DERI

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

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.

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

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).

An interesting talk by Mike Brodie...

...was given at VLDB 2007 recently. Mike (chief scientist with Verizon Services Operations, and chair of the DERI advisory board) also gave this talk internally during his visit to DERI on Monday.

Interviewed for SemanticWeb.com

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

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.

Interviewed on Morning Ireland last week

Along with Joe Zefran of rté.ie, John Waters from the Irish Times, former DCU student Deirdre Reynolds, Gráinne Barry of anotherfriend.com, and Dr. Siobhan Barry from Cluan Mhuire, I took part in a panel hosted by Richard Downes on RTÉ Radio 1's "Morning Ireland" show last week to discuss the phenomenon of online social networking.

First SIOC brainstorming session

We had our first SIOC brainstorming session in DERI last week, and I think it was quite productive (though I missed a big chunk of it). Thomas Schandl has written up the minutes here, and I've vectorised / rendered Uldis' whiteboard notes below.

Congrats to Eyal on his PhD defense

20071204a.png Eyal Oren successfully defended his PhD at DERI, NUI Galway last week.

DERI Entrepreneurial Forum #2 last week

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.