I know I'm not the only developer to get distracted by something new but invariably it happens on a Friday and I spend the majority of the weekend investigating this new thing. And it happened again today starting with Leigh's post about the recent Jena User Conference.
I remember looking at Jena a few years ago but haven't really kept up with it too much since I'm not doing anything with RDF. So after reading the post, I read another post from Leigh, this time about his presentation and paper about Slug, a Semantic Web Crawler. As an aside, I just finished reading the paper and Slug is now in my to investigate pile.
Moving along, seeing two posts like that, I started going back in time through the Lost Boy's archives, seeing things like the Scripting for the Semantic Web workshop from last year and this year. Of course I didn't even realize this was going on. Next, I found the FOAF workshop from 2004 which has a ton of papers to put on my to read pile. You can also think about subscribing to someone's brain which parallels some of my thinking of wanting to put together a master list of possible info points.
Another thing to read is Leigh's XTech paper from last year, Connecting Social Content Services using FOAF, RDF and REST.
So now, my mind is filled with thoughts of FOAF and how EarthLink could do some amazing things with it. Earlier today, I was thinking about Atom Stores and little machines. Before that, it was something else. That's how my mind flitters between technologies, landing on an idea for a brief time and then moving onto something else.
Many times this bums me out but lately I've been thinking it is a good thing. It keeps me on my toes and interested in everything. I've slowly started to focus my energies on certain big picture ideas such as search, peer-to-peer and bits of the Semantic Web. There's a ton of data out there and not always easy ways to bring it to people.
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jena, rdf, foaf, semanticweb