In an otherwise balanced article on Linux’s challenge to Windows, InformationWeek runs the following two charts:

Notice, however, that the Windows chart scales horizontally up to 80 while the Linux chart only manages to get its concerns up to 40.

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His Movable Type plugin found and removed 457 comment spams in my past 1,000 posts. It’s free, it’s easy, it’s nice lookin’. Gotta love that ol’ Web.

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I’m guest blogging at Corante Many2Many. E.g., I just posted something about why connected democracy is even better than participatory democracy. Feel free to swing on by, y’all.

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Here’s a fantastic new energy source that could just mean the end of our energy woes! (Thanks to Mike O’Dell for the link.)

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Pretend for the moment that Howard Dean wins the nomination. Who would be his most interesting choice for running mate? (Note: Reality need not impinge on this decision, although we should perhaps limit ourselves to living, non-fictitious human American citizens.)

John McCain? He’s a straight talkin’ kinda guy and he’s got the military hero vote sewn up.

Ross Perot? He’s a straight-talkin’ kinda guy and he’s got the vague and confused vote sewn up. Also, he’s shorter than Dean.

Al Franken? I’ve been reading Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them and he’s got my vote.

Martin Sheen? Best arrest record in America.

Oprah? Not just name recognition but single name recognition.

And my number one choice for Dean’s Fantasy VP:

Natalie Maines. She’s Dixie. She’s a Chick. What more could you want in a VP?

Separate thread: Which blogger would make the best VP?

Doc Searls? Elections are conversations, dude.

Chris Locke? He’s already mastered the “hiding in an undisclosed location” bit.

DBetsy Devine? She writes her own material, she wants to be PHP when she grows up, and “Dean and Devine” makes a hell of a bumpersticker.

Misbehaving? Why have just one VP when you can make history?

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David Isenberg wonders out loud if the FCC has already made up its mind how to regulate Voice over IP and is rushing it through with only a show of open public comment.

VoIP is a huge threat to the existing telcos. Guess which way the FCC will lean if left to itself?

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Shel Israel of Conferenza and ItSeemsToMe has started blogging with a piece praising the Gates Foundation and wondering why more people don’t think well of it.

Is it true that people don’t think well of the Foundation? Shel’s evidence is that the speaker at Pop!Tech from the Foundation wasn’t rated all that highly. I was at Pop!Tech and I rated her an 8 out of 10 not because I don’t like Gates or his Foundation but because I thought the presentation itself was good but not great.

I was initially skeptical about the Foundation but I’ve been mightily impressed with it ever since. So, of course I assume everyone else is, too. Ah, the Data Point of One. Welcome to the blogosphere, Shel!

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Ashley Benigno writes:

I’ve been thinking of ways of developing distributed collaborative projects and came up with the following idea: grid blogging – which I imagine as being a group of bloggers tackling a specific topic on a specific day/time.

The first grid blogging is set for December 1. It’s an interesting idea and it’ll be fun to see how the blogs then discuss the ideas they’ve plopped simultaneously into the blogosphere. But because the first topic is “brand,” I’m unlikely to participate in this particular one. (Now, if it were Stewart Brand, it’d be different.) [Thanks to Hanan Cohen for the link.]

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Shelley continues to write beautifully about the semantic web, as opposed to the Semantic Web.

The semantic web she describes is, to me, simply the Web. The Web’s links are (with rare exception) semantic, i.e., meaningful. That’s what makes the Web not an “information space” but a human place.

Liz has a useful list of bloggerini about Clay’s article.

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I’m about to agree with BurningBird (which I’m always happy to do since she’s right so damn often) but in a way that neither of us is going to find very satisfying.

IMO, she’s right to point out that something important has already begun:

My idea of semantic web is if I can look for a poem that uses a metaphor of bird as freedom, and get back poems that have bird as metaphor for freedom. But you know, I don’t have to go everywhere in the web to look for this — if I could just do this at something like poets.org, or among the poetry weblogs I know, I’d be content.

I don’t have to scour the complete world wide web today. I don’t have to get every interpretation of every poem that has ever used bird as metaphor today. I can start with a small group of people convinced that this is the way to go. And eventually, other poetry fans, and high school sophmores, will also see the benefit of doing a little bit of extra work when putting that poem online, aided and abetted by helpful tools. It’s from this tiny little acorn, big mother oaks grow.

Yes, over time we are developing schemas that make particular domains of discourse more useful, more searchable, more automatable. And, yes, over time we are hooking these together so that various domains can operate as something like a unified information space. We’re not just doing this on the Web. Without anyone declaring a new standard, business cards started including email addresses and even referring to phone numbers as V, F and C without a single piece of legislation declaring that we do so. And we map domains all the time also, as when I ask you what “C” means on your card, and I say “Aha! We call ours mobiles, not cell phones!”

So, if the semantic web means only that we’re learning to understand ourselves better on the Internet, or even that we often adopt similar terms and rhetoric, then, yes, the Web is constantly semantically webbing itself. And if the semantic web means that we are formally knitting together, in an ad hoc way, the various standards we’re adopting, then, yes, the web is semantically webbing itself.

But, I don’t think this is what most people mean by the Semantic Web. I think they have two other implications in mind.

First, they think that this semantic webbing process is going to continue until the Web is a single “information space.” But we’re not going to get close to that because ultimately the semantics of the Web is human language and understanding. And if we did get close, we’d pay a price for it: Repair manuals for aircraft are close to being a single information space because the manufacturers adopted a uniform DTD and a reduced language set. That’s how it’s done and it’s not what any of us want the Web to become. [Actually, I’m not sure they ever did adopt a uniform DTD.]

Second, the proponents of the Semantic Web aren’t simply cheering on the attempts to come up with useful domain-specific metadata standards (such as XBRL). We all like standards that help. But the supporters of the Semantic Web aren’t saying simply, “Standards are good!” They are suggesting that when these standards are put together, they will form something more than their parts. They will be machine readable and we will see marvels of automation. But history has shown us that it’s really hard to get domain-specific metadata to work together. Maybe this time it’ll happen. Maybe. But that it’s happened in this or that domain should not lead us to generalize about it happening generally.

So, I’m feeling whipsawed. Either the Semantic Web promises something grand and unifying and transformative or it refers to the growth of standards. If the former, it’s not just implausible, IMO, but is actually based on an overestimation of the ability and desirability of disambiguating language. If the latter, Shelley’s definitely right to lower-case it.

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