Social search now by Google

October 27, 2009 Leave a Comment

Google has just launched a new search service based on social data: Google Social Search. It works like this: if you have a Google profile, you can add the social networks you’re a member of (e.g. Twitter or FriendFeed). Then, when you do a Google search, you will also get results that have to do with your friends, like a post from a friend’s blog. Of course, if you don’t add this information to your Google profile, or if you are not logged into your Google account when you do a search, you won’t get any social results.

Here’s a demo video of this new service. You might notice that Google is quite concerned about privacy issues, reassuring us about the transparency of the service throughout the video:

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A tribute to GeoCities

October 26, 2009 Leave a Comment

As of today, GeoCities belongs to the past. After almost 15 years of offering free web space to anyone with “creative” ideas, GeoCities is no more. Yahoo! has decided to permanently terminate the service, as it was surpassed by the booming blogging and social networking sites.

Like many other internet users of my age, my very first web page was hosted on GeoCities. Half-coded in HTML and half in Frontpage, with lots of GIFs and different colours, my page was not very different from the rest of the GeoCities world! :D

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for your eyes!), I haven’t kept any of the early versions of my GeoCities page. I only managed to retrieve the last version, which is not too dreadful! Here’s what the home page used to look like:

Note: The monkey was “evolving” into a human sitting in front of a PC, through a home-made GIF :)

Goodbye GeoCities! We sure had a lot of fun together!

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Raw Data Now in the UK update

October 25, 2009 1 Comment

The implementation of Sir Tim’s “Raw Data Now” vision is well under way in the UK. UK government data are being released and the process is open for input from developers that may want to contribute. Open except from the fact that they have to join a closed Google group (a bit ironic don’t you think?).

Anyway, the data is now available in RDF and can be queried via SPARQL. You can find some useful examples of such queries from Leigh Dodds at the Talis blog. Happy querying! ;)

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What is an ontology anyway?

October 24, 2009 Leave a Comment

Chances are anyone who has come across the terms ‘Semantic Web’ or ‘Web 3.0′, has also come across the term ‘ontology’. But what is an ontology anyway? For philosophers it is the study of all existence (including God’s!).

Computer scientists though have a more practical view of an ontology.A recent article in the IT Professional magazine of the IEEE Computer Society examines what an ontology means for the Semantic Web:

An ontology is a method of representing items of knowledge (ideas, facts, things, whatever) in a way that defines the relationships and classifica- tions of concepts within a specified domain of knowledge. It’s this ability to define a variety of useful relationships among items of knowledge, and to implement these relationships in software, that make an ontology such a powerful gadget in the knowledge manager’s toolkit.

You can download the complete article from here.

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