FIREFOX'S PING ATRIBUTE: USEFUL OR SPYWARE

The Mozilla Team has quietly enabled a new feature in Firefox that parses 'ping' attributes to anchor tags in HTML. Now links can have a 'ping' attribute that contains a list of servers to notify when you click on a link. Although link tracking has been done using redirects and Javascript, this new "feature" allows notification of an unlimited and uncontrollable number of servers for every click, and it is not noticeable without examining the source code for a link before clicking it. [via slashdot]

possibly filed under the "social implications of html programming" section.....

PIONEERS & INNOVATORS OF THE SEMANTIC WEB: RETO BACHMANN-GMUER

Familiarise yourself with WYMIWYG/KnoBot developed by Reto Bachmann-Gmür (his KnoBot-powered weblog here).

Also, make sure you check out Reto's presentation, entitled "From the information pile to social, knowledge-exchanging bots"(OSCOM 2003) for more in-depth information pertaining to the raison d'etre of KnoBot and the motivation behind its development.


From the WYMIWYG/KnoBot project website:

KnoBot - An agent for decentralised knowledge exchange

WYMIWYG KnoBot combines semantic web technology with a P2P design to build a trust based decentralised system for information selection and discovery.

What KnoBot is:
- An innovative cms for running your blog or website
- An RSS/Atom/KnoBot aggregator
- A system for rating articles and feeds
- A system for sharing ratings with others
- A fully semantic web enabled system

KnoBot is open source software developed in Java using the Jena framework for accessing an RDF model where all contents and meta-information is stored requiring no relational database. The rendition to variuos output fomat is done with XSLT transforming RDF serialized as R3X or TriX into HTML and in future other fomats like Atom, RSS and XSL:FO (to generate PDF-files).Getting started

THE FRIEND OF A FRIEND (FOAF) PROJECT

The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is about creating a Web of machine-readable homepages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.

Your assignment: With foaf-a-matic, create a FOAF file describing yourself (follow the steps given here). My email is george at hyperdrome dot net .