I haven't written since the American election. I've talked about it. I've read and watched a great deal of conjecture. As usual, everyone's exaggerating for dramatic effect, saying the Democrats were trounced, when in the end the difference was just 140,000 votes in Ohio, which is pretty small. If the 2000 election hadn't happened, they'd be calling this one the closest ever. What worries me is why the Republicans won. I'm not sure I buy the whole "moral values" hypothesis (ie, gay marriage drove red voters to the polls), but as a student of persuasion, I'm shell-shocked by the methods...

I started this blog a year ago today. My original goal was to write once a day about the Semantic Web and its social implications: ...which is why we need Round Two: the annotated, interconnected, Web. This new organic, evolving, maintainable, improvement will do more than simply increase the accuracy of our Google searches. It'll help real people understand and visualize interconnection, which in my opinion will alter our society profoundly for the better. I kept up with the once-a-day pace for two months, writing mostly about semweb topics, before getting distracted by the demands of our in-house Immuexa project,...

In the early days of this blog, I talked about improving the semweb's "whirlpool rap", stressing that we need a clearer way to talk about it to non-technical types. Since then, I've learned there's an even greater challenge: convincing developers that RDF and the Semantic Web are genuinely worth the training time required before they pigeonhole it and write it off as hype. Choosing tech is critical for software developers and managers. In the last twenty-four years of wading through languages, API's, platforms, and design approaches, I've learned to bet on established winners because there's no more costly mistake than...