Lucas has made available publicly its playlist database. I’ll claim a small contribution there: I believe I’m the one who convinced Lucas to make part of his data open. Indeed, Lucas, Sean, and I have been discussing collaboration between Webjay and inDiscover for some time. I’m very happy to see Lucas open his data set like this. I believe this will leverage the strength of the network while still protecting Lucas’ interests.

Got to this through Seb.

The Canadian Semantic Web Interest Group (SWIG) was launched today. There are already 32 Semantic Web Canadians onboard.

There was a general feeling that Semantic Web research and development in Canada had no meeting point, and we hope the SWIG will be it. If you are into Semantic Web and are Canadians or live in Canada, check it out!

Martin Brooks asked me how Lohan, my son, was doing.

Well. He’s been sitting straight on his own for some time, but he can’t sit himself, nor can he recover if he falls over. If you hold both of his hands, he walks quite fast. He likes to walk quite a bit, but he can’t be bothered to crawl. If you put his hands on a small table, he will stand there and not fall, at least for some time. He can say things like “dadada” and “guo gui”. If you read to him, he will try to eat the book. Whenever he sees our cat, he will run after her yelling, and of course, the cat will run away. He can eat about 15 different things from carots to chicken, as long as it is mashed.

Sean was cool enough to invite me to join Gmail. Gmail is the Google free email service where you have almost unlimited storage (1GB to be precise) and various cool Google tools to search your emails.

I’m not convinced I’ll use it very much, but it is cool to have it. My address is lemire atsymbol gmail dotted com.

Thanks Sean!

Update: Several weeks later, I’ve switched over completly and I’m now using Gmail exclusively.

Yuhong is worried that as more people visit her blog, she will censor her content. You might recall that Yuhong is the latest NRC researcher to join the blogger community.

There is no question that writting for a public, however small, will impact the content. In this sense, a blog is not intimate. But I think she forgets that a blog is social tool.

I do take notes, very careful notes… and they are not in this blog. My blog is not for private thoughts, but rather, to express thoughts that I feel free to share. Because I know other people might read me, I have to think about them a bit more, and this process leads me to think more about what I do and why I do it. The fact that many other people, including Yuhong, spend more time worrying about why they do things and how they do them, will just all make us smarter as a community.

Life is funny, you’ll work like a dog on something, and it will just plain won’t work. And once in a while, a very simple concept will just work. I think that research and life has more to do with luck, as in “try many things and hope that something will work”, rather than pure intellect. Which is why I think that centralized, authoritarian systems are doomed to failure. And I think it also explains why the Americans, with their relatively free flowing class structure are eating up the rest of the world. Build all the castles you want, and force people to be your servants… but you’ll never be able to compete with a loosely controlled community. This doesn’t mean anarchy works: I said loosely controlled, not out-of-control.

This also means that as a researcher, you shouldn’t be too focused. I didn’t write that you should be unfocused… but don’t be narrow. You might get lucky and hit gold even if you had a single target, but maybe that will just be luck.

I found this post called A Partially Definitive But Slightly Abstract Guide To Why Blogs Are So Successful through a post by Seb. I really like some of the comments:

• Blogs are “person-centric not place-centric”. In this day and age where you’ll probably have 20 different employers in your life, go through 20 different cities… who wants to be place-centric? Universities have to take this into account. They should stop assuming that their students are their students. They aren’t. Just like banks realized some years ago that because you had a bank account with the Royal Bank, you might not have a VISA card from them. People are not loyal nor should they be. Realize this and the students will love you. In practice, this means that instead of trying to fit students into a mold, they should put the students as much in control as they can. Universities that get this will win.
• “Don’t Try And Make The Computer Do Things It Can’t And We Can” : I’m all for Knowledge Management (KM) research and I consider myself to be a KM researcher, but I know that computers can’t do KM. They just can’t. We should stop fooling around. Humans do KM and until computers get much, much, much improved, they won’t do KM. We have to let the humans be in charge, always. Software is there to help humans with KM, but it doesn’t do KM.

The Open Source Initiative just published its Halloween XI. The Halloween documents started from an internal memo issued by Microsoft in 1998. This was the very first time Microsoft noticed the Linux threat. Back then, they were relatively calm about it but made the following statement:

Loosely applied to the vernacular of the software industry, a product/process is long-term credible if FUD tactics can not be used to combat it. OSS [open source software] is Long-Term Credible.

This was 6 years ago. This year, they are organizing meetings in various cities to convince people not to switch to Linux. In many ways, Microsoft is losing this war against Linux, against us. They went from internal meetings, to ads, and now they are touring countries.

Microsoft crushed everything else in the software industry and made Bill Gates the richest man in the world. But they finally met something they couldn’t, wouldn’t crush the same way. Make no mistake about it: Microsoft will lose, Microsoft will fail. Not this year, not next year, but soon. They must fail.

Gates built his empire by noticing that he could sell software whereas people had been freely sharing software. Indeed, why sell what can be copied freely? Whereas most people saw software as something that had to be shared, Gates saw a nearly infinite source of revenue. And he took it for himself.

Gates’ vision has profound consequences which seems to espace most people. It might seem to be a small issue whether you store your data in a Microsoft forward and lock your work in Microsoft software… After all, who cares? Microsoft products are relatively inexpensive and well supported, so often, it is much easier to go with Microsoft… why bother fighting the system? Why indeed.

Suppose tomorrow we would have machines able to freely copy food. Suppose someone said no, this ought to be illegal, I can use this machine but everyone else has to pay for the food. We would think this individual was mad. Well, that’s what the software industry is: people who own food creating machine and they keep it for themselves. Food might not be as vital as software, but it is nevertheless quite vital in our century. Software is humanity’s future. We may soon be able to produce goods in a similar fashion. Buy one nanotech machine and it can generate any goods you want for very cheap as long as you can input the proper software into it. Are we going to allow a few people to take control of software? of our future?

I’m not advocating your break the law and copy Microsoft software. Don’t break the law. Copy software though: copy Linux everywhere you can. Because software is weatlh and by copying it you make humanity wealthier.