Wayne D's Blog

While driving to Ottawa over the Christmas break I took the time to get caught up on Buzz Out Loud. In one episode Molly Wood opined on how cool it would be when the semantic web was finally working and she could get her semantic web feed populated with funny cat pictures. I wanted to reference the particular episode but other than listening the six or so I had stored up all over again I will cross my fingers and hope I have got the reference close to the ballpark.

There was much talk this year about the semantic web being the "Next Big Thing". At its core the semantic web is about making web data easier for computers to parse and determine relationships which in the end is supposed to make it easier for you and I to find what we are looking for on the web. There are two reasons this technology is doomed to fail, firstly because people are lazy and secondly because some people are dishonest.

When I write my blog post there isn't much chance that I will the spend more time creating a semantic web description for the content it contains. I thought the whole point of computers was to make my life easier? Why should I have to write the thing twice? What about video and audio podcasts? After I edit them do I then have to write an rdf file in addition to the show notes so a computer can figure out what's inside?

The preponderance of link farms, keyword spam and tag abuse shows that if there is a way to game the system someone will try to use it. Google is in a running pitched battle to keep their search results relevant because some people are always trying to improve their result placing because they know if they aren't on the front page of results they are in trouble. The history of the web is full of people using metadata in a way that was not intended by the standards writers. The semantic web is just another form of metadata. Under carefully controlled circumstances metadata can be quite useful but in the wild west of the world wide web its pretty much useless. Imagine sending your semantic web retreiver engine out to find funny cat pictures and getting results littered with cat food ads as an example?

Cuil.com promised that it's Semantic web technology would out google Google and we know how that turned. I haven't yet seen a website advertising semantic web technology that has impressed me. I've written a couple of times about Twine.com and though I use it as a bookmark sharing tool the recommendations engine which is supposed to be powered by semantic web technologies has never recommended anything I am remotely interested in. This is not surprising because the descriptive metadata for the web resources that Cuil.com and Twine.com are using is nonexistent. They have to parse the web page and figure it out on their own. That begs the question, other than using semantic as a buzzword what do these two or any of the other purported semantic web driven website mean when they say semantic web? My suspicion is that it has become a hollow meaningless marketing term. The semantic web was last year's big thing, I wonder what it's going to be this year.

Yesterday 12seconds.tv had a special event for New Years Eve. I decided to take my EEEPC out at about 9 p.m. and record some of the Christmas lights in the neighbourhood. It was very cold, probably around -15C. Unfortunately I had to remove my glove to use the touchpad and was wearing a baseball cap because I couldn't find my winter hat. The cold wind and numb fingers convinced me after doing a few clips that I would not stray too far afield. Without further ado, here they are.

NYE lights on 12seconds.tv

New Years Liights pt. 2 on 12seconds.tv

New Years Lights Walk pt. 3 on 12seconds.tv

Another NYE house with lights pt. 4a on 12seconds.tv

NYE house lights only one more to go on 12seconds.tv

NYE lights, My Christmas tree in the window, final one. on 12seconds.tv

I finally got around to updating the Opera Mini version I had installed on my Blackberry. I had installed the 4.0 version many months ago but had problems with it giving error messages when I started it up after the first use. While fiddling around with it to switch from http to socket protocol in an effoer to fix it up I was prompted to download the latest version, 4.2. The built in Blackberry browser is adequate most of the time but has trouble with sites that have a multi-column layout because it doesn't support horizontal scrolling. If the web page has a left column then you have to scroll all the way past it to see the centre column. Other more complicated layouts also don't display very well. One page that is particularly Blackberry browser unfriendly is http://www.argonauts.ca/. Opera mini renders the whole page and lets you scroll a view window over the page and read the part of the page you are interested in. Opera mini also uses your history to assist when entering the address of the page you want to navigate to, a feature that was popularized by Firefox. The one downside to Opera mini is form fields, you can't fill them in in place but instead highlight and click on them which brings up another page where you enter your text. That's OK if you only have a few fields to fill in but would probably get tedious if you have too many to fill in.

If you have a Blackberry and were coveting the web page viewing experience of your iPhone owning friends then Opera mini gives you a free alternative. You can download Opera mini for your Blackberry at mini.opera.com

This year we paid $40 for an 8 foot white spruce for our Christmas tree. My wife likes the short needles on the spruce even though they lose them faster than the fir or pines. She was going to buy a bigger one but it wouldn't fit in the car trunk. $40 does seem a bit expensive for a tree but I am consoled by the fact that we bought it from the Knights of Columbus so some of the money does help support charities. In my previous post I put a 12 second clip of my Christmas tree but when I looked at it after posting I realized it was quite dark so I redid it with some more room light.

My Christmas tree, more light this time on 12seconds.tv

Link for the flash challenged http://clips.12seconds.tv/files/clips/mp4/record_1229828386845_eeUAD.mp4

It's getting very close to to Christmas and though I have a couple of articles in the more crusty vein percolating I thought I'd leave them for now and concentrate on something else. I've been watching a fair amount of online video recently and have found the EEEPC makes a reasonably good online video player with a few exceptions. I'm all caught up on Fringe thanks to the CTV online. I've gotten caught up on the episodes of Dr. who that I've missed thanks to streaming video from CBC. The only problem with both of these series is that they have limited time availability. I not sure I understand why networks insist on doing this as I expect both of these series are available from torrent sites. By removing a legal channel to view these programs they are driving people to the illegal alternatives. I've noticed that I'm not so concerned about taping shows or even remembering when they are on when I can watch them at my leisure online. Kudo's to Showcase for making the complete season of Weeds available to their online viewers but we Canadians are still far behind our American neighbours and the American networks wide availability of shows streamed online. I missed the last few episodes of Pushing Daisies and it isn't available for either purchase or legal streaming online in Canada. I even managed to find old episodes of Ed's Night Party on Joost.com. Ed's Night Party was a goofy little adult oriented show that used to be on CITY-TV in Toronto for many years until the station changed ownership and the new owners decided the show didn't fit the image they wanted to project.

One place the EEEPC has real trouble with the streaming video is Geekbrief.tv. The Mevio video player they use just won't work at all. It usually freezes Firefox and I have never managed to get it to work on the EEEPC even though I'm running both the latest version of both Firefox and Flash.

I'd like to with all my blog readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Here is 12 seconds of my Christmas tree.

My Christmas tree on 12seconds.tv

Here is a link for the flash challenged http://clips.12seconds.tv/files/clips/mp4/record_1229825348557_iCLfv.mp4