FDK Episode 001 : BarCamp Dallas, Graham Glass

Well, it took forever to edit, but here's Future Development Kit Episode One. If you're having problems with the feed, you can find the mp3 file here, but please use the feed if at all possible. This episode features a call for a BarCamp Dallas and an interview with coder, educator and entrepreneur Graham Glass about starting a software company in Dallas, Web 2.0, RDF vs tags, and his new venture.

• Check Graham's blog for the latest on his company, his novel, and his life: http://grahamglass.blogs.com/
  
  
• When the "International" page on cnn.com isn't quite enough, surf over to http://www.independent.co.uk/ for a balanced look at the news from outside the US. The Independent charges for access to its archives, so you probably won't get to read the article I mention, but it's worth a look in any case.
  
  
• RDF and the big-S Semantic Web can be viewed as a re-hash of Knowledge Representation studies of the 1980's. Or, if you prefer not to be reminded of the past, as something new and completely different. I appreciate the Semantic Web less for the stated goals than for the cool tools the associated research has generated: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/
  
  
• "Knowledge Representation" was/is sort of a hybrid between database and AI research. Although you don't hear much about it any more, many of things it talked about are now accepted as given. People who like Prolog probably like to read KR research papers. The wikipedia entry is a good a place as any for an introduction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_representation
  
  
• Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile
  
  
• Instead of trying to make the entire Web machine-readable, how about just marking up the important parts using simple HTML, a few tags, and some formatting conventions? That way, anyone can produce machine-parsable content using their existing publishing software, without having to learn RDF. Sound good? It is good. Check out: http://microformats.org/
  
  
• Have the cool kids thrown a party and not invited you? Don't mope. Throw your own, even cooler, party. Preferably in Dallas: http://barcamp.org/
  
  
• Ok, so the site at http://www.hotornot.com is properly called "Hot or Not" rather than "Am I Hot or Not" as I kept referring to it in the interview, but it used to be called Am I Hot or Not. See? I'm not crazy.

For the next episode, I've got Jake McKee, Global Community Development Manager for the LEGO Company and creator of http://communityguy.com I plan to ask Jake about virtual versus proximity-based communities, and how much physical location really matters in the age of internet-enabled remote collaboration.

tags: podcast, november, dallas, texas, 2005, grahamglass, barcamp, barcampdallas, startup, rdf, microformats, happiness