KF on the blog as narrative archive. The irony of linking this in such a narrative-free month (/year) hasn’t escaped me.

Why all that warm water is sitting in the Gulf. I’m not looking forward to this winter.

Tim Berners-Lee spoke on the Semantic Web at Edinburgh University last night. I last saw him in Toronto in 1999. That time, he was a tiny dot in the distance in a huge theatre at WWW8;* this time, I was down in the front row—because no-one else sat there—a few feet away. A geekish thrill, perhaps, but still exciting. This was a better talk; I liked his underground map showing how a web of RDF resources would join up related pieces of information. Got me wondering how all this might end up working with folksonomy. Maybe not so well: it’s one thing to build an RDF converter on top of a database of automatically generated scientific or weather data, another to ask Flickr users to tag every image with dozens of appropriate URIs. We need digital cameras with built-in GPS to tag photographs with latitude and longitude as easily as time and date.

Read More · 23 September 2005 · Net Culture

Methuselah

Methuselah boasted, “My dears,
I’ve confirmed all my enemies’ fears:
I’ve neglected to die,
And so celebrate my
Bicentenary—200 years!”

Read More · 14 September 2005 · · Whatever

Simon Schama on Bush. The Berliner Guardian is an impressive redesign, by the way.

MeFi on Katrina. These are the threads I was glued to all last week... The approaching storm. The storm itself. Drowning New Orleans. Shoe-shopping. “It doesn’t make sense to me.” Ray Nagin lays it down. FEMA Director Mike Brown’s prior job. Convoy on the go. Cast out the wicked. Laying blame. Red Cross told to stay out. “The cavalry is coming.” How many victims forgotten? First-hand stories. More survivors. Most of the links of note are in there somewhere, like the Interdictor, the key Nagin interview and the heart-breaking Broussard interview. The New York Times has a good round-up of the week—see it now before it slips into the archives, along with this display of prescience. Ed’s post of a first-hand email account is just one of the hundreds of stories emerging online that deserve to be read... as is this story from some paramedics.

August 2005