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!

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.

int.ere.st – create and share tags across your online communities

As mentioned in a previous blog post, int.ere.st has just launched. The main objective of int.ere.st is to demonstrate how Semantic Web and Web 2.0 technologies can be combined to provide better metadata creation and sharing support across various online communities.

With int.ere.st, you can save, tag and bookmark your own as well as other people’s tag clouds, as represented using the SCOT ontology. The tag meta search also allows you to look for similar patterns of tagging from other people based on their interests (as expressed using tags).

Some functionalities of int.ere.st include:

• Various options for tag searching, such as and (&), or (space), co-occurrence (+), broader (>), and narrower (< )
• User searching
• Resource searching
• Integrating tagged data across communities
• Meta tagging
• Ontology bookmarking
• Sharing metadata produced using the FOAF, SIOC, and SCOT ontologies

You can try it at out at http://int.ere.st/. Here are some video demos of int.ere.st in action, and some more videos are forthcoming:

Short

Long

DM110 – Week 4 – Social Networks

DM110 Emerging Web Media is a module that I teach to the Masters in Digital Media course at the Huston Film School, National University of Ireland, Galway. Yesterday, I was talking about social network theory (in brief) and online social network services (SNS). You can view the slides below.

Edit: I’ve also uploaded the previous lectures as Week 1, Week 2, and Week 3