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?

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