Welcome to our n² community blog, the new kid in the Talis blog family. It’s a group blog written by developers and researchers at Talis and as such we’ll be addressing much more technical content than our sister blog Nodalities. You can expect to see code here, lots of it in all flavours. We plan to feature projects and hacks written by n² community members plus share some of our ideas for applications we’d like to see. This is where we’ll also announce new releases of the Platform, preview some of the new features that are coming up in future releases and share some of our research.

It’s not all about us though. Tell us about what you’re up to and if we like it we’ll feature it here. We also plan to cover technical discussions of HTTP, RDF, URIs, OWL and the rest of the Semantic Web technology gang along with their friends Microformats, Atom and JSON. Of course we’ll also include pointers and commentary to anything else that catches our eye on the Web.

As I’m sure some you will have guessed n² refers to Metcalfe’s law which relates the value of a network to the number of potential connections. On one level this refers to the power of the Semantic Web, characterised by the huge number of possible connections between things (see Jim Hendler and Jennifer Golbeck’s fascinating discussion of this).

However, it also applies on a more human level: connections between the people that make up our developer community. We think the number of possibilities for learning, discovery and, ultimately, success depends on the number of people that actively participate in the community. When there are two participants there’s only one way to collaborate. Add one more person and you now have three times the number of possible ways. Add another and you have six times, plus four additional three-way collaborations and a possible four-way collaboration for a total of eleven possibilities. Double the number of participants to eight and you get a total of 247 possibilities for collaboration including 70 different ways for four people to get together and create something great!

So the goal of this blog, our wiki, our mailing list and our IRC channel is to connect our community together, to stir up the possibilities and to give everyone the best possible chance of putting a dent in the Universe.