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Mac users have been blessed with SubEthaEdit - "Recieving high praise from all users of the program, this truly is the "Killer app" of Pair Programming or Extreme Programming over long geographic distances."

Quoting Chris Schmidt and his "An open letter to the CodingMonkeys" [Aug 8, 2004] that ends with:

"If you wish to add your voice into this debate, feel free. I would be interested in hearing thoughts on either side of this issue - for or against the public release of such a protocol. However, it should be made clear that such a tool will exist on other platforms eventually, with or without the help of the originators of SubEthaEdit."

This time has come - "Gobby" is what SubEthaEdit is for Macs, but open source and runs virtually everywhere (in early / beta stage of its life though):

Gobby is a free collaborative editor supporting multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix-like platforms.

It uses GTK+ 2.6 as its windowing toolkit and thus integrates nicely into the GNOME desktop environment.

Check out the Gobby's list of features, take a look around in our screenshots section and download it right now.

There is more: this project also offers Obby - a framework used to synchronize document changes. There is work on integrating this framework into other editors and I can't wait to see it integrated into Eclipse (despite no news about integration with this particular tool).

An example: Ebby - an implementation of Obby protocol in Emacs Lisp.

And there is Sobby - a dedicated server for collaborative editing using Obby protocol.

Linux.com article "Collaborative text editing with Gobby" by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier should provide more information in case if you are interested. His summary:

Despite its immaturity, Gobby is a good choice when two or more users want to collaborate on a text document in real time. Want to browse through a log file with another admin to troubleshoot a problem, or work together to edit a configuration file? Need to write up release notes for a project, work on some documentation, or put together a requirements list? Gobby makes things much simpler than passing around a text document or OpenOffice.org file with changes. The Ubuntu folks are even using Gobby to allow remote developers to participate in the Ubuntu Developer Summit.

Gobby's developers have done an excellent job so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing what new and interesting features they will add in the future. With any luck, other developers will start integrating Obby into their editors, and we can all collaborate no matter which editor we prefer.

Good to know that someone finds your work useful. Even better to see that the Semantic Web and finding its data is important to people speaking many languages throughout the world as you can see in this selection of articles in many different languages (re. Semantic Radar and the Ping Service):

Semantic Radar for Firefox [FOAF] on "Searching the next generation web":

Recently I read about Semantic Radar over at Frédérick Giasson’s weblog. Semantic Radar is a plug-in for Firefox, notifying the user if it finds SIOC, FOAF or DOAP data referenced by the page he or she is currently viewing. When such data is detected a little icon will appear on the bottom right side of you browser, which lets you access the embedded data easily.

I really like this little helper!

Pot-au-feu sémantique [SIOC] - in this article (in French, naturellement) he wonders about the food qualities of the FOAF+SIOC+SKOS mix. I hope it tasted good.

Note: [FOAF] and [SIOC] indicate what metadata would a Semantic Radar tell you about if you visited that page.

" His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god, but then he never claimed not to be a god. "

- " But what does it feel like? "
-- " To have one's will overridden by that of another? You should know. "

Yama's smile vanished, then returned. - "You would like me to strike you, wouldn't you, Buddha? It would make you feel superior. Unfortunately I am a sadist and will not do it."

Sam laughed.
-- "Touché, Death," he said.

They sat in silence for a time.

Roger Zelazny - "Lord of Light"

It has been a very long time since I've been reading Roger Zelazny. He is one of the best science fiction authors and reading The Chronicles of Amber (a long time ago) was a breath-taking experience. Now another book has fallen into my hands, one of the first novels written by him (in 1967).

Zelazny fascinates by the visions he builds in readers' minds.

New version of the WordPress SIOC plugin supports content negotiation:

Every blog post (and other blog pages) has a "mirror" representation in RDF. It can be accessed by following an auto-discovery link or directly via content negotiation - by tools like Tabulator which send "application/rdf+xml" in Accept: header.

You only need to enter a URL of a blog post (from a SIOC-enabled blog) into Tabulator and it will display its SIOC RDF information.

This also means that a URL is all that you need to know - all other information can be fetched from SIOC / RDF data. [ Think Semantic Clipboard! ]