MashMaker — Intel entering Semantic Web"through the back door" ?
That’s at least the way they put it. As I unfortunately have not yet been able to make it among the lucky ones, who get the first bunches of early-adopter tickets for Intel’s MashMaker, I have to stick with the documentation when it comes to figuring out the details:
In order to bring mash-up creation to "the rest of us", the service provides you a toolbar for Firefox 2+ (with other versions still to come) which brings pre-programmed access to service APIs like Google Maps or Yahoo! Search with it. Whenever you then visit a webpage and choose a mash-up kind from the toolbar’s menu or simply push one of the buttons for the more popular services, the program trys to relate and mash-up the (optionally selected) webpage content with popular web services of choice.
And while the toolbar software seems to make use of semantic web content extraction more in the sense search engines do it, obviously users are enabled to share with others if they are being happy with the automated processing results and especially if they could successful use the mashup they created. So you can annotate and refine the results lateron and in return the MashMaker server will lern about web pages’ content and start soon proposing suitable mash-ups by itself.
While it currently still looks a bit like messing up DabbleDB and de.icio.us, it may indeed have a real semanti RDF based backend, making sure, it won’t mess with its databases either (which has not yet been confirmed) 
. Nevertheless MashMaker finally seems to be a really powerful new tool for collaborative webpage annotation.
Trying out my Nokia 770 Internet-Tablet (Developer Device)
When I finally received my Nokia 770 Internet Tablet some weeks ago I was very excited about it, since it will be the first mobile client device for our SemaWorx Project.
Our context-sensitive backend-interaction already works pretty well with PCs, so now it’s time to try out some smaller clients. If the N 770 works well, hopefully a couple of cellphones will be next.
About the 770 itself: No, its certaily not slow as the first press feedback assumed, but it’s just as fast as most other PDAs. The preinstalled Webbrowser (the OS is linux-based, so you will be able to install a broad range of apps yourself soon) seems to be an Opera for Linux, the e-mail software comes with support for encryption and signature certificates and IMAP4 for comfortable, server-based e-mail handling.
There have been theoretically two ways to go online with the Nokia 770: Wi-Fi (b/g) or via Bluetooth Dial-Up. Unfortunately the current Bluetooth software only dials up via mobile phones but not via common household access points. So Wi-Fi access is much more convenient, though activating encryption is somewhat ponderous.
This is what leaves you hoping for the promised firmware upgrade early next year which will hopefully not only include some fixes for its mediaplayer but also some sort of scheduling software which is missing by now.
Something to praise: Although Nokia published a battery life of only three hours, I have to admit I had almost no chance to get it empty within less than three DAYS. Clearly enough time to find a place for recharge.
I’m also a fan of the handwriting recognition software: Right after teaching it the often strange looking of the characters I produce i t did an amazing job on their transfer to plain text.
I’m really looking forward to what the maemo.org community has saved us for the next upgrade…
Deutsche Version von „Trying out my Nokia 770 Internet-Tablet (Developer Device)”…
FLOCKing to the Future
Last Wednesday I – as many others, I assume – read about FLOCK for the first time on TechCrunch: It’s a new Firefox-Clone with built-in Social Networking.
So if you’ve been annoyed by using half a dozen of apps and web services, until you finally get your thoughts on your blog, the photographs on Flickr and the new bookmarks on del.icio.us (proper tagging goes without saying here… ), this new program may have been built for you.
Although their FAQ say, that FLOCK originally had been intended to be released as a set of extensions for the "common" Firefox, it obviously turned out that it would need too big efforts to get it all work together properly, so that its developers decided to release it as a separate app.
Despite its current beta state, most of the intended functionality seems to work quite properly and I had quite some fun trying it all out.
It is said, that this could be an early predecessor of future Web 2.0 browsing apps.
Serverside a readily hosted WordPress-Blog seems to be the appropriate counterpart.
Maybe this could also be a way for future deployment and interaction with our SemaWorx services. I’ll have to take some time to think about this option…
Deutsche Version von „FLOCKing to the Future”…
