Archive for December, 2006

I’m teaching an “Emerging Web Media” module next year

Published
by
Cloud
on 12/12/2006
in Education, Ireland and Movies
. 3 Comments

I not sure if I’ve mentioned it here before before but I’ll be teaching a new module to Masters students in Digital Media at the Huston Film School in NUI Galway next semester (as referenced by Haydn in last month’s Irish Times article). The aim of the module is to educate these students on applications of new web technologies to digital media, including Web 2.0 applications such as podcasting, blogging and content syndication. Here’s the module synopsis.

“Emerging Web Media”

This module will begin with an introduction to previous forms of web media communication, and describe in detail the emergent trends and technologies being employed for media communication through the Web. These include:

  • Blogs (online journals or sets of chronological news entries that are maintained by individuals, communities or commercial entities, and can be used to publish personal opinions, diary-like articles or news stories relating to a particular interest or product)
  • Wikis (collaboratively edited websites that can be updated or added to by anyone with an interest in the topic covered by the wiki site, and have been used to create online encyclopedias, photo galleries and literature collections)
  • Audio podcasts (also known as audio blogs, podcasts are to radio what blogs are to newspapers or magazines, and people can create and distribute audio content using podcasts for public consumption and playback on personal/portable media players, computers or other MP3-enabled devices)
  • Video podcasts (also known as “vlogs” from video blogs or “vodcasts” from video podcasts, this is where people can produce and publish video content on the Web for consumption on media playing-devices, and this content can range from individuals publishing home movies or their own news “interviews”, to studios releasing TV episodes or movies for a fee)
  • Content syndication (a means whereby people can keep up to date with material published via the new media communication methods above, through RSS, Atom and other subscription methods)
  • Annotated social bookmarks and photo sharing (sites like Flickr, del.icio.us and Google Maps are allowing people to publicly publish textual or multimedia content along with associated annotations of use to others)

I will also be uploading slides to our DERI teaching site after each week’s lectures.

(No, Martin Sheen won’t be taking this course!)

Martin Sheen, NUI Galway (and Ireland’s) most famous mature student

Published
by
Cloud
on 12/12/2006
in Education, Galway, Ireland, Movies and Television
. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

I’ve been seeing lots of Martin Sheen in the Irish media recently. For those of you who don’t know, the West Wing actor and movie star is currently finishing up his semester as a mature student at the National University of Ireland, Galway, where he was studying English literature, philosophy and oceanography.

Martin Sheen is probably used to playing courageous characters on screen, but with all his accompanying fame I think that enrolling as an undergraduate student at NUI Galway must have taken more courage than you would expect from a typical Hollywood celebrity.

Also of note is his work for various charities while he has been in Galway. He need not have bothered, but he deserves our respect for doing so…

Here’s a funny quote from Martin Sheen in today’s Irish Independent:

Despite his instantly recognisable features, there were a few students who did not recognise the actor, but one of his favourite anecdotes concerns one who obviously did:

“Is it yourself?” the student inquired when he came across Sheen wandering around the campus, apparently lost.

“It is,” said Sheen.

“Where is your minder?” the young man demanded.

Sheen said he didn’t know what a “minder” was. “Your bodyguard,” came the reply. “I don’t have one,” said the actor.

“More power to you,” said the student and off he went.

Other articles about Martin Sheen at NUI Galway from The Guardian, The Irish Examiner, The Washington Post, BBC News, and The Sunday Times.

Nice demo of Query Builder alpha from OpenLink

Published
by
Cloud
on 11/12/2006
in Semantic Web
. 1 Comment

20061211b.png

Here’s a graphical screenshot of OpenLink’s Query Builder (QBE), based on their Ajax toolkit (OAT), More information from Kingsley Idehen in this SWEO mailing list message.

Edit: There’s more about this in Kingsley’s blog entry SPARQL, Ajax, Tagging, Folksonomies, Share Ontologies and Semantic Web.

Yep, practically every domain you can think of is gone…

Published
by
Cloud
on 11/12/2006
in Internet
. 3 Comments

…except for FOOMAZON!

ERROR: BARMAZON.COM is unavailable and has been removed.
ERROR: FOOGLE.COM is unavailable and has been removed.
ERROR: BARGLE.COM is unavailable and has been removed.
ERROR: YAFOO.COM is unavailable and has been removed.
ERROR: BARHOO.COM is unavailable and has been removed.
ERROR: EBAR.COM is unavailable and has been removed.
ERROR: FOOBAY.COM is unavailable and has been removed.

YouTube - Hak.5 Microshaft Web 2.0 Framework

Published
by
Cloud
on 6/12/2006
in Internet
. 0 Comments

YouTube - Hak.5 Microshaft Web 2.0 Framework

Enjoyed it muchly… Thanks to Mick for this!

Semantic Web and social software at the last Barcamp Turin

Published
by
Cloud
on 6/12/2006
in Semantic Web
. 0 Comments

Salvatico.it » Blog Archive » Barcamp Turin

Daniele Salvatico gave a talk at BarCamp Turin last week, citing Tom Gruber’s recent ontologies and folksonomies keynote from ISWC 2006 and our Semantic Web 2.0 tutorial from WWW2006 as key references. The talk was about semantic technologies and possible integrations with social software (folksonomies, geotagging, FOAF, SIOC, RSS and Microformats). The slides (in Italian) are available from SlideShare.

From mboxes to the Semantic Web

Published
by
Cloud
on 6/12/2006
in Semantic Web
. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Illustrative picture from the SWAML group, courtesy of Wikier - shows mboxes being coverted to a combination of FOAF, SIOC and DC metadata.

20061206a.png

The full report on SWAML (in Spanish) is now available at http://prdownload.berlios.de/swaml/swaml-pfc.pdf.

New hosting, fingers crossed…

Published
by
Cloud
on 4/12/2006
in Internet
. 0 Comments

I’ve moved my sites to a newer Debian VPS service. With 15 sites on the move, something’s bound to break but so far most things are running okay *touch wood* apart from Planet Journals Ireland (too many files cached…).

Apparently there’s a DOSser (Denial Of Service ‘enthusiast’) on one of our hosted forums; kind of explains the downtime over the past three weeks.

Week of presentations…

Published
by
Cloud
on 1/12/2006
in Blogs, Galway, Semantic Web and Wikis
. 2 Comments

I gave three talks this week - the first during our DERI Research Day on “Information Centric Access: The Case of SIOC” (lots of attendees from academia, industry and state organisations), the second during our eNeighbourhoods event on “Wiki Ireland” (attended by local government and community members), and the third was last night at a TTI / ITAG event entitled “Semantic Web 2.0: Creating Social Semantic Information Spaces” (basically a condensed version of our WWW2006 tutorial for local IT professionals). I was fairly happy with the first two, slightly less so with the third - it was hard compressing so much into a 45-minute talk (both for me and the audience), but hopefully they got something of interest out of the various topics I ran through…