I’ve been attending the Semantic Technology 2010 conference this week. My attendance has only solidified my belief that RDF is the data format of the future for the web. There is a constantly increasing amount of unstructured data available on the web, and RDF provides the easiest way to pull it all together and relate it. For more on SemTech, go to the SemTech website.

The official version of the ZDNet Chrome extension that I adapted from the Google sample, is available here: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/plmjgigefjbepajlfhohlhhnlmhjnlde

UPDATE: Here are the SmartPlanet and TechRepublic extensions.

Insertion sorts are good when your data is already partially sorted, or if you have a small collection to sort. That’s about the best I can say for them. Here’s two versions in PHP. The first uses two functions:

function insertion_sort($a)
{
for ($i=1; $i < count($a); $i++)
{
inserter(&$a,$i,$a[$i]);
}
}


function inserter($a,$pos,$a_value)
{
$temp = $a[$pos];
$i = $pos;
while($i >= 0 && $a[$i-1] > $a_value)
{
$a[$i] = $a[$i-1];
$i = $i-1;
}
$a[$i] = $temp;
}


The second uses one function:


function insertion_sort($a)
{
for($j=1; $j < count($a); $j++)
{
$temp = $a[$j];
$i = $j;
while(($i >= 0) && ($a[$i-1] > $temp)){
$a[$i] = $a[$i-1];
$i--;
}
$a[$i] = $temp;
}
}


To test them, use the following code:


$haystack = array(1,5,6,3);
insertion_sort(&$haystack);
print_r ($haystack);


Sequential search, or linear search, is the simplest searching algorithm. Indeed, given it’s brute force approach of just traversing a collection from the first to last element, it’s hard to justify calling it an algorithm at all. However, here’s an example in PHP:

function sequential_search($needle,$haystack) {
for($i = 0; $i < count($haystack); $i++) {
if ($needle == $i)
return true;
}
return false;
}


Here's an example of how you would use this algorithm to look for the number 3 inside an array:


$haystack = array(1,2,3,4);
$needle = 3;
$success = sequential_search($needle, $haystack);


Mike Arrington has a good post today on how social media today is a lot like search was 10 years ago. You can read it here. In it, he notes

“The online social landscape today sort of feels to me like search did in 1999. It’s a mess, but we don’t complain much about it because we don’t know there’s a better way.

Everything is decentralized, and no one is working to centralize stuff. I’ve got photos on Flickr, Posterous and Facebook (and even a few on MySpace), reviews on Yelp (but movie reviews on Flixster), location on Foursquare, Loopt and Gowalla, status updates on Facebook and Twitter, and videos on YouTube. Etc. I’ve got dozens of social graphs on dozens of sites, and trying to remember which friends puts his or her pictures on which site is a huge challenge.

And the amount of spam and just general nonsense that is flooding all of these services is crippling. As a user, I spend far too much time weeding it all out to find the few gems of real content from people I care about.”

He then goes on to call for someone to organize it:

“Someone will eventually help us make sense of all these various types of services, and help us separate the noise and spam from the real signal. I don’t know who’s going to do it, and I certainly don’t know how (if I did, I’d be doing it, not writing about it). But at some point soon, one of the Internet giants, or some new startup we’ve never heard of, is going to fix this mess for us.”

While I agree with both of his points, I don’t think figuring out the when and who is that difficult. I’m willing to confidently predict that the social media space will be organized in the next two years, and that it will be done by either Facebook or Google. The reason I have such confidence in this prediction is simple. Facebook and Google are the only two companies that have both the computing power, and the ability to collect the information necessary to actually organize the social space. Actually collecting the social information on is the first, and larger, problem. Here, Facebook has a huge advantage over Google, because it’s the largest social network in the world. However, it’s only a relative advantage. Google is a close second in the amount of information it collects. The second problem is that actually organizing the world’s social graph is a large-scale computational problem that is even more difficult than organizing the world’s web pages. Now, I was extremely impressed with the amount of technical energy I felt at Facebook when I visited there campus for the Hip Hop for PHP event, but Google still has a huge advantage in computing resources and skill. Google’s basic computational infrastructure is far ahead of Facebook’s, and indeed anyone else’s infrastructure..
So, out of these two, who would I bet on? I’d make Google the 2-1 favorite. But, as we saw in the Superbowl yesterday, favorites don’t always win.

Here’s my quick take on HipHop for PHP that was posted by Larry at ZDNet. I’m attending the HipHop event tonight, and I will add more about it later.

I’ve been playing with Google Chrome extensions, and I’m impressed by how easy they are to create. It took me about 5 minutes to alter an example, and create one that provides links to the latest ZDNet Blog posts. Should you be interested, you can download it here.

I woke up this morning to hear the news that Microsoft was launching a competitor to Twitter. In my mind, I can’t help but juxtapose that story with the news from last week that Oracle is buying Sun. Now, I’m not a big fan of Larry Ellison. I still have bitter memories from the 90s when my wife’s raise was held up, because Larry had to approve it, and he was off yacht racing. But, you have to admire the way that he approaches his business. I never have any questions about what Oracle is doing. Larry knows what Oracle is about: Enterprise Software. He has a vision of where the market is going: a few big players. And, he has a strategy to make Oracle the dominant player in this new world: buy up key technologies; offer the complete Enterprise stack. Once you understand Larry’s vision, you can understand and justify every move Oracle has made.

Now, contrast that with Microsoft. Ballmer doesn’t know what the company is about. Is it focused on the desktop, games, internet, enterprise? Who knows? He doesn’t have a coherent vision of where all these markets are going. Who could? As a result, Ballmer doesn’t have a coherent strategy. He’s attempting to do everything; and he’s doing nothing well. Seriously, does anyone have a clue what Ballmer will do next, and why? If you say you do, you’re lying. You can’t know, because there is no strategy. There’s just a bunch of incoherent initiatives. It’s too bad, because if Microsoft had been as focused as Oracle, they could be hugely dominant in the enterprise space. As it is, they’ve wasted ten years.

One of the big advantages to living in the city/valley, and working at SOMA is that you get to mingle with all the other people who are working on new web stuff, or are writing about it. Almost every night there’s a different party or event. On Thursday, I attended two: an AOL launch of their new fantasy football site, and the monthly Mashable event. Here’s my name tag from the Mashable party:

The Mashable party was far better attended, and it even had better bouncers.

Hope everyone (all 7 of you) enjoys the new blog theme. It was designed by Marc, the most talented web designer I have ever had the pleasure of working with. Here’s his explanation of the design. Any differences between his design and my actual blog are all my fault, obviously.