Blev tilbudt noget at drikke pâ avisruten i går den 4-juli-2012.
Mand: “vil du have noget at drikke?”
Mig: “jo tak” (manden rækker mig en dåse Coca-Cola)
Mig: “der er jo også noget at fejre”
Kvinde: “nå, er der det?”
Mig: “ja, man har opdaget Higgs bosonen”
Kvinde: “det kender vi ikke noget til”
Copenhagen Skeptics in the Pub – Lone Frank: Når Naturen bliver Gud
Time: 10 August · 19:00 – 22:00
Location: Ørsted Ølbar – Nørre Farimagsgade 13, 1364 København K
Created by: Copenhagen Skeptics in the Pub
Drik mindst otte glas vand om dagen. Forebyg forkølelse med naturligt echinacea, og reparer dine hårdt prøvede celler med naturlige antioxidanter.
Naturligt er godt. Eller er det? Hvordan kan det være, at medicinalfirmaernes oprensede, statskontrollerede og efterprøvede produkter vækker mistillid, mens selvbestaltet “naturmedicin” uden dokumentation anses for sikkert?
#Ohøj:@Universe #define #title:”Copenhagen Skeptics in the Pub – Lone Frank: Når Naturen bliver Gud” #copSKEP #GRL:https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=259454364068100 (twitter)
#Ohøj:@Universe #define #title:”Copenhagen Skeptics in the Pub” #copSKEP #GRL:https://www.facebook.com/pages/Copenhagen-Skeptics-in-the-Pub/196123913753761 (twitter)
Myten om hvor meget (vand) man skal drikke http://www.kontinens.dk/page/231/ #copSKEP (twitter)
http://www.google.dk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=man+skal+drikke+meget+vand #copSKEP (twitter)
Antioxydanter http://www.google.dk/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=antioxidanter #copSKEP (twitter)
Vitaminer http://www.google.dk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=vitaminer #copSKEP (twitter)
Multivitaminer – lad være siger Lone Frank – men tag D-vitaminer når der er mangel – ellers ikke http://www.google.dk/search?q=vitaminer #copSKEP (twitter)
echinacea solhat http://www.google.dk/search?q=echinacea+solhat #copSKEP (twitter)
ayurvedic medicine http://www.google.dk/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=ayurvedic+medicine #copSKEP (twitter)
hømeopati http://www.google.dk/search?q=h%C3%B8meopati #copSKEP
men MIN SEO er bedre end DIN SEO #copSKEP (twitter)
The #Weddar in Ørsted Ølbar is…surprisingly mild #copSKEP (twitter)
Q:Hvad med B-vitaminer? er det også noget man skal passe på med? #copSKEP (twitter)
@Mi_Islay Broccoli? Jow god idé, men er det ikke for “naturligt”? (twitter)
Sry…There’s no s in community
(twitter)
Copenhagen Skeptics in the Pub – Lone Frank: Når Naturen bliver Gud var rigtig fint – I found God ♥ (facebook)
IKKE det femte element/den femte gradbøjning: God Bedre Bedst Ornli’ Naturli’
.@kmdk @Palnatoke @peterbrodersen tak i lige måde – efterlod d’herrer og damer i en “røgfyldt brun pose”, og dansede videre <3 #copSKEP (twitter)
twitter-søgninger dør efter et par uger #copSKEP – må se at få sat noget aggregering op 
Næste arrangement i “Copenhagen Skeptics in the Pub” (facebook link) – “Copenhagen Skeptics in the Pub – Lone Frank: Når Naturen bliver Gud” (facebook link) lyder jo spændende, men jeg har jo ry for at være religiøs…OK, Kristjan siger jeg godt må “lege” med alligevel
Ateister har det jo med at sætte lighedstegn mellem tro og Gud – det har ikke-ateister jo også…hmm godt man er en slags Buddhist
Der ER jo også mange lighedspunkter mellem sjælesørger og “psyk*-protokollen” – etymologien er i hvertfald ikke til at tage fejl af – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#Etymology.
Tror vi har fundet et diskussionsemne til arrangementet, selv om det nok er for oplagt, og betændt. Altså “psyk*-protokollen” er jo nok det felt hvor den moderne videnskab har den største formidlings-udfordring efter “sjælen” har holdt “flyttedag” væk fra hjertet, i de flestes vestlige menneskers bevidsthed.
Min egen erfaring er at psykofarmaka da virker, og det mest potente jeg har været bruger af, Li+, virker skam, ingen ved dog tilsyneladende hvorfor.
Kan leve med at vi finder Gud, og at jeg, modsat ham her:
stadig er her.
Antager i øvrigt at det er videnskabens synspunkt at det vores kultur hidtil har kaldt “sjælen” kan forklares med “kemi” eller i hvertfald “videnskab” – igen sikkert et for oplagt og betændt emne.
Nå, mange af de “religiøse” er i mellemtiden flyttet andre steder hen, såsom CERN, der kan de jo finde fælles fodslag: “OH DEEP THOUGHT WHAT IS THE ANSWER…” – det kunne jeg godt tænke mig at høre Lone Franks tanker om.
Den 30-November-2010, og for andet år i træk lykkedes det WEMIND at få stablet en Københavnsk TEDx begivenhed på benene, og det skal de have en stor tak for. Selve begivenheden foregik i “Pressen”, det tidligere avistrykkeri under Politikens Hus.
Jeg elsker viden, ideer og folk der virkelig brænder for det de gør, så TEDx ville jeg under ingen omstændigheder gå glip af.
TED er et globalt fænomæn hvor inivterede talere får 18 minutter til at dele deres ideer og passioner. TEDs kredo er “ideer der fortjener at blive udbredt” – “ideas worth spreading” – hvorvidt vi blev præsenteret for det tirsdag i “Pressen” undersøger jeg nedenfor.
Forstå dit biom
Det er en rigtig god idé at forstå at bakterierne er vore venner, eller måske rettere at vi skal forstå dem, og stræbe efter balance, det fortalte Professor Morten Sommer os om – det hedder tilsyneladende “biomet”. At dette er et højaktuelt emne er blevet understeget af NASAs annoncering af at der er opdaget liv på jorden, baterier, der har en helt anden biologi end vi har observeret tidligere, vi ved stadig ikke ret meget og bakterier.
Mod det uendelige univers
Jeg har altid synes at det er en god idé at udforske rummet, og at prøve at sigte efter det gennem open source tankegang, var det Kristian von Bengtson fra Copenhagen Suborbitals prøver at gøre, der kan være optakt til en gentagelse af 20ernes tyske “Raketenrummel”, og tænk hvis rumfartsprogrammet havde været “open source” fra 30erne og fremad, så var vi nok nået længere i dag. Og så skal man huske at filmen om Wernher von Braun hed “He aimed for the stars” (“but sometimes he hit London” blev det tilføjet) – raketteknologi har en skyggeside, det virker dog som om de civile programmer har fundet en fornuftig symbiose med myndighederne, det vigtigste for mig er “open source” tilgangen, noget der er i stærk kontrast til millitæret og vel også til Burt Rutans SpaceShip One/Two/White Knight.
1-2-3-4 GLÆDE!
Arbejdsglæde er også en god idé, noget der virker, og det blev demonstreret helt lavpraktisk 1-2-3-4 og vi var klar til at omfavne hinanden, tak til Alexander Kjerulf. Mine tanker gik til en kollega, der netop altid siger god morgen når jeg møder, og hvor glad jeg er for at hun gør det.
Vi er smukke
Lone Frank synes at vi skal dele vores smukke genom, og det synes jeg er en god idé, fordi det kan være med til at få os til at forstå vores samhørighed, og at vores genom er del af en flydende “strøm”. Den “personlige genom” revolution er lige om hjørnet, fortalte Lone Frank, jeg vil dog næppe bruge 6.000 kr. på det, og jeg kan ikke se hvorfor det ville være interessant for mig, så jeg vil nok holde mig på sidelinjen i denne revolution, men det er ihvertfald dybt fascinerende, og egentlig er jeg tilhænger af at man laver samfundstjeneste for Big Brother, noget jeg har gjort de sidste 3-4 år gennem sociale medier, det er i hvertfald at foretrække at vi “deler” frivilligt fremfor at det sker gennem ufrivillig overvågning.
Han HAR tøj på!
Martin Fernando Jakobsen vil have pladespillere i verdens flygtningelejre, og det er en god idé, jeg elskede også hans ydmyghed, jeg mener bestemt IKKE projektet er udtryk for “Kejserens nye klæder”, og man kunne se at de unge elskede det. Fik ikke fat i om musikken de unge producerer bliver udgivet, men det håber jeg.
Lad bjerget komme til Muhammad
Kaspar Colling Nielsen & Mik Thobo-Carlsen talte om den fuldstændig vilde idé, at bygge et 3.500m højt bjerg, Mount Copenhagen – eller “Rasmus Bjerg” som jeg synes det skulle hedde, udenfor København. Det er nok ikke en god idé at gennemføre det, men det er en rigtig god idé at tænke så vildt, jeg er overbevist om det er et projekt der rent faktisk er muligt at gennemføre, og jeg synes menneskeheden mangler superliga projekter som disse.
Min idé: “THAT is NOT a moon/to boldly go”
Hvis jeg skulle foreslå et projekt så ville det være at vi byggede en “Livsstjerne”, en rumstation gerne på størrelse med en måne, selv om mindre da også kan gøre det. Et projekt vi alle, under ledelse af Copenhagen Suborbitals og Mount Copenhagen, kan samarbejde om. Oplyst af arbejdsglæde bygger vi “Livsstjernen”, og lad os fylde den med vores smukke genomer, musik og kunst. Der bliver plads til alle, også til bakterierne, og det gælder også de arsen-baserede.
At det ikke er så langt ude som det lyder til, understreges af at der for tiden er en indsamlig på nettet der går ud på at købe en kommunikationssatellit – Buy This Satelitte, i skrivende stund er der indsamlet over $23.000 ud af det første mål på $150.000, hvis tempoet holder, så er det mål nået om 14 dage.
Ideer der fortjener udbredelse? Ja, det synes jeg! Se alle videoerne på http://video.tedxcopenhagen.com
That we DO know better gives me Hope(nhagen)
Originally uploaded by Kim Bach
This is my contribution for Blog Action Day 2009 – Climate Change BAD09 #BAD09
March the 24th 2009 is Ada Lovelace Day, the brainchild of Suw Charman-Anderson. Suw pledged to write a blog-post about a woman in tech that she admired, if at least 1,000 would make the same pledge, and since I’ve admired and been fascinated by Ada Lovelace since childhood, and especially after I read the wonderful book The Difference Engine, so I embraced the project, but at the same time I knew that it would be difficult for me to find just a woman in tech that I admire, that is because the list is long, and I’m happy to say that it’s actually getting longer.
In the end it turned out to be quite simple to name one single woman in “tech” that I admire, a woman that I’ve admired for 2,5 years since I met her at the wonderful BlogForum 2 – an initiative that we really need to revive – and almost did at Copenhagen Twitterfestival.
Since 2006 the woman I have in mind has become quite the celebrity, due to her uncompromising and relentless pursuit of the truth in the murky waters of the Danish tech-business, and this year she’s the natural selection, she’s the woman behind the mainstream breakthrough of the blog-media in Denmark, she is – of course – Bizzen/Toften: the journalist and blogger par excellence Dorte Toft.
Love/hate relationship with “tech”
I have a love/hate relationship with my field, the field known as “tech”. Tech is definitely one of the places where change is happening today, and I feel blessed that I’m involved in bringing this change.
But “Tech” is a field that is riddled by paradox. On one hand it’s crawling with greedy snake-oil salesmen, on the other it’s home to the most revolutionary, idealistic and altruistic people ever as well as some of the most wonderful concepts that humankind has ever come up with.
The problem with the snake-oil salesmen, is that, until now, they’ve pretty much got away with cheating their customers, the authorities, the business community and worst, their employees, and a lot of the snake-oil has been sold under the heading that Denmark is number one in tech.
It’s been a constant embarrassment to me, and I actually left the business four years ago, and it took me two years of “repenting” before I felt that could return to “tech”, and today I’m luckily to be employed by a tech-company that doesn’t carry any snake-oil.
Emperor’s new clothes
I’m just going to, briefly, mention the fact that Dorte Toft was the woman that noticed that Stein Bagger and IT Factory didn’t wear any clothes, thus exposing one of the biggest scams the Danish tech-sector has seen to date, but thank you Dorte for exposing these people, so that we can be protected against these predators and making it possible to feel proud about working in “tech” again.
Feminism isn’t “low-status”
What I’d rather celebrate today is that Dorte Toft is a self-proclaimed feminist, even though it’s – in her own words – a field that is “low-status”, and her labour of love “Nærmest Lykkelig I Nørdland” (“Almost happy in Geekland” – something got lost in translation sorry about that), where Dorte Toft has been writing and writing and writing about the benefits young women would have if the choose to join the so-called “though” fields, technology and science, a very noble cause.
I noticed that Dorte Toft also wrote a blog-post in observation of Ada Lovelace Day today. In this blog-post Dorte is pledging to return to “Nærmest Lykkelig I Nørdland”, I’m so, so happy to hear that, Dorte Toft has been toiling away, trying to ease young women into the fields of tech and science, and her work deserves so much more attention than the perpetual Stein Bagger saga.
To all the wonderful women that I’ve worked with, am working with and will work with in the future, thank you so, so much for putting up with us, we need you, and remember how far you’ve come.
When I mentioned to my father how much I loved having female managers, he simply said that he could never ever imagine have a female manager, I was appalled.
Women, “tech” is too important to be left to men
Women please don’t stop now, so that next time I’m in a position where I’m hiring tech-staff, I hope that I’ll receive applications from women. Looking at the number of students at the IT University in Copenhagen I’m quite optimistic that that would be the case.
DORTE TOFT: Please go work on “Nærmest Lykkelig I Nørdland”, I’m waiting for it, unlike the book about “Banditterne i habitterne” (“The Bandits In Suits”) – and remember feminism isn’t “low-status”!
YOUNG WOMEN: We really, really need you in the tech-sector. Tech is far too important to leave to us men, and listen to, and get inspired by Dorte Toft!
Celebrating the Enchantress of Numbers
I’ll close this post with these wonderful quotes.
We may see aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves
Lady Ada Lovelace
Forget this world and all its troubles and if possible its multitudinous Charlatans – everything in short but the Enchantress of Numbers
Charles Babagge, inventor of the Analytical and Difference engines
Notes
If you want to learn more about the fascinating life of Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, by many considered the inventor of programming languages, I’d strongly recommend “The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason, and Byron’s Daughter“, “Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture” and “The Difference Engine“.
I’m also building a “shrine” to Ada Lovelace on Algorim.dk, a result of “mellemrumssingulariteten” which was inspired by a young woman I know, this woman is, BTW., working in the purest field of them all
This week, the world got a lot less interesting, when the visionary, humanist, inventor and author Arthur C. Clarke died. I really considered not commenting on it, because others would be better at it, and the picture from Joy of Tech on the left sums up my feelings.
Remembering a great visionary and humanitarian
Arthur might not be the best writer, but his clear visions, belief in humanity and always good spirit was such an inspiration.
Clarke has mostly been remembered for his two most famous contributions to the collective heritage of humankind:
The only thing that I feel sorry for, is that Arthur didn’t live to witness the discovery of Extraterrestial Intelligence, which I’m sure is on the verge of happening, and when we have First Contact, I hope that the politicians and scientists read the works of Arthur C. Clarke, before trying to understand E.T., I really feel that Arthur did.
First Contact
I’ll give you an example, and it’s my favourite part from one of his books, “The Fountains of Paradise”.
As is traditional with the novells by Arthur C. Clarke, the plot contains several independent sub-plots, and that is the strongest aspect of his writing, it never gets dull, and it’s filled with humour, and insights into humanity.
The main plot in the “Fountains of Paradise” is really about the construction of an elevator to the Clarke Belt, the geo-synchronous orbit, 36,000 kms from Earth.
But the by-line is a story about First Contact – e.g. the discovery of intelligent Extraterrestrials – a favourite topic of Clarke – it’s also about Artificial Intelligence – the favourite topic of Clarke.
The sub-plot is similar to “Rendezvous with Rama”: Due to universal limits of relativity, you can only travel at sub-light speeds. Another universal law is that the ordinary life-spans are too short even for ET, so ET is investigating the universe using unmanned probes.
Earth, or rather the solar system, is visited by such a a spaceship, and onboard is a computer or more correctly an AI – that is somewhat secretive – but co-operative – and we have so much to learn, like the fact that we’re an emerging level 1 Civilisation, at least in the 22nd Century, where the book is taking place.
Clarke suggested that advanced Civilisations goes through three levels:
Needless to say we’re not even a level 0 civiisation right now. When ET finally arrives, some hundred years after the probe visited, he expresses admiration for the achievements of “such a young civilisation.
Well the computer abroad the space-probe, is co-operating and teaching us lot’s of things, without violating the rules about giving away information posessed by a higher level civilisation, so we’re only given hints, like a level 1 civilisation, has mastered the conversion of matter to energy and back – e.g. has things like matter transporters and replicators, like in Star Trek.
That is until someone at a Theological Institute decides to transmit the complete religious scriptures to the computer, it painstakingly analyses it, points out the fundamental flaws of religious thinking, shuts down communication with a comment that expresses disappointment at such tribal manners from an emerging level 1 Culture, and sorry but now you have to switch to direct communications, going to cruise mode, shutting down, bye.
Mind you, ET is 50 light-years away, so everyone was upset by the actions of the religious people, but really it was also the end of religious thought, and humanity could move on the bigger projects, like building the space elevator.
The concept of the Space Elevator was lifted from a Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, that Arthur credits in the closing notes of “Fountains”. Clarke also suggests that it might be possible to build it already in this century, and the concept is well thought out, and actually feasible with current technology, unfortunately the current funding of space exploration, dictates direct military benefits, and the military seems to love chemical rockets, what a shame.
Other contributions
Another important contribution by Clarke, was his 80th birthday special feature, where Discovery dedicated an entire evening to Arthur, another was his series The “Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World”, where he was also dealt with myths and Urban legends, paving the way for the “Mythbusters”.
Clarke deserved the Nobel Peace Price, not least for deciding to live his final many years in war-torn Sri Lanka.
The Pod Bay doors have been opened, Godspeed Arthur
The Imperial Cinema in Copenhagen is showing “2001: A Space Odyssey” on Monday 24th of March oops April 28th at 3.45pm CEST.
Imperial has one of the best cinemas in Northern Europe, expect me to be in the audience, I can’t really think of a better way to pay tribute to Arthur, get your ticket here (link will probably expire soon ).
I’m humbled by your creative vision: The Pod Bay doors have been opened, and my God it’s full of Stars. Godspeed Arthur!
The picture that accompanies this article is from the great comic strip, The Joy of Tech. I dare to claim “fair use”, and why don’t you click here to buy some merchandise, or one of the paintings – I’d love to own “HAL 9000 shedding a tear” as a painting. BTW: I’m not making any money from providing Joy of Tech with such a link, welcome to the future of advertising .
When “Sergei and Larry” approached Yahoo with a brand new concept of a “search engine”, they discovered, to their dismay, that Yahoo wasn’t really interested in “search”, but in selling ads. So Google was born.
How I discovered Google
In 1998 I was doing a search of myself, e.g. ego-surfing, using my preferred search engine, Lycos, and I was stunned to see that the top hits were Usenet groups that contained my name, several of them in fact, but worse: they had names like kimbach.slut.slut.slut etc.
I was a bit upset, especially since I, at that point, was being sued over violation of the marketing law by a former employer – a case that was later thrown out – but I assumed that they might have created those groups, to slander me, and I was quite sure that it wasn’t me that created those groups .
I took a look at the content of the groups, and they had very low traffic, I only found some spam, which was rare in 1998, and someone who asked the question “who is Kim Bach” – a question I’ve pondered myself, but it didn’t look like it had anything to do with me.
Eventually I contacted the hotline of my ISP, Image Scandinavia, and they referred me to…GOOGLE.
Doing a search on Google, I realised that it had nothing to do with me, but that the groups had been created by a disgruntled husband, and Kim Bach was his ex-wife!
I also believe that using Google for the first time, immediately made me drop Lycos. At that point Lycos actually yielded what I’d label “better results”, but that changed quickly.
Google, originally, cracked “the search code”, and the world changed.
How I discovered Wikipedia
This I also remember clearly, and it’s quite interesting, I googled it – indirectly!
3-4 years ago I was trying find the English word for the type of dog, that is called “gravhund” in Danish, I somehow knew that a literal translation wouldn’t do, since that would have yielded “diggingdog”, “digdog”, “gravedog”.
So a Google search let me to the English Wikipedia article for Dachshund, and that was what I was looking for!
Seeing Wikipedia was an instant eye-opener, and at that point it hadn’t even dawned upon me, that Wikipedia was pure user-generated content!
Google isn’t interested in “knowledge”
Google won by doing a better job, but now “we, the people” are approaching the world with a concept of a “knowledge engine”, only to discover, to our dismay, that for instance Google isn’t really interested in “knowledge”, but in selling ads.
The difference: “we, the people”, will, surprisingly, transform Google from a “search engine” into a “knowledge engine” as well, no matter what Google does. The algorithm Google uses will give preference to “quality”, at least in the long run, and since “we, the people” are so numerous this will happen sooner rather than later.
Case in point, the best SEO strategy I know of is to create a Wikipedia article, try googling the terms I’ve created Wikipedia articles for (for instance: Kim Schumacher, DB03 and DB07).
You’re brainwashed
Google and the big companies have had us, pretty much, brainwashed to think that we have no say. This is reflected by the response to the launch of the Wikia Search engine, on the historic day, January 7th 2008.
Everyone is trying to compare Wikia Search to Google, and that’s missing the point COMPLETELY, and people should read what Wikia Search are writing:
WE KNOW THAT THE QUALITY OF THE SEARCH IS: “PRETTY LOW” (a polite way of saying that it “stinks”)
The way to help change it, is simply to get involved.
Every-time you do a search on Wikia Search, you’re offered the option to edit a “Mini Article” on the search. A “Mini Article” is just a Wiki article, that explains the search term. The “Mini Articles” will be used to improve the search index.
“Unfortunately” people seems to have been using a search on themselves as a benchmark, meaning that a lot of the “Mini Articles” are links to private and small web-sites, but that reflects the community.
Ego-surfing was also one of the first things I did, and the first hit that could be attributed to me was result number 8, and that yielded the photos I’ve taken, that are in the Flickr pool I created for Sjakket, my former place of work.
Is that my major contribution to the world? Well it’s not that far from it, bordering that I believe that it could be.
Getting involved – choose a community to “work” for
My criteria are:
Not for profit, open, free, strong community, sustainable.
The beer isn’t free however, so you’re allowed to make money, but take into consideration how the money is being made, if it is sustainable etc.
Personally I’ve chosen these organisations
)Currently I’m mostly involved in Wikia Search, I’ve found it really intimidating to be a contributor to an Encyclopaedia, so my contributions to Wikipedia have been quite limited, Wikia Search is much less intimidating, and right up my alley.
Where would you put your money (e.g. time)?
In ten years, Google has gone from no to 16.000 employees, but “we, the people” will, in ten years go from no to 6,5 billion, or how many it is that “we” are in 2018.
Where would you put you money (e.g. time)? It will only cost you time, and you’ll be involved in building a beautiful shrine to knowledge and human achievement.
Together we’ll do Google one better: crack the code of “knowledge”, and the world has changed forever.
Free at last, free at last, oh God almighty we’re free at last.
And “we”‘re hiring! No need to submit a resume, come join the fight!
Read more here:
The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project
I really need to “get out more”, since I’ve only just now discovered the Friend of a Friend project (FOAF), and I LOVE it!
The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.
Say what?
FOAF is an important part of the so-called semantic-web, and FOAF is just a so-called RDF specification of who you are. RDF (Resource Description Framework) is one of the basic technologies of the semantic web, and it’s nothing more (or should I say less) than an XML schema condoned by the W3C for describing resources.
Think of RDF as “the mother of all links”, RSS and Atom actually uses RDF.
The problem with links
So what is that RDF does better than the tradtional link?
When you create a link, you rarely remember to provide important information about what it is that you actually link to. At best you provide an ALT attribute (description) to an image tag. Google actively uses the ALT tag when indexing images, but if the link to an image contained more information, eg. semantics, Google could do a much better job.
Semantics means that you provide information about content and context, not just a link to it. You could call that metadata, abstracts or just “data”.
Many CMSes uses the URI of posts to provide some semantics, it’s often called SEO (search engine optimisation), the URI of this post has FOAF in it, meaning that a link to this article indeed contains some semantics.
A common standard for the WordPress CMS is that it uses year, month, day and the title of the post to generate the URI.
The problem is that this information should be provided in a structured, machine readable and – most importantly – open format, in order to make it possible to provide semantics.
I actually despise the concept of SEO, since it amounts to cheating, the only valid SEO is:
“provide interesting content”
A semantic “you”
A number of standards for providing semantics exists, one of the most interesting, especially in this day and age of social media, is the FOAF format.
FOAF is a format that describes you and your connections to provide semantics about people (you) and your connections (friends), in a standardised way, using RDF.
The FOAF file contains information about who you are, how to contact you, but most interestingly it contains links to your friends, and their FOAF files.
The beauty of FOAF is, that all you have to do, is:
Chances are that the FOAF spiders will have a feast on your FOAF, sooner rather than later.
Create your FOAF file
It’s quite simple to create a FOAF file, all you need to do is go to FOAF-a-matic, fill in a number of fields, generate the FOAF file, copy it to a text-editor, publish it on your web-site.
Below is a screenshot of the FOAF-a-matic page.
Take back your profile, it’s…YOURS!
No need to register with social networking sites, your profile is YOURS.
Who owns the information about “who you are”? You do! Should that information be made available in an open format? You bet! RDF and FOAF is the way to go.
And don’t take my word for it, just take a look at the people who are promoting and developing RDF and FOAF…
So how did the chicken cross the road
I’ll provide you with the story about how I found FOAF, since it’s interesting to say the least.
My good buddy Sebastian Lund just recently set up his blog, Silence is deafening, and I’m looking forward to following it, he’s using a beautiful theme, the Dilectio Theme, developed by Design Disease.
Design Disease has a number of free WordPress themes available, and you can test them, when I tried that, their “Lorem Ipsum” turned out to be an article by no other that TBL, timbl, Tim Berners-Lee, Mr. Web himself, and he was writing about blogging and FOAF…
So:
What an untangled web we’re weawing.
Now I need to think of a good URI for my FOAF file, TBL suggests this:
A lot of people have published data about themselves without using a URI for themselves. This means I can’t refer to them in other data. So please take a minute to give yourself a URI. If you have a FOAF page, you may just have to add rdf:about=”" and voila you have a URI http://example.com/Alan/foaf.rdf#ABC. (I suggest you use your initials for the last bit). Check it works in the Tabulator.
Ready, steady FOAF
So what are you waiting for? Create your own FOAF file, and start sharing.
And now I’m moving on to explore Tabulator, more on that later…
I’m so envious my dear brother, this day October 4th – your birthday – seems to coincide with one of the most important days in modern civilisation, a day that has importance for exploration of space, as well as important steps in the history of human thought and the move towards true democracy.
Today, October 4th 2007, it’s 50 years since the first man made satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched, and the world was changed almost overnight. 12 years later man had already walked on the moon
The first stage of the race towards space, has to be one of the single most impressive feats of human kind in history, really on a par with the building of the Pyramids.
Building of Pyramids was, like the space program, put on hold – it was just not efficient, even though the monument still stand, in the form of immense launch facilities at Kennedy Space Centre, it was only really a demonstration of power, and funding had to be cut, or else it could have ruined the economy, like continued pyramid building could have done to Egypt
Flash forward 47 years, three years ago, the era of real space exploration of space was ushered in, with the successful flight of SpaceShipOne, the first commercially developed vehicle, capable of reaching space.
So happy birthday to you all, and humanity for giving us the inspiration to do the impossible, which is escaping this cosy spaceship we’re all living in, or should I say on, the spaceship called Earth.
ps. I also found out that today marks the 23rd anniversary of establishment of The Free Software Foundation (FSF) by Richard Stallman. FSF and the thoughts behind it is slowly changing the mindset of people, and is the foundation of the current explosion in true knowledge sharing. Today also marks the 14 anniversary of the failed attempt by the Soviet military to stop the move towards democracy – October 4th truly is a historic day.
pps. If I had the energy to do so, I’d love to have made a picture showing the faces of Sergei Korolev, Burt Rutan, Paul Allen, Richard Branson, Richard Stallman, Boris Yeltsin and my brother René, to accompany this article – sorry but you have to make that – mentally – yourself.
Instead I’m showing one of the most important pictures of mankind, the “Earthrise” picture taken by Apollo 8, just a little over 11 years after the Sputnik 1 launch.
“We close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth.”