Much to the chagrin of their many boosters, prediction markets missed the boat on the Obama candidacy -- they had Clinton for too long -- and they totally whiffed on John McCain's Sarah Palin pick. - Bret Taylor
This is bogus. Of course prediction markets aren't a magic all-knowing oracle! If Kedrosky has a predictor that makes the right call for Obama and Palin and all the other races, let's see it. Otherwise, the only thing that "sucks" here is his understanding of what probability means. - ⓞnor
Prediction markets reflect a consensus estimate of outcome probability. That means that when prediction markets show 60/40, you should expect the 40% outcome to happen 40% of the time! But people think of them as "votes" and get all huffy when the 40% outcome happens. Even if the markets are saying 95/5 - as they were for Palin - then the 5% outcome will still happen 1 in 20 times. - ⓞnor
Are you saying they don't suck? Surely someone has done a study of how often their predictions have come true. In fact, I thought I'd read such a study, and it found that it wasn't terribly often. - j1m
I'm saying this particular remark is boneheaded. The question is whether prediction markets are right more or less often than other prediction methods, such as asking experts, or polling. This paper [http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem/r...] claims that prediction markets outperform polls for predicting eventual election results. That's kind of a low bar, but it's something. - ⓞnor
Yeah, it's something, in a single-french-fry kind of way. I think the real question is whether they're worth paying attention to, not whether they're better than other iffy information. - j1m
Having a single reasonable source for the best known consensus guess at the odds of some future event seems like a really valuable thing to me. - ⓞnor
"No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?" - Tudor Bosman via Bookmarklet
Thanks for posting this. I enjoyed the article very much, especially listening to the excerpts of music in the videos. - Anne Bouey
Gene Weingarten, the Washington Post journalist who wrote this story, won a Pulitzer prize for it. - Tudor Bosman
In other news, Thomas Pynchon sells poorly in airport bookstores. - ⓞnor
Sigh. After a minute's thought, it should surprise no one that classical music -- best presented in a quiet theatre to interested listeners who have completed their days work, are seated facing the musicians and have self-selected by going to the theatre and usually paying -- doesn't attract much attention from people who are trying to, you know, get to work. The Pulitzer prize committee are supposed to be expert judges of what constitutes great journalism, and should recognize this as the poor "journalism" that it is. Oh, and: http://www.cadenhead.org/workb... - j1m
The other point the article misses is that, in the passers-by's judgments of their own self-interest, they're probably doing the right thing. - j1m
I swear I read this last year. It's an interesting experiment. - Voyagerfan5761
I missed this when it was first published. An amazing experiment and insightful story on the human condition. "What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare." -- from "Leisure," by W.H. Davies - tagami
"A small amount of milk was then expressed from an upper thoracic nipple, by gently squeezing the nipple between the thumb and forefinger (See Fig. 2). The silicone suction cup was placed over the nipple and the nipple 'milked' by very gentle thumb and forefinger pressure applied on and off the suction cup ... When conducted correctly it was possible to obtain approximately 0.5 ml of milk from one nipple." - ⓞnor
But what I'm really excited about here is the possibility of *rat cheese*. - ⓞnor
“Population of Alaska = 683,478. Population of Santa Clara county = 1,837,075. Number of people employed by Walmart = 2,100,000. Things I learned on Wikipedia today.”
Random I was just checking out clips on YouTube of moose attacking cars hahaha!! - Joe Dawson
Moose burgers are really good. So is caribou stew and reindeer sausage. *mouth waters* - JMS
It may look funny, but moose can be really mean. And they are really big. People get hurt in AK every year by moose stomping. Don't get between a mama moose and her calf. - JMS
During the Australian election, Kevin Rudd had a slogan to help 'working families' . I just heard Barack Obama say the same phrase and it made me smile. Complementary montage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... - Rob Schonberger
"In the direct sense, vice presidents don't have much to do with what goes on in classrooms. But a person who's a creationist doesn't understand science and technology at all," said Lerner. "It doesn't bode well for science, and doesn't bode well for interaction between science and government." - Paul Buchheit
I'm far more likely to vote for McCain than for Obama - but stuff like this makes my stomach churn. Being a non-believing conservative can be so trying, politically speaking... - Forrest Cox
McCain has completely lost control of this campaign. I'll bet you *he* didn't pick this person. This might explain his crappy attitude in the most recent Time interview. He's knows he's getting pushed around and he doesn't like it. http://bit.ly/3IK5h8 - MikeAmundsen
Yeah, that Time interview is harsh. It doesn't get easier, in fact it gets harder. I know I wouldn't want to deal with it all, but - as a willing candidate - you should lay in that bed. AND ... pick your spots John, Time? Vent with someone a little smaller if you don't want to cause a stir. - AJ Kohn
Why would a nonbelieving conservative support the party? They're even more tax-and-spend than the Democrats, and in fact they're all about running a huge deficit which ensures we'll have taxes forever more. I guess you could hate environmental regulation, or believe we're not engaged in enough wars, or be a strong proponent of traditional religious values without actually believing in God. - ⓞnor
AJ Kohn: yeah, Time interview was not the time to vent. anyway, you think McCain knew about Palin's 'trooper-gate'? about the mass firings to save the local dairy? is he ok with that? surely Obama knew about Biden's 1988 plagarism. - MikeAmundsen
Anyway, why wouldn't McCain pick Palin? She seems like she's smart, charismatic, and photogenic, and her persona is pretty much the personification of the American oil centric lifestyle. - ⓞnor
"Palin was answering a question from the moderator near the conclusion of Wednesday night's televised debate on KAKM Channel 7 when she said, "Teach both. You know, don't be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it's so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both."" - Brian Newman
"In an interview Thursday, Palin said she meant only to say that discussion of alternative views should be allowed to arise in Alaska classrooms:
"I don't think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn't have to be part of the curriculum.""
She added that, if elected, she would not push the state Board of Education to add such creation-based alternatives to the state's required curriculum. - Brian Newman
@Mike: I can't imagine they didn't know about trooper gate or the dairy board switch. Clearly Obama's camp knew about "xerox" Biden. Big news back then. Biden did credit it correctly numerous times - he just didn't *every* time and the rest was history. - AJ Kohn
Unfortunately, as we saw in the last election, a large portion of the voting population is not troubled by this idea or would even agree with it. - Daisy
@ⓞnor - quite simple: because the very DNA of the Democrat platform stands against virtually everything I stand for. I am no fan of the current Republican caucus, nor am I a fan of the current POTUS. I am frequently at odds with the paradox that is the "religious right" - it is after all the source of the most socialist tendencies of the current Republican coalition. But the alternative is an anti-man religion borne of envy, victimhood and hate that I will not support. - Forrest Cox
If she wants it taught as part of religious education that's fine. If she want's it taught as an alternative to the FACT of evolution that's wrong. You can't teach an alternative to proven fact. But anti-evolutionists are very motivated and the average person doesn't realize that a theory is not just some idea . That two thirds of Americans don't know is exactly why Creationism seems like a good idea to teach as an alternative to the 'theory' of Evolution. But that's what govt. school buys you. - Peter Simard
“You can now add a daily comic book cover to Friendfeed, which will show as a thumbnail here: just add http://www.coverbrowser.com as the blog of an imaginary friend.”
I optimized the Cover Browser RSS feed to work together with Friendfeed. To create an imaginary friend, switch to Friend settings -> imaginary -> create... - Philipp Lenssen
Why not create a Cover Browser room and import this feed so that people can like and comment on covers if they wish? - Tony Ruscoe
Here's the feed http://www.coverbrowser.com/rs... , if you look at the source in Firefox jump to where it say "<media" to get an idea. I had media in it before but FF guided me to include a thumbnail below around 525*175, as only that made it show here. - Philipp Lenssen
"For example, if a site such as FriendFeed switched from polling feeds every 30 minutes to polling every 300 minutes (5 hours), and also monitored the appropriate SUP feed every 3 minutes, the total amount of feed polling would be reduced by about 90%, and new updates would typically appear 10 times as fast." - Paul Buchheit
That's a very interesting idea! I think that for the case of push-generated feeds it will show nice improvements over the current polling approach (which is definitely not scalable). I am wondering if there would be a way to employ the same idea for poll-generated feeds (feeds that are retrieved on request only) though. - Alex Popescu
That's correct Alex. SUP works very well for most common feeds, but it's not ideal for more dynamic feeds such as a search (e.g. http://friendfeed.com/search?q... ). However, the vast majority of the feeds consumed by FriendFeed and others map into the SUP model very easily. SUP does not solve all problems, but it provides a very simple solution that should work for 90% of feed publishers. - Paul Buchheit
Alex, a conditional GET applies only to a single URL. SUP allows feed consumers to simultaneously monitor many thousands of feeds with a single GET. - Paul Buchheit
I've told you I might not be fully functional :-). You're right SUP is a container for updated feeds. Should I post any other questions directly to the room? - Alex Popescu
Paul this SUP technology is HOT!! I am totally awed by this disruptive innovative idea.... very impressive and incredibly brilliant!! wow!! - Susan Beebe
Your welcome Paul, you guys inspire the heck out me...American techie dream in real time...neat! - Susan Beebe
my flickr upload appeared much faster just now... are you guys using XMPP for flickr? - Travis Parsons
and written in .py :)- but if we throttle "generate_sup_update(db, 120)" and "SUP feed:
{"since_time": "2008-08-12T01:44:49Z", "period": 120," [[..|..]]" , so if we take "120" and make it lets say "30", wont this make the load even more to both sides ? - Peter Dawson
It's nice to see FF innovating things... its what I miss about livejournal back when it was just danga interactive. - Dave Dash
just curious, how to read SUP? pronounce sap or soup or syoop? - huixing
'sup, like the shortened version of "what's up?" - Tudor Bosman
So, where's the "omg it's not XML you idiots" backlash? - ⓞnor
Atom streams look more effective performance-wise and just a little bit harder to implement on both sides. See SixApart's: http://updates.sixapart.com/ - Alex Kapranoff
More than a little bit harder! Dealing with never-ending XML streams is a massive pain (see: XMPP), and keeping connections open is trouble. Also, the sixapart updates stream is a firehose that gives you all of the content being posted, you have no opportunity to filter out only those feeds you care about. The FF design is pretty much totally more awesome. - ⓞnor
work with feedburner to give you a ping every time one of the feeds changes and you can replace 5h with 'whenever it occurs' ;) - Nicole Simon
I can't wait for a DUDE or YO companion protocol. - abacab
Nice idea, one thing to include would be the information if a resource (feed) has been deleted, whereby one can build a mirroring system over RSS. - Christian Sonntag
Christian: no need; "deleted" is a special case of "updated". If a feed is listed as modified in SUP, the feed consumer will try to refetch the feed, and notice that it no longer exists. - Tudor Bosman
"Dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) is the chemical compound with the formula (CH3)2SO. This colorless liquid is an important polar aprotic solvent that dissolves both polar and nonpolar compounds and is miscible in a wide range of organic solvents as well as water. It has a distinctive property of penetrating the skin very readily, so that one can taste it soon after it comes into contact with the skin. Its taste has been described as oyster- or garlic-like....Because DMSO easily penetrates the skin, substances dissolved in DMSO may be quickly absorbed. For instance, a solution of sodium cyanide in DMSO can cause cyanide poisoning through skin contact. DMSO by itself has low toxicity. Because DMSO increases the rate of absorption of some compounds through organic tissues including skin, it can be used as a drug delivery system." - bob via Bookmarklet
"Recently, it was found that DMSO waste disposal into sewers can cause environmental odor problems in cities: Waste water bacteria transform DMSO under hypoxic (anoxic) conditions into dimethyl sulfide (DMS) that is slightly toxic and has a strong disagreeable odor, similar to rotten cabbage." Er, so... what does rotten cabbage smell like? Like cabbage, only rotten? - ⓞnor
Apocryphally, DMSO/LSD mixtures and squirt guns were used in the '60s to dose cops and others. Also apocryphally, you can put your finger in a mixture of DMSO and orange juice, and taste orange juice a few seconds later. I'm not sure I believe either story. - ⓞnor
Basically this is just a way to break out of the lock screen and get access to contacts, mail, and a couple other things. Doesn't seem like that big a deal, since it requires physical access to the phone (hence Jason's comment). - ⓞnor
Ah, my comment was more about security holes turning into a trend. Other holes haven't required physical access (like the hole utilized by OpenClip). - Bob Lee
Man, I hate bad editing! Why doesn't nytimes.com proofread their articles before posting them anymore? This one, which will surely get fixed soon, repeats almost a whole page of the article and is littered with word repetitions and other grammatical errors. - darren via Bookmarklet
Well, you have to cut them some slack for fast-breaking, unpredictable news items like this. When rushing hot news to the press, errors will be made. - ⓞnor
LOL. Seriously though, I think the quality of editing on nytimes.com has gone down significantly in the past 5 years. Maybe I'm just a grammar nazi.... - darren
"FriendFeed Inc. is enhancing its service in order to fulfill a critical requirement on the Internet today: immediacy. The highly publicized startup is weeks away from boosting the frequency of its updates from social networks" - Louis Gray via Bookmarklet
What does SUP (Simple Update Protocol) do exactly, it's more than a http header last-modified check? - Philipp Lenssen
I'm interested in learning the details, too. my guess is some type of callback scheme that was discussed on ff a while back when ff was (gently) called out for polling flickr millions of times/day. - David Vasileff
also perhaps batching multiple feed requests into a single call - David Vasileff
That's it ... no more hikes in the afternoon! (Sharing .... ) - Charlie Anzman
theory 1: a single "meta feed" which you can poll to get a list of other feeds that have changed recently. (would it cover all feeds on the service, or would FF somehow supply a list of all the feeds they're interested in?) theory 2: a callback/ping/PIMP notification when a feed or feeds change (HTTP? XMPP?). theory 3: a formalization of the "public feed" concept, where you roll every (public) update on the service into a single (rapidly rolling!) feed which FF polls and gets updates for. - ⓞnor
Someone has to talk to someone to indicate a change occurred, so you can't skip that step, be it push or pull. So my guess is it's a way to get a larger aggregated chunk of what has changed and an idea of the size of the change. What might work is a bulk push of what has changed and then a pull of the changes at FF's leisure. - todd
Providing facts is just cheating. Now there's no room for rampant speculation :-) Add a sequence number and you could know if you missed an update which would indicate polling needed to occur or perhaps a download of the old change notices. - todd
great stuff. imho, when adopted, SUP will be - to the organic growth of services updates - like traffic lights to crowded intersections. or like how gps navigation is to asking people for directions :P - Dani Radu
Sounds like it's a protocol that others will need to implement and support so friendfeed can process feeds more efficiently. alot of the issues could be fixed if if-modified-since was used and rss feeds were treated more like a web service rather then a static html page, most are generated from a db real-time anyway. Read RFC 977, NNTP fixed this issue by setting up an easy way to poll what's new back in the 80's. - Shawn McCollum
WOWOWOWOW...this technology is huge! Disruptive and fantastic!! If I had VC level cash, I'd throw it at FF brainiacs and be rich... this idea is unbelievably SMART! - Susan Beebe
Shawn, we actually already use If-Modified-Since and many sites do properly support it. The key difference with SUP is that it allows feed consumers to monitor many thousands of URLs with a single GET, which is not possible using If-Modified-Since. - Paul Buchheit
If anything, it shares a few similarities with Sitemaps (which enable webmasters to notify search engines of modified URLs, etc.) Great work on SUP! - Aviv
This is one of those simple ideas that one wonders why no one thought of before. It's a good proposal and a required one in the rapidly growing aggregation/Lifestreaming world. I am sure the proposal will be widely and quickly SUPported. Well done folks. - Vinay | विनय
paul, I found and read the ff blog post, and I understand the meta-feed approach. Interesting but I think sup-id storage adds a bit of complexity. Even though the sup-id keeps the size of the feed down, full uri would be better. I think the concern about exposing usernames is a little overdone, I mean it's not going to really stop someone who wants the usernames from getting them. - Shawn McCollum
Love it. We've used a different approach to interface with "friendly" crawlers, one that is based on the ability to fetch older items in the feeds by request. But it requires a public "recent" feed, and does not work solve the private URLs issue. This is so much better. We'll be experimenting with SUP and would love to help it mature into a well defined spec. - Yaniv Golan
Excerpt: "I hope the Android folks aren't hoping that a slick UI and great user experience will sell itself, because phones ain't the web. The cognitive and financial switching costs for mobile phones are greater than for almost any other device you can buy. Helio and Sidekick are two great examples of how slick mobile products can fail to gain traction because they rely on carriers and customers to generate demand. Take a page from the Book of Jobs and tell the story to the people. Tell them why they want it. Show it to them. Educate them so well that they can proselytize another person to buy a product that neither of them has ever seen in the flesh." - Kevin Fox
Apple is great at marketing, but I think Helio failed because the devices suck, Danger was on a good ramp but fizzled because they failed to keep up or to open the platform, the Blackberry succeeded because people liked what the devices did, and the iPhone is a big success because it's an awesome product. Jobsian marketing is an accelerator -- it means they can sell millions of iPhones now, instead of in two years once everyone figures out how awesome they are -- but it's not the key enabler of uptake. - ⓞnor
Also, I have switched phones probably five times in the last decade, but I have switched search engines basically never in the last decade. So I disagree that cell phones are way stickier than web sites. - ⓞnor
They may not be stickier, but they're a lot easier to try out. I would argue that you've stayed with the same search engine because it's maintained a lead in quality/experience, rather than habit. - Kevin Fox
ⓞnor, would you agree that Apple's marketing generates a certain media narrative, and that narrative has lead to a (very large) amount of free ads? It seems like Kevin is arguing that that same thing happens by word of mouth. - j1m
Okay so here is the Survey. Please only give the Option Number. What is the reason for the seasons? Option 1: The Earths Orbit! [OR] Option 2: The Earth's Tilt [OR] Option 3: 1+2 for Sally! No comments other than responses to the survey please! - Geoff Schultz
Instead of "The Earths Orbit" you should have said "the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit". In which case the answer would be 2. As it stands, 3, because the tilt would have no effect outside the context of an orbit. Please don't draw conclusions about scientific illiteracy from these survey answers. - ⓞnor
Thanks for the input folks appreciate it. - Geoff Schultz
I wouldn't consider a question like this for the purposes of scientific illiteracy. I'm happy to be in a community where the vast majority know what orbit is. - Geoff Schultz
I really dislike the usability of this type of phone with slide keyboard. It makes the phone clunky and the keyboard is not really too quick to type with. I got rid of a similar model in favor of a simpler Nokia (which had a lot to do with the old one running Windows Mobile though, which IMO is a low-usability OS). - Philipp Lenssen
(This particular rumor aside) Well, clearly lots of people (myself included) like mini keyboards on Blackberries and the like. And if you want a keyboard and also a large screen and also to fit in the pocket, that sort of implies a slide or flip mechanism. - ⓞnor
IMO It's gotta have a keyboard to be usable as an serious email device. My current SE910 has a flip keyboard but the keys are too small to do anything but 'finger peck' would be nice to have a device that at least allows thumb typing. - Reto Meier
There are many ways to do a keyboard, like the iPhone shows with its software keyboard... I just find this particular hardware keyboard badly usable. Judging from past T-Mobile branded phones they also have a way of messing with the OS... like by occupying important buttons which are meant for navigation with T-Mobile-specific useless stuff :/ - Philipp Lenssen
By "keyboard" I mean "physical keyboard, with tactile feedback". The iPhone's soft keyboard is amazing for a soft keyboard, but I would never want to trade it for the real thing. Thumb keyboards aren't for everyone -- and apparently not for you, Philipp -- but I for one really do like them. - ⓞnor
Perhaps the Blackberry keyboard is a lot better, I don't know? I've used this HTC one... to do something simple as to enter a phone number you had to hold down a function key! http://blogoscoped.com/files/m... - Philipp Lenssen
Just create an imaginary friend in Friendfeed (friend settings -> imaginary -> Create...), name the friend "My Blog Feedback" or similar, and enter the following Google blog backlinks search URL into the Blog feed address -- replace "example.com" with your own blog domain:
http://blogsearch.google.com/b... - Philipp Lenssen
And now at the Beta.friendfeed.com site, you can create a friend list called "Site feedback" or similar and move all your site feedback imaginary friends out of home and into that section, if you like to unclutter the main view. - Philipp Lenssen
That's an interesting possibility for bloggers using Google's Blogger.com. The rest of us using WordPress or Tyepepad we get notifications in the backend of our blogs for each comment, trackback or pingback. - Matthias Schwenk
Mathias, above works for Wordpress even when people don't send a trackback (as not everyone does I think). This feedback function works for any website not just blogs, by the way... I'm currently using it for bomomo.com and watchtolearnchinese.com, both not blogs... - Philipp Lenssen
Philipp, that's right. We shouldn't underestimate the fact that many people (including some web and marketing agencies) didn't get the idea of trackbacks yet and therefore don't use them. - Matthias Schwenk
I don't understand. Isn't this just (ab)using FF as a feed reader, where one of the feeds you might be interested in is your egoblogsearch? You could just as easily pull that feed into Reader, or you could just as easily import *all* your feeds as FF imaginary friends. Is there a special connection between "blog feedback" and FF that I'm missing? - ⓞnor
Absolutely, I'm partly using FF as my feed reader :) You may call it abuse, but I don't use any traditional feed reader, and e.g. Bloglines and Google Reader isn't for me, so I call it use/ use case... - Philipp Lenssen
I use a feed reader to read things I know I want to read. I use FF to read things I don't know I want to read. - Amit Patel
it's RSS part of the semantic web? that seems to be doing okay. - Stefan Hayden
Well, you'd have to ask a Semantic Web advocate, but I'd say no... It's more around RDF and self-describing data. IMO it's not going to catch on because it's too much work for content providers for too little benefit. The benefits of Semantic Web stuff fall on people with no influence to make it happen. - Jason Carreira
it's coming baby... it's coming. Patience... - john conroy
negative @jason. look at technologies like Calais (opencalais.com)-- autotagging and enabling relationships/entity identity in content. far better classification. and legacy content can all be turned into rdf-friendly formats(xml). And the big-time web services are beginning to come on board eg yahoo! searchmonkey. I still believe!!!! - john conroy
On content providers: the problem as I understand it is converting legacy content into XML. I don't know how much of this could be automated. Hopefully all??? - john conroy
Search engines are not the ones who need to be on-board. Those companies experiment with a lot of technologies because they are technology companies. The companies you'd need to start using it are not technology companies, they are content companies, retailers, etc. and there's a lot of work for them to do for little tangible benefit over regular search. - Jason Carreira
Jason, you're obviously correct, but why bother arguing it? The fail bus will come home whether or not you ride it. It is a little bit sad because I think generic typed tuples can be a useful means of data interchange, but that gets obscured by all the murky pseudo-AI handwaving. - ⓞnor
@Cyndy is a big Semantic Web proponent and keeps sending me links... - Jason Carreira
I've always thought the "Semantic Web" was just an enhancement to some small parts of "Web 2.0". I think we'll see more services like Zemanta, that are enabling and convenient, but nothing that's going to be a total revolution - David Knight
There hasnt been an application that the masses can relate 2! Its too academic! Some apps trying at evri & silobreaker! - Arjun Ram
Well it sorta depends on what apps you're looking at. But your initial comment is indicative of how far the space has to go. To be a bit self-serving, check out some of the stuff I've written on The Guidewire and see what you think. Search, for instance, is an important step in honing the technologies so they can be effectively used on content and retail sites. I know you'll hate this argument but - when semantics is really working, you won't know it. Well maybe *you* will but you get my point. http://tinyurl.com/6b2z9x - Carla Thompson
My point is that telling content providers / owners that they have to change things to work with what you want your app to do == FAIL. Find a way to do it with what they've got or you're fscked. Search is a great example, because you've got all the data, you just need to figure out the structure. - Jason Carreira
It just needs its killer application. Or some big, breakthrough idea. It's fundamentally a better way of classifying content, so should in theory be worthwhile... I'd have thought. - john conroy
That is the way it's trending though, at least in the area of content recommendation. And Twine, for instant, works well with content, albeit not on the publisher's site. I think that's the next bridge to cross - tying the semantic analysis of content that's happening on other sites back to the originators. - Carla Thompson
@john the road of failed ideas is paved with things that "should in theory be worthwhile" - Jason Carreira
Calais is being used as a plugin on some word press installs, I think to generate relevant news stories from Reuters. I have not checked the latest on that though. The point being, if we can get relevant stories, we can generate the "linked data" through a plugin for various blog platforms. - Rob Diana
semantic web is just baby steps so far, meaning meets machine-readability with difficulty .. the chinese will have it first, better, because their alphabet and meaning density is a lot higher than english - gregory lent
