Once one starts talking the talk, it becomes time to walk the walk.  And, so I have now done so.  I’ve added semantic Web capabilities to this blog site, AI3:::Adaptive Information.

I’ve done so via a suite of nifty tools:

• SIOC Exporter for WordPress.  The plugin files can be found at http://sw.deri.org/svn/sw/2005/08/sioc/wordpress/.  SIOC, which stands for Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities, is one of the standard RDF ontologies. The SIOC Exporter is extremely easy to install as a standard WordPress plugin; it took me less than five minutes to copy the two files and activate the system from within my blog administrator. SIOC Exporter was written by Uldis BojÄ rs and works with all WordPress versions above 1.5
• Okay, so that’s well and good, but what the heck does adding this plugin do? To see the RDF annotations provided by the SIOC Exporter plugin you can use the Semantic Radar extension to Mozilla/Firefox. Semantic Radar detects links to RDF metadata (via auto-discovery information) (naturally!) and displays a status bar icon at the lower right of the browser status bar. Semantic Radar is also very easy to install, only requiring a re-start of the browser. The icon appears when RDF data is detected; clicking on the icon will allow you to browse SIOC RDF data (see below), as well as FOAF and DOAP metadata.  Semantic Radar was also written by Uldis BojÄ rs
• The presence of Semantic Radar provides another new feature, which is to ping the Semantic Web Ping Service when metadata are detected. This allows for a community based discovery of the Semantic Web data.  The Semantic Web Ping Service was written by Frà ©dà ©rick Giasson.  The purposes of the service are to notify that a new semantic web document
  has been published on the Web, to archive its location, and to give its
  location to other web services.

After these simple installations, I now had the SIOC icon for the Semantic Radar detector on my browser and my site was generating SIOC data due to the SIOC Exporter.  Clicking on that icon brought up the SIOC browser, which provides an entry for the blog as a whole and all posts listed on the main page:

One of the SIOC browser links, among other options, enables you to review validated RDF using the W3C service.  Here is what my triples looked like:

And, as noted above, the viewing of this data also pinged the Semantic Web Ping Service, which now showed my entries under both the SIOC and FOAF categories:

All of this was extremely easy to implement. My next phase in using such tools is to expand the breadth of the subject ontologies to parse against my blog site and to discover information extractors or metadata generators that create those attributes on the fly. Stay tuned!

Well, my blog has just celebrated its official one year birthday.  Happy Birthday, AI3!

In the past year I’ve posted a new entry about every three days (128 total) and about half have a user comment.  The posts have been placed into 16 different categories.  My posts tend to be much, much longer than a "standard" blog in keeping with my intent to have this site be an early release point for substantive musings and research.  In that regard, I rate the site a high success, but it does come at a bit of a cost in packaging what had normally been my own internal drafts.

My Pro Blogging Guide has been very popular, with about 10,000 downloads from various venues (including about 2,500 from this site). The site is ranked about 100,000 in popularity on Technorati, pretty remarkable given its narrow and targeted focus.  Thanks!

I find that my posts tend to very episodic.  Fortunately, I post when my natural work flow and research dictates.  I have certainly read about "blogging burnout" quite a bit in the past year.  I suspect that blog authors who see themselves as needing to fufill popular expectations or to build audiences feel such pressures.  I just dawdle along, with my own weird musings and according to my own weird muses.

What’s Coming

I am very excited about the pending release of my semantic Web expert’s reference portal, SWISHer.  It is done and presently resides in the background; I am just working out some publicaton and blog integration details.  Stay tuned!  For those of you in this space, I think you will find its 200,000 or so definitive articles an invaluable reference library.

Other than SWISHer, I expect more of the same from the AI3 blog in the coming year:  a few, long posts per week, most of a research nature or based on analysis, with an occasional PDF or white paper summarizing an active research topic or series of posts.

I’d like to thank you for taking the occasional time to look at my stuff.  I again invite all of you to comment and interact as much as you’d like.

I don’t generally rant on this blog, but after having just about puked on too many Web 2.0 references, I’m now choking on new Web 3.0 references.  (For those not in the know, Web 3.0 is the "real" semantic Web stuff, while Web 2.0 is that oh-so tired tagging and mashup shit.)

Well, the escalation now appears clear.  We’re now seeing a proliferation of Web 3.0 posts today in order to set some distinctions.  Don’t like 3.0, not enough horsepower?  How about I see that and raise you to 4.0?  But why end there?  After all, high school was terribly fun and clever. . . .   

So, the heck with it.  I decided to jump right to the jugular:

Hey, ninety eight point six, it’s good to have you back again. oh,
Hey, ninety eight point six, her lovin’ is the medicine that
saaaved me,
Oh, I love my baby.

It’s so cool to be on the cutting edge . . . .

In an earlier posting I had some fun with the Website as a Graph utility where you can enter a Web address and the system provides a visual analysis of that individual Web page (not an overall view of the site).  Friends, family, indeed, the entire Web, has been having some fun with this one.

Before I let this toy go, I decided to do some comparative stuff (and some image animation, a relic of the not too distant past).  So, the image below shows my blog at the time of its release about 1 year ago (a single post), and then the structure of this page about one week ago and then yesterday.  What a difference a week (or day) makes!  So here are these changes for my blog site:

An incredibly fascinating visualization tool by Sala on the Aharef blog is called the Website as a Graph.  This posting links to the actual entry site where you can enter a Web address and the system provides a visual analysis of that individual Web page (not an overall view of the site).  The color coding applied is:

blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Here is the figure that is created based on my blog site:

Here is the figure from the BrightPlanet Web site:

Here is the figure from a new BrightPlanet Web site design, not yet publicly released:

Here is the figure from the CompletePlanet Web site. Note it uses the Deep Query Manager Publisher module:

Here is the figure from BrightPlanet’s Web and graphics design firm, Paulsen Marketing Communications, which is also a founder of the company. PMC uses a Flash design that does not render well with the applet:

And, finally, here is the figure from the QueryHorse equine search portal, built with the DQM Publisher:

These graphs are mostly fun, and are the number one tag currently on the Flickr site as "websitesasgraphs".  You can see hundreds of examples there.  These graphs do indicate whether sites depend on tables or /div tags, use of images, complexity and the like.  But, mostly they are fun, and perhaps even art.