Happy Blog Day! (Thanks for reminding me Ina.)
Monthly Archive for August, 2005
Was sad to hear that Bob Moog died on Sunday.
Tomita-san was one of many who posted messages on Bob Moog’s guestbook both before and after his death.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2005 06:56 PM CDT
Dear Dr. Moog,
This is from Isao Tomita. I was shocked by the news from Roland that you are in the hospital. I am very much anxious for your quick recovery.
In 1972, even before the release of my first album from RCA Records, I made a visit to MOOG Factory in Buffalo with my friend interpreter, Mr. Ayugai, and had a chance to show my recorded tape to you. I had already purchased MOOG III through Japanese Trading company, but a large synthesizer was completely new in Japan then, and there were no one to tell me how to use it. I performed with my own way of trial-and-error method.
This truned out to be a good result. I still remember clearly your word. You said “This is the expression by MOOG III nobody has ever made.”
Soon after my visit, RCA Records decided to release the series of my work.
“Snowflakes Are Dancing: The Newest Debussy”
“Moussorgsky:Pictures At an Exhibition”
“The Planets”
All three above were listed on top (No.1) of Billboard Classical Chart.I owe you for MOOG III which brought me a success, and further more your contribution to the developement of electronic instrument is highly noted and innumerable musicians in the world have received the benefit.
I do wish and pray for your quick recovery.
Isao Tomita
Wow, I was just talking to Stefan last week about setting up something similar to this TechCamp. Great minds think alike!
Basically, after spending July in San Francisco, and having attended so many techie events there, I wanted us to do something similar here.
I’ve added a TechCamp forum to boards.ie to ramp up the enthusiasm!
SIOC (Was RSS Version 3 Specs Up for Review)
As (one version of) its name implies (”Really Simple Syndication”), RSS is an excellent way to get your content out to the feed consuming public (people or systems). However, since it is so generic, it has its limitations. When you see an RSS feed, how do you know what it is? Did it come from a blog, a bulletin board, a news site, your aunt’s recipe site, a bookmarks list or a set of recently updated photos? Apart from an analysis of the “generator” string, the proposed RSS 3.0 doesn’t easily solve this existing problem. How is content related to other content? Have there been any replies or comments on this content? Is item 1 a reply to item 2?
For my part, I’m interested in content that comes from online community discussions: blogs, mailing lists, bulletin boards, newsgroups - something where one person makes a post on a ‘forum’ and someone replies to that post.
Researchers in our Semantic Web cluster at DERI, NUI Galway have been working on an open specification for describing communities using online discussion forums, leading to what Ryan King and others term “distributed conversations”.
The result is SIOC, standing for Semantically-Interconnected Online Communities.
The initial version of our SIOC specification has been drafted. It can be used in on its own (having a complete set of terms) or in conjunction with other RDF formats such as RSS 1.0 (and 1.1).
At the moment, online communities are islands that are not interlinked, and the SIOC ontology has been proposed to not only link these communities but to leverage data in ways that were previously unknown.
While there are many (useful) classes and properties in SIOC, it can essentially be boiled down to: Users create Posts that are contained in Forums that are hosted on Sites, e.g.
Posts have reply Posts, and Forums can be parents of other Forums.
In terms of producing metadata, we’ve started with SIOC exporters for open-source discussion systems such as WordPress and Drupal / CivicSpace, and more are on the way. We’d also love to get input from creators of other community discussion systems. Thanks.
CaptSolo tells me about an RSS 3.0 fight!
Slashdot | RSS Version 3 Specs Up for Review
Jonathan Avidan writes “The RSS 3 Homepage now offers its first publicly available specification, the RSS 3 Lite-type Specification First Draft, intended for review and commenting for revision. RSS 3 is a reworking of RSS 2.0, filling the gaps and removing unnecessary features and is fully backwards-compatible, rather than a new format.”
I found live Ireland listed on the top picks in the iTunes music store’s podcast section. Downloading as I type; the current episode is a travel guide to Galway 
BBC NEWS | Magazine | Rewriting the rule books
David posted a link to this article on the Y! irishblogs mailing list, and before I’d finished reading it I was about to say “hey, I was there!”: then I saw that I’d gotten a mention for my blog post about my first Wikipedia article on “Tonto’s Expanding Head Band”…
Blogs also give a sense of why people commit time to the encyclopaedia, recent examples including Pete Ashton’s Goodbye Myspace, Hello Wikipedia! and John Breslin’s My First Wikipedia Article: the latter’s an entry on some prog rock synth maestros who helped Stevie Wonder with his funkiness: a sample entry from an encyclopaedia that doesn’t have to worry about how many pages it has.
It popped into my head a few days ago that Technorati could do something very similar to their blog search engine for bulletin boards. How?
- Bulletin boards can provide RSS feeds of their content, on a per-forum basis. I’ve installed this functionality for phpBB and vBulletin, and there’s not that much to it.
- Bulletin board software usually has BBCode, or quick markup for inserting HTML into a discussion post. You then just have to add a BBCode markup item for “tags”.
For example,
[tag]{param}[/tag]
would get translated to:
Tag: <a target=_blank href="http://www.technorati.com/tags/{param}">{param}</a>
for use by Technorati (as long as the HTML is exported in the description / content chunk).
Once one set of bulletin board developers start implementing this and seeing the search benefits, you can bet the rest would cop on pretty quickly.
Of course, SIOC can also be used to express information about a bulletin board post more completely than RSS, and this tag information could form part of that.
I was interested to see how many blog posts we’ve gathered at POTB over the past four months. The answer is 30452. What’s interesting is that this amounts to nearly 50 posts averaged per blog. Of course, the actual figures differ. The top 10 prolific blogs (based on stats since April) are:
- www.sluggerotoole.com (1235)
- tcal.net (1121)
- saoirse32.blogsome.com (931)
- www.freedominst.org (423)
- unitedirelander.blogspot.com (413)
- backseatdrivers.blogspot.com (408)
- blogs.linux.ie/xeer (380)
- gaskinbalrog.blogspot.com (352)
- irish.typepad.com/irisheyes (308)
- irisheagle.blogspot.com (288)
- macdaraconroy.com/linklog (287)
All the usual information on most clicked blogs and entries is available on the POTB listings page.
Steve has put up an MP3 of my boards.ie interview on Anna Livia FM, and for those who can’t be bothered downloading and listening, here’s the transcript.
Joanna: Now, we’re just gonna have a quick chat with John Breslin who was one of the founders of boards.ie, which is one of Ireland’s largest discussion boards. Good morning John?
John: Good morning Joanna.
Joanna: How are you?
John: Not too bad now.
Joanna: Good stuff. Em, how did you come up with the… Ah, how did you start Boards?
John: Well, Boards kind of came about from a very small community of, am, computer gamers, that em, I set up in 1998, and basically the idea was that we had this gaming, eh, website, and we wanted to add a discussion forum to it. So we had about 50 members or so at that time…
Daniel: Yeah.
John: …and, am, it kind of grew from there.
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