BlogTalk 2009 (6th International Social Software Conference) – Call for Proposals – September 1st and 2nd – Jeju, Korea

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 remaining committed to the diverse cultures, practices and tools of our emerging networked society. The conference (which this year will be co-located with Lift Asia 09) is designed to maintain a sustainable dialog between developers, innovative academics and scholars who study social software and social media, practitioners and administrators in corporate and educational settings, and other general members of the social software and social media communities.

We invite you to submit a proposal for presentation at the BlogTalk 2009 conference. Possible areas include, but are not limited to:

• Forms and consequences of emerging social software practices
• Social software in enterprise and educational environments
• The political impact of social software and social media
• Applications, prototypes, concepts and standards

Participants and proposal categories

Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the conference, audiences will come from different fields of practice and will have different professional backgrounds. We strongly encourage proposals to bridge these cultural differences and to be understandable for all groups alike. Along those lines, we will offer three different submission categories:

• Academic
• Developer
• Practitioner

For academics, BlogTalk is an ideal conference for presenting and exchanging research work from current and future social software projects at an international level. For developers, the conference is a great opportunity to fly ideas, visions and prototypes in front of a distinguished audience of peers, to discuss, to link-up and to learn (developers may choose to give a practical demonstration rather than a formal presentation if they so wish). For practitioners, this is a venue to discuss use cases for social software and social media, and to report on any results you may have with like-minded individuals.

Submitting your proposals

You must submit a one-page abstract of the work you intend to present for review purposes (not to exceed 600 words). Please upload your submission along with some personal information using the EasyChair conference area for BlogTalk 2009. You will receive a confirmation of the arrival of your submission immediately. The submission deadline is June 27th, 2009.

Following notification of acceptance, you will be invited to submit a short or long paper (four or eight pages respectively) for the conference proceedings. BlogTalk is a peer-reviewed conference.

Timeline and important dates

• One-page abstract submission deadline: June 27th, 2009
• Notification of acceptance or rejection: July 13th, 2009
• Full paper submission deadline: August 27th, 2009

(Due to the tight schedule we expect that there will be no deadline extension. As with previous BlogTalk conferences, we will work hard to endow a fund for supporting travel costs. As soon as we review all of the papers we will be able to announce more details.)

Topics

Application Portability Bookmarking Business Categorisation Collaboration Content Sharing Data Acquisition Data Mining Data Portability Digital Rights Education Enterprise Ethnography Folksonomies and Tagging Human Computer Interaction Identity Microblogging Mobile Multimedia

Podcasting Politics Portals Psychology Recommender Systems RSS and Syndication Search Semantic Web Social Media Social Networks Social Software Transparency and Openness Trend Analysis Trust and Reputation Virtual Worlds Web 2.0 Weblogs Wikis

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Growth of boards.ie users / posts / threads continues

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

"The Social Semantic Web": now available to pre-order from Springer and Amazon

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.

Interview with PC Live! magazine about DERI, NUI Galway and boards.ie

Available by clicking on the image below…

Presentation slides on the Social Semantic Web (from last night's IET/CompSoc talk)

Here are my slides from last night’s joint talk for the Institution of Engineering and Technology and the Computer Society…

The Social Semantic Web

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: socialweb semanticweb)

boards.ie tops BlueMetrix study of 38 Irish websites (via IIA and AMAS State of the Net)

From the latest IIA and AMAS State of the Net Issue 11:

Online Advertising

Online audience measurement in Ireland is dogged by a torrent of data. Some of it is irrelevant (such as hits on a website, which aren’t a true measure of online traffic) and little of it is directly comparable. This makes the job of media planners, the professionals who buy online advertising, a challenging one.

The arrival of a new mechanism to measure traffic on Irish websites is welcome, particularly as it offers a robust methodology and directly comparable data. The Internet Audience Measurement (IAM) is an initiative of Bluemetrix, the Irish company which measures online traffic in distant markets such as Japan and Scandinavia.

Its software was running on 38 Irish websites when the first tranche of data, on which our graph is based, was released in early November. Not all the big sites are signed up and some of those that are (such as Daft.ie and The Irish Times) did not have any stats available for the first monthly release.

But while, the top 10 table is limited in its scope, it enables like-for-like comparisons as the same measurement tool is used. This new measure will gain in importance over coming months, as more sites sign up and more data becomes available.

Source: Bluemetrix study of 38 Irish websites for October 2008 (www.irelandmetrix.ie)

Prize winners visualise Irish online life in the boards.ie SIOC Data Competition

The winners of the SIOC (pronounced “shock”) data competition being run by DERI at the National University of Ireland, Galway have been announced. The competition ran from September to October 2008, and the brief was to produce an interesting creation based on a data set of discussion posts reflecting ten years of Irish online life from boards.ie, Ireland’s largest community website. The competition had about sixty registrants and there were eight final submissions of very high quality.

First prize

The top winning submission was entitled “SIOC.ME: A Real-Time Interactive Visualisation of boards.ie Semantic Data within a 3-D Space”. The entry illustrates how 3-D visualisations may be harnessed to not only provide an interactive means of presenting or browsing data but also to create useful data analysis tools, especially for manipulating the “semantic” (meaningful) data from online communities and social networking sites. The entry was submitted by Darren Geraghty, a user interface and interaction designer, and it was praised by the judges for the huge amount of effort that went into creating it. A video of the application may be viewed here and a demonstration of the tool can be seen at go.sioc.me.

Second prize

In second place was a visualisation application called “boardsview” by Stephen Dolan of Trinity College Dublin. This is an interactive, real-time animation where one can watch the historical content from many discussion forums changing in real or compressed time. In this application, you can zoom into a particular forum to see individual users posting messages or to see threads being created and destroyed.

Third prize

Third prize was awarded to the “Forum Activity Graph” by Drew Perttula from California. This entry was a visualisation showing the popularity of forums on boards.ie as represented by coloured rivers of information, which were then rendered and displayed using Google Maps.

Other final submissions included:

• “Forum Map Demonstration” by Tristan Webb and Ian Dickinson of HP Labs Bristol, a demonstration of self-organising maps applied to an information navigation problem in a big community site,
• “WebThere: Semantic APML Profiles” by Brian MacKay from Pennsylvania, a service for creating and maintaining profiles of user interests and attention preferences in social websites,
• “Find Something Interesting” by ITT Dublin’s Alexandra Roshchina and Aleksey Kharkov, an application to provide recommendations of the most interesting posts and threads based on interest-matching and graph-mining techniques,
• “ChartBoards” by Martin Harrigan of TCD, a tool for examining community trends via term frequencies, and,
• “Visualising the boards.ie Community Culture with Charts” by Eoin McLoughlin of TCD, where various graph types were used to simplify the huge amount of available community data to something that could allow someone to easily grasp its size and depth.

The competition was judged by an independent panel of three experts: Ian Davis, Chief Technology Officer with Talis; Harry Halpin, researcher at the University of Edinburgh and chair of the W3C GRDDL working group; and Peter Mika, researcher at Yahoo! Research Barcelona and author of the book “Social Networks and the Semantic Web”. The first prize is an Amazon voucher for $4000; second prize is a voucher for $2000; third prize is a voucher for $1000.

Golden Spider Award Winners 2008

1. Best Financial Services Website – www.irishdeposits.ie
2. Best Travel, Tourism and Hospitality Website – www.ireland-guide.com
3. Best Digital Media Website – www.tv3.ie
4. Best Sports and Leisure Website – www.imra.ie
5. Best Community and Charity Website – www.heartsplay.ie
6. Best Education, Research and Training Website – www.osi.ie
7. Best E-Business Website (exclusive to web business) – www.litriocht.com
8. Best Property Website (non portal) – www.chesterfieldblackrock.ie
9. Best Mobile Content or Application – www.sentrywireless.com
10. Best New Indigenous Website 2008 – www.movies.ie
11. Best Use of Film, Digital Animation or Motion Graphics – www.thebellatwylye.com
12. Best Blog – www.mulley.net
13. Best E-Government Website – www.osi.ie
14. Best Entertainment and Games-Related Website – www.redfm.ie
15. Best FMCG Website (fast-moving consumer goods) – www.lucozadesport.ie
16. Best Recruitment Website – www.prosperity.ie
17. Best Interactive Marketing Campaign – www.mrtayto.ie
18. Best Professional Services Website – www.rbk.ie
19. Best Web Design and Development Agency – www.webfactory.ie
20. Best Retail and Home Shopping Website – www.toyota.ie
21. Best Social Networking and Community Website (people’s choice) www.boards.ie
22. Young Designer of the Year – Naoise O Conchubhair
23. Internet Hero – Aodhan Cullen
24. Grand Prix – www.tv3.ie

Irish Times: "Boards.ie scoops Golden Spider award"

Boards.ie scoops Golden Spider award

JOHN COLLINS

ONLINE FORUM Boards.ie netted the inaugural People’s Choice Award at the Eircom Golden Spiders internet awards, which were presented in Dublin last night by comedian Des Bishop.

The hugely popular discussion forum was the “clear winner”, according to the organisers in the category where members of the public were invited to vote for their favourite social networking and community website.

Aodhan Cullen, founder of the free web-traffic measurement service StatCounter, was selected as 2008 Internet Hero by a panel of judges. Founded by Cullen nine years ago when he was just 16 years old, StatCounter now tracks over three million websites and 10 billion pageloads a month.

Having this month relaunched its website following a major overhaul, which added features such as video “catch-up” of popular shows including the X Factor and the Apprentice, broadcaster TV3 picked up two awards: the Eircom Grand Prix Award and Best Digital Media.

Despite having been a vocal critic of the awards, which are now in their twelfth year, internet commentator Damien Mulley was awarded Best Blog. The Spiders judges also recognised Sentry Wireless’s Kidsafe as best mobile content or application, despite mobile operators recently claiming to Minister of State for Children Barry Andrews that they had found it to be technically deficient.

Other category winners included imra.ie (Irish Mountain Running Association), heartsplay.ie (Crumlin childrens hospital) and Movies.ie.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2008/1121/1227137519507.html

boards.ie has the second highest number of unique visitors to an Irish website

According to island of Ireland audited data on Irish websites from ABCe, boards.ie has the second highest number of unique visitors in Ireland, currently at 1.7 million compared with RTÉ’s 2.1 million visitors. This is more than the combined audited figures for both the Irish Times plus MyHome.ie (1.5 million) and for IN&M’s Irish Independent plus PropertyNews.com (1.2 million).

Unique users

Daft currently tops the page impressions league, with 86 million pages in September 2008. boards.ie had 22 million, ahead of the Irish Times and the Irish Independent (18 million each).

Page impressions

You can view the September 2008 ABCe certificate for boards.ie. See also the press release from Daft.