iThoughts

Its long till you heard from me as I was finishing on my Diploma till now. I finally did it. Well, spelling correction and some reader response still needs to be incorporated, but after all its just finished.

It about an online-rich-text-editor with support for RDFa (as lately support was announced by Google for RDFa, it should be pretty interesting for some out there). This means that I took WYMeditor, put it into a blogging platform, connected it with Freebase, added some RDF-Parsing and there you go with annotating your HTML sourcecode with semantic RDFa-markup.

You can add resources from Freebase without knowing anything about RDF, RDFa or Ontologies, you can use some static concepts like the Google review-stuff and some FOAF-concepts and you can even generate RDF-triples, that means semantic statments that machines can interpret. I mainly focussed on usability as I imaginged that most of the worlds documents don’t get created by too technical-adept people but others who’s knowlegde focusses on another area – and who use rich-text-editors to place content online.

I also had a pretty good idea for a sematic twitter service that could revolutionize the semantic web – but as I really need some experience in the free enterprise world, I can’t really start a startup now … or can I? Well, there are more buisiness ideas in my head, so maybe someone else should do the sematic twitter stuff. Well, I’ll maybe just put it online after its approved, we’ll see.

But what now? Another three year of science? No, after all, I need a job now. As I’d like to stay in Oldenburg (Germany, near Bremen), I need something in about half an hour range from here. I like web-technology, am into Java because its the “educational standard language”, but would really like to get to know some more. I worked with Struts2, JavaScript, jQuery, XML, JSON, AJAX, PHP, RDF, OWL, HTML, CSS, SVN, … I’m interested in iPhone-Applications, Social Media, Scrum Project-Management, Usability Engineering, Semantic Web (+more stuff) and would love to find a job to learn more and do something producive with my skills.

Some big companies still don’t want new people as the financial crisis makes bureocrats feel more important now, and some just don’t think they should get to know you if you didn’t send a copy of your diploma with the letter of application – and they don’t really read the letter, as I clearly say that I need to wait about two more month till I get it.

Well, its not that I don’t know what to do and learn in my free time. But where shall I begin? Learning .NET and Visual Studio? Delving into Flash or Silverlight? Try to make an iPhone App (got some useful ideas for that)? Work on business ideas? Finish reading the latest Design Patterns- or Scrum-book? Try out Hibernate? Blog some more? Many questions, no answers. Perhaps I’ll just write my next dozen of application-letters. After all I’ll need some money to buy a nice server machine ;-)