Well, I think we can now say that social networking is a bona fide part of our culture.  CNN is reporting that students are pledging to give up social networking for Lent. I have been working my profile on LinkedIn (and really enjoy their answers feature) so I can see where they are coming from.

Organizations that fight against this trend are going to be at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to hiring the best and brightest of the next generation.  You have been warned!

Complexification.net is a very cool site from an artist that uses computation and mathematics to create art.  Some pieces are striking, others whimsical, all interesting.  Being a math geek myself, I can’t seem to keep my eyes off of them.  Enjoy!

Under The Radar has an interesting post about overcoming EC2’s weaknesses, dynamic IP addressing and 24×7 operations.  The folks at WeoGeo have designed an application called WeoCEO that supposedly addresses these issues.  I think this is a very exciting development, especially when combined with the ability to use S3 as a file system.

The hype about EC2 is that it enables people to ‘rent-a-cloud’, paying for and using as many or as few servers as they wish at any given time.  The problem is that currently these servers are limited in ways that seem minor until you start working with them on practical matters.  This is really visible when working with data and databases on EC2, essentially you have to either change either your tools or your paradigm.  The problem then becomes one of economics, where you try to balance the savings from renting a server and storage against the cost of solving a problem with tools that require a lot of customization.
I would love to be a part of the WeoCEO beta, and see how things work along with S3Infinidisk.  If the problems of addresssing and persistence are solved, then we truly have the ability to scale easily without large-scale customization.  Taking care of these is a giant leap forward, and will help EC2 truly live up to the hype that it has generated in the developer community.

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.”

– John Gaule

A while back, I wrote about how useful it would be to be able to combine collaborative information and structured data. While Wikis and other collaborative information sources are great, I would argue that they aren’t useful until they can be used in aggregated or statistical form for strategic decision making or automation. Until then, they are too “abstract” to be useful (at least in the mechanical sense of the word).

Recently, ran across DBPedia, an organization that is turning Wikipedia entries into RDF, the language used for the semantic web. DBPedia has actually has downloadable datasets based on Wikipedia that are available today. These are datasets that can be queried with existing tools and linked to other datasets. Wow!

Even if you aren’t a Wikipedia fan, this is really a big step forward for the enterprise. Think about the amount of knowledge that exists in your organization that isn’t captured, but is critical to your operations. It has always been a big pain to try and sit down and do formal knowledge engineering. However, most people are comfortable enough with a Wiki to sit down and start typing. For a small organization this might not be such a big deal, but for a larger enterprise this could provide some very useful information.

The first time your Director or CXO can make a financial decision based exclusively on the information from your company wiki, it will have proved its worth. Until then, it is just another trendy tool. The work that DBPedia is doing is an important step in making this a reality.