Recently in semantic web Category

Last I wrote, we had just launched Michigan Innovators, I was considering Movable Type 4, and (perhaps not really blogged about here a lot) I was preparing to go to Pittsburgh for the CASOS Institute.

Well, a lot happened, and I got sucked in.  Here's a highlights reel:

• Producing videos for Michigan Innovators using the technology I had developed for MuscleVentures proved to be unworkable.  Michigan Innovators interviews were just too long, and I wanted to be able to edit them.  The short answer is that we did a significant upgrade.  That has been overall good but has taken some getting used to.
• The initial Movable Type 4 betas were more like alpha quality, hard to get to even install in some standard settings.  Not confidence inspiring.  Now, after 6 weekly beta updates, I can say that things have come along nicely, and this blog may soon move to MT4.  Lots of great capabilities (though bugs remain).  The biggest issue in my view is that the post editor is still not producing well-formed html.  This makes any sort of post processing difficult and really really needs to get fixed.
• The CASOS institute taught me enough about dynamic (social) network analysis that I am readdy to incorporate analyses into the learning remix.  That's an exciting and absorbing project. 

I completed the first phase of designing del.icio.us WebCites yesterday. I think of it as a sort of information service. In that regard, there are a few questions to ask:

• Who's the audience?
• How does it make money or contribute to the business?
• How do I decide on next steps?

Let me give a brief treatment of each:

I actually mean this kind of in jest, but I am struck by the style of this post on IP and syndication. Scoble is acting as a human aggregator and interpreter of blog posts. Now, at the end of the day, people are probably best at understanding and interpreting text meaning, but we have been hearing so much about folksonomies lately and ways of automating them that I have to wonder how long guys like Scoble are going to be able to keep on in the aggregation function.

Steve Rubel and David Weinberger have written interesting pieces on why business people should pay attention to folksonomies. Folksonomies are self-generated taxonomies that people use to categorize their own blog postings and other material they have archived on the web. The key thing about folksonomies is that they consist of one word tags, with perhaps multiple tags applying to a resource. These tags allow archivers (including people writing posts to weblogs) to more clearly signal what the resources they catalog are about. Folksonomies also allow people to more easily determine which archives are relevant to them by providing an extreme summary of the relevant themes. I wonder if all of the attention they are getting is deserved.