For the Love of the Web
In 1991, the year when U2 (my favourite band) released the album Achtung Baby, the World Wide Web went live! It was on 6 August 1991and there was no fanfare in the global press and in fact, most people around the world didn't even know what the Internet was, as the people from The Next Web wrote. 30
Per aspera ad astra (Newsletter, March 2019)
This last month I found myself busy chasing "all things digital", and having forgotten that not all things are meant to be digital. Cyberspaces, as beautiful as their potential is, are only but a layer in a larger tapestry. A layer - rich, intriguing and increasingly machine-readable, a fragment (and a fractal) of our live's patchwork, yet not meant
Surfing the Web Layer of Things, Technology and Thoughts: A Dialogue with Ruben Verborgh
Ruben Verborgh is one of those amazing people I have crossed paths with on my Semantic Web journey. A professor of Semantic Technology, Ruben is a hard-working man (and a rising TEDx star) on a quest to decentralising the Web. I met Ruben through the Solid project on my own way to finding the means to best support
An Ecology of Digital Being of Sorts
It’s been 30 years since the World Wide Web transformed our lives and allowed us to connect, communicate and create on an unprecedented level, reminds us a report by the Web Foundation called The Case for the Web. Among the many interesting things the report contains, the part about blogging, content and ultimately the unrealized potential of
From Envisioning Art to Embedding It with Metadata: A Dialogue with Margaret Warren
Margaret does something that is of uber importance for all of us: she builds and thinks through the technology of describing, storing and retrieving images. Her tool ImageSnippets™, created for anyone who archives, curates or shares images on the Web (who doesn't these days) was born out of her passion and scientific problem: the semantic annotation
The Project Solid as a Road Assembling Itself on the Go
The Linked Data social ecosystem Solid is a work in progress. So are its UX and UI. Roads assembling themselves on the go. But let's face it, isn't our own understanding of how we use, curate and give our data on the Web one that is still shaping and evolving? One that needs reassessing and reframing? We have
A Brand, a Hero and a Delight Well-Designed: A Dialogue with Vinish Garg
Close your eyes and imagine you work as a story designer for brands and start-ups. A dream job, isn't it? And a hard one. As a recent McKinsey report has it, design is more than a feeling, more than a department, more than a phase, more than a product. Now open your eyes and meet Vinish Garg who
What I Learned Writing The Brave New Text?
The Brave New Text, my book of essays about the metamorphoses writing and textuality undergo on the Web, is out in the world. It is now an artefact, a corpus of texts looking to find its own way into the giant intertextual fabrics of the Web. Now that I finished the boom, I have another "writing" journey
The Intertextual Animal [Book Excerpt]
Consider this. I am the sum of my readings, my immediate surroundings and my experiences. I am also what I write and read on the Web. I constantly transverse analog and digital realms, textual and non-textual fabrics. Such dynamics helps me enrich my life and the Web with an expanded field of relationships where newly connected
Towards a Semantic Web Ethos [Book Excerpt]
Beneath every website, application, email, even under the tiniest tweet flow tons of data. Once linked, not unlike the documents we connect through hyperlinks, these data can create a whole new layer, woven in the Web’s fabrics. This layer is called the Semantic Web. Many paths enter the understanding of the Semantic Web concept. Most of them
Writing in the Age of Increasing Connectivity (Newsletter, August 2015)
Dear web weavers, Hello and thank you for letting me in your inbox, it's an honour and a thrill. I will be brief, as I only published two articles on teodorapetkova.com in February: Meaning, text, understanding and two pieces of jazz The Slow Web Concept Applied to Google Plus This month, hopefully, I will be having the wonderful semiotician Lucia Trezova
The Web of Data Is Far From Done: The Project Solid
The Web of Data is all grassroots and we, its people, are to weave it. It is up to us to take action and avoid the fragmentation of the Web. It is up to us to understand the value and the importance of the data we are so easily giving away to silo platforms. Now, we can act