All posts made the week commencing Sunday 31 Mar., 2002:

21:16, Saturday 6 Apr., 2002 Link

Pole vaulting.

21:14 Link

The Web's Weaver Looks Forward: Tim Berners-Lee talks up the Semantic Web, with a little more detail about the future than he usually gives. And this is an especially interesting insight: a future www "where, in general, you won't be able to expect to get an answer in finite time". We shouldn't expect everything to happen in realtime, and browsers shouldn't necessarily be constructed around it. That sort of hints at the desktop becoming a workspace that is a portal to the internet, which can asynchronously receive and broadcast information, populate itself in the background, maybe alert you when questions have been answered. (All of which sounds a lot like Dave Winer's Radio Userland platform with more than a little Instant Outlining thrown in. Damn. Maybe that Winer chap is onto something.)

Topic merge: Dave is hinting that the Userland products already work with the unreleased Google API.

21:02 Link

Oh! "Here at Google, we're about to start offering an API to our search-engine, so that people can programmatically use Google through a clean and clearly defined interface" [via Slashdot]. At a guess, this will neither be public nor free -- but it brings the possibility of a legal googlematic [IM bot to search Google] a little closer. Here's to the scriptable www.

Two other search engines of interest: Wisenut [interesting UI additions; smart search suggestions]; Teoma [clustering on the fly].

21:02 Link

Oh! "Here at Google, we're about to start offering an API to our search-engine, so that people can programmatically use Google through a clean and clearly defined interface" [via Slashdot]. At a guess, this will neither be public nor free -- but it brings the possibility of a legal googlematic [IM bot to search Google] a little closer. Here's to the scriptable www.

Two other search engines of interest: Wisenut [interesting UI additions; smart search suggestions]; Teoma [clustering on the fly].

18:05 Link

A wrong-number voicemail, as left for me earlier today: "hello kelly it's kylie. um. kimberley and... damn what's the name um shit what's the name, um i forgot the name, um, you know the one y'know ashley went out with. they're coming in to bow looking for you, so you know watch out. cheers. ring me when you get this message. cheers. bye" -- as said by a very young sounding girl.

What's that supposed to mean, "watch out"? Gangland warfare among prepubescents? Is there a hit out on Kelly? How does Kylie know? And that fact that she didn't get this message... maybe it was meant for me. Maybe I'm meant to follow it up, and it's related to the bag of documents left outside my house and the symbols carved into the pavement. Is Kelly my codename? And does Ashley know he's fraternising with the criminal underworld?

16:28 Link

I Know Where Bruce Lee Lives - the ultrainteractive KungFu-Remixer.

15:45 Link

A month from now I'll be off to the O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference, although I've not yet booked flights or anywhere to stay. I mean, what do people do when they're going to somewhere they don't know anything about? Do I need a car? Should I spend a week in San Francisco? Yosemite? Can I walk there from Santa Clara? (I know the answer to that one.) So: hotel recommendations gratefully received. And travel advice.

Do they have bears in Silicon Valley? Do I need to take a dart gun?

23:03, Tuesday 2 Apr. Link

Some of the things I see in the paper are just so mind-bogglingly fucking stupid I have to preserve them for posterity: No comment.