Patrick Murray-John has been working tirelessly over the last month to realize an extremely exciting possibility for marrying the Semantic Web with WPMu, although this experiment is by no means limited to this application. What he has been doing is scraping the available data from the uber RSS feed of public blogs from the UMW Blogs Tags Site, and pulling it into a suite of semantic web tools provided by MIT’s Simile project (namely Exhibit and Timeline).

“Why?” you ask. Well Hondo, because these tools provide the means to visualize and connect the activity on UMW Blogs in new ways, check out the Timeline of UMW Blogs posts over the last two weeks here. Or look at how a tool like Exhibit provides interesting ways for creating a more comprehensive directory of users, tags, and posts (something WPMu just can’t do extensively). The alphabetized Bloggers Exhibit that has a weighted tag cloud for each letter of the alphabet which lists usernames, or take a peek at the Blogs Exhibit that does the same thing with Blog titles.

Moreover, we now have a way to collect all the images uploaded to UMW Blogs in one place, and a gallery of top ten lists for those blogs with the most images, audio files, or videos. What this means is we now have a series of alternative means for capturing and mnpulating dta for UMW Blogs that will allow us to search, discover, and make connections more easily than we could previously. We are at the beginnings of this experiment in some ways, yet in others we simply just have to style and re-theme the data accordingly and we are ready to unleash it on the UMW Blogs community to see how they use it and what value it brings to further build upon this already robust publishing platform. Is this what the trendy discussions about Web 3.0 is all about (besides the pervasive idea of cloud computing which is in many ways upon us)?  Finding ways to marry the power, ease, and usability of Web 2.0 tools with the promise of discoverability, visualization, and deep connections that the Semantic Web has promised? I guess we’re about to find out here at UMW.

Read/Write/Web reports on Rheingold's new project--the "Social Classroom." According to the story, it is "an open-source Drupal-based web service to teachers and students for the purpose of introducing social media into the classroom."

So, is this anything more that a Drupal distribution designed for learning and teaching? I think a lot of us who use Drupal-based sites already do that stuff. Perhaps I am missing something.

Abhay Parekh recently launched a new application, Flowgram, that those in the computers and writing crowd may want to check out. Think of it as Powerpoint-plus. An online screencasting program, Flowgram enables you to load URLs, images, and Powerpoints onto the web, to add layered audio, notes, and highlighting, and then to play the pages or to share them.

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See you all when I see you all.

Photo Credit: Alec Courosa - EduPunk Version 1 on Flickr

(and not this Hiatus for all you edupunks out there)

Technorati Tags: And that’s the way it was … and that’s the way it is … and it’s always changing … and it is always the same.

Weezer has a new video out:

If you recognize most of the references in this video you may be spending too much time on the internet. In case you just wish you spent more time on the internet here’s a list from the bastion of all things internet, Albino Black Sheep.

The best part happens here:

Because while you know that most of us got a good laugh from the the Crying Britney Spears Guy (not to mention the rest of the internet celebs) the fact is most of them (perhaps most of us) just needed a good hug. Here’s to hoping that the internet hasn’t turned us in to a society of dicks.

Of course there’s lots (and lots) of evidence to the contrary: