The holidays are upon us, and you have no idea what to get that special someone. No worries – there’s still time to hone in on something that will make your spouse, significant other, friend, or family member—maybe even your favorite semantic web technologist–jump for joy. You can take advantage of semantic and social media-based services and technologies and linked data to find, create or enhance the perfect gift.

Here are some options you might want to try:

* For the music lover in your life, how about checking out MusicBrainz? Its music metadata catalogue includes information about artists, release dates, tracks, labels and relationships between them (as an example, the site informs you that the song Rockafella Skank by Fatboy Slim includes a sample from the Just Brothers song Sliced Tomato – who knew?). The database can be downloaded for free by anyone, so you can browse its Collections feature to discover whether your loved one might be missing an album from their favorite artist that you can download on iTunes or even (imagine!) buy as a CD at a real-world retailer. Or if you want to put some muscle into your holiday effort, and assuming you have access to their digital music collection, you could use its Picard tagging application to clean up disorderly data, such as properly titling tracks.

* The gift of getting away is always welcome, of course. So how about using TripIt to plan it? Book a vacation to Italy in February, and Tripit will do the hard work of extracting and coordinating your unstructured travel data in emails from multiple sources, build your itinerary and save it to your calendar or sync it with your mobile device, connect with friends who might be traveling there at the same time, integrate dinner reservations and entertainment plans into the itinerary, let you add notes to it about (the sites you definitely want to see, for instance), and importantly share all that data about the upcoming vacation with the guy or gal you’ll be taking with you. And when you’re abroad you or your guest can add the TripitBlog Badge widgit to automatically share your current location, upcoming trips and your travel stats with whoever visits your blog.

* Treating a harried mom or stressed-out friend to a gift certificate for a relaxing dinner out is a good option. You could take advantage of Boorah to help figure out which eating establishment will make the recipient the most merry: Narrow your search down to their favorite cuisine or neighborhood and leverage the power of semantic technologies to gain insight from across the web about which restaurants get the Rahs and which Boos to steer clear of.

* You might try Jinni’s semantically-powered “taste engine” to figure out which videos would make good stocking stuffers for the movie enthusiast on your list. Type in “love story happy ending comedy” and you’ll get more than 1,000 findings, but you can narrow that down a bit further, such as choosing a mood or time/period (albeit from some limited choices) or by the praise it’s received (from blockbuster status to Oscar winner).

* The real semantic web geek on your list might want to curl up with a good book on ontologies or machine learning – you might even think of bundling up some titles with an electronic reader. Here’s what Amazon cites as the best-selling books related to “semantic technology” as of this writing:
• Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day (Dave Evans and Susan Bratton)
• Robot Building for Beginners (David Cook)
• The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education (Curtis J. Bonk)
• Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications (Bill Buxton)
• Sketching User Experiences Getting the Design Right and the Right Design (Bill Buxton)
• Natural Language Processing with Python (Steve Bird, Ewan Klein, Edward Loper, and Bird Steven)
• Measuring the User Experience Collecting, Analyzing and Presenting Usability Metrics (Thomas Tullis and William Albert)
• Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (Neil Postman)
• Essential Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) for ,Net Framework (Steve Resnick, Richard Crane, and Chris Bowen)
• World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers that Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Stories (David Meerman Scott)
• Programming the Semantic Web (Toby Segaran)

Happy gift-giving!

Announcing Semantic Tech & Business Conference - San Francisco 2012

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