Last week a mail came through the NEPOMUK mailinglist, positive feedback. I am happy to copy it here - because it programmers like the KDE guys appreciate positive feedback, usually only angry people bother writing mails:
I've been playing around with Nepomuk and his cousins since the early
days. Posted to forums about setting up virtuoso when it was
introduced. I just wanted to make everything KDE to work properly; it
wasn't like there was an major, urgent need for search.

Today I went looking for a file using search in Dolphin. Things have
come a long way with search. Fast and accurate. I found what I was
looking for with ease.

Thank you all so much for what you've contributed.

(p.s.: I don't copy the name of the submitter, as I don't know if he would appreciate it. If you are curious, check the mail archives)

Live Matrix, What's When on the Web

It's a tv guide for the Web. Neat. If you want to replace the telly with shows to watch on the web, this is the way to get to know what is running tonight. In their own words:
Live Matrix is the first guide to live and upcoming scheduled events on the Web. We link you to anything that has a start time and can be attended online: audio and video webcasts, live chats, limited-time sales and auctions, conferences, product launches, games and contests, events in virtual worlds, and much more.

Live Matrix was created by Nova Spivack and Sanjay Reddy. I recently met Nova in San Francisco shortly before beta launch and it didn't take long to convince me that LiveMatrix is great. I will watch it tonight.

In a recent newsletter, they shared details how to import data into Live Matrix. There is the old-school web form, CSV uploads, and - alas - a way to specify feed URLs to be crawled by Live Matrix.

Read the LM_Event_Providers_White_Paper.pdf for the XML format specification.

as an old RDF/XML guy, I cannot hesitate to comment on the chosen XML format by livematrix:

<events>
<event>
<link><![CDATA[http://google.com]]></link>
<title><![CDATA[title]]></title>
<start_date>2010-01-01 15:20</start_date>
<!-- Leo misses a    "T"     between date and time. -->
<duration>1:30</duration>
<end_date>2010-01-01 19:30</end_date>
<description><![CDATA[this is the description]]></description>
<time_zone>GMT-9</time_zone>

So they "nearly" reused a standard (ISO dates, RDF, Atom) but like Facebook chose to "simplify" it. Alas, I would say "as long as you give a sample to copy/paste, you can include as many xml:ns declarations as you want in the top" but it seems this view is not shared with everyone.

In the document they say that they also support ATOM and RSS, so I guess if you already have an RDF or other stream with live data on the web, Live Matrix will be happy to include it.

At Gnowsis, we are looking for a new name for our personal semantic assistant. Currently we call it Cluug, but now it´s your turn to make it better!

• The submitter of the new product name preferred by Gnowsis gets € 300 and a flight to Vienna in summer 2011.
• The submitter who gets the most user votes will also get € 200 – so go and share your idea!

Here it is:
http://cluug.uservoice.com/forums/77753-naming-competition

of course, you can also vote on facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/gnowsis/105426213178?v=app_46468144668

Do you spend a lot of time reading email? Google priority inbox is there to help. It sorts your email inbox into "important" and "everything else" based on old messages.

Here is a lifehacker article on it.

Thx to Rick Boardman for telling me.

Like four years ago, on the 8th August 2006, I ask the question:

Ok, who from the Semantic Web guys and girls is going to Burning Man this year?

I am too busy preparing my art project "God Sees" to do all the semantic web querying - last time Dan Brickley connected me to Tom Longson. This resulted in this photo


and a fucking awesome video where we explain semantic web to Mad Max (watch or skip to the end!):


and greetings to Dan Brickley:


this time I await more answers! Semantic Web and Burning Man have grown.

You go to Burning Man?
please contact me via Facebook or my email adresses,

• Look for "leobard" and "Leo Sauermann" in "The Playa Directory".
• Our camp is around Baghdad and 5:30.
• Also look for the balloon going up and down saying "God Sees". Thats our art project.

Btw: We have 2 beds in our RV for rent. Its a fair deal sharing costs, but you may need to adjust your travel plans. If you want cosy RV space, contact me.

You are not going to Burning Man but now you want? Do it. Don't move it to next year (although, 3 weeks before the event, thats usually too late to organize everything, but anyway, next year you may be dead and talking to your maker - if that happens - only Jesus can save you - so- logic or not - be there once in your life).

This is gonna be great, I know it will, as I was there 2006 (click for one line report) and 2008 on Nowhere in Spain. I love you all!