Just returned yesterday from the WBC 2005 conference, and enjoyed it overall. On Wednesday, I gave a talk on SIOC, our work on interlinking online communities. Realised that a person’s choice of avatar can also be used to connect people, if the avatars are categorised by topic. I also chaired a session on Friday entitled “Group Processes and Self-Organisation: Social Networks, Tribal- and Open Communities” which had a good mixture of technical and conceptual talks.
Met some interesting people too, including Nick Flor (creator of YesNoMaybe.com, the #1 teen advice community), Tanguy Coenen, Jon Dron (CoFIND), and Alex Schröder (Oddmuse).
Am in Shannon on the way to Web Based Communities 2005 conference, and was wondering if they had done away with their free wireless service here yet. Luckily, no! Good old Galway has it too; it really lowers my estimation of an airport when you have to pay for what should be an incentive to make use of their airport as opposed to somewhere else. Here’s hoping that the Irish airport authorities continue this attractive practice. Else, the Free Airport Wireless Forever (FAWF) campaign will begin…
Busy day today; as well as phpBBFOAF, I have just written the first version of phpBBFriends, an add-on to phpBB installations with the Profile Control Panel mod that allows users to surf from their friends to friends of their friends and so on.
Installation is straightforward; just copy friends.php to your phpBB directory. You can download the install archive. There is also a preview screenshot of the add-on.
Edit: Link to phpBBFriends thread on phpBB.com.
This is the first beta release of a FOAF RDF exporter for phpBB with the Profile Control Panel modification installed.
There have been previous FOAF modules for phpBB developed by CloCkWeRX for vanilla phpBB and Freso for phpBB with the Fetch All mod. This one differs in that it uses the buddy list functionality of the Profile Control Panel mod to produce data on a person’s friends.
Note that a user’s buddies will become publicly viewable after installing this mod, so it is advisable to notify users of a policy change on your bulletin board.
Installing this modification is quite easy, just copy the foaf.php into your forums directory. If you want to link to the FOAF export from a post’s “author panel”, read the instructions in the ZIP file (requires a one line edit to viewtopic.php).
You can download the add-on here.
You can read the discussion thread on phpBBFOAF at phpbb.com.
Stocked up on a few of these early this morning when they became available: bresl.in, greatbrita.in, and boards.co.in (to be my next project after boards.com.cn).
I had an interesting thought about boards.ie’s members. There’s > 32,000 accounts. That’s nearly 1% of the population.
More realistically, let’s say that half of those 32k are real people based in Ireland. I’d say that each person has a typical social network of a couple of hundred people (friends, business associates, classmates), so it’s safe to say that if you’re Irish, you know at least one person who is a member of boards.ie. Doesn’t matter who or where you are, one of your friends is probably on boards.ie.
As you know, I’ve been working on the social networking add-on for vBulletin (vBFriends); once I start adding in things like shortest paths, then we’ll start having fun 
[17:30] <ecksor> Our demographic information isn’t at all precise, but I recall being in a well known computer hardware shop last year and overhearing one of the sales people advise a customer to try the For Sale section on boards as a good place to look for an item they were looking for. I was quite chuffed at that.
[17:50] <seamus> Funny that, I was in a very well know PC store last year buying RAM. I casually mentioned to the checkout guy that SDRAM seemed very expensive now, and that I could do well selling off the Half Gig I had spare at home, to which he replied, “Yeah, you could try the For Sale board on boards.ie. You’ll sell anything there.”.
Published on
11/2/2005 in
Boards.
http://www.siliconrepublic.com/news/news.nv?storyid=single4427
11.02.2005 - Despite his young age, Tom Murphy has led an eventful life. He founded Spin Solutions, a software company, only to see it become a casualty of the economic slowdown; he co-founded Electronic Frontier Ireland to promote digital communications. But it was for his work in founding Boards.ie, a public online meeting place where people can exchange views on a wide range of topics, that he is best known. In December, he was awarded the Irish Internet Association?s Net Visionary Award.
Ironically, Murphy would never have founded Boards.ie if he hadn?t won a bet with his friend John Breslin. Breslin had been trying to register his nickname ?Cloud? as a domain with IE Domain Registry (IEDR). However, at the time, IEDR policy prevented the registration of generic terms. At around the same time, Breslin and Murphy had been discussing setting up a public bulletin board system similar to the one they had set up based around the Quake computer game. After his experiences with the IEDR, Breslin was not confident that the chosen name could be registered. ?So I made him a bet,? says Murphy. ?If I secured the domain name, would he build the site? And he agreed. Murphy then proceeded to change the name of his company from Spin Solutions to Boards for one day, gathered all the paperwork and submitted it, and was granted rights to the domain. ?True to his word, John put the site together,? says Murphy.
Continue reading ‘The Friday Interview: Tom Murphy, Boards.ie’
Published on
10/2/2005 in
Boards.
Irish Independent
Thursday, 10 February, 2005
e-Thursday
Technology Report
INTERVIEW
Tom Murphy, Boards.ie
TOM Murphy founded Boards.ie, a public online meeting place where people can exchange views on a wide range of topics from American football to poker, from science fiction to jazz. In December, he was awarded the Irish Internet Association’s Net Visionary Award.
What has been the major impact of the internet?
The discovery of like-minded people. Irelandoffline.org is a good example of that. People were unhappy with the Government because of the broadband situation. They could have complained individually to the politicians but it’s not very effective. But put that mass together and you get a critical mass of people who are all angry. It’s the difference between a raindrop and a tidal wave.
Isn’t there a risk that people will become isolated from their surroundings?
That’s a possibility but I find it gets people out more. I organise to meet like-minded people through the internet. One difference it is going to make is removing the geographical locality imperative. People aren’t going to get to know their neighbours as often. Why should they get to know their neighbours when there are far more like-minded people they can meet up with in town?
The internet is open to everyone. Is there a risk that this democratisation will be bulldozed to meet needs of big business?
There is a great danger in Ireland of that happening. For example, a company publishing on the internet can be sued. Everything that’s said on Boards.ie is a liability to me. You’re not responsible for waht you say. I am. We need to change this law to make you responsible for what you say. If people don’t champion the free spirit of the internet, the spirit in which it was created, then we are going to run into problems in terms of freedom of speech.
How will be using the internet 10 years from now?
There is a massive change coming in the delivery of entertainment. You will see entertainment being streamed down. Pay on demand will become more common. The internet will invade the front room through applications such as the Xbox and through internet aware TV and personal video recorders.
What is your favourite piece of electronic gadgetry?
I’m very in love with my MP3 player at the moment. It’s been a difficult settling in period but we’ve got to know each other now.
For an extended interview, see The Friday Interview tomorrow on siliconrepublic.com.
In conversation with DAVID STEWART
Myself, Andreas and Hannes are at the 1st Symposium on Interoperability Issues in Semantic Web Sites at the KMI in the Open University, Milton Keynes. (Whew, I hate losing text; just had to type that in again).
Was a bit lost when myself and Hannes arrived here, because we were expecting a town centre or something and when we came on this suburbia without an attached city, we got a bus to the “city centre” that took us past the city centre (where we actually were) on a tour to a “park and ride” spot way out from the centre. Anyway, we made up for it with a meal at Jaipur later on, and met up with Peter Mika and Jarko (sp.) from Amsterdam.
Published on
2/2/2005 in
Boards.
Four is important today for two reasons: today, the fourth boards site was launched: boards.geek.nz, joining sister sites boards.us and boards.jp and big brother boards.ie. Also, boards.jp is four years old today!
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