Plaxo? Are you listening?  Keep doing what you’re doing, stay behind the scenes, work on enabling users to publish their own data, at will, in Semantic Standards as they become timely (now?) and stay independent of the little tug-of-war between closed, albeit increasingly API-enabled social apps.   You’re better than them!  Hang in there and you’ll be worth way more!  Don’t turn to the dark side!

Competition for traffic will get everyone using RDF and Microformats soon enough…  Semantics are like SEO 2.0… The next bandwagon everyone will want to pay way too much for.

Plaxo, you’re in the perfect spot to make money on this.  Think Virtual Private Networks, Semantic Publishing to the Web, and Semantic Productivity Tools at home.

Seriously.  

ankurb.info, or “Needlessly Messianic” has a solution for you.  Thanks, philanthropic wordpress community member!  

…Let’s all take a moment to realize the value in posting solutions to our own tech problems online, for the sake of the community, and if you’re a cynical bastard, for our own interests as traffic mongers in the Social Web…

I’m not going to quote the solution here.  Go read Ankur Banerjee’s blog and learn what to do with your MySQL Admin tools to fix yourself up.

What if you’re blogging on WordPress.com?  I am in the same boat.  No access to my database because I’m blogging for free here at wordpress.com.  

Here’s my response to Ankur’s post.

I agree that it sucks. No warning and then bam, one of your best navigational features is destroyed (categories listed at the bottoms of posts).

I just accidentally did this too, but I’m currently on a wordpress.com blog…

I really appreciate that you took the time to post this fix.

Unfortunately it wont help me. I’m trying to find a script or something to hack the wordpress.com export file ( WordPress eXtended RSS or WXR), so I can re-import it and have my categories back. Let me know if you know of anything.

Really, I think WP has made a few unwise decisions recently. The first was to insert automatically generated tags (based on users’ cat names) at the bottoms of our posts so when someone clicks on them, rather than seeing the posts by that blogger under that tag or category, the reader is taken to WP’s blog-surfing, technorati-like blog search results. I’m so disappointed, but I can’t move to my own hosting a for a month or two. In the meantime, My blog’s navigation is destroyed. So sad.

I’m determined to get one of my smart friends to help me with a script that will re-write the wordpress export file, turning the tags for each post back into categories, so I can re-import everything and be back where I was, back when I had functioning categories.  If you’re waiting for a solution to this problem, message me privately and I will let you know when I get it squared away.

You probably already knew about -word to 86 any sites containing a certain word from the results.

And there’s site: url 

And you may already know about Define: word to get a dictionary entry.

But there are tons of these things.  You can use Google as a calculator, you can search for text in specific HTML tags and much, much more.

A good place to find many of these (if not all of them) is at GoogleGuide.com  

One interesting example of this is using intitle: or inurl: to get addresses of security cameras that aren’t password-protected.  Since the software that comes with these things is left to the default settings and someone wasn’t savvy enough to password-protect the cameras when they were set up, you can actually go to these cameras and control them as if you were in charge of them.  You can peer into other places in the world in realtime thru the lenses of un-secure security cameras!  And move them about!

Here’s a myspace blog entry where this guy lists many examples of this.

Here are some example google queries from the post.

• google – inurl:”view/index.shtml” – Axis Network Camera
• google – SNC-RZ30 HOME – Sony network cam
• google – inurl:indexFrame.shtml Axis – Axis Video Server(cam)
• google – intitle:”Live View / – AXIS” – AXIS Video Live Camera
• google – intitle:”Live View / – AXIS” | inurl:view/view.sht – AXIS Video Live View
• google – intitle:”The AXIS 200 Home Page” – AXIS 200 Network Camera
• google – intitle:liveapplet inurl:LvAppl – Canon Network Camera
• google – intext:”MOBOTIX M1″ intext:”Open Menu” – Mobotix Network Camera
• google – intitle:”WJ-NT104 Main Page” Or inurl:”ViewerFrame?Mode=” – Panasonic Network Camera
• google – intitle:”QuickCamPro WebCam” inurl:webcam – QuickCamPro
• google – intitle:”SiteZAP WebCam Control” – SiteZAP WebCam

Rel=”me” is the equivalent of saying “The person represented by this URL is the same person as the person represented by this other URL.”  Taking that into consideration, imagine how this would effect the experience of searching the “Web of Documents.”  I argue that if enough of us implement rel=”me” (or other microformats or RDFa) in our HTML pages, we will empower the Googles and Yahoos to take advantage to knowledge expressed by this markup.  So let’s do it!  

Quotes from the Article I mentioned:

“…So assuming that you went through the trouble to write up your HTML with rel=me, what next, where is that information actually consumed. I don’t think the 2 most popular browsers (IE 7 and Firefox 2) at this time have native support for XFN, I hear Firefox 3 is suppose to have native microformat support but I haven’t looked for it and if it is there, it isn’t immediately obvious to me. The closest thing I can find is a Firefox plugin called Operator. Operator is a microformat capable reader and for the most part seems to be able to consume most of the above microformat standards except rel=me, kind of odd but kind of understandable…”

“…At this time, I can honestly say that XFN rel=me proliferation is limited and experimental at best. It would take a while for mass adoption to happen and requires a lot of user education, adoption by popular social sites like Facebook, MySpace, etc, and native browser support…”

I commented there and when I take the time to write a long comment out, that isn’t something I’ve already written in so many words here, I like to steal my own comment and put it here for anyone who reads my blog.  My response:

I felt like I had to chime in and point out that the point of MicroFormats or RDFa isn’t really to make an overnight change in how we use the Web. It’s to create a backbone of linked data so that as Search Engines and other “Libraries” begin to have stores of these relationships between documents and other resources available to work with, they can begin to improve their services. It will be nice when Search is only partly based on scanning for text-strings or combinations of words.

If you were looking for Andrew in Sebastopol, CA, how would you do it? Perhaps you’d google “Andrew Sebastopol CA…”
But what if you could specify that you are looking for a person?
What if you could specify geocoding info or otherwise specify that Sebastopol is a town in Northern California?
What if you could filter your results by the time web-pages were created or filter by domain specifications (like show me wiki articles first or show me all MySpace profiles) or filter by type of site like say, show me blogs only, and finally, and this is where rel=”me” comes in, what if you could specify in your search results that you want to see every other document that is an expression of the same person, once you have selected from your query, a person named Andrew who lives in Sebastopol, CA? This is what it’s all about. It works because links work backward. In other words, you can already say “show me all the pages that link to this thing…” but what about being able to say “show me all the pages linking to this Twitter page that link using rel=”me” or better yet, show me all the pages linked to with rel=”me” from any page that links to this twitter page with rel=”me” …And so on…

The Web is becoming a library. By adding microformats and other semantic markup to our documents, we are making it possible for decent “card-catalogues” to be built, whether they’re being built by google, yahoo! or the guy down the street.

“Just as citizens of a nation must be educated about their rights to ensure that they are protected and upheld, so too must those who compose words and music know the rights that support their own acts of creation. Without these rights, which directly emanate from the U.S. Constitution, many who dream of focusing their talents and energies on music creation would be economically unable to do so – an outcome that would diminish artistic expression today and for future generations. 

At this time, when so many forces are seeking to diminish copyright protections and devalue artistic expression, this Bill of Rights for Songwriters and Composers looks to clarify the entitlements that every music creator enjoys. 

1. We have the right to be compensated for the use of our creative works, and share in the revenues that they generate.
2. We have the right to license our works and control the ways in which they are used.
3. We have the right to withhold permission for uses of our works on artistic, economic or philosophical grounds.
4. We have the right to protect our creative works to the fullest extent of the law from all forms of piracy, theft and unauthorized use, which deprive us of our right to earn a living based on our creativity.
5. We have the right to choose when and where our creative works may be used for free.
6. We have the right to develop, document and distribute our works through new media channels – while retaining the right to a share in all associated profits.
7. We have the right to choose the organizations we want to represent us and to join our voices together to protect our rights and negotiate for the value of our music.
8. We have the right to earn compensation from all types of “performances,” including direct, live renditions as well as indirect recordings, broadcasts, digital streams and more.
9. We have the right to decline participation in business models that require us to relinquish all or part of our creative rights – or which do not respect our right to be compensated for our work.
10. We have the right to advocate for strong laws protecting our creative works, and demand that our government vigorously uphold and protect our rights.”

PodCast is HERE

I recommend Episode 7 

QUOTE:

We kick off episode 7 of the DataPortability: In-Motion Podcast with the news of the week that MySpace launched “Data Availability” with Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter. Following immediately on their heels was the announcement that Facebook is releasing “Facebook Connect”, an extension of their 3rd party API providing deeper access to their user’s data.

We’re also joined by Brady Brim-Deforest, founder of Human Global Media, talking about the DataPortability Legal Entity Taskforce. He provides a good overview and update on the process underway to formalize the the project under a recognized legal banner.

The featured interview segment is with Danny Ayers, Semantic Web Developer at Talis. He touches on moving from document linking, through microformats, to feature-rich RDF modeling to identify portable data. Contrary to popular belief, he dispels the myth that it’s hard to migrate from a standard SQL data representation into addressable semantic objects.

Danny regularly posts on the following sites:

• Talis: N2 Blog
• Talis: Nodalities Blog
• This Week’s Semantic Web
• DannyAyers.com
• DataPortability & Me Video

Also mentioned in the episode:

• Semantic Tech Conference (Danny is speaking)
• Talis: Semantic Platform
• Tim Berners-Lee’s Giant Global Graph post
• Tabulator data browser

Planet RDF

HERE’s an interview Paul Miller did with Peter Mika from Yahoo Research for the Talking With Talis Podcast.

OR

TORRENT IS HERE Please seed as long as you can.  No need to worry about the RIAA because this is totally legal.

If you want more information and future releases from The Golden Pastime send an email to 

golden pastime at g mail dot com 

and put “TGP MUSIC” in the subject.

Lots more music is on the way!

To TED

I love that you’re providing all of these stimulating and informative videos.  Thank you for that.  

But why did I just spend five minutes clicking around on ted.com, looking for a “Podcast” or “RSS” link?  

I was thinking “C’mon!  You MUST have a feed here somewhere!!”

Finally I decided to search the iTunes Music Store for TED… There it is!  WTF?  Why are you hiding your feed?

I’m so glad I found it. But you need to put a link somewhere on your site so people don’t waste their time looking for what’s not there.

Please?

-Andrew