Funnin

Apparently there's a recognised stage that children go through during the development of their language skills in which they start to experiment with syntax and grammar. Basically they make up their own words based on the grammar rules that they've absorbed. Ethan came up with a good one recently: "funnin", meaning "having fun", e.g: "Where … Continue reading Funnin →

Searching Small Worlds

Interesting "small world" article in New Scientist this week ("Know Thy Neighbour", January 17 2004, Mark Buchanan), this time discussing how people and information can be located within a small world network. The essay discusses Milgram's famous experiment in which he asked people to attempt to route a letter, via their contacts, to a given … Continue reading Searching Small Worlds →

Share Your OPML (maybe)

I've had half an eye on the Share Your OPML as another possible source of FOAF data. I've been having scraping and converting various data sources to help faciliate interesting applications where possible. For instance this week I published some converted Freshmeat data, and in the past I've done various OPML conversions, e.g. for BloggerCon. … Continue reading Share Your OPML (maybe) →

Bray and Locke

Tim Bray's Two Laws of Explanation are good reading. I've tried to ascribe to these myself wherever possible, and especially in my writing. Of course these aren't new formulations, as they're really a modern version of John Locke's tabula rasa concept. See for example Some Thoughts Concerning Education: One of the aspects of this philosophical … Continue reading Bray and Locke →

Hailstones and the Barry Tornado

We had a cracking storm this afternoon the sky went dark, thunder, lightning, the full monty. It didn't last that long, but shortly afterwards I heard some bangs and thuds from outside as it started to hail. Hard. What you can see here fell in the space of a couple of minutes -- the time … Continue reading Hailstones and the Barry Tornado →

Lazy Photo Annotation

I was taken to task by my mother over Xmas. She'd been browsing my website during her lunch hour and had neglected to find any new photos, and precious few of her latest grandchild. After setting aside thoughts that I'd slipped into an issue of The Onion I realised she was right, and that those … Continue reading Lazy Photo Annotation →

FOAF challenges

Some interesting discussion has been triggered by Jon Udell's comments on FOAF. I agree with Edd and Dan that FOAF is about more than social networking and have said as much here on several occasions. Personally I see two problems with FOAF neither of them big. Firstly the name causes people to adopt certain expectations … Continue reading FOAF challenges →

This is 6am

Isn't it always the way that no matter how early you get into work, there's always one bright-eyed smug git who's there before you, eyeing their watch and pulling the universal facial expression of "call THIS early? I've been in for hours mate?!". Well it's 6am in the morning and I'm in work. Not the … Continue reading This is 6am →

XFN

Bryce Benton just posted to rdfweb-dev pointing out the arrival of XFN (XHTML Friends Network) and in particular a document from CSS-guru Eric Meyer constrasting XFN and FOAF. Thought I'd post a few thoughts and (hopefully) constructive comments. Firstly I'm impressed by it's elegance: annotate a few links with an extra attribute with values from … Continue reading XFN →

RDF Syntax: Profiling and Styling

Dorothea recently wrote a rant about the RDF syntax in which she rails against the suggestion from some RDF advocates that the syntax is unimportant: it's the model that counts. Dorothea notes that: ...only a few people actually create models