I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned yet that my Amazon wish list is up. Feel free to peruse, especially if you’re feeling charitable this holiday season toward, say, people whose software you use. As you can see, I have a definite scarcity of books about web design and open source.
Do you like reading about semantic wikis, but really wish you could hear me talking on the phone about them? Well, you’re in luck, because I’ll be speaking in the 3rd session of the semantic wiki “mini-series” of conference calls, on Thursday. The last two sessions, which happened over the last two months, covered the broader world of semantic wikis; this one focuses specifically on Semantic MediaWiki. Markus Krötzsch, the lead developer of SMW, will talk about the core of the technology, and I’ll talk about “Semantic Forms, Semantic Drilldown, Semantic Result Formats, Semantic Google Maps, Semantic Compound Queries and Data Transfer” (evidently, I get bored easily). There will also be people from the Ontoprise corporation presenting their contributions, and some other presenters. Each presentation will also have a real-time slide show on the web. You can see the presentation time and phone number here (it depends on where you live), plus other details, and a place to RSVP (you don’t need to RSVP to watch/listen, but it’s strongly recommended).
Thanks to Sergey Chernyshev, I got a chance to see Microsoft SharePoint for myself last week; he was nice enough to show me a lot of the interface. Or rather, what he demo’d one of the two applications referred to as “SharePoint” - it’s still a little confusing to me, but I believe what he showed me was Windows SharePoint Services, as opposed to “SharePoint Server”. That’s good, because I believe that’s the application usually referred to as a competitor for Semantic MediaWiki. Anyway, seeing the SharePoint I saw, I could certainly understand how comparisons were being made. Windows SharePoint is all about collaborative data - users can create their own page types, with each page containing a set of fields; once you’ve created a page, there’s an automatic form created to let everyone add or edit data. Finally, there are “views” one can create, which are the equivalent of SMW’s queries - you can filter a set of pages by some set of criteria, and decide how to display the pages; just as with SMW, you can make tables, calendars, etc.
SharePoint is really closer to something like a set of public Excel spreadsheets with macros for entering data, or sites like Dabble DB, than to Semantic MediaWiki; with the caveat that SharePoint allows for uploading external files in a manner similar to MediaWiki. There are a few key differences that I can see. First the strengths of SharePoint:
And the weaknesses:
Note that I’m just comparing the interfaces here - there are obviously huge differences in price, support, etc. etc., but I wanted to give my sense about the applications themselves.
1f94Jennifer Zaino at SemanticWeb.com was kind enough to interview me for an article about Referata and Semantic MediaWiki, and here it is: “Get Your MediaWiki Hosting Here”. I think it’s well-written and gives a nice overview of the site.
Karol quotes Radiohead in a way they probably wouldn’t approve of.
Wikimedia Foundation gets $890,000 grant to try to make editing of Wikipedia more user-friendly. Hm, I wonder if anyone’s come up with a way to make the editing of, say, templates easier? Worth some money, apparently.
Petitedov believes she’s found the Winter 2008 song. You heard it here first! Or second.
Owen Thomas of Valleywag says goodbye to the Web 2.0 “bubble that never inflated”. Well, the Facebook and YouTube guys did pretty well, though I don’t know how much they’ve actually been able to cash out yet.
Young Marble Giants performing “Colossal Youth” in 1980 - wow.