Andreas and Brahmananda throw a party
Google.ch disponibel en Rumantsch
KwaMedia public alpha
Kaywa have
released a public alpha version of the
media manager their CEO
Roger has been talking about for.. for years, I think.
It's supposed to be something very much like
del.icio.us - not for web resources, but for things. They start with books (using Javascript for ISBN lookup from Amazon), but other media types should follow soon.
It runs on
Rails, which is pretty cool - and quite a strategic break with their other products all being made with PHP. New developers new toys, I guess.
With my semantics hat on, I don't quite like it yet: RSS/XML everywhere is nice, but RSS/RDF, using e.g urn:isbn, would have been useful, too. You know, an Amazon->RDF bridge with a
folksonomy on top.. yummy.
Edit: Despite the obvious connections, this little piece of software is not actually a Kaywa project. I'm told it's a private venture by Patrice ("a Jesus Freak and freelance software developer"). Fun with APIs
That's what happens when a brilliant designing programmer plays with
open APIs: amaztype by Yugop (.com/.net).
The Semantic Web is Here
If you haven't yet, you should read Eric Miller's recent presentation titled "
The Semantic Web is Here", citing real-world examples by Nokia, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Adobe and Oracle.
Oracle as an RDF DB? OMG!
I particularly liked the slide "Observations and Lessons Learned":
- (Smart) Data is (increasingly) King
- Planing for evolution (data, services, partners, etc.) is cost effective
- Applying "open" solutions to "closed" problems is cost effective
- Quicker time / services / products to market
I hear there also was a /very/ exciting VC panel at that conference..
Little Boxes on the Hillside (ou le paradis petit-bourgeois)
Alright, what you see here is the house I live in Galway.*
As you might imagine, it stands between hundreds of those very same cookie-cutter houses in our little suburb: Little Boxes [♫ MP3 original
], [
♫ MP3 cover version], indeed.
Now I don`t have a problem with that. The problems is that I must find the right soundtrack for walking round here, the twenty minutes to and from the campus for example. Bach feels terribly wrong, must be something really anglo-saxon, I guess. Neither Depeche Mode nor Outkast, no doubt. Neubauten - no way, doesn`t work. The various Aphex Twin recs I have suit fairly well, and so do some compositions by Phil Glass. Might be the serial, repetitive thing.
Anyway, if you have any recommendations for my suburban soundtrack, please let me know.
__
* 69 Dangan Heights. My blog should let me annotate my images!
Schönes Schweizer-Englisch
Yesterday, after the presentation I gave here at
DERI about my favourite semantic project,
Fresnel (
[fʁɛ nɛl], s'il vous plaît), I had chat on (unsuccessful) entrepreneurship, Google, Stanford and stuff with (the great)
Dr. Stefan. All of a sudden, (the great)
Prof. Dr. Chris walks by, dropping a remark to me, like:
«Schönes Schweizer-Englisch sprichst!»
And rushed away, smiling. Oh. So der berühmte Herr Professor either made a nice flattering compliment or just tried to provoke quite a bit. I really have to go ask him, it`s bothering me. Can my accent be THAT BAD? :(
(
now that's fishing for compliments ;))
Vids: Digital Lifestyle Day / Night
Just watched some videos (after work ;)) of Burda`s Digital Lifestyle Day 05, which seems to be have been pretty posh an event (and quite a party).
Among quite a number of more or less important people from more or less important companies (folks from blogger.com, flickr, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft.. kind of everybody) Loïc Le Meur and Stefan Heidenreich had short presentations there, you find all the videos online.
I haven`t heard any of the speakers mentioning RDF so far, but some of them (Herr Heidenreich for example, explicitly emphasizing formats) should have (says the geek in me).
Well, although this sounds very much like an occasion for Marc to show up, Mr.Digital-Lifestyle himself is missing.
Our IMS/QTI 2.0 presentation engine
What you see above are some screenshots from two projects realized using mediagonal's IMS QTI v2.0 quiz engine we built last year.
The IMS Question and Test Interoperability v2.0 spec came out about a week ago, it`s meant to provide a standard for interactive assessments usable in whatever your learning management system might be, it deals with quite a number of question types, feedback and statistics, and includes a type system as well as a profile of XHTML.
Our quiz engine, written in Macromedia Flash, consumes such QTI XML files, along with further XML documents specifying some more special behavioral aspects and the entire layout specification. It should be able to plug into any system, for Moodle there is a special adapter component. Moodle is also the base for the projects shown above (for Paul Klee Zentrum and Jugend und Wirtschaft / LerNetz), we therefore improved Moodle`s question management and editing and implemented QTI v2.0 export.
In fact, I shouldn`t say "we" in this case: I did not write a single line of code for that software - nice to see a team growing and growing more powerful like that.
