Archive for the 'Social Networks' Category

WebCamp SNP and BlogTalk 2008 approacheth…

Published
by
Cloud
on 1/3/2008
in BlogTalk, Blogs, Cork, DERI, Data Portability, FOAF, Internet, Ireland, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software, Web, Web 2.0, WebCamp and Wikis
. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

I’m in Cork with a posse of eight from DERI, and it’s the night before two co-located events: the WebCamp workshop on social network portability (Sunday) and the BlogTalk conference on social software (Monday, Tuesday). Others that have arrived in Cork this evening include Niall Larkin, Ajit Jaokar, Aral Balkan, Ben Ward, Dan Brickley, Ross Duggan and Stephanie Booth.

I’m really looking forward to the talks, the discussions, the networking, the food, and some positive outcomes from the next three days. And with invited speakers of this quality, I know it’s going to be good.

Unfortunately, I’m missing the Irish Blog Awards for the second year running, but boards.ie’s Managing Director Gerry Shanahan is representing us as a sponsor. At least I hope to meet up with many of the bloggers at tomorrow night’s optional blogger’s dinner at Rossini’s here in Cork (43 people have signed up).

More blog posts about the events will be available via the tags webcampsnp and blogtalk2008. Here are some recent posts:

Five days left to register online for BlogTalk 2008!

Published
by
Cloud
on 22/2/2008
in BlogTalk, Blogs, Cork, Data Portability, FOAF, Internet, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software, Web, Web 2.0, WebCamp and Wikis
. 0 Comments

Please note that online registration for BlogTalk 2008 (and WebCamp Social Network Portability) will close next Wednesday, 26th February 2008.

You can register at Amiando.

There are a few discount codes out there.

(Don’t forget to sign up for the optional blogger’s dinner as well!)

“A funny thing happened on the way to the forum”: Article in Indo about 10 years of boards.ie

Published
by
Cloud
on 15/2/2008
in BlogTalk, Blogs, Boards, Cork, DERI, Games, Internet, Ireland, NUI Galway, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software and Web
. 1 Comment

20080214a.png Irish Independent > Business > Technology > A funny thing happened on the way to the forum
After 10 years, John Breslin’s online forum on everything from personal relationships to motors and mustard, boards.ie, is still blazing a trail

By Marie Boran
Thursday February 14 2008

Want to know where you can buy the cheapest digital camera, or how to go about claiming rent relief, or maybe if buying cowboy boots would be a fashion disaster?

The world relies on Google but the Irish have boards.ie. On this online bulletin board no question is too trivial or too bizarre and with an average 900,000 visitors to the site every month, there are plenty of answers on offer.

It is hard to believe that a decade ago, on 12 February, 1998, boards.ie founder John Breslin wrote expectantly: “The first of many messages, I hope.”

Read more…

Of course, there are four other people who have made boards.ie possible: Tom Murphy, Dan King, Gerry Shanahan, and Jerry Connolly. Without them and our amazing team of voluntary moderators, I doubt boards.ie would even exist today. Original questions and answers follow.

Continue reading ‘“A funny thing happened on the way to the forum”: Article in Indo about 10 years of boards.ie’

The Google Social Graph API: the good and the bad

Published
by
Cloud
on 4/2/2008
in Data Portability, FOAF, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software and Web 2.0
. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

I was very interested to hear about the launch of Google’s social graph API at the weekend. The social graph API “returns web addresses of public pages and publicly-declared connections between them”, where the connections are currently being obtained from crawled XFN and FOAF links. Dan Brickley, the co-creator of FOAF said:

The Google API looks like a step in a very interesting direction. Of course it will be possible to think of many things it doesn’t yet do, but I encourage everyone here to have a think about simple, practical and useful incremental improvements to it. We can do a lot more eg. with full SPARQL access, but proving full SPARQL to the aggregation of the planet’s public FOAF/XFN data isn’t going to happen anytime soon. Interesting times :)

In answer to Niall Larkin’s question about how this relates to SIOC, such services help us because by providing an easy method to find one’s social graph (both “me” and “knows” connections), it also makes it easier to find your social objects which can be described using SIOC (see my previous illustration, and see also Kingsley Idehen’s demonstration of how this can work).

In short, you can use FOAF to create the social graph, and use SIOC to represent social objects.

Not everybody is entirely happy (see the comments on Tim O’Reilly’s blog post), with the majority of objections being in relation to the APIs being operated by a for-profit as opposed to a non-profit organisation, and there is some opposition to the idea of a single point of control rather than having a set of distributed indexes.

Perhaps we need something similar to “nofollow” links for the public social graph as well. We will discuss these issues and some other important social network portability topics at WebCamp SNP in four weeks time.

Edit: What I can add to this is my gut feeling that it probably requires a company like Google to make an API that can gather the required momentum and that people will use; previous FOAF aggregator efforts like Plink and FOAFSpace could have done this, but they would have found it much harder to gain critical mass.

Interviewed for Data Portability article on PCWorld.com / WashingtonPost.com; SIOC mentioned

Published
by
Cloud
on 1/2/2008
in DERI, Data Portability, FOAF, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Networks, Social Software and Web 2.0
. 1 Comment

I was interviewed recently as part of an article by Juan Carlos Perez for PC World about Data Portability, talking about synergies with SIOC (the article has since been syndicated by many media outlets including the Washington Post).

I think Juan wrote a balanced article which outlines the main goals of the initiative and addresses the worries that some companies are still unsure of what to expect. Since DP is just a few months old, it is therefore impressive that companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Plaxo and Digg are getting involved at this early stage.

For those who are unaware of the initiative, the DataPortability.org working group was recently established to look at ways in which data can be ported from one social media service to another. For example, one of their sample scenarios involves using the YADIS communications protocol to discover an identity for a particular person, which then returns a YADIS / XRDS document indicating which identities that person prefers to use and what services those identities are held on. Then, the WRFS abstraction model can be used to find out what containers the returned identities hold on those services.

SIOC is an ideal representation method for describing all content created by a person (via their user accounts) on various social media sites and the structure contained therein (see my previous post). One of the problems with combining social media data is in knowing exactly what accounts the user holds on different social media sites. As mentioned, YADIS / XRDS / WRFS can be used for discovery purposes, and the combination of the FOAF and SIOC vocabularies is particularly well suited to describe a person’s social network profile, their user accounts and the content items created using those accounts in various containers.

Yet SIOC is more that just a way to represent personal containers of data. I think that another task for the DataPortability.org workgroup is to discuss what methods can be used to port not just personal sets of data but whole sets of community data - especially for niche groups. SIOC was initially created to provide a way to describe the content from online communities (mailing lists, message boards, etc). While it was soon used for people’s blogs and more recently for other personal sets of Web 2.0-type content items, it has the concepts needed to describe the structure and contents of a community site as a whole. If someone runs a community site, and they decide that they want to port their group from one place to another, SIOC can be used to describe the structure (and content if combined with other vocabularies) of most community sites in order to re-create it on a different information system.

(Edit: The related workshop on social network portability will be held in Cork on the 2nd of March 2008.)

Programme announced for BlogTalk 2008

Published
by
Cloud
on 23/1/2008
in BlogTalk, Blogs, Cork, Internet, Ireland, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software, Web, Web 2.0 and WebCamp
. 0 Comments

We recently announced the programme schedule for the 5th International Conference on Social Software (and the co-located workshop on social network portability), to be held in Cork in six weeks time. We have an interesting set of keynote speakers and invited panellists so far (with one keynote to be confirmed).

20070823a.png

Also, the list of accepted presentations at the conference is varied and interesting, with some familiar faces and some new ones shown below. (In all, we accepted six presentations from practitioners, two from developers and six from academics. We’ve interspersed these in the schedule, but grouped by related topics.)

20080123b.png

Finally, I’d like to thank our reviewers, without whose help the selection would have been an impossible task. (The breakdown of our committee was seven academics and 15 non-academics).

20080123c.png

If you are interested in participating, I’d advise booking tickets as soon as possible as we do have an upper limit of 200 attendees. We will have a drinks reception in UCC’s Aula Maxima on the Sunday, followed by an optional blogger’s dinner for those interested. On Monday, the main conference dinner will be held in the Kingsley Hotel.

Interviewed for SemanticWeb.com

Published
by
Cloud
on 21/1/2008
in DERI, General, NUI Galway, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks and Social Software
. 0 Comments

You can read an interview I did recently with Jupiter Media’s Jennifer Zaino for SemanticWeb.com about SIOC.

The title of the article is SIOC-ing the Semantic Web.

XTech 2008, May 6th-9th 2008, Dublin, Ireland

Published
by
Cloud
on 21/1/2008
in Blogs, DERI, FOAF, General, Internet, Ireland, Podcasts, RSS, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software, Web, Web 2.0 and Wikis
. 3 Comments

Call for Participation for XTech 2008

Proposals for presentations and tutorials are invited for XTech 2008, Europe’s premier web technologies conference. The deadline for submitting proposals is January 25th, 2008.

XTech 2008 will be held from May 6-9th 2008, in Dublin, Ireland.

XTech’s theme this year is “The Web on the Move”, focusing on the emerging portability of data, applications and identity on the internet. We will explore the benefits, issues, practicalities and fun of a web built on open standards, open source and commodity technology.

XTech presentations should inspire, educate and challenge. Your audience will be people like you, responsible for steering the technological direction of their organizations and the web as a whole.

Last year’s schedule can be viewed on the XTech 2007 web site.

Please direct any questions to the conference chair, Edd Dumbill.

View the calls for participation and submit a proposal

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Social platforms
    • Design patterns for social software
    • Social network interoperability
    • Internet application platforms (Facebook F8, OpenSocial, etc.)
  • Identity management
    • OpenID
    • Practical security
    • OAuth
  • Ajax
    • jQuery, YUI, other toolkits
    • Offline applications
    • Comet
    • Professional Javascript
    • Flex
  • The web of data
    • Collective intelligence
    • Semantic technologies
    • Search
    • Markup and meaning
    • Freebase, Twine, Google Base
    • The place of XML on the web
  • Data and databases
    • Client-side databases
    • REST-oriented databases (e.g. CouchDB)
    • XML and RDF
    • Messaging architectures
    • XQuery
  • Operations and programming
    • Web application frameworks
    • Virtualization and appliances
    • Application scaling
    • Multicore and concurrency oriented programming
  • Mobile devices
    • Commodity mobiles
    • Android, iPhone
    • Hardware hacking and personal prototyping
    • Geolocation
    • Getting the mobile mindset

(Note: DERI will be a co-host of this event.)

Keynote speakers lined up for BlogTalk

Published
by
Cloud
on 8/1/2008
in BlogTalk, Blogs, Cork, Internet, Ireland, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software, US, Web and Web 2.0
. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

I’m happy to announce that we have four interesting and varied keynote speakers lined up for the BlogTalk 2008 conference on social software in Cork this March.

  • Nova Spivack - Founder and CEO, Radar Networks
    Nova is the entrepreneur behind the Twine “knowledge networking” application, which allows users to share, organise, and find information with people they trust. He will talk about semantic social software for consumers.
  • Rashmi Sinha - Founder, Uzanto
    Rashmi led the team that produced SlideShare, a popular presentation-sharing service that some have described as “YouTube for PowerPoint”. She will talk about lessons learned from designing social software applications.
  • Salim Ismail - Head of Brickhouse, Yahoo!
    Salim is a successful investor and entrepreneur, with expertise in a variety of early-stage startups and Web 2.0 companies including Confabb and PubSub. He will talk about entrepreneurship and social media.
  • Final speaker has been selected but has yet to be 100% confirmed.

You can see further details and longer biographies of the keynote speakers at 2008.blogtalk.net/invitedspeakers. We will also have two invited panel sessions, the details of which will be announced shortly.

DataPortability.org, web standards, SIOC and FOAF

Published
by
Cloud
on 4/1/2008
in FOAF, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Networks, Social Software and WebCamp
. 5 Comments Tags: , , .

Leo Sauermann has written an e-mail to the public DataPortability.org mailing list suggesting that the DataPortability.org initiative also takes W3C’s web standards like RDF into account, as well as considering existing efforts like FOAF and SIOC for data portability on the social web. The initiative’s chairperson Chris Saad has indicated that they will put all related communities and standards in context, including RDF (and I assume FOAF and SIOC too).

As co-founder of the SIOC project, I’ve recently been evangelising the fact that SIOC can be used to provide a representation of all content items created by a person (via their user accounts) on various social media sites, and this can be nicely combined with the FOAF profile of that person who holds the associated user accounts (click on the picture below, and see our Internet Computing article for more).

20080104a.png

In the image, Bob holds user accounts on various social websites (two shown for clarity, but here’s another view), and via those accounts he creates content items (usually within containers of some sort, e.g., in a bookmark folder, personal weblog, message board or image gallery) on those sites. He should be able to port not only his social graph (in this case, his connections to Alice and Carol), but also his personal containers / sets of content items and perhaps even associated comment replies. The vocabulary terms are shown in dark grey: foaf:knows, sioc:User, etc.

It’d be great if we can get some of the DataPortability.org people to come to the WebCamp workshop on Social Network Portability in Cork in March. There are some valuable contributors to the initiative so far including Chris Saad, Ashley Angell, Paul Jones, Chris Messina, Ben Metcalfe, Daniela Barbosa, Phill Morle, Ian Forrester, Shashank Tripathi, Kristopher Tate, Paul Keen, Brian Suda, Emily Chang, Danny Ayers, Marc Canter, Jeremy Keith, Peter Saint-Andre, Robyn Tippins, and Robert Scoble.