I started “A Semantic Web Primer” today at the urging of a colleague. Chapter 1 seemed to say, “If web sites exposes structured data using a language we could all agree on (or a mapping to a language we could all agree on [or a mapping to a mapping…]), we could build much cooler apps w/ the data that’s already on the web.” I find that to be an eminently reasonable argument. Plus, it sounds line “an ontology” is “a class diagram,” so I’m already at home. : )

Unfortunately, we’ve got a chicken ‘n’ egg problem here, i.e. no one’s going to build the cool apps ’til the info is available and nobody’s going to make their info available ’til there’s cool apps to plug into. How did RSS make it over that hump?

Chapter 2 was a summary of XML, i.e. useless for anyone reading this site.

I’m hoping to get to Chapter 3: RDF tomorrow.

Anyone got any arrows in the back trying to use this technology that they’d like to share?

Sweet!

Whenever anyone hears that I program Avalon, the first thing they think is, “Oh, good, let’s get Chris to create a cool looking UI for us!” They also tend to lump in data visualization expertise and user experience into that mix as well. On the “beginning to experienced” scaled, I’d rate myself in the following way on these tasks:

• Avalon programming: beginner to intermediate, depending on the bit of Avalon you’re taking about
• Visualization expertise: interested beginner (I’ve attended a 8-hour Edward Tufte seminar, skimmed 3 of his books and wished for something more than the DataGrid)
• User Experience design: intermediate in the realm of standard Windows applications but beginner when those limitations are removed, i.e. what Avalon enables
• Graphic art: untalented hack

Seriously, I can’t draw myself out of a paper bag (or in one, for that matter). I hired all of the art done for my web site and I almost never draw pictures for my books. Instead, I write programs and take screen shots or make Mike draw the pictures for me.

Being able to program Avalon doesn’t make me a graphics artist any more than being able to program my financial calculator (which I can’t do anyway) would make me Warren Buffet. In fact, I’m closer to being Warren Buffett than I am to being a graphics artist, which should give you some indication about the gap we’re talking about here…

That’s not to say that some enterprising 3rd party couldn’t create tools to help artistic yarn heads like me produce useful Avalon graphics. If my experience is any indication, there are going to be a lot of developers moving to Avalon that are expected to create wonderful things w/o an artistic bone in their bodies. Somebody help!

Here.

May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT (08 May 2005 02:00:00 UTC)

East Campus Courtyard, MIT

42:21:36.025°N, 71:05:16.332°W

(42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees)

I can’t attend this year myself, but I’m definitely planning to go to this one and only convention some time in the future (I love that idea : ).

It wasn’t perfect, e.g. lots of the fun bits were gone and at least one sub-plot never got resolved, but I liked the new stuff, e.g. the motivation for the end of the movie and the romance. Bottom line: I laughed a lot. We did have a pretty decent local geek turn-out, so that made it even more fun, but it was a completely watchable movie and I’d definitely see it again.

First there was case-correction, now VB programmers in VS 2005 beta 2 get grayed out members in intellisense if they set their ClickOnce properties below FullTrust. Cool!

The brothers Sells and I will be attending the 7:35pm showing of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on Friday at the Evergreen theater at highway 26 at the 185th exit in Hillsboro. I plan on being at the theater around 7pm.

Everyone’s welcome to join us. I’ll buy the popcorn!

There is huge value in Robert Scoble publicly criticizing his employer’s CEO. The value is this: when the GM of VSTS says “ask me anything you want” concerning a recent pricing controversy, you can have confidence that Robert is going to ask the hard questions and push out the results as unedited as MS PR will let him get away with (I detected no edits in this piece). The world may not like the answers he digs out, but because Robert is risk-his-job honest, you have a high degree of confidence that what he says is the truth as he finds it.

Robert Scoble has become the Geraldo Rivera of technology reporting. Even if MS took away Robert’s camcorder, I expect O’Reilly, Fawcette, CNET, ServerSide, CodeProject or any of a number of other technology eyeball companies to hand it right back to him.