Tag Clouds & Word Clouds

Ok, monday's lecture topic will be "Web 2.0" ... and of course we will talk about tagging, folksonomies, and tag clouds (as well as word clouds). A word cloud is a visual depiction of content (words) used in a body of text ... and here's the word cloud for my homepage.
You can create your own word cloud (and design a word cloud t-shirt...)

time flies...

Only four weeks and the semester will be over ... this means only three lectures to go. This semester the monday lecture included 2 holiday mondays, 1 workshop moday, and....the semester started on a tuesday. This means that instead of 14 lectures I had only 10 (!) ... lucky me....but somehow I had to stuff all the 14 lecture's information into only 10 weeks .. and ofcourse I had to shorten it somehow. We left out eBusiness (more interesting for students of economy), Basic Web Security (should have been already done in basic and networking lectures), and we will probably also leave out Trust Management and the Web of Trust.
I focused on web programming concepts (ranging from rpc to web services, covering web frameworks as well as ajax), search engine technology (how does google work...and how to improve it), web 2.0 (the recent hype...), and semantic web (the next hype...). We have just finished two lectures on search engines and next monday (july 3rd), the topic will be Web 2.0 with all its collaborative tagging, folksonomies, social networks, ajax, xml, etc... It's a entire new lecture (because Web 2.0 as a concept is rather new...remember the term was coined in 2004, although most of its technical infrastructure did already exist before), so I promise it might get quite interesting...

don't tell me...

Hey....what a week! Ok...it was a rather short week with monday's holiday, but I'll tell you...
I came down with a bad cold starting last sunday. So I was sneezing, caughing, and felt as if I had egg salad in my brains (if there's anything left of it). Then there were those deadlines....the patent application, the XML-Days paper, and several really important meetings. Everything worked fine - I don't know how I managed it - until friday. The most time-consuming thing of all was to get our XML-Days paper ready. I told Heiko (my coauthor) to start to work almost two weeks ago...but I knew in advance, where (better when) it would end....in a night shift on the very last day...friday. The deadline was friday night, 23.59 pm...we were stil working at 23.50pm, when Heiko was downstairs copying the last changes into our cvs-repository. At 23.52pm I received an email. It said......'attention: the deadline is extended to friday, next week!'.....
There I was, 23.53pm...thinking about what I could have done instead this night and all the nights before. I told it to Heiko at 23.58pm - just after printing out the final version for submission ;-)
so, don't tell me....

web application development...

This suits perfectly to the current topic 'web programming' of our lecture 'web technologies' at the FSU Jena. Sean Kelly is giving a very nice presentation on better web application development. Definitely worth while listening, not only if you are one of my students....