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Creating a Semiotic Web Through Enchanted Learning

The “inventor of the Internet,” Tim Berners-Lee, argues Google’s days ruling the web are numbered by claiming the future is a “semantic web” functional interface:

“Using the semantic web, you can build applications that are much
more powerful than anything on the regular web,” Mr Berners-Lee said.
“Imagine if two completely separate things — your bank statements and
your calendar — spoke the same language and could share information
with one another. You could drag one on top of the other and a whole
bunch of dots would appear showing you when you spent your money.

“If you still weren’t sure of where you
were when you made a particular transaction, you could then drag your
photo album on top of the calendar, and be reminded that you used your
credit card at the same time you were taking pictures of your kids at a
theme park. So you would know not to claim it as a tax deduction.

“It’s about creating a seamless web of all the data in your life.”

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Yale University Goes e-Book Crazy

In a delightful turn of events, Yale University decided to make large bits of its library holdings available as e-books and e-journals so students may more easily search for relevancy based on the actual text of books and journals instead of only by their abstracts or a publisher’s promotional blurp.

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Open Yale Courses Opens the Floodgates

Well, it happened: Yale University now offers free online courses for anyone interested in learning online.

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Protecting Children and Fighting Evil

In a recent article — Rise of Radical Religiosity in Representative Democracies — I argued that the purpose of the religious right and conservative politicians is to punish the humble majority by provocatively creating false fears:

Protecting Children and Fighting Evil — those are two topics where we are forced to surrender our civil liberties in the grand stretch of being good citizens — and governmental powers know this and exploit those two ideals for their own darker demands.  If you stand up and say, “Waitaminute!” you are branded a pornographer and an infidel. 

Children should not be imaged on the internet or allowed to surf without direct parental control until the age of majority.  What’s the rush?  Make friends in person first.  Practice your social skills with your family.  Create a place in reality for yourself first before going virtual.  Then, once you’ve learned to read people in person you can work on the harder task of “reading” them on the web. 

The web has become a series of insane cul-de-sacs where those with vested interests create their own truths outside of an unbended reality and they claw and scratch each other trying to prove they are right and the rest of the world is mad.  This is the path of the familiar the hate mongers with political ties.

Kids are too set on growing up too fast and the parents let them grow up and shoot away because it is the easier, selfish, path where they no longer wish to be bothered with a life that is not their own even though they, The Parents — in one of the original and native acts of “power labeling” — named their kids but failed to provide expectation.

Good people need to stand up against bad intentions and truly evil ideas that are conceived and bred in the fallow minority.

If we fail to fight unfair persecution in every instance, our morality is made shallow and our meekness in the face of The Wrong Thing begins to tragically define us, our neighbors, and our nation.

Web Cruelty 2.0 and the Myth of Kindness

I’ve written a lot about how cruelty has ruined Web 2.0:

Hate Mail and Spam
Why Do You Hide Your Identity?
Impulsive Web Rage
Anti-Social Networking
Sycophants in Rejection: Making Terroristic Threats

Continue reading → Web Cruelty 2.0 and the Myth of Kindness

Google Web History Knows Your Wants

We all know Google knows everything about us.

How do you feel about that fact?

If you are logged into your Google account, do you know you can have Google show you a Web History of all your Google searches?

It’s a little creepy. It tells you a lot. Google Web History is a newish feature that isn’t getting a lot of play yet.

Google can remember all your web searches and provide context and analysis of who you are and what you needed. Google Web History can provide a scary look back in time over the course of who you are and what your searches want. You need to be logged into your Google account in order for your Web History to be recorded.

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Making Your Web Server Crawl

Over the past six months I have increased the server capacity for this blog, and for my other sites, three times. The latest Media Temple upgrade happened last week but there were still moments even after the upgrade when this blog was spiking the server. When a server meets its capacity strange things happen and the “user experience” begins to slow down for everyone and that’s a Bad Thing.

Continue reading → Making Your Web Server Crawl