RDF Book Mashup

"The RDF Book Mashup demonstrates how Web 2.0 data sources like Amazon, Google
or Yahoo can be integrated into the Semantic Web. ... information about books, their authors, reviews, and online bookstores ... can be used by RDF tools and you can link to it from your own Semantic Web data."

What Motivates OSS developers (per Clay Shirky)

Video clip of Clay Shirky's presentation at Supernova 2007, comparing the Ise shrine to the Perl user community. The shrine is re-built every 20 years from forest that supplied wood for original building. UNESCO would have none of it, since the original was not preserved. "Perl is a shinto shrine," in the sense that it perseveres over time through the love of its community, not through signed contract and financial promise (or in the case of the shrine, a solid physical presence). He says, "Standing from today, looking towards the future, you will make more accurate predictions about software, and, in this web-driven world, about services, if you ask yourself not 'what’s the business model?' but rather 'do the people who like it take care of each other?' That turns out to be the better predictor of longevity."

Vizualize books with Amaznode

Amaznode visualizes the relationships between and among books in the Amazon database. For example, I searched "Shogun" and retrieved a networked cluster of cover images related to that search. Would be interesting to mash up with YuFind ...

TechEssence (blog)

Don't know how I missed this before. "Roy Tennant started TechEssence to address the need for simple, easy to understand information about information technology ... " Other contributors include: Dorothea Salo, Eric Lease Morgan, Jenn Riley (the "Inquiring Librarian"), Lori Bowen Ayre, Marshall Breeding, Meredith Farkas, and Thomas Dowling.