Ontologicon

I’ve started work on forestfire.gr, an experiment which aims at bypassing every single “traditional” media channel in Greece in order to reach as many people as possible to come to terms with all things wrong. This sounds like web3.0/[insert your most hated “religion” here]/digital-revolution BS, and may end up being exactly that. In any case, my refusal to deal with traditional media in Greece originates in a few observations I’ve made:

•  ”Corruption” would be an understatement when trying to describe the greek media landscape. You not only have opinion makers indulging in what can be described in extremely derogatory terms with politicians and upper-level execs, in effect supercharging modern anonymous and greedy practices, in addition you have a mob which rests assured that belonging to a clan, as it were, either by supporting a particular football team, buying products from particular companies or bending over for the bank assures them of a long and prosperous life. How surprised they are when they realize that, well, maybe not.
• Describing politics in what was once the birthplace for western democracy and now goes head to head trying to be the worst of the worst in this part of the world would take a long time. Suffice it to say that you are effectively made passive since any grass roots movement is either totally neglected by traditional media (except for a few left-wing shops that need to get their image straight first) or ridiculed, or made into a target for populists (that also need to check with a PR consultant on how to behave) or ignored. 
• “Religion is opium for the masses” never sounded more right than now and here. Substitute “tv” for “religion” and there you go. Spoon-feeding people crap is unfortunately not a crime, so I need to come up with something that IS a crime to nail the buggers that misbehave.

There will be a beta invite, API, viral marketing and all that. Soon. I hope.

I got called up and asked to give my opinion (same article, three websites) on the emerging HTML5 standard. Nothing new, still you have people fighting for standardizing features to push their products. The only difference I can see here is that the standard body of all standard bodies, the W3C is viewed as a major culprit (one commenter suggests that the W3C stop producing useless no-hoper standards).Time will tell. 

Second article published on xml.com, arguing for the need to “force” IT vendors to follow specifications.

An article written by Dimitris when he was leading the W3C DOM Test Suites Group, arguing for the need to create a common understanding of what testing specifications amounts to.

A debate article in Swedish, published in 2002, about the need for Sweden’s IT industry to position itself wrt. standardiztion efforts.

It was written when Dimitris was active in the W3C as invited expert.

Long time coming, I finally decided to migrate an old static-html based site to Wordpress.

Most likely, this will change to Mephisto (some time in the future), but at least for now, here goes.