December 2007

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Is gone.  Lina and I went to New Zealand for a visit, with our unborn child (the little guy is probably sleeping through the whole trip). 

I don't know if I expected NZ to change a lot, I feel it changed, but not much.  One Tree Hill is no more, there is no tree now, and the whole place is just the Park Summit.

No more George Pie.

Auckland Grammar School has about 4 or 5 more buildings which is kind of crazy.

My old place is still there, but it's now inhabited by strangers who has planted new and strange plants in the garden.

The road to Cape Reinga is being resurfaced and they've removed the shop (and the post office).  There is a mail box though, but stuck between two Portable-Loos it's just not the same.

We still had heaps of fun.  Thanks NZ.

jliu

What is hakia and why should I care

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I was reading my web ad's again (because I turned adblock off - I'll talk about that some other time).
There's this ad that hits me again and again.

"Can't find what you're searching for on Google?  Try Hakia"

My first impression is great another startup throwing money away...  you are 10 years behind Google.  Give up!

Curiosity got the better of me, so I searched on Google with this exact phrase:
"What is hakia and why should I care"

Google didn't have an answer for me, but it pointed me to a few Hakia websites which I didn't want to go read (after all it's just marketing rubbish written to suck venture capitalists' blood and money dry!).  I also found a link on readwriteweb.  What other people think, now that's far more juicier.

I didn't manage to get past the first sentence when my imagination ran wild.  The magic word?  Semantic Web.

Back in my university days, there was all this talk about the semantic web.  Idea is simple really.
  • Web (http) is designed for people
  • Web will become overloaded with information
  • Machine agents will be necessary to search our results for human queries
  • Web is hard for machines to understand
  • For this to happen, we need either:
    • A really powerful/fast natural language processing system to translate web information on the fly
    • Or someone bored enough to go around tagging all the web data with xml-based RDF's
Of course, Google happened, and people realized they didn't need semantic web... for another 10 years.  There's always the problem of finding answers to really obscure queries that you might have.  Usually, we just blame ourselves for not knowing how to type the Google query.

Try this one.

"who is the first man on the moon"
http://hakia.com/search.aspx?q=who+is+the+first+man+on+the+moon
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=who+is+the+first+man+on+the+moon&btnG=Google+Search

Hakia at this stage feels REALLY limited.  It doesn't seem to understand a lot of stuff or have answers to many things.  I imagine this is because it hasn't indexed/parsed enough content - what I would like to see is this:
  1. Don't fight Google head on - I don't think this can be won in 10 years.  I think they need some big guys behind their back to go directly against Google...  Ask Jeeves... I think isn't big enough.
  2. Open up the RDF data to machine queries - sell them to volume users like Google, MS, Yahoo, etc.  I'm sure lots of people will be very interested.  Hey Yahoo bought their search from Google for a long time!
  3. Stay relevant enough and long enough so that semantic web might actually take off.

Haha anyway, my love is for the semantic web, not necessarily for Hakia.  But good luck to them for pulling this off.  The web depends on somebody getting down and do this stuff.

Here's what wikipedia has to say about Semantic Web

A really nice background picture

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http://veimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/1438/earth_lights_lrg.jpg

This is a NASA image of the world at night, I'm guessing since you can't take the picture in one go, it's probably super-imposed a few times.

I love how the busy cities/places light up!  (ha I made a pun!)

It's a very nice picture for desktop background too -  it's a bit big and if you use the Stretch option it should fit any desktop size.