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Gordon Brown announced yesterday the establishment of a UK Institute of Web Science, aiming to promote “cutting edge” web technologies. Mr Brown outlined this vision:

This will help place the UK at the cutting edge of research on the semantic web and other emerging web and internet technologies, and ensure that government is taking the right funding decisions to position the UK as a world leader. And we will invite universities and private sector web developers and companies to join this collaborative project.

Good news indeed, in light of the recent developments in the Linked Data initiative in the UK.

So the new iPad was finally unveiled this week, giving an end to loads of speculations and high hopes… The device is essentially just a large iPod Touch, lacking basic features someone would expect from a tablet, like multitasking, a usb port, or even a camera. Criticism has been ruthless so far, from mocking the device’s unfortunate name to comparing it with… a stone

In anticipation of the big announcement of the new tablet / e-reader by Apple next week, Jason Bradbury of the Gadget Show wrote a very passionate piece in his blog:

Let me place my neck squarely on the block and predict the most important dimension of the next Wednesday’s launch: it will change publishing, forever.

I’ll just say I hope even half of what Jason believes comes true (and judging from Apple’s history this might just happen!).

A year ago, I was starting this blog, after taking a break from loads of christmas food… just like today!
Here’s to another year of blogging! Cheers!!

In anticipation of the Christmas holidays, here’s an intoxicating video I fished on YouTube. Enjoy!

If you’re lucky enough to hold a Google Wave account, or just want to learn more about this exciting new technology, there is a guide out there by Gina Trapani, editor of Lifehacker.com. The guide is freely available under the Creative Commons licence and can give you a pretty good idea of what the Wave is all about, from basics to a bit more advanced capabilities.

…you can ask at the Semantic Overflow. A Semantic Web expert will (hopefully) pick this up and give you a straight answer. Give it a try!

Google has just launched a new search service based on social data: Google Social Search. It works like this: if you have a Google profile, you can add the social networks you’re a member of (e.g. Twitter or FriendFeed). Then, when you do a Google search, you will also get results that have to do with your friends, like a post from a friend’s blog. Of course, if you don’t add this information to your Google profile, or if you are not logged into your Google account when you do a search, you won’t get any social results.

Here’s a demo video of this new service. You might notice that Google is quite concerned about privacy issues, reassuring us about the transparency of the service throughout the video:

As of today, GeoCities belongs to the past. After almost 15 years of offering free web space to anyone with “creative” ideas, GeoCities is no more. Yahoo! has decided to permanently terminate the service, as it was surpassed by the booming blogging and social networking sites.

Like many other internet users of my age, my very first web page was hosted on GeoCities. Half-coded in HTML and half in Frontpage, with lots of GIFs and different colours, my page was not very different from the rest of the GeoCities world!

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for your eyes!), I haven’t kept any of the early versions of my GeoCities page. I only managed to retrieve the last version, which is not too dreadful! Here’s what the home page used to look like:

Note: The monkey was “evolving” into a human sitting in front of a PC, through a home-made GIF

Goodbye GeoCities! We sure had a lot of fun together!