I like powerpoint as much as the next guy, it’s a valuable presentation tool, it’s feature rich and a great complement to spoken presentations and keynotes.  More than a decade after its debut in 1997 as part of the Microsoft Office suite, Powerpoint has gained a virtual stanglehold on executive meetings and presentations.  The use [...]

The Google Bloggers have reported on the State of the Google Union, creating this post titled Helping computers understand language. I’m a big fan of Google, but in this case (and in a previous post titled How I Know that Search Engines Haven’t Mastered Semantics), I have to take the side of the devils advocate [...]

The first of Watzlawick’s five axioms of communication is “One cannot not communicate”.  Because every behaviour is a kind of communication, people who are aware of each other are constantly communicating. Any perceivable behaviour, including the absence of action, has the potential to be interpreted by other people as having some meaning. On the web, [...]

I don’t want to sound like a nerd, (ok, maybe I do), but I was just reading a paper called ‘tagging human knowledge’ by Paul Heymann, Andreas Paepcke, Hector Garcia-Molina.  Because I’ve been speaking recently about categorization and taxonomy and their importance in defining relationships of things, I completely neglected tagging as a viable method [...]

The semantic web is coming.  Tim Berners Lee, the “father of the internet”  describes it in this article in Scientific American. The Semantic Web will bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users. Clear as [...]