So I've been on lot's of first dates in my life. Nearly, but not quite as many, second dates. Far fewer third dates.

Lots of first dates start with being smitten, enamoured, and very excited about the second date.

So I've spent the last several weeks doing, in essence, a complete rewrite of the scripts that scrape in data from UMWBlogs. It's all now much more modular, which I hope will make it much more nimble to expand out into new data sets. The first priority will be grabbing feeds from a wider variety of sources. Then, it'll be into tapping into linked open data sources.

Twirony

(noun) The joy of finally having internet service at home again after a week and wanting to express your joy on Twitter, but encountering

I've been following MarsPhoenix on Twitter for a while, and was delighted to see a really neat use of Twitter -- people tweeting questions to the probe, anthropomorphized.

I ran across DebateGraph, (by way of this post by John Breslin) and it seems very exciting.

I'm in the middle of watching a video of Michael Wesch doing a version of his "Crisis of Significance" talk, a much-revised version of a talk I first heard him give at ELI, but now moving toward virtual learning environments. A key part of the introductory part of his talk is the question, "What are schools for?"

I will have much more to write here as I work through amble through "Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist" (I know, I know...I'll add links later but I gotta get this out now!). I was tempted to skip the early, introductory chapters, but it was a delight to resist that urge.

Tomorrow begins Faculty Academy here at UMW. Far too much to get ready, but there's much to look forward to!

So the analogy here will be fleshed out later, but here's a tidbit about why I've come to think of the various projects I'm working on as all falling under an umbrella project called "Amiatinus"

Getting scrapers for UMWBlogs data into better shaper---to some degree, at least, I'm getting dcmitypes info. That's let me put a couple tests together, generating image and video galleries: Images, Videos.