Tom Morris

Ian Davis has a great post on the SemWeb and adoption. The idea that the SemWeb has had years and years to develop and just hasn't is silly. CSS has taken a long time to develop, and RDF has the same fight to make.

Danny Ayers has more on this. He also has a guide to what you can do with FOAF today.

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You'll have to excuse the egocentric nature of this post - it's a way for me to thank and respond to the various people who have been linking to me recently.

Austin Burbridge of Cinema Minima gets it. The Web is a cacophany of human voices, but a monoculture of machine readable voices.

Gareth Rushgrove and Ben Ward have different ideas as to how GetSemantic should proceed. Ben thinks it should do something new and unexpected, while Gareth thinks that RDFising existing formats is fine. Both and neither are what we're shooting for. Sometimes the GetSemantic project will need to take existing formats and RDFise them. That doesn't mean that we are going to take existing formats and change them - it means that we'll use technologies like GRDDL to turn them in to RDF, and we'll come up with tools and ontologies to make this easier.

When we are creating new formats, then we won't necessarily be saying "there is only one way of doing it!" We'll make a suggestion, based on what users have to say and whether we've had much luck implementing it in a particular way. But, we've basically got an open toolbox - eRDF, RDFa, microformats/semantic markup and GRDDL. We can construct whatever we want using those tools. And if none of those work how we want them, we come up with something new. The key idea is that so long as the eventual RDF is consumable in sane ways, the representation isn't that important.

The other important part of GetSemantic is that we're not going to be strictly tied down to the microformats "it's gotta solve a problem" adage. Yes, it's useful in advocacy to say "this solves problem x". But, as Tom Hughes-Croucher says, a lot of the technology we're building stuff out of today has little practical purpose. A lot of possibly interesting avenues for research and experimentation are closed off if you say "only practical research, please".

With regards to GetSemantic, Andy Mitchell liked "bastardisation of the "long tail" buzzŠ Microformats are the fat (common) parts of the tail; where as the Semantic Web is the thin end of the tail - for the many small cases where you need the additional flexibility RDF gives you". It's fun, but there's a serious point - with eRDF and/or GRDDL, the barrier to entry for new format development is much lower than it has to be for microformats. Microformats, using semantic class names without namespaces, should be a conservative effort - avoiding confusion in the marketplace. We are not so tightly bound! This means we can play about with formats, and if they don't work, no problem.

I do like Gareth's description of me as being "card-carrying". When they find me lying unconscious in the street, they'll open up my wallet and find cards for the NRA, ACLU and the RDF.

On to Twitter. Ian at twopointouch has a write-up of my Twitter Tube experiments, and the question was asked "what's the point?" Basically, Transport for London provide a similar service to the one I've built. True. What makes Twitter interesting from a developers point-of-view is that it's basically a free SMS layer which you can build on. The Tube example may not be the most exciting, but it is useful.

The reason I chose the Tube is because of user need - I've tried the London Transport SMS service and it didn't work for me. I tried two or three times to set it up and got nowhere. Eventually, I just gave up.

Twitter is far more user-friendly than the TfL service, in my experience. It is also far more 'remixable'. I'd like to have it so that we can use user contributions to send data around. That's more of a pipe dream until Twitter extend their API in certain ways.

Eventually, we'll have a system that's far more useful for Tube planning because we could have a script that could turn updates on and off for you based on where you are going. This is only a first step. Once developers get a chance to play with location and presence-aware mobile data neworks, all sorts of fun will start happening.

I am taking requests for more Twitter transport mashups. The more I look at the websites for metro services and so on, the more I react with disgust. So many of these sites could be improved! I'm not sure what I'm going to do next. Things with XML feeds come higher up in the list than services where I have to scrape some godawful website.

More thanks to Aral Balkan, Conor O'Neill and all the del.icio.us kids, among others, for the links and nice comments about Twitter Tube Tracker. I hope that other people find it useful. So long as I know when the blasted Circle line isn't working, then it's mission is accomplished.

Okay, self-indulgent ego-stroking over. Need to get back to Real Life.

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Ian has a post about Get Semantic. It's worth reading.

I've been working on Get Semantic today, though nothing that I can yet post up on, say, the wiki.

The BibTeX-RDF format is coming along nicely. I don't like the way that it's been done so far, as it doesn't use the work that has gone before - the Dublin Core, FOAF etc. It's going to be in three parts - an OWL ontology, a GRDDL transform, and stylesheets and tools to convert to and from BibTeX.

I've got to do quite a lot of experimentation, though tomorrow I hope to put out a screen-cast of using Protégé.

Hopefully in the next day or so, there should be something interesting and cool to show for the GetSemantic project. Running code is more interesting to me than marketing, and so I'm working on running code. The marketing can follow.

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Following on from my Tube Twitter application the other day, I've started working on a BART tracker at bartsf. It's all been testing up until now, but it should start working properly today. Add "bartsf" as a friend on Twitter and you should get updates about delays to the BART system.

The BART system seems to be pretty switched on to technology - they provide a pretty decent website and an RSS feed. If only a few other cities could provide XML feeds, it'd make it easier for this kind of thing to happen. Much as I like Python, I really don't like having to do loads of BeautifulSoup.

Tags: bart, twitter, tube, metro, rail, public transport

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I've been reading the debate over diversity at conferences, and it reminds me why I far prefer going to BarCamps than the dull conferences that go on most of the time.

I think that there ought to be more women at conferences, because I tend to learn a lot from women speakers, and I find it terribly oppressive to be in a room of men without any women. It's more pleasant for everybody if there are women at events. "Men only" is for changing rooms and gay bars, not web conferences. Even at gay bars, you've got drag queens. And I'd rather have drag queens speaking at web conferences than the utterly dull business casual brigade mouthing "social media" and "Web 2.0".

I heard recently that at a Ruby on Rails conference there were "Rails Girls" - basically, 'booth babes' wearing tight fit t-shirts with the Rails logo on the front and handing out leaflets about Rails. Tacky or wot? The thing is that it wouldn't be out of place at a tech business event - geeks probably dislike this kind of tackiness far more than their suited counterparts.

Getting more female speakers at conferences is just a part of improving conferences, which are in general terrible. BarCamp is the antidote to this.

My blog is currently number one if you search for crap conferences on Google (without quotes; with quotes, I'm number two). I have a funny feeling that I'll be featuring crap conferences a lot more. Here's an idea of a not-crap conference. A development focused one day BarCamp where it's women speakers only. I'd go along. And I bet I'd enjoy every minute.

Diversity at conferences is a problem, but the conferences themselves is a far bigger problem. Let's solve both.

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I've got this great idea for a conference

First, it'd have a session called "Pop Culture and Democracy" which would discuss whether the Internet culture's of remixing popular culture helps in democratic participation and related areas. Just over an hour long.

Then I'd have a panel of tech people talking about microformats, spam, Creative Commons and anything else that seems interesting or relevant.

After that a short discussion from a researcher talking about the Semantic Web.

Next, a half hour session or so on Python programming.

Then just under fifty minutes of Cory Doctorow doing all the usual Cory things - copyright, DRM, evil Microsoft etc.

A discussion of the role of developers, then an hour on the One Laptop Per Child project.

Sound like a cool conference? That's good. It's a list of the podcasts I'm going to listen to. Podcasts are what conferences have become.

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A while back I thought it would be a neat idea to have Tube status information delivered over Twitter. That way people who have the dubious honour of using the most expensive metropolitan transit system in the world can keep track of what's wrong with it.

And I then put it on the back burner.

Today I found out the best way of doing it, built it in the space of half an hour (in true bloggers' style, while in my pyjamas).

And I can now announce it here.

Every fifteen minutes, my server will check the Tube status and send any delays to the relevant Twitter accounts. You can then quite easily subscribe to individual Tube lines and get updates via whatever means you deem appropriate as you would as a Twitter user.

A neat side effect of this is that there is now Atom and RSS feeds for each Tube line which you can subscribe to and get these updates sent directly to your RSS reader too. Twitter can also serve as a historical home for Tube problems from now on.

This is real Tube 2.0 stuff.

Bakerloo: tubebakerloo (Atom, RSS, LiveJournal)

Circle: tubecircle (Atom, RSS, LiveJournal)

Central: tubecentral (Atom, RSS, LiveJournal)

District: tubedistrict (Atom, RSS, LiveJournal)

East London: tubeeastlon (Atom, RSS, LiveJournal)

Hammersmith and City: tubehcity (Atom, RSS, LiveJournal)

Jubilee: tubejubilee (Atom, RSS, LiveJournal)

Metropolitan: tubemetro (Atom, RSS, LiveJournal)

Northern: tubenorthern (Atom, RSS, LiveJournal)

Piccadilly: tubepiccadil (Atom, RSS, LiveJournal)

Victoria: tubevictoria (Atom, RSS, LiveJournal)

Waterloo and City: tubewcity (Atom, RSS, LiveJournal)

How to use: Sign up for an accont with Twitter. Once you are logged in, go to the Tube line profile that you want to add and choose "add" in the right hand menu. Check the delivery settings on your Twitter homepage to make sure that status updates are delivered through the right medium (over the web, over IM or over SMS).

How to use (LiveJournal): There are now LiveJournal feeds for each tube line - just click on the ones you want and click 'add friend'.

I can't promise it'll always work. And I'm sure there'll be a few little bugs which might appear over the next few days. Things like planned closures (the W&C line doesn't run at weekends, and I may need to tweak the script in order to not tell you that). If you get updates which you don't want, I apologise in advance and I'll try to make sure that such annoyances are kept to the minimum.

Since I'm both a user and developer, if it's annoying, it will annoy me too.

If Twitter extend their API, I will be offering some new functionality soonish. Talk to me in person for long enough and you'll find out what it is.

And remember - if your Tube train gets delayed, don't get mad, get a Customer Charter complaints form from your local Tube station, fill it in and get a free Tube journey in return.

Update: I've put together a similar service for the San Francisco BART. The username is bartsf.

Tags: tube, london, twitter

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Mike Arrington thinks the BBC ought to be dissolved because it's stifling innovation.

Based on what - the Office not being shown in the US, the TVLA and a new social network being produced for the target audience of CBBC.

WTF? If startup innovation - the "four or five startups" that Arrington mentions - is being prevented because of a CBBC social network, then we really are in a bad situation. The idea that there are VCs out there who would fund a rather dull social network for kids if only the BBC weren't competing is just... laughable.

The fact is that in the United States, the technology behind startups is valued higher than here, where the actual market revenue is weighted higher in valuation. This reflects a much more risk-averse society. Google would never be built in the UK, because Google doesn't let Dixons or Boots push more widgets. The investors here would be the guys betting the family farm on Lycos or Excite or any of the companies which have basically disappeared because they didn't focus on building good technology and got "portalitis" instead (as now we have MySpace imitation syndrome).

Excuse me while I find the upgrade disc so that I can start surfing Web 6.0 where evil CBBC presenters fearlessly destroy startup opportunities at every turn. I bet they didn't know that was in the job description.

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I think I've got almost the most perfect JavaScript building envrionment possible. I'm using Aptana as a plug-in for Eclipse to write my JavaScript, and using Firebug to debug it. This setup absolutely rules. What's nice about Eclipse is that it enables me to hack quicker (and not have to care about files and folders - just boot up Eclipse, hit "new (whatever) file" and then do local development really quickly. When doing back-end stuff, it's even nicer because it tends to make one do bigger things - orient oneself towards objects, develop more generic classes etc.

So Eclipse - and IDEs in general - get a big thumbs up from me. Especially Code Assist - or, as Simon Harriyott tells me, IntelliSense for you Visual Studio folks.

Following the discussion from yesterday, I asked Andy Budd on the train about the "dc\:title" class name idea for using RDFa. He seemed sceptical that it'd actually work. It works in Firefox, but it's likely not to work in some browsers and could have all sorts of undesirable and unpredictable side-effects. It also looks appalling, and is not a good way to endear web designers to the cause of semantics.

The final thing is Twitter hacking. For those who've been following along today with the Twitter Tube Tracker, you may have found the updates rather sporadic. That's because they're not happening regularly yet. I haven't turned on automatic updates. I'm doing all the updates manually at the moment, so as to ensure that they are all actually working. This is to prevent mass spammage of people. Hopefully, if we make it through the night without too many problems, I shall then set the crontab up tomorrow and we'll start getting pings going through automatically. I must say, it has been enlightening to see how utterly rubbish the Tube can be.

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Jeremy Keith's new book, Bulletproof Ajax, is finished according to Jeremy's Twitter. I'm just getting around to teaching myself JavaScript properly - mostly using Jeremy's first book and Christian Heilmann's book.

As a humorous aside and an introduction to the writing of Denmark's (only) great philsopher, Søren Kierkegaard (or rather, his satirical pen-name Johannes Climacus), I present a little quote that may illustrate the situation of this somewhat hapless reader:

An author publishes a big book; it has scarecly been out a week before he falls into conversation with a reader. The reader asks politely, sympathetically, and in a very glow of longing, if he does not soon intend to write another book. The author is enchanted: to think of having a reader who so quickly works his way through a big book, and in spite of the labor and the toil preserves his zest undimmed! Alas for the poor deluded author! In the further course of the conversation, the benevolently interested reader, the same who so longingly awaits the new book, admits that he has not read the published book, and that he will probably never find the time to do so.

-- Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Introduction, p. 13

Talking of satirical pen-names, I was reading an old thing from Scripting News a few days ago when I came across an entry where Dave said that when he first started putting italics at the end of his posts, he'd get e-mails from people concerned that someone had hacked in and was adding snarky comments to his blog, only for him to explain that it was alternative Dave. Nobody knows where Mr. Italics comes from. It wasn't a technical fault, but it was a different person.

I wrote up a seriously snarky blog entry earlier and trashed it. Oh, if you guys could read it. Alas, it has gone to the bit bucket. Just writing it made me feel better. Certain actions will be taken to remedy the situation that caused me to write it, but I'm biting my tongue. I'm self-censoring. I'm not sure whether that's a good or bad thing.

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In response to my presentation, Mark Birbeck pointed me to this post claiming that RDFa is usable within XHTML 1.

Technically, it may be. I've written up some code based on Mark's example, using "dc:title" in a @class in a div. It validates as perfect XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

But if you use 'namespaced' classnames, you cannot style the class. You can style "dc-title", but not "dc:title". CSS compatibility is something that we should shoot for. eRDF and non-namespaced class names can be styled, RDFa class names cannot - yet.

I think RDFa is not ready for prime time yet.

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Wow, it's been an absolute mad panic of announcements. Firstly, "macroformats" is dead. It lasted all of a few days, but realism set in - assisted by some pissed off microformateers - and we ditched the name.

We've still got the domain names, but they will redirect and we aren't going to advertise them.

I'm just waiting for the Internet to catch up - specifically, DNS. Once the DNS machine has figured out what it's doing, then we can proceed to building the site.

I actually bought the licence for Snapz Pro X ($69!) because I feel that screencasts are going to be very important in what we are doing. Screencasts certainly helped with things like the Ruby on Rails project.

The plan is to help people understand the process of coming up with their own formats - which can be as simple as writing up a bunch of class names or as complex as coming up with a 3,000 item ontology. Of course, if they only want to do the first one, there'll be people who know how to do all the other steps and will do it for them.

I've sent out a sort of 'vision' statement to the people on the list, but I won't bore you with it here - my blog isn't the best place for it, after all. Once the site launches, something very much like it will be up there.

The first GetSemantic project I'm going to be pushing for is Embedded BibTeX. I use BibTeX a lot. The "citation" work at microformats.org is suffering because there's no clear cowpath to be paved. But we have a BibTeX ontology written in DAML+OIL and it wouldn't be too hard to use eRDF to turn that in to HTML. I'm already writing academic essays in XHTML with CSS and having the tools to embed and extract those citations would rule.

The other thing that I might do is "hRSS". hAtom is a great format, but not all web sites can be turned in to Atom - RSS 2.0 serves sites like mine better. I'll follow hAtom as closely as possible, but then move away when the RSS 2.0 specification differs from the Atom specification. Before I get flames, there are good reasons to choose RSS 2.0 if you have untitled blog entries. And, yes, there are good reasons for that too. You may not like the reasons, but they exist.

One of the key differences between GetSemantic and the more formalised microformats is that we're going to say "yes" more often. Think of them as science experiments - have fun, build something, see whether it works. We'll start herding cows down new paths and then if that works, then it might become a microformat. If it doesn't work, then we will learn why it doesn't work and try not to make that mistake in the future.

Tags: getsemantic

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I really love the fact that in Eclipse, many of the plugins have Code Assist - whereby one gets autocomplete on function, variable, class and instance names as well as information on what arguments functions take.

The PHP extension has this, and it's extremely useful. Who can quite remember what order the arguments for array_multisort() go in? Having that information flash up as you type is helpful.

oXygen XML is a great example of this - if you provide a well-fleshed-out schema for an XML file, it'll make sure that the elements and attributes you insert validate. No putting div in head! It not only keeps your code wel-formed, but keeps it validating as you type it. This has helped me dramatically reduce the number of validation errors I have.

Finally, there’s Aptana which does the same for JavaScript and CSS. (It installs as a separate application, but you can use it with Eclipse as a plugin).

While for a lot of non-web developers, they can learn one language like C++ or Java and spend their life doing it, the skills of web development seem to require a knowledge of hundreds of languages and tools. Which is why I’m so thankful for Code Assist. It’s not that Code Assist makes you a bad developer (it doesn’t). Developers are there to solve problems, not be walking, talking reference manuals.

JavaScript is especially annoying in this regard. Firebug goes some way to making JavaScript easier to learn, but I think that Eclipse and Code Assist will help even more.

If, like me, you aren’t wild about JavaScript, take a look at this. It’s really rather nice.

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To illustrate some of the things I spoke about at BarCamp, I have been putting together a really simple parser for (X)HTML pages contaiing microformats to turn them in to RDF.

It basically takes a page, runs it through Tidy, runs all the GRDDL stylesheets across it, loads the result in to RAP and outputs the result as (somewhat messy) RDF/XML.

Currently, the parser is reading hCard, hCalendar, XFN, DC-Extract (not a microformat with a capital ‘M’, but still parseable) and rel-licence. I also have support planned for hReview, GeoURLs and hDOAP.

What’s neat about the parser? Once the stuff is in a document, you can easily run SPARQL queries over the pages. One of the planned functions that I hope to add is an RSS adder. What this would do is let you request that all the URLs that are likely to be web pages be checked to see if there is an RSS feed attached which we might be able to add.

What is nice about RDF is that it becomes almost like a universal format, and it is trivially easy to get data out of it.

I’m planning to add some new functions to it in order to extract more data from different places - Flickr parsing, better Twitter parsing. Now I basically have a workflow which I can edit based in PHP5. For instance, Twitter supports XFN, but there is better data available by writing a domain-specific parser for it. It can be as simple as writing:

if (strstr($url, "twitter.com") { $stylesheets[] = // twitter parser

Of course, we can use weak string matching for speeding up the process:

if (strstr($data, "vcard") { // add hCard parser

This is simply to reduce resource usage - parsing stylesheets isn’t the quickest of processes.

The parser itself is 37 lines of PHP5. It’ll grow as I add domain-specific and site-specific conditionals.

You can access the microformat-to-RDF parser at:

xml.opiumfield.com/mf/rdf/URL

The mf/rdf means that it may be possible to start offering other parsing possibilities - mf/xml, mf/rss etc.

If there’s a problem, either post a comment or come and chat - I’ll be in #swig and #microformats most of this evening.

This brings me on to another little service I’ve started offering over REST which is Tidy.

Tidy is a fantastically powerful C application that takes badly marked up (X)HTML documents and tries to make them slightly more sensible - with validation, XML well-formedness and the such being the end result.

If you use the microformat to RDF parser, I run the HTML I get through Tidy anyway, so there’s no need to bother doing it for that.

I am using Tidy because I really like using XSLT, and XSLT doesn’t run on HTML - of course, Beautiful Soup can be used when XSLT doesn’t.

The REST interface for Tidy is:

tools.opiumfield.com/tidy/URL

By default, my Tidy interface returns XHTML (even if not provided). This is an utterly greedy mostly practical, somewhat philosophical decision - I need XML. Non-XML standards don’t deserve existence unless absolutely necessary.

But if you don’t want automatic XHTML conversion to take place, use:

tools.opiumfield.com/tidy/h/URL

tools.opiumfield.com/tidy/html/URL

Yes, both ‘h’ and ‘html’ work fine.

Try not to bombard my server, and try to cache results wherever practical. And if you are in the position to provide similar services, then please do so - drop me an e-mail and I’ll point some of my external traffic to your script.

Tags: rdf, semweb, microformats, grddl, barcamplondon2, tidy, xhtml, html, xml

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Tony Blair - or someone writing on his behalf - has responded to the “scrap the proposed introduction of ID cards” petition which appeared in my inbox. Here it is in full, with some comments (if you don’t see it in your RSS reader, just click through):

The petition calling for the Government to abandon plans for a National ID Scheme attracted almost 28,000 signatures - one of the largest responses since this e-petition service was set up. So I thought I would reply personally to those who signed up, to explain why the Government believes National ID cards, and the National Identity Register needed to make them effective, will help make Britain a safer place.

The petition disputes the idea that ID cards will help reduce crime or terrorism. While I certainly accept that ID cards will not prevent all terrorist outrages or crime, I believe they will make an important contribution to making our borders more secure, countering fraud, and tackling international crime and terrorism. More importantly, this is also what our security services - who have the task of protecting this country - believe.

So I would like to explain why I think it would be foolish to ignore the opportunity to use biometrics such as fingerprints to secure our identities. I would also like to discuss some of the claims about costs - particularly the way the cost of an ID card is often inflated by including in estimates the cost of a biometric passport which, it seems certain, all those who want to travel abroad will soon need.

In contrast to these exaggerated figures, the real benefits for our country and its citizens from ID cards and the National Identity Register, which will contain less information on individuals than the data collected by the average store card, should be delivered for a cost of around £3 a year over its ten-year life.

But first, it’s important to set out why we need to do more to secure our identities and how I believe ID cards will help. We live in a world in which people, money and information are more mobile than ever before. Terrorists and international criminal gangs increasingly exploit this to move undetected across borders and to disappear within countries. Terrorists routinely use multiple identities - up to 50 at a time. Indeed this is an essential part of the way they operate and is specifically taught at Al-Qaeda training camps. One in four criminals also uses a false identity. ID cards which contain biometric recognition details and which are linked to a National Identity Register will make this much more difficult.

Secure identities will also help us counter the fast-growing problem of identity fraud. This already costs £1.7 billion annually. There is no doubt that building yourself a new and false identity is all too easy at the moment. Forging an ID card and matching biometric record will be much harder.

I also believe that the National Identity Register will help police bring those guilty of serious crimes to justice. They will be able, for example, to compare the fingerprints found at the scene of some 900,000 unsolved crimes against the information held on the register. Another benefit from biometric technology will be to improve the flow of information between countries on the identity of offenders.

The National Identity Register will also help improve protection for the vulnerable, enabling more effective and quicker checks on those seeking to work, for example, with children. It should make it much more difficult, as has happened tragically in the past, for people to slip through the net.

Proper identity management and ID cards also have an important role to play in preventing illegal immigration and illegal working. The effectiveness on the new biometric technology is, in fact, already being seen. In trials using this technology on visa applications at just nine overseas posts, our officials have already uncovered 1,400 people trying illegally to get back into the UK.

Nor is Britain alone in believing that biometrics offer a massive opportunity to secure our identities. Firms across the world are already using fingerprint or iris recognition for their staff. France, Italy and Spain are among other European countries already planning to add biometrics to their ID cards. Over 50 countries across the world are developing biometric passports, and all EU countries are proposing to include fingerprint biometrics on their passports. The introduction in 2006 of British e-passports incorporating facial image biometrics has meant that British passport holders can continue to visit the United States without a visa. What the National Identity Scheme does is take this opportunity to ensure we maximise the benefits to the UK.

These then are the ways I believe ID cards can help cut crime and terrorism. I recognise that these arguments will not convince those who oppose a National Identity Scheme on civil liberty grounds. They will, I hope, be reassured by the strict safeguards now in place on the data held on the register and the right for each individual to check it. But I hope it might make those who believe ID cards will be ineffective reconsider their opposition.

If national ID cards do help us counter crime and terrorism, it is, of course, the law-abiding majority who will benefit and whose own liberties will be protected. This helps explain why, according to the recent authoritative Social Attitudes survey, the majority of people favour compulsory ID cards.

I am also convinced that there will also be other positive benefits. A national ID card system, for example, will prevent the need, as now, to take a whole range of documents to establish our identity. Over time, they will also help improve access to services.

The petition also talks about cost. It is true that individuals will have to pay a fee to meet the cost of their ID card in the same way, for example, as they now do for their passports. But I simply don’t recognise most claims of the cost of ID cards. In many cases, these estimates deliberately exaggerate the cost of ID cards by adding in the cost of biometric passports. This is both unfair and inaccurate.

As I have said, it is clear that if we want to travel abroad, we will soon have no choice but to have a biometric passport. We estimate that the cost of biometric passports will account for 70% of the cost of the combined passports/id cards. The additional cost of the ID cards is expected to be less than £30 or £3 a year for their 10-year lifespan. Our aim is to ensure we also make the most of the benefits these biometric advances bring within our borders and in our everyday lives.

Yours sincerely,

Tony Blair

There are a lot of other issues, but this doesn’t really cover the cost correctly. ID cards will cost us a lot more than the £30 - they’ll cost us in implementation costs, which will come out of taxation. They’ll cost us indirectly in adoption costs.

Tags: tonyblair, id cards, no2id

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We just had an utterly humourous play-fight about an hour ago with Jeremy Keith, Brian Suda, Tom Hughes-Croucher, Ian Forrester and myself over microformats and the SemWeb.

One of the conclusions was that RDF and the Semantic Web needs much better marketing, by taking what works from the marketing of microformats - namely, the plethora of great examples, well-written specifications and tools.

The only difference between us and the microformats folk (who we know and love) is that we prefer the endgame of RDF and the Semantic Web.

HTML is not the end, and we cannot simply observe.

“Macroformats” is a reaction to the accusation that RDF isn’t sexy. We want to make RDF sexy, and the Semantic Web fun.

To explain what macroformats are, the important thing is to say what they are not.

Firstly, macroformats are not a replacement for microformats. If you use microformats and they solve problems for you, that is great.

Secondly, macroformats are not anything new. There is absolutely zero new technology. What the macroformat movement does is different - it helps people use pre-existing technology to do new and interesting things. Through a Darwinian process, new and interesting uses will bubble up that aren’t imaginable.

We have already seen this with microformats - people are doing things with microformats that are not within the specified ‘problem’. Why should we not let the whole web get involved with the development of the web of tomorrow?

The technology that is in development need not be complicated. We need to stop talking about RDF and OWL and SPARQL. We really need to stop talking about ontology development and inference engines and SemWeb research, not because that stuff isn’t important - but because that stuff isn’t all important.

Technology doesn’t matter, data matters.

Keep a watch out - we have registered usemacroformats.com. The macroformats are coming. Semantic Web for the rest of us.

Tags: macroformats, microformats, rdf, barcamplondon2

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I have put up the slides of my RDF and microformats and the Semantic Web. Ian Forrester shot some video, which I’ll post as soon as it’s available.

In the meantime, read it here - it’s in S5, but it’s liberally laced with lots and lots of hyperlinks to interesting stuff.

Tags: microformats, rdf, semweb, barcamplondon2

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I’m here with Aral Balkan and we’re working on scraping Twitter to do functions that the Twitter API doesn’t currently support. Aral just releeased TwitAPI, a PHP regular expressions-based screen scraper.

Aral’s written some regular expressions to pull the data out of the direct messages out. I’m doing it with Python’s BeautifulSoup.

Here are the BeautifulSoup recipes (‘n’ is the B.S. instance, x is to be looped over).

User URL: n.findAll(True, {"class": "status_actions"})[x].\
parent.contents[5].contents[1].contents[0]['href']

User Name: n.findAll(True, {"class": "status_actions"})[0]\
.parent.contents[5].contents[1].contents[0].contents

Comment: n.findAll(True, {"class": "status_actions"})[0]\
.parent.contents[5].contents[2].string.strip()

Fucked-up Twitter timecode: n.findAll(True, {"class": "status_actions"})[0].parent.contents[5].contents[3].contents[1].string.strip()

Once I’ve figured out how to do HTTP Basic authorisation using urllib2, the Twitter parser can be released unto the world!

Tags: barcamplondon2, screen scraping, beautifulsoup, python, aral balkan, twitter

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The main criticism made against new technology is a kind of Luddist response that personal technology like the iPod keeps them from that exciting social brouhah known as modern urban life. Back in 2005, Andrew Sullivan whined:

Even without the white wires you can tell who they are. They walk down the street in their own MP3 cocoon, bumping into others, deaf to small social cues, shutting out anyone not in their bubble… Walk through any airport in the United States these days and you will see person after person gliding through the social ether as if on autopilot. Get on a subway and you’re surrounded by a bunch of Stepford commuters staring into mid-space as if anaesthetised by technology.

The key word in that is autopilot. And it’s because there really is nothing interesting in a railway announcement telling you all the stations that your train is going to. It’s the same stations as it went to yesterday, and the same stations that it will go to tomorrow. When you get to the airport, getting groped by security guards and buying slightly-discounted Toblerones from the duty free is also not massively exciting. Once you’ve been to one airport, you’ve been to them all. Nobody gets excited about Gatwick Airport. Once you’ve taken one commuter train once, the pleasure in repeating the experience drops somewhat.

People have always known that this world has parts which are almost by necessity dull and to-be-avoided. Hence meditation, imagination, books, movies and music. The difference with the iPod is that it is easy for people to put material on to it. A number of my friends put out podcasts. Occasionally, I wake up to find new material from friends and acquaintances. This technology has helped strengthen friendships and social togetherness by allowing us to spread news of events and discussion points among people. Should I refuse to spend my commute reading the blog entries and listening to the podcasts of friends and rather try to engage with my fellow passengers?

Sorry, but nice enough people that they undoubtedly are, we probably share little in common, except for the fact that we will both arrive in central London at about 10am.

If the people who run the public spaces which the iPodders opt-out of really want their attention, stop wasting it. Cut all the damn announcements down to an absolute minimum. Stop informing passengers of every little thing. Don’t have alarm tests. Install a quiet carriage where mobile phones and noisy children are not allowed.

I spend three hours a day on some form of public transport. Can you blame me for wanting to learn something interesting and useful during that time? When the alternative is listening to hasty phone calls from self-important suits, screaming children and tinny announcements of the blindingly obvious, of course people will want to escape. Until we can get a spam filter for our ears, personal stereos like the iPod will be a requirement for mod