Hippos are more closely related to their whale cousins than they (hippos) are to anything else
Tree of Life – evolution interactive – Darwin 200 – Wellcome Trust Want to know the concestor of two species then this is for you. And they have obviously spent time on the visual and interaction design and it’s great they have released it under a Creative Commons license. But, but because they haven’t provided URLs for each of the taxa it’s lost to the web, which is such a shame.
Google Latitude – see where you friends are in realtime [Google]
A service for sharing (primarily via your mobile phone) your location with friends and family and as such it’s similar to BrightKite and FireEagle. If Google integrate this into existing services, that is it becomes a service sat behind Google search and maps, then this could be a bit of a killer if only because that’s where people’s attention is. That said FireEagle is a generative location exchanging service.
Listen to Yourself [xkcd]
YouTube comments are a mess — this could the be answer, so might making the site about people and their videos rather than videos with some comments.
BBC’s Semantic Music Project [ReadWriteWeb]
“As more projects like this take advantage of the publicly available metadata available, the beginnings of a real semantic web can finally take root.” What a nice thing to say.
BBC Artists: Getting down with semantic Web [CNET UK]
BBC’s new music site gets a great write up on cnet. But why is it that there appears to be an inverse relationship between distance from the team and an understand of the project’s importance and benefit?
More good news…
Twitter can has OAuth? [factoryjoe.com] Twitter API lead Alex Payne announced today that Twitter is now accepting applications to its OAuth private beta, making good on the promises he made on the Twitter API mailing list and had repeated on the January 8 Citizen Garden podcast.
Obama’s agenda for technology [whitehouse.gov]
“Protect the Openness of the Internet: Support the principle of network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet.” I find the face that this is his first agenda point in “ensuring the full and free exchange if ideas through an open Internet and Diverse Media Outlets” surprising (for a politician) but truly wonderful.
Cool…
Harder, better, faster, stronger [digital urban]
“David Hubert wanted to make a video of London but I didn’t have a camcorder, so he took pictures instead. In fact he took more then 3000 pictures and put them all together into a video lasting less then 2 minutes with excellent result”
Teaching a six year old about Triples, by Leigh Dodds. Some rights reserved.
Content modeling & FOAF — this is really very good stuff — you should read these then subscribe to Paul’s blog
Paul’s experiments with FOAF and Doctor Who “I chose the first ever episode of the show, from 1963. This featured four main characters, and thanks to the workshop from Yves and the others, I had an inkling of an understanding of how to create FOAF profiles. The results can be seen here (best viewed if you use a Firefox plugin like Tabulator). So far so good. I then linked each character to the other, using the simple ‘knows’ relationship. Finally, to get my linked open data brownie points, I linked each character to its DBpedia equivalent, using the OWL ’same as’ relationship.” Modeling Doctor Who is going to be cool esp if Paul looks at the different incarnations of the Doctor (different actors + different version).
Part three of Paul’s investigation into fictional content modeling and FOAF One thing that has come up in the discussions, though, is that there’s perhaps two elements to what I’m trying to achieve. The first is to link existing ontologies and, if needed, build a new one, to help describe the narrative content of ’stories’ within the context of television and radio programmes. The second is to experiment (and for me to learn) with existing ontologies, again, linking them up, to build dynamic and interesting webpages that work on linked data principles.
Visualising radio — I can’t but applaud the team and I love the technology but does the idea make sense? I’m not so sure…
… a bit like ‘enhanced podcast’ (you know podcasts with pictures) because my iPod lives in my pocket as far as I’m concerned the images are just a waste of bandwidth; likewise visual radio. That said it’s well worth checking out.
Visualising Radio, pushing, not pulling [whomwah.com] A bit of technical background from Duncan. “So, the big news here is that we are pushing and not pulling. Ordinarily, you would request a webpage using your browser and a some data would be returned. The only way that you would then subsequently see any changes to that data, would be if you requested it again, or if something on that page requested it for you, maybe via polling.”
These are just great…
In Search of Cultural Identifiers [BBC – Radio Labs] Getting this stuff right is really the first job in any web project. Identify the objects you want to talk about and model the relations between those objects. The key point is to ensure the things you model map to user’s mental models of the world. User centric design starts here and if you choose to model and expose things that users can’t easily comprehend no amount of product requirements or personaes or storyboards will help you out. For want of a better label we A&M types often refer to this work as ‘cultural identifiers’. One identifier, one URL, one page per cultural artifact, all interlinked. It’s something that Wikipedia does better than anyone. One page per concept, one concept per page. bbc.co.uk could be a much more pleasant place to be if we can build something similar for the BBC.
Teaching a Six Year Old About Triples [Lost Boy] “I suggested to him that we try drawing it out. I thought that this might help him get a better mental picture. I explained to him that we could try writing down the characters names and start drawing lines between them to illustrate the relationships. He got it straight away.” This is brilliant and shows just how intuitive RDF is.
Wikipedia over DNS [DgL] “I had written some code to take wikipedia articles and summarise them. I wanted to offer this for use in various places, now the obvious way to offer it is just a web service (via REST, SOAP, etc), but that’s boring and I had a cunning plan. Why not offer it over DNS – it is basically a huge associative array and DNS is designed for this stuff. So I wrote a little nameserver which returns the results as TXT records. There are some obvious limitations for example responses are limited to around 430 bytes (it only does UDP). It has advantages too, it gets cached at your nameserver and it is also faster than HTTP (no need to setup a TCP session).” Such a cool idea and lovely URLs too.
