Co-founder of Last.fm to speak at BlogTalk 2008 on 4th March

I am happy to announce that Michael Breidenbrücker, co-founder of Lovely Systems and of Last.fm Ltd., will be our fourth keynote speaker at BlogTalk 2008 in Cork (he will speak on Tuesday week).

Michael has been actively involved in interactive digital media since 1999 and is widely recognised for his expertise in the areas of interaction design and product development. Lovely Systems is a web technologies company providing localised video portals serving hundreds of gigabytes of video each day. Their latest service is Zoomer.de, which was launched last week. Last.fm was incorporated in 2002 as an internet radio station and music community website, and the related Audioscrobbler music recommendation system was fully merged into Last.fm in 2005. The company was acquired by CBS Interactive in May 2007. You can read more about Last.fm on their Wikipedia page.

Unfortunately, Rashmi Sinha is now unable to speak at this event. Hopefully Rashmi can present at BlogTalk 2009!

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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.

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”.

Lally Logic hits Galway

Brendan Lally is visiting Galway at the moment; do any Web 2.0 heads want to meet up for dinner in Galway tomorrow evening (7:30 PM on 27th October 2007)?

If so, drop me an e-mail.

Press release: "Sharing knowledge on technology and business at the BarCamp 'unconference'"

The “BarCamp Galway” event will be held at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway from 10 AM on the 22nd of September. BarCamp is a technology-focused, informal gathering of people from technical and business backgrounds, where information and experiences are exchanged. The event is geared towards sharing knowledge and learning from others, and there is a policy of encouraging active participation in all discussions.

BarCamp Galway extends from other successful Irish “unconferences”, most recently the BarCamp Dublin and BarCamp Belfast events. The term unconference is used as BarCamp allows anyone to present, and talks can be technical or non-technical. The BarCamp ethos is simply about sharing information, with no overriding theme. Speakers and discussion panel members who have signed up to talk so far include:

• David Lenehan, PollDaddy: creator of the very popular online polling service.
• John Collison, Auctomatic: the young Irish student who along with his brother Patrick received significant venture capital funding from Y-Combinator in Silicon Valley.
• John Breslin, boards.ie: co-founder of Ireland’s largest discussion community.
• Conor O’Neill, LouderVoice: editor of Blognation Ireland.
• Ina O’Murchu, DERI: writer of Galway First’s TechTalk column and speaking about the Social Web.

The event is free and is being sponsored by Microsoft, Blacknight, boards.ie and Logon.ie. If you wish to attend, simply send an e-mail to barcampgalway@gmail.com

BarCamp Ireland Jaiku channel

Aidan has set one up – join in and discuss the forthcoming BarCamp Galway:

http://jaiku.com/channel/barcampireland

State of the SIOC-o-sphere (#5)

It’s that random time of the year again where I summarise what’s been going on in the world of SIOC…

• We now have a SIOC W3C Member Submission! Along with W3C members Asemantics, DFKI, FZI, Fraunhofer, Fundación CTIC, OpenLink, Opera, STFC, UPM, University of Trento and other co-authors, Uldis and I edited three main documents as part of the submission describing the SIOC core ontology specification, SIOC applications and implementation status, and some ontologies and RDF vocabularies related to SIOC. You can also read the W3C Team Comment for our submission. Thanks again to everyone involved!
• The Semantically-Interlinked Scientific Communities project aims to improve how scientific data and knowledge is represented and communicated. It will use SIOC, FOAF, DC, Creative and Science Commons, OBO and HCLS ontologies and technologies as its basis.
• Mark Wahl has written a useful article entitled “organizing principles for identity systems: embedding SIOC in XHTML with RDFa” which details how to describe blog post structures using SIOC and RDFa.
• There is a Google Summer of Code project from the Apache Software Foundation on creating plugins for embedding/producing RDF/XML and microformats in Forrest content objects, and SIOC is one of the target vocabularies.
• John Wubbel has an interesting post about how SIOC and semantic technologies can connect real estate networks.
• Lee Faus has been telling us on the #sioc IRC channel how the forthcoming Stuff project will use SIOC to facilitate searching, creating, and maintaining all kinds of ‘stuff’ online (from wikis, forums, knowledge bases, IM, support tickets, e-mails, etc.).
• SIOC metadata is being used in a very cool demonstrator from OpenLink on how to inject Facebook data into the Semantic Web. This is something I had been waiting for, so nice work!
• There are also a number of modules for the OpenLink Data Spaces (ODS) platform that each export SIOC metadata, including ODS-Blog, ODS-Wiki, ODS-Bookmarks, ODS-AddressBook, ODS-Calendar, ODS-Polls, ODS-Gallery (for photos), ODS-Feeds (for feed aggregation and exposure via SIOC), and ODS-Discussion (for comments across blogs, wikis or any other data space that supports some form of commenting).
• Another interesting SIOC-enabled application is the Mailing List Explorer. MLE is a tool that allows the exploration of mailing lists via query, timeline view, etc. It provides RDF representations (including SIOC metadata) for any valid W3C public mailing list archive.
• On the wiki front, IkeWiki is a semantic wiki for knowledge engineering. IkeWiki allows discussions (following a forum style with threaded views) to be attached to wiki pages. These discussions are represented using the SIOC ontology, which allows one to use semantic queries to investigate the structure of any discussion.
• SIOC is being discussed for use by the Italian workgroup for internet and web technologies. The group already produces metadata in FOAF and OPML.
• Harry Chen has written an interesting post about how ontologies like FOAF and SIOC can play important roles in the development of a people search engine. This post was made in relation to the forthcoming Finding Experts on the Web with Semantics workshop at ISWC 2007, for which SIOC is a major topic of interest.
• SIOC gets referenced in Mark Canter’s blog post about posting to multiple social media sites, and this time it isn’t referred to as STOIC!
• For Russian speakers, here’s a blog conversation in Russian about the SIOC discussion clouds picture. SIOC has also received coverage in Korean (ZDnet), Austrian (ORF, Computerwelt), and German (Computer Zeitung) media following talks by Stefan.
• Tom Morris has created a MySpace parser that produces SIOC data; unfortunately due to some web hosting issues, this is currently offline.
• In a joint collaboration between DERI, NUI Galway and BiKE, Seoul National University, int.ere.st provides metadata creation and sharing support across online communities that use tag data. int.ere.st aims to build a tag-mediated society based on Semantic Web technologies, and resources in the site are based on RDF vocabularies including SIOC, FOAF, and SCOT. You can view a demonstration video for int.ere.st at YouTube.

Schmap tourist guides

Just found out about the Schmap set of dynamic travel guides, since a Flickr photo of mine was selected as the image for King’s Chapel in Boston. The site uses Google Maps for plotting and navigating through the various attractions.