Potato I have

Last October in Monterey, California.

I’m probably mentioning Wikipedia too often, but my previous post about the semantic web offers an interesting comparison. The Forbes article and the Wikipedia entry are both approximately 1200 words, and the former is perhaps a better non-technical introduction, but I’m vastly more satisfied with the latter.

Why? The Wikipedia entry:

• has had an awful lot of editing, by many people
• has an ongoing discussion to improve the entry; anyone who can read the entry can participate
• being hypertext, directly links all of its numerous internal and external references
• also links its ‘Knowledge representation’ category, which has another 37 now 44 topically-related entries

The one is a feature article, the other an encyclopedia entry, they’re not the same thing, but it seems to me a good illustration of the different authoring processes and results.

This Forbes article describes the semantic web in simple terms, starting by mentioning how rudimentary our search technology is:

We’ve become a society of information managers, navigating huge amounts of data with ease and expertly tracking down obscure facts and figures.

But as far as we’ve come, all we’ve really done is become good at finding needles in haystacks.

Semantic web means smarter search, but that is just the start:

[S]emantic technology also holds great promise for all kinds of businesses. […] With data growth rates averaging between 20% and 30% annually, many businesses are drowning under the weight of their own files […] “We want to get the human out of the loop for obvious reasons–they cost money, and they make errors.”

So machines can handle a lot of the work in a rapid-growth area.

Google’s comparison shopper Froogle is given as an example of the first step to the semantic web: agreed-upon “tags” help us all find a price, for example, regardless of what language or what terms the web site uses. But it doesn’t do the harder things: relating terms and building context.

(via wired)

I’ve noticed for a while that Firefox browser share at sites I visit is much higher than the 5-10% we’ve been hearing; this InformationWeek article tries to find numbers for the blogging community, and they are considerably higher — in some cases Firefox is exceeding IE:

At Boing Boing, among the most popular blogs, the most recent statistics for the month of March indicate that 35.9% of visitors are using Firefox, compared with 34.5% using Internet Explorer.
[…]
Kottke.org, another popular blog, reported on Feb. 27 that 41% of visitors sported Mozilla-based browsers (one of which is Firefox), while 31% of visitors arrived with Internet Explorer.

I find the productivity boost, just to pick one thing, so compelling with Firefox that I never understood the 90/10 numbers. Now I’m hoping that blogger browsing is somehow a leading indicator for browsing in general, and that Firefox won’t remain a weak minority for the duration.

Ben Hammersley has an article in the Guardian that claims Yahoo has eclipsed Google. For him, Google’s real differentiators until now have been their lab and prototypes, and their API. He says Yahoo is better on the first, because they are more transparent:

Research.yahoo.com, launched last month, is the same idea as labs.google.com - a showcase for new and interesting projects - but it’s better. Unlike Google, Yahoo publishes its papers, names its researchers and says what it is up to.

He also claims Yahoo’s new API is better too, because it “has more features, it’s more complete, it’s technically more elegant, and it’s easier to use than Google’s alternative.”

Finally, he compares a number of product moves, e.g. Picasa vs Flickr, but it was this one that especially caught my attention:

Yahoo has quietly launched search.yahoo.com/cc, a search engine engineered to find and index Creative Commons material. To do this, Yahoo must be indexing the web for data called RDF - a highly advanced, potentially powerful technology that Google has said it isn’t going to touch.

Yahoo even wins the googlefight.

The Morning News has a roundtable discussion, a follow-up to Mireille Guiliano’s extremely popular French Women Don’t Get Fat (a kind of diet book), with four French women food bloggers. I also link their blogs, which are good reading in their own right; now I need to find a recipe for Gibassier de Lourmarin, and make hamentaschens with my daughter. And, decide if I dare grow my Omea aggregator by another four feeds.

There’s something funny about the “French paradox” being rendered as a diet book, but not having read it I’ll not comment on that.

(via kottke’s remainders)
(more…)

The US State Department provides a synthesis of foreign media reaction:

Each business day, the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Research produces an Issue Focus of foreign media commentary on a major foreign policy issue or related event. These reports provide a global round-up of editorials and op-ed commentary from major newspapers, magazines and broadcast media around the world.

(via neat new stuff)