Archive for the 'Social Software' Category

Slides from the SIOC tutorial at WWW2008

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Cloud
on 28/4/2008
in Blogs, China, DERI, Data Portability, FOAF, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software, Web, Web 2.0 and Wikis
. 0 Comments

Here are the PowerPoint slides from our tutorial on “Interlinking Online Communities and Enriching Social Software with the Semantic Web” at the World Wide Web Conference in Beijing - you can also download them from here:

The tutorial went well, it was hot in the room and we were a bit jetlagged, but we had some good feedback afterwards and about 30 people attended in all.

I had a nice few days in Beijing, participating in the W3C advisory commitee meeting on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, giving our SIOC tutorial with Alex and Uldis on Monday afternoon, popping along to our paper at the Linked Data on the Web workshop on Tuesday, attending some sessions on Wednesday (Kai-Fu Lee’s plenary keynote on Cloud Computing, the discussion panel with Lada Adamic et al. on the Future of Online Social Interactions, the W3C Open Your Data! track, and a packed session on Social Networks: Discovery and Evolution of Communities). On Thursday, I gave a talk about DERI at Tsinghua University to Cemon Yang and his team at the Digital Government / Web and Software Research Centre. Thursday evening we had the banquet in the Great Hall of the People, and I headed back to Ireland on Friday.

Unfortunately I saw little of Beijing outside of travelling between venues in taxis and buses, so I have a good reason to return and see / do more next time…

Really cool SIOC widget from Sindice (for WordPress)

Published
by
Cloud
on 20/4/2008
in DERI, FOAF, NUI Galway, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software and Web 2.0
. 5 Comments

I’ve installed the new Sindice SIOC widget, produced by Adam, Fabio and Giovanni from the Sindice team.

As you can see, if you look at the post author or click into any comments list, each user now has a speech bubble beside the username. Clicking on this bubble will show you posts, comments and topics created by that user across the “SIOC-o-sphere”.

20080411b.png

You can also click on any arrow icon beside a link in a blog post to see where else it has been referenced, like this one.

There is a Sindice SIOC API available which serves as a gateway to SIOC data via the Sindice discovery and search services, enabling the verification of the presence of a user or a link on the SIOC-o-sphere as indexed within Sindice.

DataPortability lunch meetup in London / OpenSocial hackathon

Published
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on 11/4/2008
in Data Portability, FOAF, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Networks and Social Software
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20080411a.png

I attended the DataPortability lunch meetup in London on Sunday (see link to some photos above), where I met up with DP enthusiasts including Tom Morris, Tony Haile, Chris Saad (founder), Cassandra Shanks, Imp, Julian Bond, Christian Scholz, and Sokratis Papafloratos. We had some great food and interesting discussions, including DP scenarios, the scope of DataPortability (is it more than just the Social Web?), SIOC, forthcoming announcements, and more…

Tom, Christian and I went to the OpenSocial hackathon at the BT centre afterwards. I spoke with organiser Michael Mahemoff briefly, and Dan Peterson invited us to attend the forthcoming Google I/O event in May. I also listened in to Dan Brickley and Cassie discuss connections between FOAF and the OpenSocial APIs. (Unfortunately, I missed the presentations which were on in the morning before I arrived in London.)

Tales from the SIOC-o-sphere #7

Published
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Cloud
on 5/4/2008
in Blogs, DERI, Data Portability, FOAF, Internet, Ireland, NUI Galway, Podcasts, RSS, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Software, Web 2.0 and WebCamp
. 2 Comments

20080403a.png It’s been three months since my last round-up of all things SIOC-ed, so here is entry number seven in the series:

Previous SIOC-o-sphere articles:

#6 http://sioc-project.org/node/310
#5 http://sioc-project.org/node/294
#4 http://sioc-project.org/node/272
#3 http://sioc-project.org/node/271
#2 http://sioc-project.org/node/138
#1 http://sioc-project.org/node/79

Danja rocks with his “DataPortability and me” video / some slides I’ve made for DP+SIOC

Published
by
Cloud
on 31/3/2008
in Data Portability, FOAF, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software and Web 2.0
. 1 Comment

Wow! Danny Ayers has made the best video I’ve seen for the “DataPortability and me” competition, which ends today:

Travelling on the train to Dublin and back this morning, I gathered and made some slides for future presentations on DataPortability and SIOC:

(De-)centralised me

Published
by
Cloud
on 30/3/2008
in Data Portability, FOAF, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks and Social Software
. 3 Comments

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington has an interesting article today about the “centralised me”, a follow-up to Loic Le Meur’s post about wanting to re-centralise his decentralised social “map”. Here is a picture I drew some time back showing the decentralised me:

20080330a.png

I previously talked about how SIOC and FOAF can be used to represent this, and how this representation of people’s decentralised content is tied to the networks formed via social objects. (See also this paper.)

This is certainly something that fits with the ideas of DataPortability. I think people may have different requirements, including:

  • I may want to centralise my stuff on my own service, like Loic outlined.
  • I may want to see my stuff on a third-party service providing an aggregate view, like FriendFeed.
  • I may want to move all my stuff from multiple services to one third-party service.
  • I may just want to move the stuff I have on one service to another (e.g., move all my blog posts, comments, friends, etc. from WordPress.com to Acme Blog Service).

DataPortability, Microsoft’s Contacts API and OpenSocial.org

Published
by
Cloud
on 26/3/2008
in Data Portability, FOAF, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Networks, Social Software and Web 2.0
. 5 Comments

20080326a.png (No, the picture I created on the right ISN’T the new DataPortability logo; I totally missed out on the closing date, but it will serve as an image for this blog post. There have been some very cool submissions for the competition however.)

There were two interesting announcements yesterday in the portability space. The first was from Microsoft, announcing that they would be “working with Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Tagged and LinkedIn to exchange functionally-similar Contacts APIs, allowing us to create a safe, secure two-way street for users to move their relationships between our respective services” (Contacts APIs provide contact data portability). The second was from Google, Yahoo! and MySpace, jointly announcing that an OpenSocial Foundation is to be formed as a non-profit entity (OpenSocial provides social application portability). Unfortunately, there is still some confusion regarding exactly what data portability functionality OpenSocial will offer (if any), and at the moment the consensus seems to be that DataPortability and OpenSocial aren’t as related as previously thought.

DataPortability (including Microsoft’s move in this area) is mainly about users being able to have portable data (profiles, identities, content like photos, videos, discussion posts) that they can move between the services and sites that they trust and choose to use. (See Uno de Waal’s interesting post on how the Microsoft Invite2Messenger service allows you to get your Facebook friends’ e-mail addresses in plain text.)

OpenSocial on the other hand is more about “gadget” portability, where social applications can be deployed across a variety of social networking sites. As summarised by Julian Bond, OpenSocial consists of a gadget API (for gadget programmers) and a standard for site owners to implement these gadgets on their own sites. The part of OpenSocial related to DataPortability is a REST API, details of which are a bit vague right now. Not to be confused with OpenSocial (although the similar names make this difficult), the Social Graph API from Google is more related to DataPortability as it indexes semantic data from many social networking sites like Hi5, MySpace, LiveJournal, Twitter, etc. and allows users to bring their social graph with them when they sign up for a new site that supports the API.

Apart from the lack of intersection between Microsoft (plus affiliate Facebook) and Google, a good few companies are in multiple “camps” (DataPortability, Contacts APIs, OpenSocial), as shown by the Venn diagram I drew below:

20080326b.png

Marc Canter and others have pointed out that although the Contact APIs from Microsoft are not open in themselves, at least the APIs seem to export as much data as they can import. Marc also says that Microsoft (and other big companies) may not be explicitly following the actions (e.g. the technical recommendations) of the DataPortability initiative, but rather claims that it would hurt them if they didn’t open up and go along with some portable data efforts given the current climate and the tide of users in favour of this.

For users to have true data portability, there needs to be some consensus on both the APIs and the formats needed to transfer / represent this portable data. It may be that a number of APIs and formats are required for different scenarios. The Semantic Web is an ideal means for representing the data to be ported from social websites, in that is well suited (using vocabularies like SIOC and FOAF) to represent how people and all kinds of objects on these sites are connected together (documents, discussions, meetups, places, interests, media files - whatever). Of course other data formats may be used, but most importantly, it would be a waste of time to come up with a bunch of new formats for representing the data that needs to be portable, because a lot of work has been done on how to best provide interoperable, reusable and linked data through efforts like the Semantic Web, AtomPub and the microformats community.

I’ll be attending the DataPortability Lunch Meetup in London on the 6th April 2008 if anyone there feels like a chat about some of these topics…

Related posts:

Nova Spivack visits DERI, NUI Galway and talks about Twine: Radar Networks’ semantic social software product in beta

Published
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Cloud
on 25/3/2008
in BlogTalk, DERI, FOAF, Galway, NUI Galway, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Networks, Social Software, US and Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

20080325b.png In association with the IT Association of Galway, DERI recently invited Radar Networks‘ Nova Spivack to speak at our research institute in the National University of Ireland, Galway (Nova also gave a keynote talk at BlogTalk 2008 in Cork).

Nova is CEO of one of the companies that is practically applying Semantic Web technologies to social software applications. Radar have a beta product called Twine which is a “knowledge networking” application that allows users to share, organise, and find information with people they trust. People create and join “twines” (community containers) around certain topics of interest, and items (documents, bookmarks, media files, etc., that can be commented on) are posted to these twines through a variety of methods. The seminar room was full of both “DERIzens” and members of Galway’s IT community for Nova’s talk on the Semantic Web and Twine (see his slides here), and after a lengthy question-and-answers session, this was followed by some presentations to Nova of ongoing research work in DERI.

20080325c.png I personally find Twine very interesting, and as well as using it to gather information about SIOC, I intend to use it to gather and publish personal interests that I think will be of interest to the public (once it leaves beta). As well as producing semantic data (just stick “?rdf” onto the end of any twine.com URL), Twine features some cool functionality that elevates it beyond the social bookmarking sites to which it has been compared, including an extensive choice of twineable item types, twined item customisation (”add detail”) and the “e-mail to a twine” feature, all of which I believe are extremely useful. (I have a few Twine invites left for readers of my blog; drop me an e-mail if you need one.)

There is also the community aspects of twines. I forsee that these twines will act as the “social objects” (see presentation by Jyri) that will draw you back to the service, in a much stronger manner than other social bookmarking sites currently do (due to Twine’s more viral nature, its stronger social networking functionality, better commenting, and a more identifiable “home” for these objects). Of course, having more public users will help, but from experience I know that it is a good idea to build on a core group of regular users (in Twine’s case, mainly techies) before increasing the user base too much.

It’s been an exciting few months in terms of announcements relating to commercial Semantic Web applications. As I mentioned recently in an interview with Rob Cawte for the web2.0japan.com blog, this is becoming obvious with the attention being given to startup companies in this space like Powerset, Metaweb (Freebase) and Radar Networks (Twine), and also since many big companies including Reuters (Calais API), Yahoo! (semantically-enhanced search) and Google (Social Graph API) have recently announced what they are doing with semantic data. There has been a lot of talk recently about the social graph (notably from Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick), which looks at how people are connected together (friends, colleagues, neighbours, etc.), and how such connections can be leveraged across websites. On the Semantic Web with vocabularies like FOAF, SIOC, etc., it is not just people who are connected together in some meaningful way, but documents, events, places, hobbies, pictures, you name it! And it is the commercial applications that exploit these connections that are now becoming interesting…

(Edit: Nova Spivack has blogged about his visit.)

WebCamp SNP and BlogTalk 2008 approacheth…

Published
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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

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:

Co-founder of Last.fm to speak at BlogTalk 2008 on 4th March

Published
by
Cloud
on 24/2/2008
in BlogTalk, Cork, Internet, Ireland, Radio, Social Media, Social Software and Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

I am happy to announce that Michael Breidenbrücker, co-founder of Lovely Systems and of Last.fm Ltd., will be our fourth keynote speaker at BlogTalk 2008 in Cork (he will speak on Tuesday week).

Michael has been actively involved in interactive digital media since 1999 and is widely recognised for his expertise in the areas of interaction design and product development. Lovely Systems is a web technologies company providing localised video portals serving hundreds of gigabytes of video each day. Their latest service is Zoomer.de, which was launched last week. Last.fm was incorporated in 2002 as an internet radio station and music community website, and the related Audioscrobbler music recommendation system was fully merged into Last.fm in 2005. The company was acquired by CBS Interactive in May 2007. You can read more about Last.fm on their Wikipedia page.

Unfortunately, Rashmi Sinha is now unable to speak at this event. Hopefully Rashmi can present at BlogTalk 2009!