Arggghhhhh… by some unfortunate series of events, I deleted this whole blog. I won’t tell you the long, boring story, just the bottom line: I will have to start over again. The only good thing about it is that it gives me the opportunity to implement some changes I had planned on doing for quite some time. For starters, I changed the name from “semiblog” to “kantenwerk”, because I’m no longer working on the semiBlog software. I realized it was a bit pointless to try building a complete blog authoring tool, when all I really wanted to do was provide a tool to annotate blogs with all kinds of content-related metadata. There are lots of really good blogging tools out there that have functionality that semiBlog just couldn’t compete with.
So, I extracted the core functionality of semiBlog – create RDF metadata from desktop objects – and threw away the rest. The result is an application called “Shift”, which simply let’s you take objects from other desktop applications (contacts, calendar event, papers, …) and generate a snippet of metadata from them in a very convenient way. Drag&Drop, autocompletion, copy&paste, that’s all. Those snippets can be in various format, such as RDFa, which makes it really easy to incorporate them into web pages – blog posts, but also any other web page. For WWW2007, I made a little video of Shift in action.
Also, instead of using this blog as the web site for one software project, I think I will just turn it into my personal web site. It’s too annoying to have to juggle around with too many different sites.