Thing 23: Surfacing from My Blog Fog

23 Things has captivated me. It seems that we are in the midst of a transformation every bit as revolutionary as the invention of the Gutenberg printing press. The Web is a democratizing force. Anyone can publish a blog, or a book; people can organize politically, or socially, or professionally, with great ease and efficiency. Geographical boundaries are disappearing, as techie professionals in Bangalore work with their colleagues in Silicon Valley via the internet and video-conferencing.The new technologies that we've explored in 23 Things are all contributing to this incredible technological transformation.

The YouTube video The Machine is Us/ing Us, held me spellbound for four + minutes, and then prompted me to have a conversation with my 17-year son -- who has been working and playing with computers and programming for the past three years--about the Semantic Web.

He explained to me that in the "old" Web, HTML programming language linked form and content. The two were inseparable. The code told the computer where (form) to put what (content), but the meaning of the text was opaque to the computer.

In the Semantic Web, programmers are basically inventing an entire programming grammar that enables the machine to understand the content of a paragraph, just as a person would when reading text. Resource Description Format language, or RDF, makes this possible. By parsing the text, or breaking it up into individual components, and assigning a grammatical code to each component, RDF can infer the meaning of a sentence or a paragraph and then store that information in a structured database that is easily accessible by computer programs and search engines. People are teaching the machine to "think", and as this capability strengthens, the Web will evolve in complexity, utility and efficiency. This is amazing.

Anyway, I loved this learning experience, and hope to revisit many of the Things and explore them in greater detail. I would definitely sign up again for such a program, but would recommend that more time be allotted, maybe 4-6 months, so that there's no need to rush to make it to the finish line.

I don't have a single favorite exercise, although I did especially enjoy setting up my own RSS feeds on Bloglines, my own search engine on Rollyo, my own library on LibraryThing, and learning about wikis. I think all of these technologies will be helpful to me in my work as a librarian at HCL, and I plan to use them.

I'm now in a better position to assist our customers with technology queries since I've studied and played with these 23 Things. It has been really gratifying to develop enough of an understanding of HTML to be able to alter the appearance of elements on my blog by changing some of the specifications within the code. The only way to learn this is to do it, and 23 Things taught me how to figure this out for myself.

I am grateful that I've had this incredible learning opportunity, and thank HCL for its generosity in sponsoring 23 Things and giving us those MP3 players! Who ever knew work could be so much fun?