Kaizen Bits

Now it´s official: I have been awarded with a small research grant for movility from my University, the great Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, to research in South Korea for the next two months.

I will be staying at the University of Wokwang, under the supervision of my great friend and PhD thesis reviewer, Prof. Dr. Sung-Kook Han, one of the people I respect, admire and care about in the whole space. He was a friend, pure wisdom and kindness when we stayed together  a few years ago in Innsbruck.

I am so happy that it is difficult to explain with words… it was many years that I wanted to visit and stay some time in this impressive country South Korea is. I will be soon telling more from there. Stay tuned!!

For the first time, HTTP traffic has overtaken the one of P2P. Currently,  HTTP traffic is 46% and P2P has decreased 65% in two years to the current 37%. There is just a reason for that: YouTube and the akin.

Joost, Babelgum, Stage6, Zattoo…. there are tons of ways of watching video on the Web, not to forget Apple TV and Microsoft Mediaroom which aim to become new ways of moving the TV out of the living room. So what is the situation in Spain? For a better analysis I recommend this great post in Caspa TV that has been a basis for this one. YouTube is the leader but there are many others coming along.

In my opinion, once YouTube will deliver its Spanish version, it will still keep as the leader. This has happened with products such as Microsoft MSN which stayed still as the ruling champion of IM or Hotmail, which, despite the excellence of Gmail, many people still reject to leave.

What is very clear is the stardom of User Generated Content Video. I am not sure how TV 2.0 will be, but for sure, we will be part of it.

(Yes, the picture is Boston Commons Park… no big relationship with the text )

People really have time…
(Thanks, Luis)

I have been invited as a keynote speaker to the Web 2.0 Conference in Mexico that will take place in November in Veracruz, Mexico. I feel very honoured and hope I can meet the expectations which are quite high in such a great event.

Particularly, I think I can contribute in stretching the differences between the Web 2.0 and what I thought it would be already the Semantic Web, and how both have been together nominated under the Web 3.0 paradigm by world-leading media such as the New York Times.

Anyhow, thanks for inviting me, I will do my best!

Surprisingly enough, iTunes sells already 10% of the music in the US, right behind WalMart (15,8%) and Best Buy (13,8%). Apple gets a 10% profit operating iTunes and proves the forecast: rain for physical retailers vs. online.

I am not surprised at all that this is happening in the US. When I was there two weeks ago, I could see how the Carnegie Mellon students were using a break to download some songs from the iTunes Store and the prices were more than reasonable… till when are we going to use those uncomfortable and unreasonable pieces of plastic called CDs? Who uses CDs? In the era of the USB, a CD is turning as obsolete as the A: diskette… (Thanks to Enrique Dans).

I asked John Breslin about how good would be RDF-ing Twitter, an app we have already talked about several times, and he showed me Sioku, an RDF version of Jaiku which uses SIOC and FOAF as reference vocabularies and pointed me to an RDF version of Twitter by Tom Morris.  Kudos to John and Tom, great job…

Still, I have a number of ideas to use Sioku… and I will ellaborate on them a bit more as soon as I will get rid of the huge burocratic hassle I am in, trying to justify my almost one month of permanent travelling…

As I already posted about, I am at the IWINAC2007 in Murcia, where I just presented BIRD, our SWS solution for Biomedical Information Integration. I started working in BIRD last year at University of Texas at Dallas and it is good to see it now more mature but still plenty of things to fix up.

Great weather here, nice summer, I love La Manga.

I would like to thank once more Prof. Labra for the great opportunity of having contributed to his Master de Ingeniería de la Web with my Semantic Web Services Tutorial.

First of all, I must confess that the students were impressively brilliant and skilled. There were interesting debates and discussions which attained the added-value of the talk. They absorbed a huge amount of knowledge in an amazing short time and are currently working on their assignment efficiently. Kudos to all of them, these people at the Universidad de Oviedo are truly top-class.

Second, I had the chance to enjoy Oviedo. I simply love Asturias, it is a wonderful land and few times I have found such an outstanding distribution of great food, beautiful landscapes and joie de vivre.

Hope I can repeat it and we will have soon Labra at UC3M…

Interesting conference by Stowe Boyd (documentation also) which can be summarized in one line:

“Productivity is second to Connectivity: network productivity trumps personal productivity”.

So what is better, networking or producing? This is a very similar dilemma to the proposal / paper dilemma in the academic world. Without proposals, there are not projects and then no funding, subsequentially no papers, because there are no resources to work. However, focusing too much on proposals might lead to lack of academic productivity i.e. academic death in a publish or perish paradigm.  How finding the balance? That is the tough question…

Steve Jobs and his “reality distortion field” came up with the announcement that Safari would run for Windows and the iPhone is on “coming soon” mode at the WWDC07. I downloaded the browser and tried it (after realizing that the proxy at Universidad de Oviedo was not set and hence disabling Internet connection. After reading this entry in Cult of Mac, I got confidence enough to write this:

- Using Safari having Firefox is like riding horses in the XXI century

- I don´t know who made the typographical analysis of Safari, but he should consider getting into Dark Art.

- Safari is slow, has not the Firefox community of developers and it does not look “cool” like other Apple products do.

Now, if the iPhone core is going to run on Safari and Apple WebKit engine, my rant is: is this not a “technological gateway” i.e. a trick to impose a technology by abiding the others? I remember in college an optional course where we were taught about these strategies to impose vendors stuff.  I hope Apple will measure the community feedback on Safari and will turn back.