Archive for Web

Miraculously Find: (mini) Photo of Steve in Princeton University Museum of Art

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Pointing to tiny photo of Steve from 2001

My dear wife Amy, dear friend Julie and I paid our first visit to the wonderful Princeton University Museum of Art on December 31st.  And, in what has to be the most bizarre and serendipitous event (not in any way the most important event!) in my blessed life,  I found my ugly face in a work of art!

We came across the piece by artist Joan Fontcuberta titled “Googlegram: Niépce”.  The work uses 10s of thousands of images from the Web to form a representation of the  earliest surviving photograph, Nicéphore Niépce’s View from the Window at Le Gras (1826).

The miraculous part  …

1. A tiny photo of me taken in 2001 while in Vienna was used (see above, where I point to the location, and below for an enlargement).   [read on]
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Was the Web Invented 123 Years Ago? Evidence Surfaces ;-)

Some of my favorite runs with the Winchester Highlanders were through the spacious and gorgeous Middlesex Fell Reservation - directly adjacent to Winchester, MA, USA. One sunny and cool Saturday, we took a slightly different route and came across the mysterious structure below (map).  Looks like an old pump house. Or … is that just a cover?

Pump house on the shores of Spot Pond, Middlesex Fells Reservation, north of Boston

Pump House or Home of the Web?

Check out the inscription (photo below) above the massive doors:  “WWW 1890″. Could it be that this is where the World Wide Web was invented? And could the Web have been invented nearly 100 years before history records that Sir Tim Berners-Lee is believed to have conceived of the world’s most important communications medium?

Inscription above door of pump house reads " WWW 1890"

Inscription reads, “WWW 1890″ .. and also “Big Russ”

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Steve’s New Gig at GS1, and the Unambiguous Identification of “Things”

BarcodeIt is an honor and a pleasure to announce that I have joined GS1 as the Chief Technology Officer and President of Standards Development.  I’ll be based near beautiful and intersting Princeton, New Jersey, and traveling frequently (as usual).

You may not recognize the name, but you will definitely recognize GS1′s products. GS1 is the international, neutral, non-profit organization that develops and manages the world’s barcodes (40 years old in 2013), RFID tag technology (e.g. electronic tags for vehicles, shipping containers, consumer goods, even running race chips) and other standards for the unambiguous identification of things (entities, assets, products, services) and sharing of data.   All of this is critical for business, health, safety, sustainability and other life-critical activities around the world. Here is what I’ll be doing  …

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Open Data on the Rise

mug with linked data scoring

5 levels of linked data proficiency

There has been a noticeable increase in news about Open Data (news that is more substantial than my last post on running data).  Putting data on the Web in standard formats promises to spur innovation, commerce, cures for diseases, transparency, accountability and collaboration around the world. Linked Open Data takes this a step further, leveraging the power of linking, which is central to the Web of documents, to connect data across the Web like a large, distributed relational database.

See video:  Linked Open Data – What is it? (from Europeana)

Linked Open Data Cloud

Read on for pointers to initiatives at the Open Data Institute, TED, Web Foundation, Orange and the US Gov’t …

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First Web Index Goes Live – Sweden is #1, US #2, UK #3 …

Web Index Ranking of 61 Countries

I’m extremely please to share the news that the Web Foundation’s Web Index is now public. It premiered today at a symposium in London, headlined by Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee. The Web Index is the world’s first measure of the impact of the Web on people and nations around the world.  This inaugural publication ranks the state of the Web, as well as its political, economic and social impact, across 61 countries on all continents. The plan is to publish the Index annually, and to continue to expand its geographic and analytic scope.

As we conceived the Web Foundation in 2008, I started to formulate the concept for the Web Index. Why?  We needed an objective and powerful tool to help governments, companies and citizens develop better informed and targeted strategies for investing in technology and policy in order to make the Web a better value. The Web Foundation also needed an anchor, metric and compass for the work of the Foundation itself. The Board and many others have contributed to getting us to where we are now (see below).  Methodology and results …

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Web Index Previewed at TED 2012

 

 

 

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The theme of this year’s TED conference was “Full Spectrum” — “the rich use of multiple technologies, formats and approaches for the most powerful possible impact on an audience”.  Certainly the World Wide Web has greatly expanded the spectrum of people with access to a broad spectrum of information in a broad spectrum of ways.  I proposed a talk entitled, “Measuring the Web’s World Wide Impact”, and was fortunate to one of a couple dozen of talks selected from 250 or so candidates for a talk during the TED-U sessions at TED2012.  Speaking on 28 February, I had 7 mins to explain the Web Foundation’s scheme for the Web Index.  Here are some pics of my talk from the TED Flickr site (pic 1, pic 2, pic 3)

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