Snurb's blog

This just in - RDF and OWL Are W3C Recommendations (Slashdot). The discussion following the article contains a host of useful links for further reading, too.

My interest in this links to my research on gatewatching: increasingly we're seeing gatewatcher sites make use of RDF and semantic Web approaches to share their own content - and of course these technologies also help the process of gatewatching itself.

Starting to write lectures for the coming semester today - for my Creative Industries unit. Googling for convergence I found this OJR article which seems to do a pretty good job introducing the concepts surrounding it - of course I found this only after my unit reader went to print... Still good stuff, and I might include it in a later revision of the reader.

Andrew Murphie pointed out this Wired article on the fibreculture list - All the News That's Fit to Skewer. Puts a whole new spin on the idea of gatewatching... Andrew also mentions the work of Pierre Levy on collective intelligence - better read up on this, too.

OK, I've grabbed a new version of import.module from the Drupal CVS, which means that the newsfeeds should be fixed now - recently the Kuro5hin.org feed just wouldn't update any more. Let's hope that this didn't break the other feeds.

This also brought home the fact that Drupal is now up to version 4.3.x, while I'm still running on 4.1.

It's taken a while, but finally this site is directly accessible to outside users - so if you're reading this, welcome ! There have been any number of delays, and I would have liked to get this online earlier - but the lack of content for the general information pages meant that I didn't want to launch yet, and the delayed launch meant I didn't blog as regularly as I wanted to. Now I'll try and provide more frequent blog entries as the year progresses.

Haven't written for a while, but (because) much is going on. I'm currently preparing the 2003 fibreculture conference here in Brisbane, with a host of colleagues, and am also hoping to get in a grant proposal for a project I'm developing with my colleague Liz Ferrier at UQ.

No, this isn't about whether you'd rather be obliterated by the weapons of mass destruction of Dubya's evil empire or Kim's evil minnow. Rather, there's the start of an interesting series of articles about content management systems at the All-American Web Portals site (what a name). They're promising to look at a group of PHP-Nuke-style CMSs to compare their features.

Doing more work on my M/C Journal article for the 'fight' issue today. It was accepted for publication with some requests of further changes by the refeerees. One referee wondered about the impact of CD burning and filesharing on CD sales, so I did a bit more research and rediscovered a nice article at The Register which questions the RIAA's claims using its own figures.