Second Year Anniversary (1)

The keyword of this blog is "think."

Think is an inalienable right of human beings. One could be poor, one could be weak, one could be ill, one could be laughed and humiliated, and one might be deprived of all of the other rights such as speaking, hearing, reading, writing, or walking. But as long as he breaths, he thinks.

Think is also the most beautiful thing of human being. Through thinking we learn and create. Learning allows us to discover the beauty of the world. Creating then enables us daring to realize beyond what we can see.

Think assigns us humanity.

Thinking Space, The Second Year

Today is the second-year anniversary of Thinking Space. I sincerely thank all the readers who have supported the blog so far.

The number of visits at this blog has grown tremendously from about 8,600 to over 45,000 in the past year. This number does not include readers who read through RSS subscriptions. If we add both of the regular on-site readers and the RSS readers altogether, Thinking Space is reaching 2,000 visits per week and the total number of visits has been over 70,000.

As a normal single-person, part-time blog site without any sponsorship, I am honored by this accomplishment. With neither money nor fame, distinctive thinking is the only gift Thinking Space brings. Thank you for loving it!

Here in a three posts I summarize the accomplishment of this blog during the past year.

Sites I recommend

Good thinking originates from reading high quality materials. The following are the sites/persons that I have particularly learned during the past year. I would like to express my special thanks to them.

1) General:

TED: learned a lot from great speeches.

Read/WriteWeb: a well balanced site mixed with instant news and insightful analysis, I personally like all of its major bloggers such as Marshall Kirkpatrick, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, and certainly Richard MacManus, the founder.

TechCrunch: probably the most popular blog on Web technology and Web industry, breaking news and wide coverage.

VentureBeat: leading discussion on cutting-edge technology and business news.

Internet Evolution/ThinkerNet: not for breaking-news readers, however, if one looks for in-depth articles written by true domain experts and field thinkers in their professional areas (in contrast to reading news reports from journalists), this is the site.

2) Specific:

O'Reilly Radar: Tim O'Reilly and others, a site bringing thoughts about the most frontier of World Wide Web.

Alt Search Engines: the best site to broaden the knowledge of Web search, Charles Knight is a true knight on broadcasting Google-unlike Web search tools.

Read/WriteTalk: hearing insightful thoughts spoken by industrial Web evangelists.

Nodalities: watching and hearing insightful thoughts by primarily academic (also with a few industrial) Web evangelists, especially recommending the Talis Talk podcast series and the Semantic Web Gang series moderated by Paul Miller and the "This Week's Semantic Web" series written by Danny Ayers.

Semantic Focus: for some reason James Simmons was too busy to keep on his blogging in the past few months, but this site remains to be a premier source to learn novel thoughts on Semantic Web.

3) Individual:

Tim Berners-Lee: you know the reason to read this site, don't you?

Nicholas Carr: great writer and thinker, sharp, insightful, and often illuminating.

Kingsley Idehen: practical, real, and visionary, demonstrating the way to practice Semantic Web/Linked Data concepts in the real-world business.

Nova Spivack: an example of being a visionary thinker and a pragmatic entrepreneur simultaneously, watching his thoughts and his recommended reading.

Tim Finin: no inspiration? UMBC eBiquity tells what a leading Web scientist thinks and recommends. You will be recharged.

Jason Kolb: thoughtful, in-depth, and great writing, Jason is surely one of my most favorite thinkers.

Allan Cho: compact, new Web-age style brief thinking, but unquestionably insightful.