Andy Budd has thoughts on the development of HTML. Personally, I rather like the way that XHTML2 is shaping up, though it'll probably take all of about nine years to actually get adopted. The sooner we get away from HTML's SGML roots and towards pure XML the better. Yes, the XML stack is big, but it's a lot less messy than the HTML stack. 
Ophelia Benson on Catholics: "We know they have a very warped idea of what is immoral and what isn't. Forbidding condoms during a pandemic, moral; keeping children in institutions rather than letting them go to gay parents, moral; being gay, shockingly immoral and sinful and bad."
Anne Zelenka has links to companies who are trying to "monetize" the mashup space.
Katha Pollitt summarises Dinesh D'Souza's latest insane dropping: "9/11 was provoked by feminism, birth control, abortion, pornography, feminism, Hollywood, divorce, the First Amendment, gay marriage, and did I mention feminism?"
Betsy has been off meeting geisha in Kyoto.
I've been ranting about this in person, but I gotta say that since my local NHS trust is currently £18.9m in the red, news that the Olympics is costing so much they need to take money from the lottery good causes fund pisses me off. Sure, take it from the sports fund - that's what it's there for. But having a glorified sports day does not count as a good cause like, oh, making sure people in my area get healthcare is. I like the London 2012 might be shit logo - we ought to have a pan-London group blog of 2012 haters. That'd be great.
Shelley Powers, the queen of the SemWeb, has the full details about Flickr's machine tags (as does Danny Ayers, which is basically RDF but described in such a way that the Web 2.0 crowd goes "ooh! Woo! Yummy!" rather than "err, that's not fresh and exciting enough for us". Oh, wait, this is another, yet-to-be-published rant of mine. Anyhow, go check it out. Looks cool. Oh, and I don't get Shelley's thing about RDF/XML. It's all about the N3, kids. James is pointing to how machine tags could be used along with GPS and mobile phones.
Jeremy Keith has links to pretty pictures from Google Maps when they fly over geeks. As does Tom Coates. Cool.
I promised to link to this - Which programming language gets you the most sex? Is Python just Ruby for the sexless? 
And what about UserTalk?
Just imagine if oven manufacturers sold their devices as allowing users to take raw ingredients and put together "user-generated food" with them. Now you don't have to rely on those elitist restaurant owners to feed you, you can do it yourself with user-generated food. Which reminds me of the Davos panel on user-generated content.
Jon Udell is pondering del.icio.us and syndication. As for displaying the del.icio.us JSON feed, that's easy. It's only a matter of grabbing the feed, json_decode()-ing it and looping through the array. Send me $50 bucks and I'll write you a WordPress widget to do it for you.
Technical wizardry 
Today, I've had a lot of getting things running. I've managed to get an IM and IRC client running on my Palm TX. I've managed to get rdflib running on my hosting account. I've managed to get RDFa running in my brain. And I've managed to get the podcast I've been planning with Ian Forrester for a while ready to go. We now have a blog, a feed, a wiki and some prepared notes for the first episode.
rdflib is a great package, and it's very fast. I'm really liking Python, perhaps enough to shelve the learn Perl project, buy a copy of Mark Pilgrim's book and become a Python addict. I like the fact that modules in Python get compiled in to pyc bytecode. It's like Java, but without the whole use-a-nuclear-bomb-to-kill-a-cockroach thing.
My BarCamp talk is coming along nicely - I wrote a large chunk of it yesterday on my PDA's excellent outliner. Today I've been revising it over and over again. Eventually, I'll shift it over to S5. When I give the talk, I'll also record it as an MP3.
Last night, I went to Geek Dinner and met Molly, Ian and a lot of the usual GeeDee crowd. I also found a few places in Brick Lane to leech wi-fi, which is actually practical with a PDA.
