Keynote speakers lined up for BlogTalk

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.

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Social corkware, Web 2.0 and BlogTalk

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.

• Tom Raftery, BlogTalk 2008 co-chair, social media consultant, and the person behind the hugely successful Thought Leaders podcast series (interviewing the likes of Ross Mayfield, Loic Le Meur, Dave Sifry, Thomas Vander Wal, Chris Messina, Vint Cerf, Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble amongst many other luminaries) is from Cork.
• Conor O’Neill, founder of Argolon (known for their LouderVoice service), editor of blognation Ireland and Web 2.0 Ireland, and co-ordinator of the Cork OpenCoffee Club (we should organise one to co-occur with BlogTalk) is based in Cork.
• Pat Phelan, founder of Cubic Telecom (whose services include MAXroam), and a proponent of Web 2.0 and telecommunication crossovers, has his headquarters in the city of Cork.
• Web 2.0 guru Tim O’Reilly was born in Cork.
• Sxoop Technologies, the company (Walter Higgins et al.) behind the Pixenate online photo editor, are located in Cork.
• Donnacha O’Caoimh, co-founder of Automattic and lead programmer for WordPress MU (on which WordPress.com is based) is in Cork.
• Blackrock Castle is home to Ireland’s first “social software” cinema, allowing an audience to influence the design of a space mission so as to divert a comet from colliding with the Earth.
• Damien Mulley, organiser of the Irish Blog Awards, winner of the 2007 IIA Net Visionary award for technology journalist, and former chair of IrelandOffline, is from Cork.
• And there’s a bunch of other companies in this space from Cork: waveson, eWrite, Lukulu, Comhar, Beecher Networks and CIX.

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!

Opening up the social graph at the WebCamp workshop on "social network portability"

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

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”.