To avoid brand confusion with the Wavemarket products, we've decided against the name Waveplace for our desktop app. We've picked another name we like even better: Tidepool™ Tidepool lets you collect, organize, describe, and browse your personal memories, such as digital photographs, movies, sound clips, and stories. With Tidepool, you can tell the who, what, where, and, when of it, using semantic web tagging technology. You can then browse through your memories semantically, with one thing suggesting another, and another. Looking at a photo of Katie on vacation at the beach in 2002, you can then look at other photos...

This morning my house is surrounded by fog so thick it's hard to see the ground from my upstairs window. I can almost feel the earth drinking in the needed moisture this wet morning. In recent weeks, the weather has been getting warmer. The highest, most stubborn, snow drifts are completely melted. We even went geocaching last weekend. For those that live in a place where it doesn't snow, you should spend a winter in a place like Pennsylvania. It's impossible to describe a spring approaching. The changes are subtle, fragrant, wet, and green. Birds slowly arrive. Deer quicken their...

I started this blog in November with the goal of posting once a day, which I kept to for two months, then settled into a rhythm of once every five days. Now that we're trudging hip-deep through the project, it's harder to make time to write. It's even harder to find time to research and reflect on the Semantic Web and its inevitable implications. Such writing requires a stand-back perspective. Instead, my head's been buried in the details of development. What have we been up to? Well, some of you may be interested in the way we're mixing FOAF with...

Writing the website text for Tidepool, I'm realizing that people may have a tough time putting the product into an established software category. If PC Magazine were to include us in an "Editor's Choice" roundup, I'm not sure which category we'd be in. Tidepool's a semantic browser, a digital media organizer, an instant messaging client, an authoring tool, a contact manager, a calendaring app, a PIM sync program, and a personal publisher (blogs & photos & sounds & newsletters), all built upon an agent-based control system and extension mechanism. Sounds like we've bolted a bunch of stuff where it doesn't...

After scrambling for days toward an ambitious release date, we managed today to pull the pieces together enough for our first private release of Tidepool. At the very last minute, we discovered a showstopper bug having to do with Java Web Start. I was actually about to press "Send" on the announcement email, then we found it. Ah well. At least we had a nice lunch to celebrate Immuexa's sixth. Many thanks to everyone who kicked ass to (almost) make this date. Not pictured, but there in spirit, are two Russians, two Canadians, one Brit, one Clevelander, and an American...