I was interviewed by the Multime group in DCU for this documentary on Bebo recently. Enjoy the video (in two parts) below.
Archive for the 'Social Networks' Category
- Are you connected?: The Guardian’s guide to social networks.
- Imagini: Connect to and communicate with others using images, not words. About 2.5 million registered users.
- nimble: A new Irish social network for young adults. About 30,000 registered users.
Wink looks nice, kind of like Bigulo but for multiple OSNs. See it in action at wink.com, and here’s the “about” blurb:
Wink is a people search engine. We specifically target our search engine to find individual people who are active web and social network users. We search the public profiles on MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, LinkedIn, Live Spaces, and other sources. We’re adding more and more networks all the time and are developing new technology to find even more people in a variety of cool ways. We also use our PeopleRank technology that takes direct input about our search results from users and refines it to deliver the results that people think are the best. Wink People Search lets you find people by name, location, school, work, and interest anywhere on the web.
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.
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.)
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”…
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.
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.
Our mini WebCamp on social networks will take place from 10 AM next Wednesday, the 7th of March 2007. The venue is DERI, NUI Galway - more information and travel links available from webcamp.org/SocialNetworks. If you have an interest in social networks, you won’t want to miss this…
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