Adrien’s blog
Stuff I like, stuff I do, stuff I make

I’ve just found this quote while reviewing FOAF’s website, I love it !

“There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.”
Robert Benchley, Benchley’s Law of Distinction

Tout d’abord, bonne année à ceux qui liront ce billet!

J’entame donc cette nouvelle année avec un billet en français pour faire la promotion du JDE 2008, la Journée Entreprises-Doctorants qui aura lieu à l’ENS de Lyon le 7 février prochain. J’ai découvert cet évènement par hasard, mais j’en parle car c’est le genre d’évènement que j’attendais quand j’étais encore un étudiant à l’avenir incertain…

Bref, j’invite tout ceux qui — comme moi à l’époque — se demandent quels opportunités de recherche proposent les entreprises à se renseigner sur cet évènement ainsi que sur les bourses CIFRE (dont je bénéficie actuellement).

http://www.jed2008.fr/index.php

This question excites business people, researchers and web enthusiasts… What will Web3.0 be? Gurus say it’s gonna be a set of technologies allowing to get rid of the browser, to work semi-connectedly (sometimes off-line) or it’s gonna be the so-called Semantic Web that W3C have been dreaming about for years, or maybe it’s about moving from the keyboard/mouse/screen paradigm to new human-machine interfaces… I think everyone is being too specific, in my opinion.

Here is my vision of the Web evolution:

• Web1.0: sites that broadcast information to people
• Web2.0: services that allow people to contribute and exchange information
• Web3.0: platform that brings relevant and contextual information to every individual

If you read between the lines, you see different dimensions:

• the information flow: broadcasting -> exchange -> relevant delivery
• the platform: web sites -> services -> platform
• the social aspect: people look for information -> people exchange (blogs, social networks, tagging…) -> every person is informed (personalized and contextual aggregation)
• the relevance: company or service-based sites (brands, forums, chats…) -> convergence to topic-based sites that allow manipulation of information (widget, mashups, RSS feeds…) -> feed of personalized information based on the context of the user
• the technologies: HTML (server-based pages) -> AJAX (rich client interfaces) and RSS feeds (extracting information from websites) -> ??? (A.I., semantic technologies…)
• the interfaces: keyboard/mouse/screen -> support for more interfaces (webcams for video conferencing…) -> multimodal access (adapting to the context)
• the community spaces: forums/irc/chat/im -> social networks, metaverses (second life…) -> augmented reality?

Sorry for posting such a draft, that’s just a bunch of random thoughts I just felt I had to write down!

As you may know, I believe that the future of computing is through the use of Semantic Technologies in order to link knowledge (note the contrast with the words “data” or even “content”) in a way that is more natural for humans but also understandable for machines. Although many enthousiasts (including the W3C) try to push semantic standards to the public to follow the vision of Tim Berners-Lee (well know for having written the foundings of the Semantic Web in Weaving the Web), many detractors think that this vision is naive/idealistic and that it will thus never work. I believe that we are ready to Semanticize the Web, but it will take time and we should not expect the masses to do the hard work.

Concerning the Semantic Web, Mor dared to declare publicly that the “The Semantic Web is Dead“. On his article The Emerging-Semantics Web (”The Semantic Web is Dead”), he claims that, even with Web2.0 in which users annotate data and the use of microformats, we cannot expect the masses to generate Semantic data (or should I say knowledge). As I commented on his article, it’s true that nobody but geeks can write pure Semantic data (using RDF for example, and it would not be perfect anyway). But wouldn’t it be the responsability of the platforms (i.e. websites/webservices that allow users to feed their databases with user data) to enrich the user data with semantics? I explain this idea on Mor’s article, check it out.

On his article “Moving Towards the Semantic Web: Grassroots vs. Ivory Towers“, James Simmons shares a similar belief that Semantizing the Web must be done by developers on their publishing platforms, not by the masses using these platforms. In his explaination, he smartly introduces two categories of Semantic Web believers: “Grassroots” and “Ivory Towers”. The Ivory Towers (we’re mainly thinking of the W3C) make the Semantic Web by building its foundations in a top-down approach. They define standards to store, link, query and represent semantic data on the web but their vision of how the web should be is too idealistic for now, as they are on Tim Berners-Lee’s side. Whereas the Grassroots make the Web more Semantic, following a bottom-up approach. For example, they enrich state-of-art websites using smart tricks like microformats to embed metadata within XHTML pages.

Like James, I believe that the Semantic Web is starting to grow as developers build bridges between the current Web and semantic standards. According to the fact that most content of the web is stored using platforms like WordPress (for blogs), Joomla (for websites) or even Facebook (for social networking), this evolution could become exponential soon if the developers of these popular platforms integrate some semantics in them. It’s a long way to Tim Berners-Lee’s (and other Ivory Towers’) vision for sure, but we’ll get there progressively!

i’ve just decided to start using twitter, i couldn’t stand ignoring the buzz anymore! but now i’m facing a critical problem: i need friends to twit with!

“what the hell is twitter?”, i can hear you say… well, it’s between a very concise blog (with very short posts) and the status message of your msn/aim/gtalk (or any instant messaging). it’s a bit like myspace bulletins, actually. the idea is to write occasionally what you are up to, in order to let your friends know; and thus read what your friends are up to. it’s a good way to share instantly a particular state of mind, good/bad news, or updates about your life that may be important to your friends.

some examples? “got 2 invites for a concert tomorrow, anyone interrested?” ; “i’m leaving to paris in september” ; “i broke up with my gf” ; or even “damn, i just stepped on a dog shit”!

the cool thing is that you can receive your friends’ updates, and send your own updates on your cell phone by SMS, wherever your are. therefore you don’t need a computer nor an internet connection to keep in touch!

so, if you’re curious, if you care about keeping in touch with me, or if you’re a geek who already has a twitter but lacks friends (well, sounds like me!) => please join, i can invite you!

see you on twitter, or go to hell!

Don’t you realize that people don’t socialize much in the train anymore? Most people have their own personal entertainment means: they watch movies on their laptop, listen to their ipod, read books… But in the same time, many of them have a profile on myspace or any other social networking website in order to meet new people. Isn’t that a paradox?

In France, I’ve found two initiatives that extend the idea of social networking to train journeys. Idtgv&co is proposed by SNCF (the French railroad company), and Train d’Union is a free and independant alternative. In both of them, passengers are expected to create a personal and/or a professional profile, register the references of the trains they will be travelling on and meet other people sharing the same journeys online before they can eventually meet on the train.

While some people may think that it’s ridiculous to use a website for meeting people whereas you can talk sponteanously with the person next to you, I think the idea is great because you can make new interresting contacts instead of doing stuff on your own during long journeys.

Now, the next step is to be able to browse people’s profiles and exchange messages on line, during the train journey, like you would do on myspace, in order to meet them right away and make your journey much enjoyable.

Back from the "forum CIFRE" that was happening in Paris on March, the 20th, I released the last version of my CV/résumé in three flavours:

• a short "french-fashioned" CV to introduce myself as a "Software Architect" (in French only)
• a complete CV including my research works in French
• and the same complete CV including my research works in English

I also updated my business networking profiles on Viadeo (formerly "Viaduc", now both in French and English), LinkedIn and Ryze.

Updates are indicated by a "post-it" icon followed by the update date written in red font. 

Check this out on my home page: http://joly.adrien.free.fr/ 

Hey, just wanted to let you know that I made some changes to my homepage:

• added a presentation
• added little flags for english and french documents
• added link to RSS feed of this blog
• added a nice & clean background image

I have not had any feedback at all about my homepage so far, and your opinion does matter to me! So, please, feel free to tell me what you think about it by posting comments here or sending me an email!

Cheers! 

Facts: With the increasing popularity of the "web 2.0", internet users are invited to get involved with the content proposed on web sites by annotating, commenting, tagging… This way, information is reviewed and linked to other resources, helping people to learn and navigate in a more intuitious way - because these annotations are human.

BUT such annotations are found on specific websites, e.g. YouTube for videos, del.icio.us for bookmarks, Last.fm for music, and so on…

Challenge: What about bringing human annotations to another level by generalizing it to any kind of information and pushing it to the user when relevant, without expecting him to look for it on specialized websites?

Uses cases:

1. Reviewing resources and sharing opinions
2. Warning about resources: "content is not up-to-date" etc…
3. Linking to other human-relevant resources
4. Creating communities: meeting other visitors

• Yakalike, Chatsum and many other services intergrate your favorite browser to chat with other people visiting the same page as you. This is an interresting solution for all of the 4 proposed use cases, but there are some drawbacks:

• the lack of popularity (too few users installed the software) prevents the idea from taking off
• the identification of a "page" is based on its URL, which can be irrelevant (especially with web 2.0 apps?)
• this chat program, as a browser extension, may be too intrusive for permanent use: too much space is wasted, sometimes for nothing

• Blogger Web Comments is another browser extension which notifies the user (by a small icon) when the visited page is commented in blogs, allowing her/him to consult the relevant posts. This approach is less intrusive and relying on blogs, which are commonly used nowadays, but also has its drawbacks:

• this add-on only relies on blogs hosted by Blogger.com, limitation that is not acceptable since it would chunk the information for each blog host
• commenting on a page consists in posting in your blog, and this blog must be hosted by Blogger.com. is a small note worth a post on your blog?

• Del.icio.us and other bookmark sharing communities are services that invite users to submit their bookmarks on their account by tagging them. By sharing them with the community, we can evaluate the popularity of a website, discover new websites related with certain tags and read user reviews. We can also consult the people who tagged a bookmark to interact with them. This approach is very popular and interresting but:

• you have to go on the del.icio.us website in order to browse this information
• tags are not necessarly efficient: their are sometimes subjective (synonyms and interpretations) and culture-dependant (translations), this may result in improving ranking bookmarks which are trivial to tag and forgetting content which is not easily categorizable but valuable.
• like a few people, I like to keep my bookmarks stored locally too, and I don’t know about any possible synchronization between del.icio.us and Firefox. It would be hard anyway since browsers use hierarchical categorization while del.icio.us use tags.

I like the idea of chatting with people concerned with certain websites, when they could represent an interresting community, but I think that this concept should not be integrated in all cases. In the blog approach, I like the fact that the user can be notified if some annotations were identified about the website which is currently visited, this is less intrusive. Unfortunately, it also too specific because most interresting annotations are not worth a post on your personal blog. Nevertheless, del.icio.us, as a bookmark sharing service, is the perfect place to store these annotations. But the current service is sticking to its website too much, forcing users to look for information instead of the information being brought to her/him.

A perfect approach?

I think that annotations should be proposed to the user when browsing websites or consulting results of a search engine. In the case of the search engine, these annotations should have an influence on the ranking of the results, by the way. In the browsing side, an extension should connect to a service like del.icio.us to propose sticky notes, a link to an irc channel (chat), human-entered links to related resources and other ranked annotations about this page. The sticky notes and the proposed chat channel must be elected democratically by user vote, favorizing commonly agreed and concise information. The sticky notes would consist in objective information, like the current status of the the content: telling if it’s not up-to-date for example. Any other annotation would remain in a list in which users can rank them (like in Digg). Adding a bookmark would propose to the user to rank the annotation which best describes the content. Ideally, we’ll find a more efficient way than tags or hierarchies to classify bookmarks both locally in your browser and remotely on the bookmark sharing service on the internet.

An interresting post about two evolvements of taggings: hierarchichal and clustered tagging.

Hello World: Hierarchical Tags