A tribute to GeoCities

Oct 26
2009
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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! :D

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:

geocities

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!

Category: Personal, Technology/Internet | Tags: , , , , , ,

Web 3.0, Linked Data and the Semantic Web

May 26
2009
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Greg Boutin, founder of Growthroute Ventures, recently posted a series of articles about the latest trends on the web: Web 3.0, Linked Data, and the Semantic Web. Greg attempts an in-depth analysis of these concepts, the technologies and innovations behind them, and how they can be combined to form the next generation web. Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb has posted a recap of these articles, together with some of his views on the future of the Semantic Web and the role of Google. Richard concludes:

It’s clear to us that the time for structured data has come. We’re beginning to see it in the current wave of Linked Data sets being released, and in the support that big companies, like Google and Yahoo, are showing for structured data. Who knows, maybe the Semantic Web is nearly upon us too.

Category: Semantic Web | Tags: , , , , , ,

Semantics in Cloud Computing

Feb 10
2009
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Cloud Computing is about replacing desktop-based computing resources with internet-based ones. The driving concept is called Software as a Service (SaaS), according to which software applications are licensed for use as services provided to customers on demand. This is similar to how traditional utilities like electricity or water are charged.

The latest issue of the IEEE Intelligent Systems journal features Cloud Computing and includes an article on Semantic Web applications. The authors claim that the volume of computing resources on the cloud can help deal with the explosion of web data and the scalability problems of the Semantic Web. They describe a number of such initiatives: Hadoop’s MapReduce, as well as the HBase and Yahoo! Pig extensions. The purpose of these open-source platforms is large-scale processing of semantic RDF datasets without any scalability limits.

Category: Semantic Web | Tags: , , , , , , , ,