Archive for the 'Web 2.0' Category

Keynote speakers lined up for BlogTalk

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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
. 0 Comments

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.

Videos of “Paddy’s Valley” to VC pitches

Published
by
Cloud
on 6/12/2007
in Ireland, US and Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

Well done to the Paddy’s Valley Irish entrepreneurs who gave great pitches to venture capitalists in the Bay Area. And thanks to Damien for the videos. Here are the links.

There are also some “behind the scenes” vodcasts at paddyvalley.blip.tv and an associated social network at paddysvalley.ning.com.

Social corkware, Web 2.0 and BlogTalk

Published
by
Cloud
on 5/12/2007
in Blogs, Cork and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

So why is BlogTalk 2008 coming to Cork, Ireland? You may not know it, but there are a lot of connections between the “People’s Republic of Cork” and the world of Web 2.0 and social software.

So I expect to see more submissions from all of you Corkonians about your social software products and development experiences to BlogTalk 2008 before Friday!

DERI Entrepreneurial Forum #2 last week

Published
by
Cloud
on 4/12/2007
in DERI, Galway, Internet, Ireland, Web and Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

We had a very interesting event in DERI last week - the DERI Entrepreneurial Forum #2 - where six CEOs from the west of Ireland gave us their views on entrepreurship. There was some frank sharing of professional and personal experiences on both starting and running a company in Ireland.

The speakers were Jan Blanchard, CEO of Tourist Republic; John Brosnan, CEO of Netfort Technologies; Greg Cawley, CEO of Traventec; Julian Ellison, CEO of Tablane; Alan Duggan, CEO of Nephin Games; and Karl Flannery, CEO of Storm.

I think it was very useful for buddying entrepreneurs in DERI to engage these CEOs and to exchange ideas about their “dos and do nots”. (We even got some book recommendations from Jan!)

(Aside: God, I hate it when Google do their link tracking stuff for searches. I just want to be able to right click and copy a link, not have to copy some text on a page or click through, CTRL+L and CTRL+C. Stop it Google, you have enough tracking information already!)

Tales from the SIOC-o-sphere, part 6

Published
by
Cloud
on 30/11/2007
in Blogs, DERI, FOAF, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Software and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

Here are the latest happenings from the world of SIOC during the past few months, with thanks to all involved in supporting the initiative! (Note to new readers that SIOC is an open data format for community description.)

Opening up the social graph at the WebCamp workshop on “social network portability”

Published
by
Cloud
on 27/11/2007
in Blogs, Cork, FOAF, Internet, Ireland, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software, Web 2.0 and WebCamp
. 1 Comment

20071127b.png

A WebCamp “Social Network Portability” workshop has been announced to be co-located with BlogTalk on 2nd March 2008. You can view the wiki page for this event.

“Social network portability” is a term that has been used to describe the ability to reuse one’s own profile and contacts across various social networking sites and social media applications. At this workshop, presentations will be combined with breakout sessions to discuss all aspects of portability for social networking sites (including accounts, friends, activities / content, and applications).

Topics of relevance include, but are not limited to, social network centralisation versus decentralisation, OpenSocial, microformats including XHTML Friends Network (XFN) and hCard, authentication and authorisation, OpenID single sign-on, Bloom filters, categorising friends and personas, FOAF, ownership of your published content, SIOC, the OpenFriend format, the Social Network Aggregation Protocol (SNAP), aggregation and privacy, permissions and context, and the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP).

You can register for this workshop in conjunction with BlogTalk 2008. If you are interested in speaking or otherwise participating in the workshop, please add your name under the Speakers or Participants headings on the wiki page at http://webcamp.org/SocialNetworkPortability.

Premier “BlogTalk” social software event comes to Cork in March

Published
by
Cloud
on 27/11/2007
in Blogs, Cork, Ireland, Social Software and Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

20071127a.png

BlogTalk 2008, the 5th International Conference on Social Software, will be held in Cork, Ireland on 3rd/4th March 2008. The event is designed to allow dialogue between practitioners, developers and academics who are involved in the area of social software (blogs, wikis, forums, IM, social networks, etc.). A workshop on Social Network Portability will also be co-located with the event.

The organisers (me included) have just sent the final call for proposals to present at BlogTalk 2008. The end date for submissions is 7th December 2007, and these should be over two pages in length (no fixed template). Reviews will be completed by the end of December 2007, and the organisers will notify successful authors in early January 2008.

You can view the full call for proposals at http://2008.blogtalk.net/proposals and can submit your proposals at http://www.easychair.org/blogtalk2008

As well as peer-reviewed proposals, BlogTalk 2008 will have a number of prominent invited speakers (including Rashmi Sinha of SlideShare and Nova Spivack of Radar Networks, with others to be confirmed).

Mashable recently listed BlogTalk as one of the top 10 events for bloggers in 2008, and you can register for BlogTalk 2008 with Mashable’s 10% discount code “mashtalk”.

At the blognation Japan launch party last week

Published
by
Cloud
on 23/11/2007
in Blogs, Japan and Web 2.0
. 3 Comments

Last Friday, I attended the blognation Japan launch party (organised by editor Robert Sanzalone) at the Outback Steakhouse in Tokyo along with Eyal and Armin.

20071123a.png

I really enjoyed the evening, had a great chat with Rob Cawte (see his report here) about the Semantic Web and community wikis, and also talked to John Foster, Yusuke Kawasaki, Andrew Shuttleworth, Robert, and some others whose names have either escaped me or whose business cards I did not get.

You can read more at blognation Japan.

Web 2.0 Expo Tokyo: Eric Klinker - “Web 2.0 and content delivery”

Published
by
Cloud
on 21/11/2007
in Japan and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

My last report from the Web 2.0 Expo Tokyo event is about the talk by Eric Klinker, chief technical officer for BitTorrent Inc. (I met Eric and his colleague Vincent Shortino briefly on Thursday evening), who gave a talk about “the power of participation”.

The market for IP video is huge, and a Cisco report called the “Exabyte Era” shows that P2P, which currently accounts for 1014 PB of traffic each month, will continue to rise with a 35% year-over-year growth rate. User-contributed computing is happening right now, and is delivering over half of the Internet traffic today.

A new order of magnitude has arrived, the exabyte (EB). One exabyte is 2^60 bytes, which is 1 billion gigabytes. If you wanted to build a website that would deliver 1 EB per month, you would need to be able to transfer at a rate of 3.5 TB/s (assuming 100% network utilisation). 1 EB corresponds to 3,507,000 months or 292,000 years of online TV (stream encoded at 1 MB/s), 64,944 months or 5,412 years of Blu-ray DVD (maximum standard 54 MB/s), 351 months or 29 years of online radio traffic, 20 months or 1.7 years of YouTube traffic, and just one month of P2P traffic.

If you have a central service and want to deliver 1 EB, you would need about 6.5 MB/s peak bandwidth, and 70,000 servers requiring about 60-70 megawatts in total. At a price of $20 per MB/s, it would cost about $130 million to run per month!

The “Web 2.0″ way is to use peers to deliver that exabyte. However, not every business is ready to be governed by their userbase entirely. There is an opportunity to take a hybrid model approach. BitTorrent are a content-delivery network that can enable Internet-based businesses to use “the power of participation”. 55 major studios and 10,000 titles are now available via BitTorrent.com (using BitTorrent DNA). Also, the BitTorrent SDK allows BT capability to be added to any consumer electronic device.

He then talked about the Web 2.0 nature of distributed computing, and how we can power something that wouldn’t or couldn’t be powered otherwise. For example, Electric Sheep is a distributed computing application that renders a single frame on your machine for a 30-second long screensaver, which you can then use. Social networks also have a lot of machines, but the best example of distributed computing is search. Google has an estimated 500k to 1M servers, corresponding to $4.5B in cumulative capex (that’s capital expenditure to you and me) or 21% of their Q2 net earnings (according to Morgan Stanley). And yet, search is still not a great experience today, since you still have a hard time finding what you want. Search engines aren’t contextual, they doesn’t see the whole Internet (the “dark web”), they aren’t particularly well personalised or localised, and they aren’t dynamic enough (i.e, they cannot keep up with most Web 2.0 applications [although I've noticed that Google is reflecting new posts from my blog quite quickly]).

The best applications involve user participation, with users contributing to all aspects of the application (including infrastructure). Developers need to consider how users can do this (through contributed content, code or computing power). As Eric said, “harness the power of participation, and multiply your ability to deliver a rich and powerful application.”

Web 2.0 Expo Tokyo: Håkon Wium Lie - “The best Web 2.0 experience on any device”

Published
by
Cloud
on 21/11/2007
in Japan, SIOC and Web 2.0
. 1 Comment

There was a talk at the Web 2.0 Expo Tokyo last Friday afternoon by Håkon Wium Lie, chief technical officer with Opera Software. He has been working on the Web since the early nineties, and is well known for his foundational work on CSS. Opera is headquartered (and Håkon is based) in Norway.

Håkon (pronounced “how come”) started by talking about the Opera browser. Opera has browsers for the desktop, for mobiles and for other devices (e.g., the Nintendo Wii and the OLPC $100 laptop). He thinks that the OLPC machine will be very important (he also brought one along to show us, pictured), and that the browser will be the most important application on this device.

Another product that Opera are very proud of is Opera Mini, which is a small (100k) Java-based browser. Processing of pages takes place via proxy on a fixed network machine, and then a compressed page is sent to Opera Mini.

He then talked about new media types on the Web. Håkon said that video needs to be made into a “first-class citizen” on the Web. At the moment, it takes a lot of “black magic” and third-party plugins and object tags before you can get video to work in the browser for users. There are two problems that need to be solved. In relation to the first problem - how videos are represented in markup - Opera proposed that the <video> element be added to the HTML5 specification. The second problem is in relation to a common video format. The Web needs a baseline format that is based on an open standard. Håkon stated that there is a good candidate in Ogg Theora, which is free of licensing fees, and in HTML5 there may be a soft requirement or recommendation to use this format. He showed some nice mockups of Wikipedia pages with embedded Ogg videos. You can also combine SVG effects (overlays, reflections, filters, etc.) with these video elements.

He then talked about the HTML5 specification: the WHAT working group was setup in 2004 to maintain HTML, and a W3C HTML working group was also established earlier this year. HTML5 will include new parsing rules, new media elements, some semantic elements (section, article, nav, aside), and also some presentational elements will be removed (center, font).

Håkon next described how CSS is also evolving. As an example, he showed us some nice screenshots from the css Zen Garden, which takes a boring document and asks people to apply their stylesheets to change the look. Most of them use some background images to stylize the document (rather than changing the fonts dramatically).

CSS has a number of properties to handle fonts and text on the Web. Browsers have around ten fonts that can be viewed on most platforms (i.e., Microsoft’s core free fonts). But there are a lot more fonts out there, for example, there are 2500 font families available on Font Freak. Håkon says that he wants to see more browsers being able to easily point to and use these interesting fonts. In CSS2, you can import a library of fonts, and he reiterated his hope that fonts residing on the Web will be used more in the future.

Another use for CSS3 is in professional printing. Using the Prince tool, Håkon has co-written a book on CSS using CSS3. CSS3 can allow printing requirements to be specified such as multiple columns, footnotes, leaders, etc.

He then talked about the Acid2 test. Acid2 consists of a single web page, and if a browser renders it correctly, it should show a smiley face. Every element is positioned by some CSS or HTML code with some PNGs. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer performs worst in this test. But I also tested out Firefox 2 and got something distorted that looked like this.

The last thing he talked about was 3D. He gave a nice demo of Opera with some JavaScript that interfaces with the OpenGL engine to render a PNG onto a cube and rotates it. He also showed a 3D snake game from Opera (only a hundred or two lines of code), which is available at labs.opera.com.

I really enjoyed the forward-looking nature of Håkon’s presentation, and said hello briefly afterwards to say thanks for Opera Software’s (via Chaals and Kjetil) involvement in our recent SIOC member submission to the W3C.