fish tanks’ will have their first showing in Lille on the 6th Dec:

“Augmented Fish Reality is an in process installation of rolling robotic fish-bowl sculptures designed to explore interspecies and transpecies communication. These could best be termed as “biocybernetic” sculptures that allow Siamese Fighting fish to use intelligent hardware and software to move their robotic fish bowls…

(more…)

Two thirds of all the worlds Bengal tigers are thought to live in backyards and basements in the US.

BBC NEWS | Magazine | 10 things we didn’t know this time last week

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