CONIECTO

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Tuesday, March 04, 2008

BlogTalk Day 2 - afternoon session

Thomas Burg is chairing the afternoon session.

Keynote talk: Michael Breidenbrücker (Lovely Systems, Last.fm)
Let's face it: Web 2.0 is all about advertising

The Germans copy everything; StudiVZ is probably a localised version of Facebook.
Another company bought them because they had a lot of traffic.
How do we send this traffic to other sites? They put on ads, but they looked like old 1.0 banners-
"extraterrestrial beings that happened to be on that site".
In Facebook, you have newsfeeds. The same kind of feeds are produced by Last.fm - what are your friends listening to - actually ads;-)
If you want to push the right data to the right person, collaborative filtering doesn't work - you can't do it in real time.
Connect any user to any data - instantly. But we can't do it right now. Hope the semantic technologies will help!
Q&A - when you buy a book - last click recommendation; Last.fm - you recommend in real time while you're listening.

Andera Gadeib (Dialego)
MindVoyager: an interactive journey through the collective thoughts of a selected target group
People who take the elevator to go to the fitness centre; who knows what's on their minds?

100-200 people as target group - they are including the long tail. Have a pool of 100,000 people in different countries they screen for each study.

The Mindvoyager online tool: test design, survey design.
People are selected from a panel - choose an identity- an avatar. They join different rooms where they choose tags. Later on, they can see how other people tagged the same product/service. Allegedly it is fun for the participants and gives the clients an idea about what people in their target group think.

Sponsored demonstration: Martha Rotter (Microsoft)
Building blogs and mashing them up with Windows Live Services and Popfly

Martha is talking about the Windows Live platform.

- maps for Harley-Davidson owners - with photos and videos
- a website built for inspiration - Contoso bicycle club
- Contoso University -
- not many fans of Spaces in the audience...

Tafiti - a new search application

Robert Mao (Microsoft)
Social blog: turning a blog into a decentralised social network
Pet project, but occupying 100% of Robert's time; he knows of several avenues he could take, but unfortunately he doesn't have more resources.

Brian O'Donovan* (IBM), Gabriela Avram*, Liam Bannon (University of Limerick)
What is happening behind the firewall? The emerging role of social software in IBM
I have the feeling our presentation went well, but there were 100 things we didn't manage to say. I hope to blog about it in detail later.

Hak-Lae Kim*, John G. Breslin (DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway)
int.ere.st: SCOT-based tag sharing services
He did the same mistake Martha Rotter mentioned earlier: once he showed us the int.ere.st toy, we all jumped on it, ruining his demo. Bad, bad audience :)

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|| Gabriela 3:44:00 PM
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BlogTalk Day 2 - morning session

John Breslin, after being a perfect host at the conference dinner last night, is introducing the first speaker of the morning:

Keynote talk: Nova Spivack
Semantic social software: the Semantic Web for consumers
- the 3rd decade of the web - is a period in time, not a technology - a higher resolution web
- the web IS the database!
- web 3G - the Giant Global Graph instead web 3.0 (2010-2020)
OWL SPARQL OpenID Ajax - semantic search, semantic databases, widgets
- web 4.0 (2020-2030)
(2030's the human body as platform??! time of the borg? I don't wanna go there...)
  • the tagging approach
  • the statistical approach(Google doesn't work very well when there are no hyperlinks; Autonome does a better job parsing texts)
  • the linguistic approach - Powerset Hakia
  • the semantic web approach
  • the AI approach

- some approaches make the software smarter, other make the data smarter
- relational databases - relationships between columns
- RDF - only needs 3 columns and the relationship is given (subject, object, predicate)
Next, Nova gave a demo of their product Twine creating a new twine: Blogtalk2008.
Twine adds semantic tags to people, organisations, places and can be used as a blog, as a wiki and in several other ways. "Google says it's trying to organise the world's information, Twine is trying to organise your information."
- he invites the audience to try it - it is still in closed beta - but we can get invited.
Q: why would I put my content in? To get it semantically annotated - you can pull the feeds of your blog in - get its content annotated
Q: How can you get your data out? RSS, SPARQL


David Cushman (Bauer Consumer Media)
Reed's law and the demand curve
(initially announced as The long tail, and why multiple identities make it just a little bit longer)

I got distracted reading David's blog and forgot to take any notes...

And skipped the next two presentations because I started to feel nervous and needed to go through my presentation again... While in the lobby, I had a "dealing with procrastination" chat with Niall Larkin and Geoff Hartnett - nice occasion for procrastinating again;-)

Panel discussion: Stephanie Booth, Bernard Goldbach, Donnacha O'Caoimh, Jan Schmidt
From blog-style commentary to conversational social media

Steph - 3 tags that express your interest in SM, and one things people do not know about you
Jan: academic, sociology, practice - football fan
Bernie: academic,syndication, watchlist - blogged from prison
Donnacha: conversation sharing photographer - interested in soccer

Steph - the idea of this topic - on a panel with 4 teenagers
Do you blog? No, we're using Facebook now

How are the new tools influencing the reasons of why people blog?
Jan - people's perception that think blogs are irrelevant is aggravated by Facebook and micro-blogging
Bernie - transition year students introduced to blogging after being introduced to Twitter - "cool! like Bebo text!" the lack of opening for thoughtful writing, open to commentary
Donnacha - Wordpress developers worked on a tool named Prologue - takes a text message and puts it in a blog post format

Steph: different things people use blogs for - a tool and a publishing format - no limitations about the content - how did your own use of blogs changed since you started? is it because the new tools?

Jan - started in 2004; researched older blogs- diaries and photo blogs;
Bernie - I'm using different tools for blogging now; you can touch different people.
Donnacha - several blogs: In Photos, I quit Facebook; the format imposed by the tool definitely influence the practice
Steph: easy to publish feature first; adding a lot of other tools made it a lot more complicated and reduced the amount of posts. Now she uses Twitter and facebook to communicate short and simple messages.

Steph: survey - who blogs? a lot of people; who tweets? a lot of people; did Twitter change the way you blog? less

Joe Lamantia - Twitter - more like IM than blogging

Tom Raftery: Twitter made my blog posts sink - before 3-4 a day, now 3-4 a week.
Donnacha: feels like cheating the blog subscribers if he talks about personal stuff; refrains from doing it now. Twitter provides RSS feeds and making tweets public and taking them out of context is dangerous.

Twitter supports conversations, but so do blogs. Are tweets googlable?
IM and IRC - the Wordpress community communicates via IRC;
Bernie : Twitter better for average users than IRC.

Steph: your blogging habits changed because you evolved, or what this influenced by the existing tools?
Jan : it would be interesting to study people who start blogging now, in the current environment; more influenced by the tools.
Bernie: IRC, tweets are not publicly visible; the current tools are taking you away from things that need to be done; people consuming his RSS feeds are giving him feedback about things they don't want to see there.
Donnacha: the content influenced by the people who joined the blogosphere; he prefers to write long in-depth articles.

Steph: Social networking sites are not the death of blogs, but they influenced what we blog about. What do you think?

Jan: doesn't see any change from blogs to Twitter;
Bernie: we're using new technology to enhance the way we speak about things; buying options are influenced by what bloggers share; teaching about watchlists for taking informed decisions;
Donnacha: a lot of my friends don't use Twitter. Blogging about personal life - he knew he could reach his old friends - through Twitter, he knew it wasn't possible.
Bernie: a lot of people in their 50s have no clue about social networking, but they're brought in by their kids; that start using them without knowing what they are.

Steph: are blogs social networks?
Bernie: if you tag your blog posts properly.

Salim: the whole concept: self-publishing; why do we choose to fragment this discourse? putting fragments on different sites does not help. Jan- how do we bring this data back together?

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|| Gabriela 10:21:00 AM
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Monday, March 03, 2008

Blogtalk 08 Day 1 afternoon session

Jan Schmidt is chairing the afternoon session.

Keynote talk: Matt Colebourne (coComment)
Conversation tracking technologies: how to improve communication in a UGC world
- not everything people say is true and fair - but you have to take them into account

HD DVD hack - put on digg how to stop people from commenting?
people are passionate and emotional in their opinions - if you argue with them, their argument becomes stronger
52% of people are occasional players - they don't comment on blogs or write blogs


Paul Miller (Talis)
Realising potential in the web of relationships
Too tired to blog about... Interesting talk although!

Note to myself: Do I like slides with beautiful nature pictures and a few words on them? are they better than plain ppt? Internet waves on a background of sea waves...
The number of laptops patched with stickers around me is impressive. I perceive it as a fashion crime...


Sponsored demonstration: Jeremy Ruston (Osmosoft, BT)
The further adventures of TiddlyWiki
- innovative interface, possible to download the page

RippleRap
mojo, SpeedConnect used to connect - random dating
different way of building mashups
collaborative notes taking for conferences
I feel a bit frustrated because my phone didn't ring during the demo; left out of the game?!

One of the TiddlyWiki users: Garrett Lisi - Deferential Geometry
Support for users : tiddlyspot.com

Hugo Pardo Kuklinski* (University of Vic), Joel Brandt (Stanford University)
Campus Móvil: designing a mobile Web 2.0 startup for higher education uses

- applications for mobile devices used in Spanish-speaking universities

Jon Hoem (The Media Centre, Bergen University College)
Memoz: spatial webpublishing
- memoz - tribute to Vannevar Bush's memex - memory organizer
- using weblogs for learning...
- the concept of ship logging - combining geographical position and information
- selection by association - trail blazers
- del.icio.us - text driven -
- wists -images
- clipmarks - text&images
- Facebook - info org in time, but not in space
- geotagging of blogs, twitter - still not very helpful

- images are different - have a look at how information is conveyed by this painting: Pieter Bruegel - Fight between Carnival and Lent
- weblogs organise information temporarily
- how does temporality support mental maps?

Wim Wenders - In Defense of Places
- poster about video-editing
- had a look at how 15yo girls represent themselves - Piczo

- collaborating on annotating a map - but is this blogging?!
- Jorn Barger - collection of links on the web
- yes, spatial weblogging makes sense
My note: a pity he didn't close the circle - how does this apply to teaching and learning?
- Tinderbox - an example on how info can be displayed in different ways
Q: would a combination between the spatial and temporal perspectives be possible?

Jan Blanchard*, Conor Wade (Tourist Republic), John G. Breslin, Conor Hayes (DERI)
A proposed semantic recommender network for trip planning
- building a semantic trip planner together with DERI (John Breslin and Conor Hayes)
- explore, share and plan trips online
- cut and paste trip planners - ask you to have a travel blog
- a semi-intelligent trip planner - Yahoo trip planner, Kango
- so, what is missing? 3 areas: recommendation, booking, collaboration
(my note: could Dopplr, Twitter, Plazes content help? nowadays we use them to get suggestions from friends...)

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|| Gabriela 3:10:00 PM
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BlogTalk 2008 Day 1 - morning session

Tom Raftery opened the morning session and introduced Salim Ismail (ex Yahoo! Brickhouse)
He's back to "start-up land" now - just left Yahoo; he shows us the picture of an old "Guiness by night" t-shirt; when Damien Mulley, planning Paddy's Valley, asked him what could he bring from Ireland, Salim asked Damien for a new similar t-shirt!

Entrepreneurship and social media
- blogging being overtaken
- 4 major drivers: XML, syndication, low latency, great UX
- publish and subscribe - 00s - watching is today's pattern of information exchange
- we went from email (80s) web browser (90's) to RSS aggregators (00's)
- Internet 3.0 - is the nervous system, where search is the memory
- the hidden web - databases that are not visible to search machines
- ephemeral pages - plane tickets, eBay offers
- not easily available to search engines - 95% publicly available
- user fills form - data is syndicated - user receives feeds
- blog - only one facet
- Who do I know?(social networks), What am I doing? Where am I?
- social networks - closed syndication - you have to go there to get the info
- 3 ways of making money: users/advertising, subscriptions, data mining
Rapleaf - scrap info from several SN sites - aggregate it - sell it back
Internet Entrepreneurship:
- you have to do everything right AND get very lucky
- market timing
- team, team, team
- focus, then execute
- never give up - stick around long enough...
Dynamics of starting a company today:
- low barrier to entry, virality is key, lots of competition, focus on service rather than data
- you have to break some rules to get traction - afterwards, you can become a good citizen again
Flickr started as instant messaging for gamers - enabled photo posting accidentally

Thoughts on Social Media: social networks are going to fail - because of the numerous ways you can relate to someone. Computers are binary!
Advice for entrepreneurs:
- pick up a domain you're passionate about
-
- choose one of the drivers
- think about the risk
- jump in with both feet

If it doesn't work - get yourself a new t-shirt and start again!

the big problem - no of searches and no of new data published - matching data and searches
publish&subscribe - it is actually request/response
Twitter goes down - people publish - they have to match the queries (got a new tweet - who cares?)
- companies opening their databases to the public - they're guarding it
- big companies - forced to open their databases and position themselves as platforms
- Yahoo service to come out - danger - people can figure out where other people are - implications

The next speaker: Joe Lamantia (Keane)
The DIY future: what happens when everyone designs social media? Practical suggestions for handling new ethical dilemmas

- Joe's achievements - sorting cards - framework for portal design
A few sites to look at:
  • JoeLamantia.com
  • BoxesandArrows
  • UXMatters
  • Tagsonomy.com

Ethics & conflict in social media:
- Tagged.com - similar story with my Shelfari one
- asked his contact about his experience
- deliberate design decision "It's a highly viral, albeit controversial marketing strategy"- TechCrunch
- social software building blocks
- design becomes conflict mediator
- 3 shifts - permeation, integration, conflict
- for young people - technology seamlessly integrated in life
- more people are integrated in design
- Quechup.com - defence mechanism
- social networks anti-patterns
spam your contacts, enter your other site login

- rise of SPIME(Bruce Sterling) - world where the boundaries between information, physical objects and spaces blurr
- DIY shift - shadow IT, open source, mashups
- experiences are c0-created - more people involved in design - not only designers
- Joe suggest the term "eco-system of design"
Integrated experiences - integration actually amplifies the experience
- the role of designers changes - Kevin Kelly - The Bottom is not Enough
Craig Newmark - I created the platform, and then I got out of the way

"The Ethical design kit"
strategy, simple goals,...
Conflict resolution process - in 4 steps
- you need a framework - bows and arrows, bill of right
- conflict aware design artefacts - to make you aware what is ethical and what unethical
- last slide - questions? in gaelic as well
augmented experience - blogtalk IRC channel, jaiku, blog, flickr


Mark Bernstein (Eastgate Systems Inc.)
Neovictorian, nobitic, and narrative: ancient anticipations and the meaning of weblogs
(recording of the talk)
- weblogs do have ideas
- they are not C2C
- pro weblogs - The romantic critic
- enemies - weblogs - no ideas, no ideals
- neoVictorian computing OOPSLA 08- software factory - artisan software
- neoVictorian internet
- weblogs write with links; links the first significant punctuation
- weblogs want to be right, to be first
- weblogs want to be independent - who is the master? and who the slave?
realism
- blogging teaching us about how we ought to feel
- mutual improvement societies - the public lecture - Scoble lecturing the world every day
- nobitic = writing to ourselves
we're only allowed one person on stage - blogflaneur
- our objects send each other messages behind our back Tinderbox


Anna Rogozinska (Institute of Polish Culture, Warsaw University)
Everyday body regimes: the construction of self in weblogs about dieting
- academic and user - PhD student
- identity as reflective practice - Giddens
- virtual identity - facilitating identity play (Turkle 1996, Wakeford 2000)
- methodological concerns - context
- writing the self as cultural practice has 3 main aspects: technology, means of identity construction, social context
- participatory observation - researcher as user - being a fellow user as participation (ethic aspects- you actually hide there pretending to be a user!)
- Dieta.pl - a portal - Miladka - her own blog

Panel discussion: Sean McGrath, Bill de hÓra, Conor O'Neill, Ben Ward
Mashups, microformats and the mobile web
Questions already on the website:
* Is the phrase "reliable mashup application" an oxymoron?
* Will we ever see one syndication format emerge to dominate or is babelisation inevitable? Desirable?
* Do microformats need governance in order to work?
* Is the mobile web a technological superset subset or mutation of the "original" web?
* Can MMS be equated with WAP. Would that be a category error?
* Has blogging run its course as a phenomenon?
* Are microformats running out of steam or gathering steam?
* How many forms of digital identity will I need to use the Web in 2010?

I have to take a break from blogging and just listen to the conversation...

Own reflection: this conference as a playground - participants taking different roles - connecting through back channels: IRC, Twitter, Jaiku; parallel conversations contributing to the flow; how it changed from the first Blogtalk; How I changed over the last 5 years :)

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|| Gabriela 10:31:00 AM
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