It's the day of trèfle (clover), which I guess should be good luck for all of us. I hope so, at least. We finished (I think) the evaluations of applications for Summer of Code 2006 for MediaWiki, and I think we got some great project proposals.
I was pretty amazed by the sheer bulk of proposals that came in; after Brion Vibber sifted through the accidental and incorrect, we ended up with more than 100 project proposals to choose from. Almost all of them were strong, interesting project ideas that deserve some time and energy; unfortunately there's a limited number of spaces available.
I'm looking forward to working with the students who get SoC 2006 grants; it's one of my favorite parts of programming to work with someone smart and energetic on a large project and help direct them in the right way strategically.
tags soc summer of code 2006 mediawiki
Back home
We had a good right home from Mont Tremblant today. We stopped at Bistro Brunch in Saint Jovite for late breakfast, then walked around the town for a little while, then had a nice drive home. Amita June fell asleep in her car seat listening to the Creative Commons Remix CD I mooked from Marcus Bornfreund at CC Salon Toronto. It's a good album, by the way.
It was good to get back to the apartment, although Montreal is cowering under a doomed bludgeon of black clouds. This is summer in Quebec, though: rain and thunderstorms. On the good side, Parc La Fontaine is just bursting with foliage -- hard to believe how short a time ago it was that the buds first came out on the trees.
tags: saint jovite mont tremblant amita june cc rain summer montreal
Killing me softly
Alexa's related links for this site are eerily correct: World66, Wikitravel, Ubuntu Linux, Pigdog Journal, MediaWiki, Wikipedia, Debian GNU/Linux, Creative Commons, Creative Commons Canada, Burning Man.
tags: alexa
Google conspiracy theory
There was one thing I heard at the Mesh Conference last week that I forgot to mention here, which is unfortunate because I think it's very interesting. It was in a panel session covering the importance of the Web and society with Ren Bucholtz of the EFF, Bob Young of Lulu.com, and George Schlukbier of the US Library of Congress.
Schlukbier was discussing the Google Library Project, an effort to digitize thousands of books and make them available on the Web. He said that the LOC was a participant, and it was pretty OK, and that Google shared back the digitized works with the library, but they didn't provide any metadata (like Dublin Core RDF, say) to make it easy to catalog the digitized works.
This brought an interesting comment from an audience member, namely, that Google actively discourages use of metadata on the Web. Why? Because in a world without author-provided metadata, only the best information-extraction tools will be useful for readers and searchers. Google currently has the best free-text cataloging system available, protected by patents and trade secrets, so they rule a metadata-free world. Any increase in the use of metadata would benefit their competitors at Google's expense.
I found this a pretty seductive argument, actually. At some point in the late 90s Google took the lead in search engine technology, and proceeded to eliminate almost all of its competitors. Today, instead of providing metadata in open formats that all Web-aware software can use, Web site owners spend a lot of time doing Search Engine Optimization just to position their content in a way that Google's Web crawlers will like.
The myth that Google does not use metadata? has been particularly pernicious for people interested in a semantic Web for some time. I think the idea that Google is going out of its way to discourage the use of metadata -- by ignoring it for search engine placement, and by disparaging it publicly or privately -- is pretty sexy in an X-files way. Maybe Google doesn't not use metadata because metadata is no good; maybe they don't use it because it's too good.
I'm not sure I believe it, but I'd love to hear counter-arguments.
tags: google metadata semantic web conspiracy theory
Edited essay
Thanks to some constructive feedback from MJ Ray, whose ideas are always well-considered, I've trimmed down the defensive posture of my CC Licence Distinctions essay, and left only the core idea. I hope it's more readable and less off-putting now.