Leobard's blog

Joost is there, I got invites. As a personal favor to Libby and Dirk-Willem, I am happy to post their advertisment material:

You can also watch the promo video, that says it tells everything about Joos:

Promotion video

What’s Joost, Quicktime (9.79 MB)

My personal Experience:

They got many wakeboarding videos, what else do I need.

Talis, the company that recently hired Danny Ayers, has a fine and excellent collection of assorted Podcasts of interviews with Semantic Web aficiandos. The quality of the interviews is low, they are recorded via Skype. Nethertheless, you will hear many people remembering many stories about the semantic web.

here are the podcasts:
http://talk.talis.com/

for the impatient, feed your iPods this munchy url:
http://talk.talis.com/index.xml

Mary Czerwinsky and Victor Kaptelinin have edited a book about future desktop metaphors.
More you can find out via

• Amazon.com (link from Richard Boardman)
• The page about the book at MIT press

Here is what they say themselves, copy-pasted from the first chapter:

The objective of this book is to present and discuss new approaches to designing next-generation digital work environments. Currently the most pervasive computer systems, such as Microsoft Windows and Mac OS, are based on the desktop metaphor. For many users and designers, these are the only digital work environments they have ever known. It is all too easy to assume that the desktop metaphor will always determine our experience of computer systems. The present book challenges this assumption. Its point of departure is an understanding that desktop systems as we know them may well represent a temporary—if hugely successful—phase in the development of interactive environments. Future systems may further develop, modify, or even abandon the metaphor.

I can only add: for me, the Semantic Desktop is only the first step needed towards cyberspace! Lets make new metaphors! (as blogged before one two three times)

If you like Semantic Desktop, think about buying this book. For me, the reasons are threefold:

• First, I chatted with Mary Czerwinsky over a cup of coffe in Kaiserslautern, back in January 2005 and she said she is preparing a book on future desktop metaphors – aha! Nifty I am, I added a todo to my organizer to remind me a year later if the book is there – it was not, but I moved the todo to remind me in another year…
• Second, I recently tried to find out more about Richard Boardman, who is my secret hero for completing a PhD (btw: how could anyone ever ever finish a PhD?), and he blogged about the book, because he is in it. Reading his blog, it hit me: that is the book.
• Third, because my clever Diploma Thesis student Danish Nadeem has found the book and recommended it to me. That was another reminder saying: you should buy this book NOW

So, I had a todo-item in my organizer saying “buy the future desktop metaphors book from Mary”, which I today, after 17 months, can close. Three cheers to Mary Czerwinsky and Victor Kaptelinin for making it! Thanks for Danish to remind me.

See me speak at webinale 2007,

Where I give a talk about Semantic Desktop and how it connects to web 2.0 services and why the personal information model is the key to personalization.

Last weekend we had the fourth Semantic Desktop Hands-On Workshop, this time again in Berlin. There were about 25 participants from the whole world, people from various open source Semantic Web projects, employees of companies, interested friends, professional consultants, and semantic web evangelists. All were practioners, all anticipate using the semantic web.

Nothing could possibly go wrong, and it turned out to be a great success. We had three days of intensive discussions, code hacking, demos, talks, talks, talks, and a special social event on each day. At the end, everybody was just exhausted and we had a wrapup session in the Bebop-Bar, discussing about the future of the Semantic Web until 03:00.

Here is a small video I hacked together using photos from our semantic desktop hack flickr pool.

And here more pictures from this pool:

Matthew Magain blogged the roadmap for the Web 3.0:

this is a follow-up to my thoughts about the semantic web 2.0

Kudos to Michael Sintek for pointing me to this roadmap.

Davor from the Center for knowledge transfer in information technologies/Jozef Stefan Institute wrote an e-mail, pointing to the videos of the ISWC and ESWC conferences. This institution recorded all talks at these conferences and put them online, a valuable resource if you are interested in Semantic Web.

Here is their message:
The videos are online a few months now and we believe that you would be interested in seeing them. They are published on our new video-educational web portal which has more than 1900 educational videos, including various tutorials, workshops, interviews. We hope you will enjoy in your lecture and will browse our portal…

• your videography: http://videolectures.net/leo_sauermann/
• educational portal: http://videolectures.net
• iswc06 conference: http://videolectures.net/iswc06
• eswc06 conference: http://videolectures.net/eswc06

Marian Bantjes blogged a year ago about the art of heraldic banner design. First of all: I want such a banner, darn that I don’t carry my shield with me every day. Perhaps the back of my Laptop will also do. Second, this aint no bad way of annotation.

“…Corporate logos are most often completely meaningless, or they try to portray something quite complex without having a language to express it.

http://www.underconsideration.com/speakup/archives/002570.html

“Designing logos would be an act of science: careful symbology applied in, yes, a creative and pleasing manner, that tells the tale of mergers, takeovers and change of business. At least then it would all mean something. Anyone could look at a logo and read its history. Logo changes would indicate what had changed. And it wouldn’t matter if the CEO did or didn’t like green; wanted or didn’t want a dog; loved or hated the shape. Then at last, we could look at a new logo and understand, “Ah, a young telecommunications company with sales over $100 million/yr which has merged with a digital company and is transistioning into the entertainment industry. I see.”