Explore and Learn

I have been in the industry for a long time and still to this day wake up every morning wondering what new thing is being invented. This is my page dedicated to stuff I find that I think is interesting or cool.

Web 2.0 (The Semantic Web)

Mostly I just want to get this out of the way. Web 2.0 is part of the IT tradition of "the next big thing." In order for there to be a next big thing it has to have a new name. Web 2.0 was coined at the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. Web 2.0 can be defined as "the philosophy of mutually maximizing collective intelligence and added value for each participant by formalized and dynamic information sharing and creation."

Friend of a Friend

The general concept here is that you code relationships into your html tags. So instead of just having a link to my son's web site the tag would include a reference to the fact that he is my son. The knowledge can also be stored in a .rdf file in the root of a web site. The file is intended to be read by a friend of a friend spiders when crawling the website. We have a simple rdf file here. The project site is at http://www.foaf-project.org/ It would appear this project is somewhat in remission.

Zimbio

The concept behind Zimbio is to republish bogs into Wikizines - interactive magazines that anyone can create or edit. So, for example, I might have a blog entry about politics, a blog entry about sailing, and a blog entry about programming. These three entries would be sorted on the Zimbio site into three separate Wikizines. We upload our two blogs Roger J Jones Consulting and Reboot Racing to Zimbio. Some day we will find out if anyone cares!

Blog Search and Aggregation

We will be playing with this topic and spitting things out as we go along. For the moment let us note the following sites:

People Search and Reputation

What are Pipl, Spock, Wink and ZoomInfo? Why do you care?

These are people search engines designed to find you on the internet. In the case of Wink the search then takes you to intelius where for a mere $50.00 you can get a public record search of your targeted person. Once you get to intelius you can search for a person, you can search for a property, find a list of sex offenders in your neighborhood, and all sorts of other stuff. Of course they all cost money. Or, you can sign of for the reverse of all this, the service that monitors all the other reporting services and tells you if your reputation is in jeopardy.

This might be all well and good if the information was accurate. Of course some of it is and some of it is not. That is the num of the problem

Here is another interesting concept. Wink and Google have partnered. Do a Google search; get a Wink search at the same time.

Of course for those who desire to remain “connected” each of these services permits you to sign up and entry your own data so you will not be overlooked.

Here are the links – check yourself out:

http://pipl.com/
http://www.spock.com/ (Beta)
http://wink.com/
http://www.zoominfo.com/

And in case you want to go to a public records search directly:

http://www.intelius.com/