Videos and slides from WebCamp and BlogTalk (continually being updated)

Moved here.

WebCamp SNP and BlogTalk 2008 approacheth…

I’m in Cork with a posse of eight from DERI, and it’s the night before two co-located events: the WebCamp workshop on social network portability (Sunday) and the BlogTalk conference on social software (Monday, Tuesday). Others that have arrived in Cork this evening include Niall Larkin, Ajit Jaokar, Aral Balkan, Ben Ward, Dan Brickley, Ross Duggan and Stephanie Booth.

I’m really looking forward to the talks, the discussions, the networking, the food, and some positive outcomes from the next three days. And with invited speakers of this quality, I know it’s going to be good.

Unfortunately, I’m missing the Irish Blog Awards for the second year running, but boards.ie‘s Managing Director Gerry Shanahan is representing us as a sponsor. At least I hope to meet up with many of the bloggers at tomorrow night’s optional blogger’s dinner at Rossini’s here in Cork (43 people have signed up).

More blog posts about the events will be available via the tags webcampsnp and blogtalk2008. Here are some recent posts:

• Jan Schmidt (in German, but some nice photos!)
• Aral Balkan
• Conor O’Neill
• Stephanie Booth
• Ajit Jaokar

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DataPortability.org, web standards, SIOC and FOAF

Leo Sauermann has written an e-mail to the public DataPortability.org mailing list suggesting that the DataPortability.org initiative also takes W3C’s web standards like RDF into account, as well as considering existing efforts like FOAF and SIOC for data portability on the social web. The initiative’s chairperson Chris Saad has indicated that they will put all related communities and standards in context, including RDF (and I assume FOAF and SIOC too).

As co-founder of the SIOC project, I’ve recently been evangelising the fact that SIOC can be used to provide a representation of all content items created by a person (via their user accounts) on various social media sites, and this can be nicely combined with the FOAF profile of that person who holds the associated user accounts (click on the picture below, and see our Internet Computing article for more).

In the image, Bob holds user accounts on various social websites (two shown for clarity, but here’s another view), and via those accounts he creates content items (usually within containers of some sort, e.g., in a bookmark folder, personal weblog, message board or image gallery) on those sites. He should be able to port not only his social graph (in this case, his connections to Alice and Carol), but also his personal containers / sets of content items and perhaps even associated comment replies. The vocabulary terms are shown in dark grey: foaf:knows, sioc:User, etc.

It’d be great if we can get some of the DataPortability.org people to come to the WebCamp workshop on Social Network Portability in Cork in March. There are some valuable contributors to the initiative so far including Chris Saad, Ashley Angell, Paul Jones, Chris Messina, Ben Metcalfe, Daniela Barbosa, Phill Morle, Ian Forrester, Shashank Tripathi, Kristopher Tate, Paul Keen, Brian Suda, Emily Chang, Danny Ayers, Marc Canter, Jeremy Keith, Peter Saint-Andre, Robyn Tippins, and Robert Scoble.

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.