Catching up with the Semantic Web

While trying to catch up with the latest happenings around the whole semantic web idea I came up with the following list of recommended reading:

Official definition from the W3C
Tim Berners-Lee's "Roadmap"
"The Semantic Web", according to Scientific American
The State of the Art, aka, where has it failed so far

Funny quote on design patterns

From a blog post by Grady Booch:

The past few days I've been cataloging several hundred architectural and design patterns ...

I mean, these things were supposed to make our lives easier in the long term, but nothing easy starts with learning hundreds of patterns and concepts. Do we really need that much different patterns ?

Long live Chuck Norris

Chuck Norris Facts: This would be one of the funniest sites I've ever seen (yes, I'm weird just like you). Some quotes:

Chuck Norris' tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried. Ever.

Chuck Norris has counted to infinity. Twice.

Chuck Norris is 1/8th Cherokee. This has nothing to do with ancestry, the man ate a fucking Indian.

Chuck Norris can win a game of Connect Four in only three moves.

The quickest way to a man's heart is with Chuck Norris' fist.

Chuck Norris can set ants on fire with a magnifying glass. At night.

And today I came across a full length SNL music video giving some insight on how this legend came to be and a Web 2.0 version of Chuck Norris facts.

Struggling with bookmarklets size

I've been playing with bookmarklets lately as I try to improve the one I created for our.imgSeek. During my struggles, I found a really useful online bookmarklet builder which is great for testing, formatting JS and compressing it (removing useless chars).

And why compressing it ? Firefox doesn't seem to care about your bookmarklet code size, but IE does and will silently ignore your code if it's longer than 500 chars. I'm feeling like an artist trying to squeeze useful code in 500 chars and trying a lot of hacks to overcome this IE limit.

browser based image annotation techniques

I was doing some research on current implementations of browser based image annotation (basically letting users select an image region and input some data about that region) and the only working example I could find is this Javascript example. I know Flickr! does it with flash, but anyway it's not opensource.

Is there anyone else out there aware of another good example ?