Monthly Archive for March, 2007

New flights planned from Dublin to San Francisco, Orlando and DC

Published
by
Cloud
on 27/3/2007
in Ireland
. 1 Comment

Irish Emigrant - News and jobs for the global Irish community

Transport ministers from the 25 EU states on Thursday approved the draft “Open Skies” agreement recently negotiated between the European Commission and the US Government. [...] The five-month postponement in implementing the deal will not delay Aer Lingus’ plans for services to San Francisco, Washington and Orlando. These will commence in October-November as planned. One report suggested that Taoiseach Bertie Ahern had negotiated some side agreement with the US which caters for this. In the wake of the ratification of the “Open Skies” deal, there was further talk about the potential benefits. In addition to Aer Lingus’ plans to launch new services, it is reported that United Airways is considering a Washington-Dublin service while Northwest is looking at a Detroit-Dublin route. There is also an expectation of lower fares as a result of the increased competition. [...]

SiliconRepublic.com: IBM to create 130 jobs in Cork and Galway

Published
by
Cloud
on 27/3/2007
in Galway, Internet and Ireland
. 0 Comments

SiliconRepublic.com: IBM to create 130 jobs in Cork and Galway

It emerged this morning that computing giant IBM is to create 130 jobs at plants in Cork and Galway. An official announcement is anticipated for later today. It is understood that 100 of the jobs will be based in software development in Cork while the remaining 30 jobs in R&D will be based in Galway.

My Erdös number is <= 4

Published
by
Cloud
on 23/3/2007
in Social Networks
. 0 Comments

After seeing a reference to his own value on Ivan’s page, I’ve found out that my Erdös number is no more than 4 (via an IEEE paper with Eugene G. Gath, who wrote a paper with Thomas J. Laffey, who wrote a paper with LeRoy B. Beasley, who wrote with Paul Erdös), using the MathSciNet author search and collaboration distance calculator.

The Erdös number (more info here) is the number of links required to connect scholars to mathematician Paul Erdös, a prolific writer who co-authored over 1500 papers with more than 500 authors, and this number is commonly referenced in social network materials.

Future Web articles

Published
by
Cloud
on 22/3/2007
in Semantic Web and Web
. 4 Comments

Some interesting reads about the future of the Web from timbl and em respectively:

  • “Watching the Web grow up“, The Economist
  • “A smarter Web: new technologies will make online search more intelligent, and may even lead to a Web 3.0″, Technology Review, Part I, Part II

Edit: And another… “Web 3.0“, PC Magazine

SIOC Explorer from Eyal and Benjamin

Published
by
Cloud
on 21/3/2007
in DERI, SIOC, Semantic Web and Social Software
. 2 Comments

Eyal and Benjamin gave us a nice internal demo today of their explorer for SIOC forums. It’s written using Ruby on Rails and their ActiveRDF / SWORD Semantic Web application framework for Rails. From the SIOC explorer page:

SIOC is a Semantic Web format for online social communities such as forums, blogs, or mailing lists. SIOC feeds are already offered by many blogs (similar but much richer than RSS feeds). The SIOC explorer is a web application similar to a feed-reader: it allows people to subscribe to SIOC feeds and read their content. Because SIOC data is very rich, people can filter the content based on e.g. authors, topics, creation date, or any other properties.

First off, here’s a shot of some blogs that can be browsed / explored:

20070321a.png

Then, here’s one particular blog (from GNU), with a single post and tag list expanded:

20070321b.png

What’s nice is that you can then filter by the properties associated with a post, e.g. show all posts by a particular creator, by tag, by date, and even by expanded properties associated with a particular FOAF maker (e.g. homepage or whatever is defined for that foaf:Person):

20070321c.png

By crawling SIOC comment posts, and getting data from forums, blogs, mailing lists, etc., tools like the SIOC explorer can provide a nice overall view of a person’s contributions to various ongoing or past discussions, or can provide very specific views of what a group of people have been saying during a certain timeframe (something that is not easily done with current feed readers or aggregators).

Cisco’s social network acquisitions (Was Sunday Tribune: “Social networking: sharing is caring for the bottom line”)

Published
by
Cloud
on 20/3/2007
in Semantic Web, Social Networks and Social Software
. 1 Comment

I was quoted for this article in the Sunday Tribune by Damien about our boards.ie CI (commercial interaction) forums. There are other interesting parts to the article, in particular Cisco’s move into the social networking domain earlier this month. When I wrote earlier about Cisco’s “Human Network” ad, I hadn’t realised that Cisco had actually purchased Tribe.net (and Five Across), thinking that they were content to simply have us use their networking infrastructure for whatever collaborative purposes we enjoyed. But despite much bewilderment, there seems to be some good reasons for this acquisition (see Marc Canter’s list and Winer’s tongue-in-cheek take on the move). (From the Semantic Web side, maybe Cisco could be persuaded to provide further convergence via OpenID, Tribe’s FOAF provisions and something similar from Five Across’ “Connect” product.)

ShareIT training day in UCC

Published
by
Cloud
on 20/3/2007
in Education, Internet and Ireland
. 0 Comments

Damien tells us about a training day he is organising in UCC this Saturday (March 24th):

The training will cover the basics for an IT company or IT person that’s just setting out in business. [...] If you are interested in coming along, please do come along or if you think someone you know in the Cork/Munster area would benefit from the training, send the details on to them. All training is provided free. After Cork it is hoped there’ll be on[e] in Dublin around April 28th.

More details are available from url.ie/388.

IRC logs of #sioc using SIOC :)

Published
by
Cloud
on 14/3/2007
in SIOC and Semantic Web
. 1 Comment

tuukkah has provided an index of IRC channels he is logging in both HTML and Turtle RDF, and the nice thing is that SIOC is being used as one of the representation formats. For example, here is the #sioc channel from today in both HTML and Turtle. Logs of #swig are also available.

The script is written in Haskell and is available here.

“Podcasting: What’s New?” talk by Conn Ó Muíneacháin at DERI today

Published
by
Cloud
on 13/3/2007
in DERI, NUI Galway and Podcasts
. 1 Comment

Conn gave a great talk and question / answer session at DERI, NUI Galway this morning about podcasting and his experiences producing both “An tImeall” and “An Líonra Sóisialta”.

My Digital Media students recorded a video of his talk - due to some upcoming exams, it will probably be about two weeks before they can edit / upload a video podcast of the event. Conn also captured an audio recording of the talk, so maybe there can be an upload race :)

“Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us”

Published
by
Cloud
on 13/3/2007
in Semantic Web, Web and Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

Nice video, thanks to Ron Lichty for the link (via The Long Tail blog).