For those who haven’t seen it already, a nice presentation from a BarCamp event in London by Tom Morris: Semantic Web: a quick but detailed introduction.
Monthly Archive for March, 2007
Tom Raftery has posted his podcast interview with Ross Mayfield at PodLeaders, well worth a listen. Ross, whom I met him briefly at Wikimania 2005, is CEO of SocialText.
To follow up on my question about Semantic Wikis, I think that sometimes there is the misapprehension that anything semantic has to involve some automatic AI-like deduction of metadata from the content by some agent or computer. A big part of the Semantic Web is enabling users to add structured content / annotations to pages (wikis being a good example here!) that can then be used to link things together (see the latter part of my IIA blog post on this). The Wikipedia page about Ross Mayfield links to about 25 pages - but it isn’t possible to get help with even a simple question such as “find me all the organisations that Ross has worked with or for”.
For example, the Semantic MediaWiki system allow people to add structured data into pages, such as typed links and attributes (or relationships and number / text properties). By allowing people to add such extra metadata, the systems can then show related pages (either through common relationships or properties or by embedding search queries in pages). These enhancements are powered by the metadata that the people enter (aided by computers of course, but not too much!)…
Cisco had a full page ad in the Guardian on Saturday about what they call “the human network”:
On the human network, people everywhere are experiencing a new kind of day. Encyclopedias update themselves every minute. Movies appear wherever there’s a screen handy. And a phone can double as a train ticket or an air ticket. Welcome to a place where wikis, collaborative applications and social networks are making us smarter, better and faster. Welcome to a network where possibilities are endless. Because when we’re together, we’re more powerful than we could ever be apart.
The ad has a link to this page. Apparently they also ran this ad (with slightly different wording) in the New York Times late last year (1, 2). The optimistic statement “where anything is possible” has been replaced by the slightly more realistic “where possibilities are endless”…
From The Onion (via the Sunday Times):
ACCORDING to The Onion, the satirical online newspaper, Google is planning a new project, Google Purge, to destroy all the copyrighted books it cannot index. And it plans to erase the hard disk of any computer that doesn’t run its search engine.
“A year ago, Google offered to scan every book on the planet for its Google Print project,” The Onion reported.
“Now, they are promising to burn the rest. Thanks to Google Purge, you’ll never have to worry that your search has missed some obscure book, because that book will no longer exist. And the same goes for movies, art and music.”
…
Google book downloading row is a real page turner-Business-Industry Sectors-Technology-TimesOnline
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A great day by my account at least (and by some others that I overheard!) was had at the WebCamp workshop on social networks held at DERI, NUI Galway yesterday.
Considering the short notice of just nine days, there was an impressive turnout of between 50 and 60 people, and as well as six talks in the morning we had some interesting “birds of a feather” discussion sessions in the afternoon.
All presentations from the day are available at SlideShare. We hope to publish some of the day’s videos to YouTube during the next week. Thanks to Conor and Uldis for their help with organising the event, and to Ina for recording the videos.
John Breslin - Introduction / overview
Conor Hayes - Topics, tags and trends in the blogosphere
Jill Freyne - Collecting community wisdom: integrating social search and social navigation
Andrew Page - The demand for search in a social network
Gabriela Avram - Where is the knowledge: reflections on social networking in corporate environments
Mark Tarbatt - Successful campaigns on the Bebo social network
Valdis Krebs - Social network analysis: 1987-2007
I’m very happy to announce that we will have an additional speaker at tomorrow’s social networks event - Mark Tarbatt from Generator - he is MD of this leading Irish online advertising company and has directed some big campaigns on Bebo, Ireland’s most popular SNS.
Mark Tarbatt is the managing director of Generator, which promotes Internet advertising and sponsorship opportunities to clients and their agencies on behalf of a select number of publishers.
Through his work with leading brands such as Coca Cola and Disney, Mark has delivered some very successful campaigns on the popular social networking site Bebo.
Mark previously worked with Hoson Publishing, with eircom.net / rondomondo, and he has served on the board of the Irish Internet Association, the Advertising Press Club of Ireland, and is a founder member of the Interactive Advertising Bureau in Ireland.
Today’s talk was about RSS, uses for feeds and a bit about mashing with Yahoo! Pipes.
Last week’s lecture on content sharing, presented this week. Talking about sharing maps, photos, bookmarks, events, etc.
30 people have signed up for the forthcoming WebCamp “Social Networks” day of talks and discussions on Wednesday, 7th March. Again, this was organised on very short notice (just announced last Monday) but the response has been amazing, in part due to the high quality of speakers we will have and also because of the topic relevance and scope. Oh, and it’s free!
So, here is a bit about each of our speakers. If anyone has any ideas of what they’d like to discuss in the afternoon, please post them here.
Valdis Krebs is a management consultant, researcher, trainer, author, and the developer of InFlow software for social and organisational network analysis (SNA/ONA). InFlow maps and measures knowledge exchange, information flow, emergent communities, networks of alliances and other connections within and between organisations and communities. Since 1988, Valdis has participated in almost 500 SNA/ONA projects. His clients have ranged from IBM to Shell, and his work has been covered in major media from Business Week to the New York Times.
Jill Freyne is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Computer Science in University College Dublin. She received her PhD and BSc degrees from UCD, and worked as part of the I-SPY research project which was funded by Enterprise Ireland. Dr. Freyne specialises in the area of social search, and also has research interests in personalisation, social networks, web search and folksonomies.
Conor Hayes is a senior researcher at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway. He previously worked at the Centre for Scientific and Technological Research (ITC-IRST) in Italy. Dr. Hayes’ interests include online recommender and advisory systems, case-based reasoning, collaborative filtering, user profiling, knowledge discovery in databases, information retrieval and machine learning systems, and trend discovery in online communities (such as the online music or blog domains).
Des Traynor is co-creator of Bigulo, an enhanced search and rating system for users of social networking services (such as Bebo). He works as a lecturer and PhD scholar in the Department of Computer Science, NUI Maynooth and is an expert on computer science education and social networks. Please note that Des may be replaced on the day by Bigulo colleague Andrew Page.
Gabriela Avram is a blogger, researcher, and educator, currently working at the Interaction Design Center in the University of Limerick. She is involved in a major project at UL on globally-distributed software development. Dr. Avram’s research interests include social software, online communities, blogging in corporate environments, knowledge-based systems, learning elements in education, and open source communities.
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