Blog Ranger

Longer Post with new BlogIT Tool

I think the real issue with trying to post anything of ength using BlogIT will be the iPhone keyboard.

I consider myself relatively iPhone keyboard proficient but am not sure that I really want to bang out anything of substantive length using it.  In other words, great for IM or Twitter, but not my mini novel.

It is frustrating that the 1st generation iPhone implementation of bluetooth is so weak. With things like Sailing Clicker in the past I was always able to tether my phone to the computer and use the standard keyboard to do lengthy posts, not possible on iPhone. In addition, the weak Bluetooth implementation means that about 60% of the time my outgoing audio in my car via kenwood bluetooth box is horrible (Kenwood claims they are aware and working on a software fix).

The account registration for BlogIT with the iPhone was painful because of lack of cut and paste. At least two of the services that I wanted to add had obscure pass codes that I had to manually reenter. ;(

Apologies in advance for the typos that must be in this post.  I am betting they won't run a spell check  for me. 

"Made in USA" scientific innovation on the decline

One of my X2 blogpost being rebroadcast...

"Made in USA" scientific innovation on the decline: "Jerry Sheehan http://www.sciencex2.org/en/node/473 The last three years have seen increasing concern over the scientific and technological competitiveness of the United States vis a vis other industrialized and ..."

(Via Search for "KAUST".)

Carbon Nanotubes Mimic Asbestos in Early Study

Carbon Nanotubes Mimic Asbestos in Early Study: "Carbon Nanotubes Mimic Asbestos in Early Study"

(Via Wired News.)

Semantic Mashups: Bridging Web 2 and Semantics

Creating Semantic Mashups:  Bridging Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web
Related Paper

Intro to What Web 2.0 is...

Semantics makes our data more mashable, use new data sources, be used by new applications

Freespin, flash ap that understands relationship within freebase, see who employed by the company in demo ap. venture spin

perigoddess.com

Widget at the heart of web 2.0 but made more powerful with semantic approach.

T1: Future of Social Networks, Session 2

Second Half of Session

SIOC builds on FOAF to represent people.  http://foaf-project.org

SIOC allows your to choose which accounts you attach to your person

nice visual of SIOC+FOAF

topic ontologies using SKOS http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos

MOAT-Meaning of the Tag, it allows users to describe what meaning they are associating with a tag. Suggests meaning back to you.  MOAT reference..that would be way cool. http://moat-project.org

Need to identify/unify URIs to get networks linked together. 

Combine FOAF URIs via OWL to create unified view. 
Nepomuk (did I get this one right)

Can use openid with foaf
Would be able to add rules using sioc that would allow you to create fine grain rules:  if X knows me in Y then show them Z if we are both on Q.

SIOC applications list, http://rdfs.org/sioc/applications
SIOC exporters kick out rdf data....SIOC is machine targeted data

SIOC APIs in Java, Perl, PHP, RDFa
SIOC FOAF challenge sine 2004, 10 years worth of bboard data and find most interesting ways to use data http://data.sioc-project.org

PingTheSemanticWeb http://pingthesemanticweb.com
SemanticRadar export for Firefox

sindice lookup index for semantic web documents, http://sindice.com

Can use SIOC with RDF data browsers
examples of data browsing

Interesting example of SIOC with timeline
Semantic MicroBloggimg SMOB, http://smob.sioc-project.org
Have a sioc importer

How can semantics be used in enterprise 2.0 in social networking services
25 case studies right now
Interesting..using SIOC as a way to transfer data from two different collaborative servers.
Lots of interlinking efforts that are going on, the examples are all european.  Wonder if this will end up being a cultural issue?

conclusions
object oriented sociality makes sense
interlink different sites and content

T1: Future of Social Networks, Need for Semantics...My Notes

Decker-Digital Enterprise Institute in Norway, Breslin and Bojars
Conference Web Site Session Link

+Overview of DERI mission:  semantics on the web, 130 members, $23 million Euro R&D portfolio, 370 research pubs.  They created semantic desktop.

+Early use or semantic now, like the wright brothers plane compared to the jets of today.

+Three foci to their efforts:  Research Domains, Social Semantic Info Spaces, Semantic Reality

Overview of session:  -collab via social web, social networking services, issues with sns, leveraging semantics for social web foaf and sioc, procurers, collectors, consumers, leverage semantics for enterprise 2.0 sns

Lots of social sites, data silos and no bridges.

Social web:  great new yorker cartoon (the dog 93) and blogging (dog 05)
Social media creation is increasing with web based services (web 2.0)

Web 2.0 Social Media:  Users, Content, Tags, Comments
Blog use Overview
70 million web logs in March 2007, technorait graph

Wiki use Overview

STATE OF SOCIAL NETWORK SERVICES

We all live in social network but currently siloed

Milgram (sociologist) six degrees of separation
Erdos number for connecting logical paths for mathematicians
Small world phenomenon..discovering connections among extended social networks
Kevin Bacon example

WHAT ARE SOCIAL NETWORKING SERVICES
Idea behind SNS i to make real world relationships explicitly defined online
About 20% of most popular domains are social networking services

Basic SNS services:
-Friend of friend, person surfing, private messaging, forums, events, blogging,

Facebook API:  70,000 developers...4,000 apps. 
Overview of other SNS sites

SUN social open for carbon....name missed

object oriented sociality to provide meaning:  documents, job, university.
Basically want to start looking at people as social objects.
Sweet spot is unified view and more transparency. 

What we need
-distributed and reusable profiles
-people search engines are starting to hit this niche..due to data silos
-dataportability.org standards for interop between various sites, leveraging existing tech
-Need a social networking stack underneath the application layer.

+/- DOI as something we should investigate on documents

Semantic web tech can be leveraged and also benefit from social communities. 

Need agreed upon semantic formats to describe people, content objects, and connections that bind them.  Object oriented social networks can serve as rich data sources for semantic applications.

Provide data in common ways:  RDF, xml. 
microformats-humans first, machines second
yahoo search
SIOC-50 aps, 400 sites. 

How much support is there for SIOC?  We have session on data portability and myspace
SIOC ontology
SIOC food chain has produces, collectors, and consumers

siocproject.org
sioc for w3c
sioc becoming more popular...sioc developers mailing list

sioc doesn't have trust constraints right now...but you could attach licensing that has permissions associated with it in the RDF.  I would not make it public. 

SIOC question...what is required to represent community:  users, content, actions between users and content.

SIOC has five top level classes:  user, role, space, container, item
try to build on top of existing ontologies.

-Overview again of sioc ontology:  http://rdfs.org/sioc/spec
-SIOC User is an account, not a FOAF based person. So SIOC connects to post

+/- how long before there are sioc extraction tools or modules for communities.  Hand coding this stuff would be no fun. 

http://url.ie/e46 for slides

First Session: Semantic Overview

Dave McComb

Framework for Semantic Tech Conference

-Most of the people at the conference are here for the first time.
-Basic overview of semantic techs with a enterprise based focus

+Book:  George Lakoff:  Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things

+Enterprise side created schema to deal with data and then combined schema
+Internet had disruptive impact on thinking about categorization and schema (umh...yeah).

+Existing system lateral information exchange, we get in (if we are lucky) what we put in.  Hoping for augmentation.

+Two main search problems right now: false positive (find what you don't want), False negative (couldn't find what you were looking for)

+Semantic world intensional sets which allow new items that met rules to be added to set. 

+geonames as website and data assertions tied to simply ontology, 9 classes, 22 properties, 722 coes. http://www.geonames.org/ontology

+Most semantic content will come from machine creation, some human efforts..but not the only way.

+Human tools- Editors, Authoring tools, Tagging Tools, Mappers, Knowledge Apps, Visualization

+Machine generated issues:  design time v run time,

+/ Jerry ? Will we get to a point where we actually have too much information?  Today we have too much information, but as info increases geometrically could we extract too much knowledge to be useful (info paralysis)

+Triple store: db for storing assertions

+Call for embrace of standards when building out semantic tools.  Whenever possible use semantic web protocols vs proprietary solutions. 

+URI=conceptually like URL for data(?)

+Ontologies that are becoming standards:  Dublin Core,  

+garlik built using semantic?  Jerry wonders what they are doing?

+Information Aggregation:  people sticking ontology on top of information aggregation.

+Semantically enabled search

+Crystallized Take Away
-Semantic tech is like broad spectrum antibiotics
-Industry is where relational db were about 25 years ago.
-Network impact will make this have major impact. 

HP Live Tech Support: Only for Windows

No Real Time Love for Mac Users From HP

I was a little disappointed to find out that the HP live web based tech support only includes Windows operating system machines.  Below is the transcript of my chat session with an online specialist, trying to get an issue resolved on a HP 7310xi.

Kennedy: Hello Jerry,
Kennedy: Welcome to HP Total Care for All-in-One products. My name is Kennedy. How may I assist you today?
jerry sheehan: Can you tell me if I can fax from my mac using this printer via usb
jerry sheehan: did you get my question kennedy?
Kennedy: I understand that you want to know the fax can send or not from the Mac computer. Am Icorrect?
jerry sheehan: little different, I don't want to physically connect via phone cord..just use usb
Kennedy: Jerry, are you able to send and receive the fax from the front panel of the All-in-One?
jerry sheehan: yes
jerry sheehan: but what I want to do is send from my mac directly
jerry sheehan: and I want to know if that is possible just over the usb connection
jerry sheehan: if it is...what do i need to do to enable?
Kennedy: Fine.
Kennedy: It confirms that the printer hardware functionality is working fine.
Kennedy: Here the issue seems to be related with software part of the Mac computer.
Kennedy: I am sorry to say that this chat session relates to HP All-in-One units which supports Windows based platform. My expertise is confined to Windows based platform
Kennedy: However,You can avail complete support on the Macintosh environment through our phone support teams. You can call them @ 800-HP-INVENT or 800-474-6836.
These service engineers are Macintosh OS specialists and would be able to help you over the phone.
jerry sheehan: color me disappointed that online chat doesn't cover my operating system type but thanks for the link
Kennedy: Jerry, you can also contact our Mac email support.
jerry sheehan: Kennedy: What's their address? Just disappointed that real time support is windows centric :(
Kennedy: I will provide the web link.
Kennedy: Thank you for staying online.
Kennedy: Here is the web link:
Kennedy: =================================
Kennedy: https://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/email?product=391189&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en〈=en&cc=us
Kennedy: ===================================
jerry sheehan: Thanks for your help. Have a great day
Kennedy: You are welcome.
Kennedy: Have a nice time!!
Kennedy: It was a pleasure assisting you today. I appreciate the patience you presented while we worked together on this issue. May health and happiness be yours in all seasons!
Kennedy: Thank you for using HP Total Care and giving us an opportunity to serve you through Real-Time Chat. Please contact us again if you require any further assistance. We are available 24hrs a day, 7 days a week.

Our exclusive Owner Services will help keep all of your HP and Compaq products up and running. Please visit our Web site at: http://www.hp.com/home/ownerservices
 

Wireless Woes in O'Hare Admiral's Club: Terminal G

Agh...why do they dumb down airport wireless making it virtually impossible for anyone with a little knowledge to trouble shoot their own problem?

I checked into the Admiral's club in Chicago O'Hare because I had 3 hours to kill before the next leg of my incredible journey and wanted to get some work done. Critical to my efforts was being able to gain network access.  After I paid for my one day pass to be a temporary admiral they gave me a network passcode.  According to the "wifi for dummies" instructions all I needed to do was connect to the network, open my browser, and then after a browser redirect enter the magic password. 

The problem for me starts when my computer (a macbook pro) refuses to do the browser redirect.  I examine the so called "pin" number "48wyxyvctakxdtjq" and decide it must be a network password.  So, I begin the hassle of trying to directly enter a network password for an open network.

I saw "hassle" because Apple in it's user friendly obsession has decided to hide where this information can be directly entered.  Instead, you have to walk through a network diagnostic, select a network, and then enter a password.  I should note in what I think is a monumental design mistake all password entry is obscured.  Now for my normally secure password "bat" this is ok but when I am entering a 16 character password it becomes a bit more of a challenge. 

I enter the password and failure.  I decide maybe I mistyped the password, so I reenter...failure.  I choose each type of possible security and they all fail.  At this point, my techie pride damaged I decide to go to the main check-in desk and ask if they might be able to assist me.  Unfortunately they aren't technical.

But, they do call their "techie" who tells me they have been having problems with the tmobile service and Apples and that perhaps I should turn off bootp and try again.  Unfortunately in the Apple network control panel it isn't clear how to do this.  So...I now move on to T mobile tech support.

After describing the issue tmobile over the phone, much to the consternation of the seat wolf who took away my foot chair, I finally get real trouble shooting.  First try is to direct the machine to a direct IP.  This fails and I get handed off to tech support level 2.  This person, moderately technical, explains to me that it is likely a browser cache issue.  However, mysteriously prior to me emptying the cache , the machine redirects and gets to the network.  I follow my "wifi for dummy" instructions and am on the network...some 30 minutes after I started. 

Network speed is pretty poor (320K) and I take the time I am running the ping test to get the network measurement to ask the tech what the password is that I entered?  He can't really tell me, but knows it isn't a WEP or WPA password.

At this point I am happy to just have my narrow network straw to do email.  When I note how slow the performance is he asks "are my drivers up to date".  Now, unless they are using a super secret new G++ protocol this isn't really an answer.  He then turns to telling me to rebooting...but that also isn't an answer..and I'd risk losing my connection.

OY!

iPhone Most Popular Cameraphone on Flickr

The iPhone is not only the most popular phone for browsing the Internet but also leads the pack in terms of picture sharing on Flickr!  Now, if the camera only had:  a) better resolution, b) some actual user controls, c) maybe a flash, d) perhaps video!
 

Full story from ComputerWorld's Seth Weintraub