July 26, 2006

Annotating with markup in wikis

Danny intrigued me with a snip of SemWiki syntax. I had not realized it, but the Semantic MediaWiki project has made a lot of progress toward offering a rapid-fire means to annotate content.

Take a look at Help for Annotation Markup to understand how this works in MediaWiki.

Corrib.org also has some good ideas in SemWikiSyntax.

July 18, 2006

Comments on TBL's AAAI '06 Presenation / Q&A

This is an interesting but somewhat negative write-up from Nick Montfort of Grand Text Auto: Google’s Norvig Questions Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web.

A question from Andrew McCallum about using probabalistic approaches in the semweb is also discussed.

July 9, 2006

Diminishing Participation

Digg has become the avant-garde of American tech workers. However, there is emerging doubt that an application like Digg can withstand the destructive effects of... popularity.

A would-be Digg might consider granting diminishing voting power to new members along a semilogarithmic scale. This would generate an automated inner cadre of sorts, formalizing what naturally occurs in most organizations online and off. Granting fractional votes to the horde would not be fair, but it would preserve the basic reason why newcomers came to the party in the first place.

But what would the unintended consequences of this be? Would newcomers learn of this and not want to use the aggregate data generated by the community? Would that matter to the original participants?