Benlog

I’ve given far too many talks over the last 2 months. You’d think I wasn’t defending my PhD thesis next month. All of my slides are available under a Creative Commons license, of course: Introduction to Cryptographic Voting, a lecture I gave in Kevin Fu‘s Applied Cryptography class at UMass Amherst. (Kevin was a classmate [...]

For about 18 months now, I’ve been chairing the W3C’s Task Force on embedding RDF in HTML. In simpler terms, this means my little group is defining how you can add extra structure to your HTML, so that, if you announce a talk, your contact information, a document license, or any other metadata, a small [...]

This week, I’m at WWW2006, giving two talks on Interoperable Web Metadata: on Wednesday, at 4pm, for about 20 minutes, focusing on the developer’s view of embedding interoperable metadata in HTML. Location TBD. on Friday at 11am, for about 20 minutes, focusing on the W3C/RDF issues of embedding interoperable metadata in HTML. Location TBD. What [...]

I’m giving a lightning talk at the W3C AC Meeting in Edinburgh on Sunday, at around 1500 GMT about RDFa for 3 minutes . UPDATE: The slides for the talk are now available online.

How much Kool-Aid do you have to drink before you come up with a slogan like: Carbon Dioxyde: they call it pollution, we call it life. No, it’s not a joke. We breathe out the carbon dioxyde, and plants breathe it in, so obviously it can’t be bad for us, right? Notice one important detail [...]

The Freakonomics guys find it interesting that some guy downloaded their book from a P2P network and now wants to send them money. They lecture him about the publisher/distributor costs, etc… How about, instead, realizing that there’s an interesting development here: lots of people will pay after they’ve sampled the content if they find it [...]

It’s not often that I agree with the likes of James Dobson, but when they’re right, they’re right. Richard Viguerie, a “conservative direct-mail pioneer” says: There is a growing feeling [...] that the only way to cure the problem is for Republicans to lose the Congressional elections this fall. Precisely my thought. Though, somehow, I [...]

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, explains how, if network neutrality had not been the norm in the early 1990s, the web would never have happened. I can’t think of a more powerful example of why network neutrality is so crucial. Once again, it’s about the economics of platforms: to allow Internet-based innovation to [...]