Paul Ford uses a fictional story from five years in the future to explain the semantic web: August 2009: How Google Beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web.
For more info about the Semantic Web concept:
I suspect that Paul’s story is ispired by Perhaps Paul’s story inspired some actual events…
In 1967, Stanley Milgram proposed the “small world theory”, which proposed that every person on earth is connected to every other person by a chain of just six other people. In other words, you know somebody, who knows somebody, etc., You might have heard of a humorous application of this called the Kevin Bacon Game. Several years ago, some clever programmers created a web site, called SixDegrees (it’s been down for a while, but is preparing to re-launch), based on this idea. [...]
A few weeks ago, I applied for membership with the Jabber Software Foundation. The vote for new members was yesterday, and all 17 people up for membership were voted in as new JSF Members.
The responsibilities are pretty light — particpate in the jabber mailing lists, evangalize Jabber technology, and participate in the quarterly meetings. I was already doing the first two, and it’s no big deal to spend my lunch hour online for the meetings once in a while. And eventually I hope to actually contribute something interesting to the community. [...]
Eric Sigler has whipped out a prototype of the FOAF Comment Identity idea. It’s still in its early stages, but it’s a good proof-of-concept!
Ben Hammersley has taken an idea of Dave Winer’s and added a cool twist to it: Using FOAF For Comment Identity and Followups.
I’ll probably work on implementing something like this on my site…in my Copious Free Time. . [...]
Yesterday was just full of map references. Another cool thing I found out about is the Jabber World Map. If you are a Jabber user, you can register with the map notifier, and your status will show up on the map. You’ll have to email your location name and lat/long coords to the administrator (instructions are at the bottom of the web page, below the map).
I’ll probably hack some Jabber features into my blog one of these days. At the very least, I could easily add a status indicator to show if I’m offline, away, available, etc. [...]
Geography rules.
I’ve been trying to work out some sort of concensus for how to include location info in FOAF files. [...]
I was starting to think that nobody noticed my JabFoaf announcment. On the one hand, I figured that a lot of people are too busy with holiday travelling/relaxing to worry about FOAF. . [...]
OpenID News
Since my WordPress upgrade and theme change, the OpenID sign-on functionality here has been a little iffy. I think I’ve got all the kinks worked out now, and it should be working correctly again. There seems to be a buglet in the functions that attempt to automagically add the OpenID login fields to the comment form. So I had to disable that option and manually edit my comment template file to insert the appropriate bits. I don’t like having to modify the theme files (it’s going to make it harder to upgrade when a new version of Sandbox comes out), but that was my best solution, short-term.
In other news, Microsoft is working on interoperability between OpenID and their CardSpace™ framework. [...]