Archive for March, 2006

Mojo at Rojo

Thursday, March 16th, 2006

I’ve been working really hard building our new Mojo feature at Rojo. Adding Mojo to stories in Rojo is a convenient way to show the world news that you like.

I’m especially excited because we’ve really “kicked it upstairs” for this feature with a new back-end architecture that we designed to make our mojo extremely snappy and scalable.

Here’s a screenshot showing this story’s mojo count in the upper-right corner. Just click it to add your mojo to any story. The first person to add mojo to each story gains a little bit of “microfame” (the link in the bottom right corner).

rojomojo

Posted in web | 1 Comment »

The Semantic Divide

Wednesday, March 8th, 2006

Its what I call the “semantic divide.” This is the mountain range that semantic web robots are not (yet) adept at crossing. On one side is a plethora of electronic information made available in well-defined machine-readable forms. Over on the other side (where some of our moms hang out) there are troves of useful data. All of it has even been made publicly available, though it was never intended for anything more than a mere human to interpret. For a little while longer, those of us building aggregators can keep busy with the various formats on the machine-readable side, but soon the divide will be crossed by grass-roots tech efforts. For those that can’t be asked to create machine-readable versions of their electronic data, someone else will happily do it. Yes feedyes, the grass-roots semantic web is coming.

Posted in social | No Comments »

Tour De Deuce: 33713 km

Tuesday, March 7th, 2006

He did it. My friend Greg Kaiser completed his trip from Deadhorse, Alaska to Ushuai, Argentina. A while ago I managed to accomplish a similar route from the comfort of a Jeep, but Greg negotiated the humbling distance on his mountain bike!

Greg’s pan-American trip (aka “Tour de Deuce“) totalling 33713 km also outdoes his first amazing trip, “Tour de Dude,” which led him all the way around the continental U.S.

dude-ometer

From Tierra del Fuego, Greg writes:

It was pretty incredible to realize I’d biked here from Alaska, although I think even as I write this the whole magnitude of the trip hasn’t fully sunk in yet. I still remember biking out of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska on my first day of the tour. The skies were overcast and there was snow and ice on the ground all around. I remember seeing the “Next Services 240 miles” sign and how far it seemed just to get to the next town. And here I was, who knows how many thousands upon thousands of towns later.

You have made us proud, Dude.

Posted in fun | 1 Comment »