This Week’s Semantic Web…not
Regular readers might have noticed I’ve been intermittent with this at best. I was doing it for a bit before I joined Talis, but then could get on with it as part of my paid work, which was cool. At some point, it was Ian or David (*cough* time for a fresh blog post) suggested I give an introductory blurb to give humans a chance to interpret the list of links. Very good idea.
But the humongous problem of compiling such a list is that there is simply too much material these days – the best I can do (before blanking out) is to offer a personal shard. If someone else wants to have a go at approximating comprehensiveness, I can get you started. It’s much harder work than one might imagine, get way too distracted. Each link is interesting, so off you go. Takes between 2 hours (and I’m doing a serious injustice) and 2 days.
So I’ve got another proposal. Same title, but each week get a different person to give 5-10 links to things they found significant in the week, with a paragraph or two of explanation as prefix.
Go on, volunteer!
btw, nice serendipity, I was looking for my first TWSW and there found a quote, the source of which has been bugging me for ages, that I used in a mail only about 2 hours ago (to John Musser):
Quote of the week:
In the Semantic Web, it is not the Semantic which is new, it is the Web which is new.
- Chris Welty, IBM (lifted from TimBL’s slides)
October 7th, 2008 at 11:20 am
How about creating a webpage where authenticated users can contribute one link & description at a time and then I can just get an RSS feed of the page (similar to this page http://www.housepricecrash.co.uk/newsblog/ which I have found extremely usefule over the last few years).
Thanks, Andrew
October 7th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
Until you get a page together, I’ll give it a shot.
October 8th, 2008 at 5:14 am
Andrew, that’s plan B
October 8th, 2008 at 5:15 am
Ms. Powers, you’re on.
October 8th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
Hi Danny!
Why not present a single “Semantic Web Gem of the Week”, together with some related links (the latter would replace your old much larger list). The gem may be a project, may be an interesting Blog entry, or an interesting discussion in some mailing list, etc.
You can then focus much better on one particular topic, describing a bit what happens there, and bringing it into larger context, telling where it fits in the SemWeb. The main text shouldn’t take more than 10 Minutes to be read.
I would definitely appreciate this. I all the time find such “potential gems”, in particular in your weekly link list in the past. But then, there have always been two problems: First, there are so many links, and I have so few time, so I can only select one or two of them – but which one? And even if I made a decision, then I was still alone with getting together all the interesting information from the single link. Regularly, I didn’t had the feeling to have learnt something really interesting.
Don’t know whether you know, but there’s a different world from that we are knowing, and it’s called Second Life. And there is one particular user, Torley Linden, who creates a “video tutorial” on a particular topic every week (well, at least he did so for a long time). There are so many interesting things to see in Second Life, but I always only watched his great 10-minute Videos, and played around with the new things I learnt for another half an hour or so. I rarely have more time for these kinds of exploration, but following Torley’s lead has often been enough to satisfy my interest.
Why shouldn’t this approach work in the real world, either?
Just an idea!
Cheers,
Michael
October 10th, 2008 at 10:07 am
Ooh Michael, “Gem of the Week” is a great idea.
re. Second Life – I’ve still not had opportunity to join in, my bandwidth here (in the middle of nowhere) is minimal. But suggestion noted, thanks.
re. real world – er, conferences?
October 15th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
[...] I’m a little tardy with this, anyhow last time here I asked for volunteers to give their own take on TWSW . Shelley Powers stepped up to the plate, and [...]