Octavianworld

Semantic Web Possibilities

Today I listened to a great interview of Elias Torres by Phil Windley; the podcast is linked from here:

http://www.windley.com/archives/2006/08/elias_torres_on_sparql.shtml

Elias discusses the Semantic Web layer cake of tools, and focuses on SPARQL, the RDF query language.  It's a technical topic, but the conversation is very accessible to non-programmers.  My head's been churning all day with possibilities that seem interesting.  One idea: cross-site, heterogeneous-data collaborative filtering.  For example, crossing voting patterns on social bookmarking sites with Amazon's "Statistically Improbable Phrases" (sorry, what marketing genius wrote that label for such a useful feature?) gets you, "If you liked this article, you might also like these books..."

Found!

PostSecret (http://postsecret.blogspot.com/) is a guilty pleasure of mine.  If it's one of yours too, you might enjoy this podcast of Found Magazine's Davy Rothbart speaking at PopTech in 2005, courtesy of GigaVox/ ITConversations:

http://www.itconversations.com/audio/download/itconversations-775.mp3

Here's the GigaVox page for this podcast:

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail775.html

Have Your Cake, And Eat It Too

Via the IWantMedia Newsletter and CNET, word from Disney that delivering programs free (ad-supported) via the Web doesn't cannibalize TV viewership.  This data point will certainly get more play in the coming days.  Expect the hole in the wall between TV and Internet programming that "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives" created to get bigger.  Smarter firms will think harder about how to do this -- for example, is there a "digest version" of a program or a series that makes sense in the "lean-forward" Web medium to complement the longer-form "lean-back" TV experience?

Flipping this on its head, I keep waiting for some smart network executive to aggregate a bunch of web videos into an "America's Funniest Home Videos"-style program.  Access to rights would seem to be the only stumbling block, but there's enough content out there to keep rights-holders honest and cheap.  Besides, an appearance on a network TV show could send their web traffic (and AdSense payments) into the stratosphere -- maybe enough to cover the hosting bill!

Legi-Wiki?

Via Slashdot, I saw the recent Fortune article on the US Patent Office's new wiki for helping with the patent review process (http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/08/21/8383639/index.htm?source=yahoo_quote).

Prompted by the work I've done in recent years with public sector clients, I've been wondering for a while about the suitability of a wiki for the legislative and regulatory process (pick your level of government).