Archive for November, 2007

Web 2.0 Expo Tokyo: Rie Yamanaka - “A paradigm shift in advertisement platforms: the move into a real Web 2.0 implementation phase”

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on 16/11/2007
in Adverts, Japan and Web 2.0
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The second talk at the Web 2.0 Expo Tokyo this morning was by Rie Yamanaka, a director with Yahoo!’s commercial search subsidiary Overture KK. (I realised after a few minutes of confusion that Ms. Yamanaka’s speech was being translated into English via portable audio devices.)

According to Yamanaka, Internet-based advertising can be classified into three categories: banners and rich media, list-type advertisements (which was the central topic of her presentation), and mobile advertising (i.e., a combination of banner and listings grouped onto the mobile platform).

First of all, she talked about advertisement lists. Ad lists are usually quite accurate in terms of targetting since they are shown and ranked based on a degree of relevance. Internet-based ads (when compared with TV, radio, etc.) are growing exponentially. This increase is primarily being driven by ad lists and mobile ads. In yesterday’s first keynote speech with Joi Ito, the discussion mentioned that the focus has already shifted a lot towards internet advertising in the US, perhaps more so than Japan, but that this is now occuring in Japan too.

She then talked about the difference between banners and ad lists. In the case of banner ads, what matters is the number of impressions, so the charge is based on CPM (cost per mille or thousand), and some people think of it as being very “Web 1.0″-like. However, ad lists, e.g., as shown in search results, are focussed more on CPC (cost per click), and are often associated with Web 2.0.

Four trends (with associated challenges) are quite important and are being discussed in the field of Internet advertising: the first is increased traceability (one can track and keep a log of who did what); the next is behavioural or attribute targetting, which is now being implemented in a quite fully-fledged manner; third are APIs that are now entering the field of advertisement; and finally (although its not “Web 2.0″-related in a pure sense) is the integration between offline and online media, where the move to search for information online is becoming prevalent.

  • With traceability, you can get a list of important keywords in searches that result in subsequent clicks. Search engine marketing can help to eliminate the loss of opportunities that may occur through missed clicks.
  • Behavioural targetting, based on a user’s history of search, can give advertisers a lot of useful information. One can use, for example, information on gender (i.e., static details) or location (i.e., dynamic details, perhaps from an IP address) for attribute-based targetting. This also provides personalised communication with the users, and one can then deploy very flexible products based on this. Yahoo! Japan recently announced details of attribute-based advertising for their search which combines an analysis of the log histories of users and advertisers.
  • As in yesterday’s talk about Salesforce working with Google, APIs for advertising should be combined with core business flows, especially when a company provides many products, e.g. Amazon.com or travel services. For a large online retailer, you could have some logic that will match a keyword to the current inventory, and the system should hide certain keywords if associated items are not in stock. This is also important in the hospitality sector, where for example there should be a change in the price of a product when it goes past a best-before time or date (e.g., hotel rooms drop in price after 9 PM). With an API, one can provide very optimised ads that cannot be created on-the-fly by humans. Advertisers can take a scientific approach to dynamically improve offerings in terms of cost and sales.
  • Matching online information to offline ads, while not directly related to Web 2.0, is important too. If one looks at TV campaigns, one can analyse information about how advertising the URL for a particular brand can lead to the associated website. Some people may only visit a site after seeing an offline advertisement, so there could be a distinct message sent to these types of users.

In terms of metrics, traditionally internet-based ads have been classified in terms of what you want to achieve. In cases where banners are the main avenue required by advertisiers, CPM is important (if advertising a film, for example, the volume of ads displayed is important). On the other hand, if you actually want to get your full web page up on the screen, ranking and CPC is important, so the fields of SEO and SEM come into play.

Ms. Yamanaka then talked about CPA (cost per acquisition), i.e., how much it costs to acquire a customer. The greatest challenge in the world of advertising is figuring out how much [extra] a company makes as a result of advertising (based on what form of campaign is used). If one can try and figure out a way to link sales to ads, e.g., through internet conversion where a person moves onwards from an ad and makes a purchase), then one can get a measure of the CPA. For companies who are not doing business on the Web, its hard to link a sale to an ad (e.g., if someone wants to buy a Lexus, and reads reference material on the Web, he or she may then go off and buy a BMW without any traceable link). On the Web, can get a traceable link from an ad impression to an eventual deal or transaction (through clicking on something, browsing, getting a lead, and finding a prospect).

She explained that we have to understand why we are inviting customers who watch TV onto the Web: is it for government information, selling products, etc. The purpose of a 30-second advert may actually be to guide someone to a website where they will read stuff online for more than five minutes. With tracebility, one can compare targetted results and what a customer did depending on whether they came from an offline reference (she didn’t say it but I presume through a unique URL) or directly online. Web 2.0 is about personalisation, and targeting internet-based ads towards segmented usergroups is also important (e.g., using mobile or PC-based social network advertising for female teens in Tokyo; for salarymen travelling between Tokyo and Osaka, it may be better to use ad lists or SMS advertising on mobiles or some other format; and for people at home, it may be appropriate to have a TV ad at a key time at night where there’s a high probability of them going and carrying out a web search for the associated product), and so there’s a need to find the best format and media.

She again talked about creating better synergies between offline and online marketing (e.g., between a TV-based ad and an internet-based ad). If a TV ad shows a web address, it can result in nearly 2.5 times more accesses than can be directly obtained via the Internet (depending on the type of products being advertised), so one can attract a lot more people to a website in this way. Combining TV and magazines, advertisers can prod / nudge / guide customers to visit their websites. There is still a lot of room for improvement in determining how exactly to guide people to the Web. It depends on what a customer should get from a company, as this will determine the type of information to be sent over the Web and whether giving a good user experience is important (since you don’t want to betray the expectation of users and what they are looking for). Those in charge of brands for websites need to understand how people are getting to a particular web page as there are so many different entry points to a site.

Ms. Yamanaka referenced an interesting report from comScore about those who pre-shop on the Web spending more in a store. These pre-shoppers spend 41% more in a real store if they have seen internet-based ads for a product (and for every $1 these people spent online, they would spend an incremental $6 in-store).

There’s also a paradigm shift occuring in terms of ubiquitous computing, which is already a common phenomenon here in Japan. At the end of her presentation, she also referenced something called “closed-loop marketing” which I didn’t really get. But I did learn quite a bit about online advertising from this talk.

Web 2.0 Expo Tokyo: Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter - “In conversation with Tim O’Reilly”

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on 16/11/2007
in Blogs, Internet, Japan, US and Web 2.0
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The first talk of the day was a conversation between Tim O’Reilly and Evan Williams.

Evan started off by forming a company in his home state of Nebraska, then moved to work for O’Reilly Media for nine months but says he never liked working for other people. A little later on he formed Pyra, which after a year had Blogger as its main focus in 1999. They ran out of money in the dot com bust, had some dark times and he had to lay off a team of seven in 2000. He continued to keep it alive for another year and built it back up. Then Evan started talks with Google and sold Blogger to them in 2003, continuing to run Blogger at Google for two years. He eventually left Google anyway, says that it was partially because of his own personality (working for others), and also because within Google Blogger was a small fish in a big pond. Part of the reason for selling to Google in the first place was that they had respect for them, it was a good working environment, and also they would be providing a stable platform for Blogger to grow (eventually without Evan). But in the end, he felt that he’d be happier and more effective outside Google.

So he then went on to start Odeo at Obvious Corp. Because of timing and the fact that they got a lot of attention, they raised a lot of money very easily. He ran Odeo as it was for a year and a half. With Jack Dorsey at Odeo / Obvious, they began the Twitter project. Eventually Evan bought out his investors when he realised Odeo had possibly gotten it wrong as it just didn’t feel right in its current state.

Tim asked Evan what is Twitter and what Web 2.0 trends does it show off? Evan says its a simple service described by many as microblogging (a single Twitter message is called a tweet). That is, blogging based on very short updates with the focus on real-time information, “what are you doing?” Those who are interested in what someone is doing can receive updates on the Web or on their mobile. Some people call it “lifestreaming”, according to Tim. Others think it’s just lots of mundane, trivial stuff, e.g. “having toast for breakfast”. Why it’s interesting isn’t so much because the content is interesting but rather because you want to find out what someone is doing. Evan gave an example of when a colleague was pulling up dusty carpets in his house, he got a tweet from Evan saying “wine tasting in Napa”, so that its almost a vision of an “alternative now”. Through Twitter, you can know very minute things about someone’s life: what you’re thinking, that you’re tired, etc. Historically, we have only known that kind of information for a very few people that you are close to (or celebrities!).

The next question from Tim was how do you design a service that starts off as fun but becomes really useful? A lot of people’s first reaction in relation to Twitter is “why would I do that”. But then people try it and find lots of other uses. It’s much the same motivation (personal expression and social connection) as other applications like blogging, according to Evan. A lot of it comes from the first users of the application. As an example, Twitter didn’t have a system allowing people to comment, so the users invented one by using the @ sign and a username (e.g., @ev) to comment on other people’s tweets (and that convention has now spread to blog comments). People are using it for conversation in ways that weren’t expected. [Personal rant here, in that I find the Twitter comment tracking system to be quite poor. If I check my Twitter replies, and look at what someone has supposedly replied to, it’s inaccurate simply because there is no direct link between a microblog post and a reply. It seems to assume by default that the recipient’s “previous tweet by time” is what a tweet sender is referring to, even when they aren’t referring to anything at all but rather are just beginning a new thread of discussion with someone else using the @ convention.]

Tim said that the team did a lot for Twitter in terms of usability, by offering an API that enabled services like Twittervision. Evan said that their API has been suprisingly successful, and there are at least a dozen desktop applications, others that extract data and present it in different ways, various bots that post information to Twitter (URLs, news, weather, etc.), and more recently a timer application that will send a message at a certain time period in the future for reminders (e.g., via the SMS gateway). The key thing with the API is to build a simple service and make it reusable to other applications.

Right now, Twitter doesn’t have a business model: a luxury at this time, since money is plentiful. At some point, Tim said they may have to be acquired by someone who sees a model or feels that they need this feature as part of their offering. Evan said they are going to explore this very soon, but right now they are focussed on building value. A real-time communication network used by millions of people multiple times a day is very valuable, but there is quite a bit of commercial use of Twitter, e.g., Woot (the single special offer item per day site) have a lot of followers on Twitter. It may be in the future that “for this class of use, you have to pay, but for everyone else it’s free”.

20% of Twitter users are in Japan, but they haven’t internationalised the application apart from having double-byte support. Evan says they want to do more, but they are still a small team.

Tim then asked how important is it to have rapid application development for systems like Twitter (which is based on Ruby on Rails)? Most Google’s applicationss are in Java, C++ and Python, and Evan came out of Google wanting to use a lightweight framework for such development since there’s a lot of trial and error in creating Web 2.0 applications. With Rails, there are challenges to scaling, and since Twitter is one of the largest Rails applications, there are a lot of problems that have yet to be solved. Twitter’s developers talk to 37 Signals a lot (and to other developers in the Rails community); incidentally, one of Twitter’s developers has Rails commit privileges.

Tim says there’s a close tie between open source software and Web 2.0. Apparently, it took two weeks to build the first functional prototype of Twitter. There is a huge change in development practice related to Web 2.0. A key part of Web 2.0 is a willingness to fail, since people may not like certain things in a prototype version. One can’t commit everything to a single proposition, but on the flip side, sometimes you many need to persist (e.g., in the case of Blogger, if you believe in your creation and it seems that people like it).

So, that was it. It was an interesting talk, giving an insight into the experiences of a serial Web 2.0 entpreneur (of four, or was it five, companies). I didn’t learn anything new about Twitter itself or about what they hope to add to their service in the future (apart from the aformentioned commercial opportunities), but it’s great to have people like Evan who seem to have an intuitive grasp on what people find useful in Web 2.0 applications.

BlogTalk 2008 deadline extended by a week

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on 14/11/2007
in Blogs, Cork, General and Social Media
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We’ve extended the proposal submission deadline for BlogTalk 2008 by one week.

You now have until 23rd November, 2007 to submit your 2-4 page paper proposal.

Thanks!

Talk by Barney Pell at ISWC 2007, CTO of Powerset

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on 14/11/2007
in Korea and Semantic Web
. 1 Comment

Barney Pell gave the opening talk of the day at ISWC this morning. Barney is former CEO, now CTO of natural language search company Powerset.

He talked about how natural language (NL) helps the Semantic Web (SW), especially both sides of the chicken-and-egg problem (the chicken AND the egg). On one side, annotations can be created from unstructured text, and ontologies can be generated, mapped and linked. On the other side, NL search can consume SW information, and can expose SW services in response to NL queries.

The goal of Powerset is to enable people to interact with information and services as naturally and effectively as possible, by combining NL and scalable search technology. Natural language search interprets the Web, indexes it, interprets queries, searches and matches.

Historically, search has matched query intents with document intents, and a change in the document model has driven the latest innovations. The first is proximity: there’s been a shift from documents being a “bag of keywords” to becoming a “vector of keywords”. The second is in relation to anchor text: adding off-page text to search is next.

Documents are loaded with linguistic structure that is mostly discarded and ignored (due to cost and complexity), but it has immense value. A document’s intent is actually encoded in this linguistic structure. Powerset’s semantic indexer extracts meaning from the linguistic structure, and Barney believes that they are just at the start of exciting times in this area.

Converging trends that are enabling this NL search are language technologies, lexical and ontological knowledge resources, Moore’s law, open-source software, and commodity computing.

Powerset integrates diverse resources, e.g. websites, newsfeeds, blogs, archives, metadata (”MetaSearch”), video, and podcasts. It can also do real-time queries to databases, where an NL query is converted into a database query. Barney maintains that results from databases drive further engagement.

He then gave some demos of Powerset. With the example “Sir Edward Heath died from pneumonia”, Barney showed how Powerset parses each sentence; extracts entities and semantic relationships, identifies and expands these to similar entities, relationships and abstractions; and indexes multiple facts for each sentence. He showed an interesting demonstration where multiple queries on the same topic to Powerset retrieve the same “facts”. The information on the various entities or relationships can come from multiple sources, e.g. information on Edward Heath or Deng Xiaoping is from Freebase and details on pneumonia comes from WordNet.

20071114a.png He gave an example of the search query “Who said something about WMDs?”. This is difficult to express using keyword search: to express that someone “said something” and that it is also about weapons of mass destruction. Barney also showed a parse for the famous wrestler / actor Hulk Hogan, with all the relations or “connections” to him (e.g., defeat) and the subjects or “things” that he is related to (e.g., André the Giant).

Powerset’s language technologies are the result of commercialising the XLE work from PARC, leveraging their “multidimensional, multilingual architecture produced from long-term research”. Some of their main challenges are in the areas of scalability, systems integration, incorporating various data and knowledge resources, and enriching the user experience.

He next talked about accelerating the SW ecosystem. Barney said that the wisdom of crowds can help to accelerate the Semantic Web. What starts as a broad platform gets deeper faster when it gets deployed at a large scale, realising a Semantic Web faster than expected. This drive comes from four types of people:

  • The first category is publishers, who upload their ontologies to get more traffic, and can get feedback to help with improving their content.
  • Users are the next group, as they will “play games” to create and improve resources, will provide feedback to get better search, and will create (lightweight, simple) ontologies for personalisation and organising their own groups.
  • There are also developers, who can package knowledge for specialised applications (e.g., for vertical search).
  • Finally, advertisers will want to create and upload ontologies to express all the things that should match their commercial offerings.

For the community, Powerset will provide various APIs and will give access to their technologies to build mashups and other applications. Powerset’s other community contributions are in the form of datasets, annotations, and open-source software.

Their commercial model is in relation to advertising (like most search engines) and licensing their technologies to other companies or search engines. Another related company (a friend of Barney’s) is [true Knowledge]™.

I’m still waiting for my Powerset Labs account to be approved; looking forward to getting in there and trying it out myself. Thanks to Barney for the great talk.

Fwd: Galway Linux installfest, Sat 17th Nov

Published
by
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on 13/11/2007
in Galway and Unix
. 1 Comment

Via Andrew Gallagher:

Galway LUG is organising a Linux installfest on Saturday 17th from 10am-noon in the DERI building, Lower Dangan (map). This is a chance for you to bring along your old laptop/desktop and give it new purpose in life! If you have thought about trying Linux, but haven’t yet summoned up the courage, here is your chance to get some hands-on help. We will have several experienced users on hand to help you select, install and configure your first Linux.

A word of warning: if you have data on your hard drive, please BACK IT UP before bringing your machine. Galway LUG and its volunteers cannot be held responsible for loss of data. It is your responsibility to have current backups.

See you there!

Brewster Kahle’s (Internet Archive) ISWC talk on worldwide distributed knowledge

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on 13/11/2007
in Internet, Korea, Literature, Movies, Music, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Software, Television, US, Web and Wikis
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Universal access to all knowledge can be one of our greatest achievements.

The keynote speech at ISWC 2007 was given this morning by Brewster Kahle, co-founder of the Internet Archive and also of Alexa Internet. Brewster’s talk discussed the challenges in putting various types of media online, from books to video:

  • He started to talk about digitising books (1 book = 1 MB; the Library of Congress = 26 million books = 26 TB; with images, somewhat larger). At present, it costs about $30 to scan a book in the US. For 10 cents a page, books or microfilm can now be scanned at various centres around the States and put online. 250,000 books have been scanned in so far and are held in eight online collections. He also talked about making books available to people through the OPLC project. Still, most people like having printed books, so book mobiles for print-on-demand books are now coming. A book mobile charges just $1 to print and bind a short book.
  • Next up was audio, and Brewster discussed issues related to putting recorded sound works online. At best, there are two to three million discs that have been commercially distributed. The biggest issue with this is in relation to rights. Rock ‘n’ roll concerts are the most popular category of the Internet Archive audio files (with 40,000 concerts so far); for “unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, forever, for free”, the Internet Archive offers bands their hosting service if they waive any issues with rights. There are various cultural materials that do not work well in terms of record sales, but there are many people who are very interested in having these published online. Audio costs about $10 per disk (per hour) to digitise. The Internet Archive has 100,000 items in 100 collections.
  • Moving images or video was next. Most people think of Hollywood films in relation to video, but at most there are 150,000 to 200,000 video items that are designed for movie theatres, and half of these are Indian! Many are locked up in copyright, and are problematic. The Internet Archive has 1,000 of these (out of copyright or otherwise permitted). There are other types of materials that people want to see: thousands of archival films, advertisements, training films and government films, being downloaded in the millions. Brewster also put out a call to academics at the conference to put their lectures online in bulk at the Internet Archive. It costs $15 per video hour for digitisation services. Brewster estimates that there are 400 channels of “original” television channels (ignoring duplicate rebroadcasts). If you record a television channel for one year, it requires 10 TB, with a cost of $20,000 for that year. The Television Archive people at the Internet Archive have been recording 20 channels from around the world since 2000 (it’s currently about 1 PB in size) - that’s 1 million hours of TV - but not much has been made available just yet (apart from video from the week of 9/11). The Internet Archive currently has 55,000 videos in 100 collections,
  • Software was next. For example, a good archival source is old software that can be reused / replayed via virtual machines or emulators. Brewster came out against the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is “horrible for libraries” and for the publishing industry.
  • The Internet Archive is best known for archiving web pages. It started in 1996, by taking a snapshot of every accessible page on a website. It is now about 2 PB in size, with over 100 billion pages. Most people use this service to find their old materials again, since most people “don’t keep their own materials very well”. (Incidentally, Yahoo! came to the Internet Archive to get a 10-year-old version of their own homepage.)

Brewster then talked about preservation issues, i.e., how to keep the materials available. He referenced the famous library at Alexandria, Egypt which unfortunately is best known for burning. Libraries also tend to be burned by governments due to changes in policies and interests, so the computer world solution to this is backups. The Internet Archive in San Francisco has four employees and 1 PB of storage (including the power bill, bandwidth and people costs, their total costs are about $3,000,000 per year; 6 GB bandwidth is used per second; their storage hardware costs $700,000 for 1 PB). They have a backup of their book and web materials in Alexandria, and also store audio material at the European Archive in Amsterdam. Also, their Open Content Alliance initiative allows various people and organisations to come together to create joint collections for all to use.

Access was the next topic of his presentation. Search is making in-roads in terms of time-based search. One can see how words and their usage change over time (e.g., “marine life”). Semantic Web applications for access can help people to deal with the onslaught of information. There is a huge need to take large related subsets of the Internet Archive collections and to help them make sense for people. Great work has been done recently on wikis and search, but there is a need to “add something more to the mix” to bring structure to this project. To do this, Brewster reckons we need the ease of access and authoring from the wiki world, but also ways to incorporate the structure that we all know is in there, so that it can be flexible enough for people to add structure one item at a time or to have computers help with this task.

20071113b.jpg In the recent initiative “OpenLibrary.org“, the idea is to build one webpage for every book ever published (not just ones still for sale) to include content, metadata, reviews, etc. The relevant concepts in this project include: creating Semantic Web concepts for authors, works and entities; having wiki-editable data and templates; using a tuple-based database with history; making it all open source (both the data and the code, in Python). OpenLibrary.org has 10 million book records, with 250k in full text.

I really enjoyed this talk, and having been a fan of the Wayback Machine for many years, I think there could be an interesting link to the SIOC Project if we think in terms of archiving people’s conversations from the Web, mailing lists and discussion groups for reuse by us and the generations to come.

At the International Semantic Web Conference in Busan

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on 13/11/2007
in DERI, FOAF, Korea, SIOC and Semantic Web
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I arrived in Busan on Sunday evening for the 6th International Semantic Web Conference in Busan, Korea. Busan is a great big place with three million people; very impressive as you drive into the city from the airport.

Yesterday, I chaired the 2nd International ExpertFinder Workshop (or FEWS, “Finding Experts on the Web with Semantics”), where we had six interesting and varied papers. The workshop had about 35 attendees, and this bodes very well for future events. We also had a meeting about the ExpertFinder initiative for FOAF afterwards. Thanks to the ISWC 2007 Metadata Chairs Tom and Knud, metadata from FEWS is available here.

From DERI, NUI Galway, both Tudor et al. (”SALT: Weaving the Claim Web”) and Andreas et al. (”YARS2: A Federated Repository for Querying Graph Structured Data from the Web”) have been nominated for the best student paper award. Best of luck to you! (With Hak-Lae et al., I also had a submission for the Semantic Web Challenge at the conference.)

20071112a.png

Last night, members from DERI Galway and DERI Seoul had dinner at a famous local fish restaurant. Sebastian snapped some great pictures of our meal, and here’s a video of something wriggling that he and Andreas bravely ate…

Some more images from Busan: a lovely sea view from the Paradise Hotel and a city view from the other side, a Japanese-style Captain Kirk toilet, and maybe butter is good for your heart.

Some images from Narita

Published
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on 11/11/2007
in Japan and Photos
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I snapped these images on my phone this morning; heading to Busan this afternoon.

20071111a.jpg

This is a typical scene on the side of a Japanese street - vending machines, and lots of them, even on less-populated streets. Not only can you get stuff like Coke and water (or the charmingly-named Pocari Sweat), but you get buy coffee in a can (heated), Kirin or Asahi beer for around a euro, and cigarettes galore. Oh, and some sake if you like it!

20071111b.jpg

In a nation where the normal hair colour is black, hair dye is big business. Here’s a picture from a pharmacy showing a few of the options you can choose from (this is the men’s selection BTW).

20071111c.jpg

I was looking for a depato (department store) and accidentally wandered into a full-blown pachinko zone. Pachinko is a Japanese game where you put little metal balls into a machine in the hope of getting more balls out, which you can then re-exchange for cash. (Actually, we had a less-interesting game not unlike that in Ireland where you’d put 2 pence coins into a machine in the hope of knocking one of an ever-growing piles of 2 pences off the edge into the out slot - I don’t think it had a name so I hereby christen it “topplepence”.) In this huge gambling building, there was row after row of people happily connected to their pachinko machines like cigarette-smoking Borgs. Maybe I’ll give it a go if I’m feeling brave next time…

20071111d.jpg

And if a break is needed from pachinko, the same establishment has a relaxation area with massage chairs and a library of manga to read!

Stopping over in Narita, Japan

Published
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on 10/11/2007
in Anime, Ireland, Japan and Web 2.0
. 1 Comment

(You can see all of the accompanying photos I took today at flickr.com/photos/cloudie/sets/72157603048959630.)

I’ve arrived in Narita, Japan on my way to the International Semantic Web Conference in Busan, Korea tomorrow (and am also going to the Web 2.0 Expo Tokyo after that). It’s been over nine years since I was here last, and I didn’t make it to Tokyo that time - so looking forward to exploring the city proper and practicing my very basic Japanese when I return after ISWC.

I flew with Aer Lingus on the dying Shannon-Heathrow flight, and from there direct to Tokyo Narita Airport. Taking the Shannon flight makes you realise just how stuck we’ll be when it goes - it’ll mean either an extra flight to Dublin or a three hour (at least) trip of some sort to Dublin Airport, not very nice. The other alternative involves flying from Galway to London and having an airport switch there from say Luton to Heathrow, which won’t be fun either. This makes me really mad with the government and their stupid salary hikes (note to non-natives: the SNN-LHR route is being axed by Aer Lingus, and the government did nada about it; they also recently okayed pay increases for themselves, making our Taoiseach the highest-paid leader of the world’s richest nations) - a use for my compla.in domain perhaps… Anyway, the Tokyo flight was 11 hours, pretty long but I didn’t find it too bad thanks to the in-seat entertainment screen which had at least 30 movies and many more TV shows and music albums to choose from.

20071010a.jpg I arrived in Narita Airport at 9 AM local time (midnight Irish time), and then got the Keisei rail line to Narita so was getting pretty tired by then (10:30) as I’m normally in bed early. Unfortunately the hotel had a check in of 3 PM, so I wandered around Narita for a few hours to keep myself awake. It’s horribly wet here today, but I found many parts of the town charming as I wandered down Omotesando Street and saw all the traditional stalls and eateries with people working in street-facing areas.

20071010b.jpg I made my way up to the Naritasan Shinshoji Buddhist Temple, where I attended a very interesting religious ceremony with chanting monks playing large traditional drums and other instruments. (Incidentally, and not as interesting, I heard my first Christmas music of the year on Omotesando Street too - “Adeste Fideles” was being belted out from some speakers along the road!)

20071010c.jpg I finished off my journey with a very tasty lunch of spring onion soup and Chicken fried rice in the Ramen Bayashi Noodle Shop (right) before heading back to the Comfort Hotel Narita. I got to check in 30 minutes early, and I must say that the hotel facilities are amazing considering the very low price of around €35. Free wi-fi and coffee, with breakfast included, slippers and nightshirt for your use, and the rooms are an okay size too. They have some bottom spraying toilets (some with heated seats too) if you like that kind of thing ;) I’d recommend it if you’re having a stayover.

I really miss family and home, but I am going to make the most of my trip both professionally and socially. I next go to Busan for four nights and then back to Tokyo for four nights after that. (I also found out today when reading the Daily Yomiuri that the SCWBI are holding an event next Saturday [17th November at 6:30 in Shibuya] entitled “Made in Japan: What Makes Manga Japanese - And Why Western Kids Love It” - perfect timing and location for me, since that’s when and where I’ll be in Tokyo!)

My latest 10 posts from SocialMedia.net

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on 6/11/2007
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“Product 2.0″ competition on the Web 2.0 Expo blog…

The Web 2.0 Expo blog recently launched a “Product 2.0” competition for free tickets to any of the forthcoming Web 2.0 Expo events. Here are my entries: Broc.co.li is the healthy green vegetable you will WANT to eat! Our Broc.co.li heads contain powerful nanites that can target the mouth’s taste buds and provide […]

Eco Treadsetters: Yokohama Tyre Corp. gets ‘traction’ with Pringo SNS

In the niche SNS area, Yokohama Tyre Corporation recently implemented the Pringo white-label SNS solution for their “online presence and green marketing initiative” called Eco Treadsetters. LA-based marketing agency PCGCampbell built the site using Pringo so that Yokohama consumers across the US could communicate with each other, create and navigate custom profiles, form sub-communities, and […]

“The Long Tail Wags”

I’ve just read Chris Horn’s article entitled “The Long Tail Wags” which was inspired by a recent conference I participated in. His post describes how commercial organisations can benefit from and add value to the global Web 2.0-using community. There are some interesting observations on risks and opportunities associated with the large quantities of user-generated […]

Nooooooo… I want my Chumby!

(I got my invite today to buy a Chumby, but apparently they don’t do shipping outside the US.) Here’s an extract from the Wikipedia definition if you haven’t already heard about them: Chumby is a consumer product created by Chumby Industries slated to go on sale in November of 2007. It is designed as an […]

“People don’t appreciate how many page views on the Internet are in social networks.”

Eric Schmidt, speaking at Google’s Zeitgeist conference recently said: “People don’t appreciate how many page views on the Internet are in social networks. It is very real. It’s a very real phenomenon.” It’d be interesting to know just what proportion of ALL page views do go to SNSs. I’m still quoting last November’s […]

Wired article against niche SNSs / anti-social networking

In a September article from Wired entitled “Beware These Six Lamest Social Networks“, Matthew Honan lists some of his least favourite social networking services (SNSs). These happen to be niche SNSs, and although he sees little reason for their existence, I would strongly disagree. As long as a niche SNS or community site […]

Twine in invite-only beta

At the 2007 Web 2.0 Summit today, Radar Networks are officially announcing the invite-only beta version of Twine, a new service that uses the power of Semantic Web to enable an intelligent way of sharing, organising and finding information. During today’s 4 PM panel (that also features Powerset’s Barney Pell, Metaweb’s Daniel Hillis and Web […]

ThinkWeb20: a ratings directory for Web 2.0 sites

There has been some blog comment ‘promotional marketing’ going on for a new directory specifically for Web 2.0 sites called “Think Web 2.0″ (due to the language used on the site, I believe it may be from France, but the WHOIS shows a private registration). The site allows users to submit sites to the directory, […]

Social networking services for enterprise use

Here are some interesting links I’ve come across in the past few days related to social networks and their applications in enterprise / business scenarios. The water cooler is now on the Web The expanding world of social networking Social networking: a time waster or the next big thing in collaboration? Social networks may become interoperable Business faces up to […]

UK is the top social media consuming country in Europe

According to figures from comScore, the United Kingdom was the top social media consumer in Europe during August, with 25 million unique visitors using social media sites (equivalent to 78 percent of the UK’s online population). The Europe-wide social media user figures are 127 million unique visitors in August (56 percent of the EU’s […]