More bloggers are embedding Technorati Tags into their postings, and it’s great to see a major league app use user-created metadata for anything. The popular convention of announcing what your Technorati tags are as part of your blog’s content, though, made me wonder: can we add these tags where the casual reader doesn’t see them, so that they really are metadata instead of being additional tagged content? For example, if I write a posting about RDF and XMP without actually…

A few months ago, Danny Ayers said that he was looking for work. Now, he writes

June 2018 update: when Bloglines went down, I used Google Reader for a few years. When that went away, I used FeedReader for a few years, but having been recently a bit frustrated with their interface, I now use inoreader. Long live RSS!

Saxon is great for getting to know XQuery syntax (see part one and part two of my “Getting Started with XQuery” articles in XML.com for more on this), but it reads all of the data to query into memory, and much of the point of XQuery is to work with large, indexed, disk-based collections of XML that won’t fit into memory. I’ve started playing with the open-source eXist XML database for this.

Adobe is pushing for XMP to become the metadata format for the OASIS OpenDocument format, and Leigh Dodds just posted some notes on his review of XMP. He covers the XMP-RDF relationship issues better than I could. He also refers to my article on XMP published in XML.com over a year ago, in which I wrote this:

The debate over whether feeds should provide complete entries or brief descriptions of them is getting religious in its fervor. People on both sides are so damn sure that they’re right.

A 1981 article in IBM’s Journal of Research and Development gave me a much better perspective on how database systems got where they are. The abstract of W.C. McGee’s article Data Base Technology tells us that “The evolution of data base technology over the past twenty-five years is surveyed, and major IBM contributions to this technology are identified and briefly noted.” It put a lot of disjointed facts that I knew in perspective, showing how one thing led to another.…

In George Dyson’s recent Third Culture essay Turing’s Cathedral, one theme is the value of a shift in programming models toward something closer to biological “computation,” and Google’s potential role in this. The general idea is that instead of writing instructions to act on data at specific locations in memory, which is how computers have worked since John von Neumann first set up the concept of the stored program computer, code would be written to act on certain…