Graphic for your application or site

Working on the Semantic Links wiki site (http://www.semanticlinks.net/wiki) I faced a problem of high-quality free graphic resources (icons/buttons). So I found several good sites that provides such resources. First of all thanks a lot to Nikolai Bird (http://www.webdesign-guru.co.uk/icon/) for his Web 2.0 graphics (http://www.webdesign-guru.co.uk/icon/web-20-graphics/) and collection of free icons links (http://www.webdesign-guru.co.uk/icon/free-icons-graphics-links/) And of course I found IconLet search engine (http://www.iconlet.com/) useful. It provides search for icons having the following search parameters:

• name
• format (gif,png)
• resolution
• license (free, GPL, Creative Commons, etc ...)

Just one disadvantage - it's impossible to specify several resolutions (or range). Well and last - Icons on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Icons).

Semantic Links Wiki

Now the wiki site is created to accumulate the information about the Semantic Links and about the Semantic Web. You can find it here: http://www.semanticlinks.net/wiki.

One year in Live

The Semantic Links project is one year in live. Now It supports the FireFox. Thanks to Firebugs! Also I implemented a possibility to inject the Semantic Links functionality to any site. I'm still working on the Class Designer and new widgetes. Let me know if you'd like to attend the project!

Furebug - great web development tool

This is an excellent add-on for the FireFox. The Furebug lets debug front-end stuff with pleasure because it provides such cool features as:

• JavaScript debugger
• Nice watch panel that shows all about JavaScript objects, functions, variables
• DOM Viewer
• CSS Viewer
• Dynamic HTML Viewer that can higliht elements on the FF when your mouse is over HTML tag
• Inspector - to select any object on the rendered page and show it's HTML
• Console
• Editor
• Features to speed up your code

Very useful tutorial is here. Also you can find some videos about Firebug.

To Open or not to Open?

Well, I'm thinking about make the Semantic Web project an open source. It seems that it can push the project.

Yahoo! Proposed they mashup builder. The main feature that you can design your mashup with graphical designer and use some predefined operators and modules.

The mashup is a pipe in Yahoo! terms. So you can create your pipe with use:

• Inputs from Yahoo Search, Fetch, Google Base, Flickr.
• User inputs: numbers, strings, URL, location, …
• Operators – they help to process data: create loops, counters, filters and other.
• Other modules and operators.

Very interesting is that you can reuse other pipe in your own pipe.

Mostly pipes are suitable to analyze RSS feeds. This is because Yahoo provides several cool modules that work with feed. For example I created a pipe that do the following:

1. Gets user input (search text)
2. fetch feeds from:
1. http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/semantic
2. http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/semanticweb
3. http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/rdf
3. search for “search text” in every entry of feeds

The picture with this simple pipe is shown below.

Pipes can be useful to search what you need across feeds with similar semantic. Especially if you search every day.

It’s not so tricky to create your own pipe. Also I’m sure that number of allowed modules will grow and more complex pipes will be possible just as 1-2-3.

Start from example pipes to understand how they work http://pipes.yahoo.com/tags/example/

On January 16, Geni launched. It allows people to create quick and beautiful family trees.

That’s really simple but valuable idea. A kind of social network built on the sibling connection. Just imagine that next step of the Web 2.0 is to interconnect different social networks. In this case we’ll have “real digital persons” with a lot of connections of different types. This will be a many-dimensional web.