I attended the yearly IT Association of Galway Barbeque on behalf of DERI last week - it was an enjoyable night, and you can check out the ITAG website for other forthcoming events including Managing Teams Remotely, Borderless Ireland, and the ITAG Industry Awards 2007.
Monthly Archive for August, 2007
…The Internet is having a bad week.
I’d have hoped for a nicer error page from Blogger:
As you probably know, we’ve been planning to spin off various boards.ie services (blogs, albums, events, friends functionality) into a separate social networking site for nearly a year now. Unfortunately, time and effort have been against us, but I’ve started on this again and hopefully we can launch a beta version within the next few weeks.
The result will be called social.ie (pronounced “socially” :-)). It will leverage our existing boards.ie userbase and the social network connections that have been formed on the site since I added friends functionality three years ago (so far, there are 15335 links between users, 6347 of those are reciprocated). The screenshot below shows the buddylist functionality in vBDrupal that has been hacked a little to be a bit more graphical.
Will post more as it happens…
I’ve re-run our statistics gathering queries, and produced three new graphs showing boards.ie’s growth in terms of users, posts and threads. Currently, boards.ie has 111350 registered users, and 6931221 posts on 596763 threads in 671 forums.
User growth
Post growth
Thread growth
Just had lunch with Richard and John, and talked about the upcoming World Cyber Games Ireland finals which will be held on the 15th and 16th of September. It sounds like it’s going to be a great two days, and only for a family wedding I’d pop up for a look… You can register at lanparty.ie for the event.
(Courtesy of Simpsonize Me, an old photo and some manual tweaking.)
Yes, the rumours are true, Thomas Burg, Tom Raftery and I are currently putting together a plan of action for a forthcoming BlogTalk 2008 conference. The event is provisionally scheduled for early March 2008 in Cork… More as it happens!
As mentioned in a previous blog post, int.ere.st has just launched. The main objective of int.ere.st is to demonstrate how Semantic Web and Web 2.0 technologies can be combined to provide better metadata creation and sharing support across various online communities.
With int.ere.st, you can save, tag and bookmark your own as well as other people’s tag clouds, as represented using the SCOT ontology. The tag meta search also allows you to look for similar patterns of tagging from other people based on their interests (as expressed using tags).
Some functionalities of int.ere.st include:
- Various options for tag searching, such as and (&), or (space), co-occurrence (+), broader (>), and narrower (< )
- User searching
- Resource searching
- Integrating tagged data across communities
- Meta tagging
- Ontology bookmarking
- Sharing metadata produced using the FOAF, SIOC, and SCOT ontologies
You can try it at out at http://int.ere.st/. Here are some video demos of int.ere.st in action, and some more videos are forthcoming:
Short
Long
I was talking this morning to Sean from Zimbie, a spinoff from WIT’s TSSG group, about their Zimbie applications and services. Although it took me a while to get my head around it, and it is still in early stages, Zimbie is a nice idea whereby you can send notifications via IM to anyone who is interested in your blog or other online content (at the moment, it mainly works through RSS updates but I am told it will be extended to include other update methods). Think Twitter or Jaiku via IM, except for any content (not just microblog entries).
So how does it work?
Client. Basically, there is a Zimbie client and a Zimbie bot. I am not sure if the client application is needed for those who don’t want to run Zimbie bots, but it acts like a normal Jabber IM client. It uses Jabber, so is compatible with Google Talk, but has yet to be extended to other IM protocols.
Bot. The Zimbie client is required if you want to set up Zimbie bots (”Zimbots”). The idea is that you create a bot that will notify anyone who adds the bot to their IM contact list about any updates to your site (or set of sites). So, in the screenshot below, I set up a Zimbie bot for barcampgalway at gmail dot com. Then, I configured the bot with details of my RSS feed (in this case, for the BarCamp Galway blog). Anyone who adds barcamp at gmail dot com to their contacts lists in their Jabber-compatible IM client will be notified when the BarCamp Galway blog is updated. Voila!
My impressions…
The Zimbie client is easy to install and use. The Zimbie bot, less so. It works just fine, and the Zimbie bot demo video does a good job of explaining how to set up a bot, but I think that this may be a bit complicated for most, and editing XML is okay for someone like me, but may not be to all tastes. I also assume you must either leave your Zimbot running or else people will only be notified of updates when you start your computer / Zimbie application running again, but that’s not a big issue and will suit most.
But it is still an early release, and it’s really nice to see applications and ideas like this coming out of research institutes. Well done, and I wish all at Zimbie success with it. You can keep up to date with developments at the Zimbie blog.
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