http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog John Breslin's Blog Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:32:46 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en For the past few months, there have been a variety of calls for feedback and suggestions on how the US Government can move towards becoming more open and transparent, especially in terms of their dealings with citizens and also for disseminating information about their recent financial stimulus package. As part of ... http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/2009/06/24/open-government-and-linked-data-now-its-time-to-draft/ BlogTalk 2009 The 6th International Conf. on Social Software September 1st and 2nd, 2009 Jeju Island, Korea Overview Following the international success of the last five BlogTalk events, the next BlogTalk - to be held in Jeju Island, Korea on September 1st and 2nd, 2009 - is continuing with its focus on social software, while ... http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/2009/05/29/blogtalk-2009-6th-international-social-software-conference-call-for-proposals-september-1st-and-2nd-jeju-korea/ Here's a Twitter "Wordle" via my TweetStats tag cloud page: Also, my usage stats show a nice growth over the past two years: http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/2009/05/27/my-twitter-wordle/ I've re-run our statistics gathering queries, and produced three new graphs showing boards.ie's growth in terms of users, posts and threads during the period February 1998 to April 2009 (here are the previous set of graphs from August 2007). User growth Post growth Thread growth http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/2009/05/18/growth-of-boardsie-users-posts-threads-continues/ Tim Berners-Lee recently posted an important request for the provision of Linked Open Data from the US recovery effort website Recovery.gov. The National Dialogue website (set up to solicit ideas for data collection, storage, warehousing, analysis and visualisation; website design; waste, fraud and abuse detection; and other solutions for transparency and ... http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/2009/05/02/idea-for-linked-open-data-from-the-us-recovery-effort/ NUI Galway's College of Engineering & Informatics is now offering a new course titled "Engineering Innovation - Electronic". This course will provide graduates with specialised multi-disciplinary skills to start their own business, centered on the development of innovative, niche, market-led, electronic products. The programme is composed of three ... http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/2009/04/24/new-bemengsc-in-engineering-innovation-electronic-from-nui-galway/ My mother, Mary Breslin, died two weeks ago today. It was a terrible shock to all of our family, but I wanted to say a few words about her so that you would have an idea about what an influence she was on my life and the lives of ... http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/2009/04/23/mum-mary-breslin-1950-2009/ Our forthcoming book entitled "The Social Semantic Web", to be published by Springer in Autumn 2009, is now available to pre-order from both Springer and Amazon. An accompanying website for the book will be at socialsemanticweb.net. http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/2009/03/23/the-social-semantic-web-now-available-to-pre-order-from-springer-and-amazon/ It's been another exciting six months in terms of SIOC-related developments. Here's a summary: In today's blog post entitled "Obama?s Groundbreaking use of the Semantic Web", David Peterson references a recent presentation by George Thomas about recovery.gov at Transparency Camp where he details a variety of Semantic Web ... http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/2009/03/19/tales-from-the-sioc-o-sphere-part-9/ (Cross-posted at socialmedia.net.) Via Drupal creator Dries Buytaert's post entitled RDFa and Drupal and St?phane Corlosquet's post about RDFa and Drupal examples and use cases, there is a really cool video that demonstrates how the structured data that is available in many Drupal deployments (but is difficult to leverage due to ... http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/2009/03/18/nice-video-shows-how-hidden-structured-data-from-the-drupal-content-management-system-can-lead-to-semantic-search/