Alex Iskold has written a fantastic piece on The Road to the Semantic Web

"Some people think that the Semantic Web is about AI, some claim that it is more about semantics, while others say that it is about data annotation. All agree however, that we will all be wonderfully more productive and simply happier when it arrives."

What is the Semantic Web?

Mashups

are one of my favorite things - synthetic creativity born from the creativity and generosity of open technologists whose works are available on the web to be cross-pollinated with other technologies or datasources to produce brand-new things. It is an ever-accelerating artform in the World Wide Mesh that promises endless Darwinian generative possibilities. Recently the term has been showing up in common culture and the meaning risks dilution. Let's get specific. What exactly is a mashup? Mashups: The new breed of Web app is a new IBM article that provides a great overview of the history and the categories of "mashups" - and bears reading even for Technorati who already get and even contruct mashups.

Just like it says. Check out this amazing tool: http://www.scrutinizethis.com/

Submitted by Brooks Cole

Distributing the Future has podcast with a segment on "attention streams". I have been posting on the topic here, including 2 podcasts with Fen.

I declare 2006 the year of attention.

This is a short conversation with Jakob Lodwick of Connected Ventures. BarCamp is happening at ConnectedVentures' office. Jakob works on CollegeHumor.com and Vimeo.com, a video sharing and social networking site. Yesterday Jakob lead a talk about soft links in social networks. I talked about it a little bit in my first podcast from yesterday. Basically the idea is that there isn't just one type of connection between people, we have different connections, social networking applications should recognize that. The machines should be able to learn the strength of our connections based upon how we give our attention. If I look at your flickr pictures all the time, but not the photos of another contact, then flickr should stop showing me the other person's and show me more of yours.

I just talked to Chris Messina of Flock and formerly of CivicSpaceLabs about Microformats, Flock, Attention and BarCamp.

Chris is one of the Founders of BarCamp and seemed to be pleased with the outcome so far here in NYC. He was also happy to answer way more than three questions, even given the late hour...

Listen here

barcamp