Blog Book Hybrid – Navigation Changes

Those who follow have noticed daily changes on The Book of W. I took the final step and overhauled the navigation on that tumblr based site.

The site is now a good mixture of a blog and a book. The starting page displays recent updates like in a blog, and navigation at the top opens pages like in a book.

Main thing was to add page tags to each post. Now I can control which blog post belongs to which book page. In a way, this is a misuse of tags but…

With tags, users can link and refer to a certain page easily and intuitively, like in a book. As you probably know, blog pages are something one can not link to because they change dynamically.

I removed timestamp of the posts: books don’t have dates under their chapter titles. I like to think the contents are not glued to a certain time period, they are valid also in years to come.

Some things to prepare for are:

• Sooner or later, as the page count increases, I will notice that the page numbering at the top will need some changes.
• The cover page contains a water related photo from Flickr;  for some reason it doesn’t load 100% of the time and displays only some white space. Then it doesn’t look that good. Anyway, it’s great to have a dynamic cover page. Although, sometimes, the photo is not that close to the subject matter.
• One of the worries is that users find themselves lost caused by the duplicate page concept: there are book page numbers and blog page numbers. This is something that needs to be addressed.

I’m pretty satisfied with the end result. Next task is to fill the blog book with top content.

Onion Joke That’s Not

Uncannily good prediction from The Onion archives, dated January, 2001.

The Guy Working At The Top of The Tallest Building

Have you heard about the guy working at the top of the tallest building?

On his office wall, he has a map of the world. There’s a knob on top of each country. On the spur of the moment, he turns knobs left and right. Rain pushes into the windows. Lights of the city low around him flicker as he slowly moves his gaze to another knob.

His telephone doesn’t ring.

As he turns the knobs, commands are sent down to the stories below for an army of his minions to execute. This country goes in the red, this into black. Rates of the currencies change. He releases a knob, goes to sit on his chair. Looks outside.

His companies have many names, his products are made from iron and binary digits. You wouldn’t recognize him on the street. An inverse Domino effect gathering all the money from the world, from your pockets, ends to where he stands.

He doesn’t play golf, he plays the world. After the deeds of the day are done, he enters the elevator, goes down, crosses the street, grabs the evening paper and silently goes into a taxi. Arrives to his home where his two kids and wife are already sleeping deep. In the night, his dreams are like the dreams of any other person.

Something Wet Is Out! Really Wet…

It’s quite natural for a guy nicknamed raindropper to create a book covering all aspects of water, don’t you think?

So, point your browser to The Book of W and start exploring. There will chapters and postings about science, business, arts, cultures and religions – all of course water-related.

It looks like a mish-mash of blog postings and book chapters. But there’s a simple, common theme underlining all of those – and it’s clear as water.

Radiohead – …

… Learnings from The “On How The Brain Functions” Experiment.

You, the web wanderer, are perhaps aware that a bit over one year ago I posted my research paper about theory of how the brain functions. I also built a blog around it so that you, the brain researcher, can comment it with witty references to tin-foil hats.

The current gain is zero remarks to tin-foil hats.

Seriously, though, I still stand behind the theory and see several strenghts in it. The question is: why I’m not building a working prototype as it only takes a few diodes, capacitors and coils to make it. Maybe it’s because I do not want to disturb the local neighbourhood with electromagnetic noise.  

And: I’d like to thank Joni Tuoreniemi and Paul Tudsbury for commenting it and creating conversation. Thank you!

Thoughts on OpenSocial API and Social Applications

This week, Google introduced OpenSocial API. It is a set of common interfaces for building social applications. Scobleizer’s blog post led me to more information about the OpenSocial API, here:

http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/

I watched the Campfire One video – almost from beginning to end - and browsed through some Developer’s Guide docs. I appreciate Google’s simple and straightforward, hands-on approach. They have not created a “Meta-Reference Application Framework for Interfaces of Social Network Applications” and dozens of new acronyms. Instead, they show working code and the classic “Hello World!”, written with a vanilla text editor.

Why are Google and other companies allocating resources to social media? The way I see it, that is because their main revenue streams come from advertisers. Social applications are filled with data of people’s activities, interests, daily patterns, schedules, locations, networks etc. This data provides juice for building highly targeted marketing systems, which in turn generate happy advertisers.

The more data people put into the system, the better the system will serve the people. It’s a win-win for us all, don’t you think?

W3C – Let’s Extend The A HREF Tag To Convey More Information

Sig’s posts on Thingamy and RDF triples inspired me to “put the verb” back to this interlinked mass of documents we call the Web. In a simplified way. 

Here’s the official W3C recommendation and specification of links: 

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html

If you go through it, you perhaps end up in the same conclusion with me: There’s no simple way to define a semantic relationship between web resources.

I propose that we extend the A HREF tag so that it carries more meaning with it. Let’s borrow the PREDICATE concept from RDF and add that to A HREF tag. 

Here’s an example. On nokia.com, there could be a link like this: 

<A HREF=”www.nseries.com” PRED=”produces, sells, markets”>Nseries</A>

So, what would we achieve with this? It would be a way to provide more precise information, more knowledge for the search engines, etc… We would be closer to the Internet Singularity. 

Introducing Deomo TV/HIFI Unit

You know the thing with home audio and video electronics these days: too many boxes, too many cables, hard to keep clean and in order. They are messy looking, you can not put those in to a modern living room.

We couldn’t find a solution in the market for our needs, so I (with my wife) designed a TV stand that solves our storage issues. I gave it a name Deomo.

Magic is in the mirror – you really have to see it to believe it. More pictures in Deomo.com – currently in Finnish only.

If you are interested in manufacturing/distributing/marketing it, drop me an email (tomi.itkonen@gmail.com).

[Update 10.9.2007] An additional pic added of Deomo TV stand:

Ridley Scott’s A Good Year – A Film of Sunshine, About Timing

After renting and watching scary Ils (Them) and uneasy Blood Diamond I decided to choose something more relaxing and better suited for my wife’s taste. So, Ridley Scott’s film A Good Year was perfect for getting into that sunny summer mood. (Raining outside, again). It was also interesting to see how versatile Ridley Scott is; light romantic comedy is a long step from Blade Runner and Alien. Of course, there are over 25 years between those sci-fi films and A Good Year.

In the film, the old snippet of wisdom was mentioned a couple of times. It roughly goes like this:

“What’s the most important thing in comedy?”

“Timing.”

And… 

“What’s the most important thing in buying and selling stocks?”

“Timing.”

Let’s expand that further. With perfect timing, can one achieve everything – be a master in all tasks? Do these work:

“What’s the most important thing in ice hockey?”

“Timing.”

“What’s the most important thing in dancing?”

“Timing.”

“What’s the most important thing in playing a piano?”

“Timing.”

“What’s the most important thing in playing poker?”

“Timing.” 

“What’s the most important thing in writing code?”

“Timing.”

“What’s the most important thing in marketing?”

“Timing.”

“What’s the most important thing in scientific research?”

“Timing.”

And finally the grand question: 

“What’s the most important thing in making love?”

“Timing.”

Et cetera. Some of the above do sound reasonable.

Semantic Web – Have You Seen It?

Some of you have already heard about W3C’s Semantic Web framework. Tim-Berners Lee, the inventor of the Web,  presented roadmap for Semantic Web in 1998.

The framework can be summarized as:

“The Semantic Web is a web of data.”

“The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects.”

Web today is about sharing documents, Semantic Web is about sharing and reusing data. If it gets the momentum, it will break the boundaries between applications, free the data from their silos. W3C provides a concrete example: my calendar application could - if I wanted – display my bank transactions from this week, and also the photos I’ve taken, day by day.

Some of the tools that the Semantic Web will be powered by are RDF, a knowledge modeling language, and SPARQL, a query language for RDF.

RDF is a method of describing data and resources formally so that they become accessible and understandable for software. Here’s a primer for it. Berners-Lee’s view is that the future lies in “programming at the RDF level”.  

Below is an example of a SPARQL query. It displays title and price for books that are priced below 30.5. 

PREFIX dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/>
PREFIX ns: <http://example.org/ns#>
SELECT ?title ?price
WHERE { ?x ns:price ?price .
  FILTER (?price < 30.5) .
  ?x dc:title ?title . }

On IBM’s developerWorks interview (28.7.2006), Berners-Lee gives his view on the status of Semantic Web:

“I hope the Semantic Web will take off so that the data basically all the data which is out there which you have access to, to the Web pages, will now be available as data so you can treat it as data. There will be lots of very exciting applications built on that.  And we’re starting to see that now, but it really is, you know, we’re seriously into the exponential growth of the Semantic Web right now, and that’s very exciting.”

Some questions arise in my mind:

Is the original Web - this Web here you’re using now - non-semantic?

Where’s the boundary between data and a document? If Semantic Web uses RDF documents, will it eventually fall to the same “trap” with the original Web?    

Considering the massive amount of data in the Web today, could it be somehow utilized and reused in building the Semantic Web?   

Is there a demo somewhere showing the power of Semantic Web?

Do we really need another query language with its own syntax – why not expand SQL or use English? Could this query be enough:

book title, book price, book price < 30.5