The New Web
May 29, 2008 at 9:29 am
Excellent post by Stowe Boyd in which he charts the rise of social media – from early day/Web 1.0 “Alone in the Library” to Web 2.0 “Global Village” to The Edge. His description of the edge is, I think, what semantic web is all about, but he doesn’t use the word semantic once! That’s because he’ll probably come up with a new word and then bandy that around as ‘the’ word for what’s going on.
He very accurately describes where we live now – wandering in the web and finding little clusters of people at the edges interacting with each other, trying to make sense of their own concerns.
As the edge grows, the center dissolves. Mainstream journalists begin to act like bloggers, editors begin to drop the veneer of objectivism, and immediate, first person voice becomes the standard not some radical minority.
And the world, once the subject of conversation, is itself changed when so many have changed their beliefs, either explicitly or at a level below awareness.
Boyd outlines the rules of the new web as he sees them:
- We are searching for a reason to be, to be linked into relationships where it would matter if we stopped coming back, where we can become ourselves through others.
- It’s a village world, where reputation matters, and affiliation is tribal. “Glocalisation” (first time I’ve heard that word and I don’t believe the last)
- When it becomes possible to remain connected with hundreds not dozens of people, and to remain cognisant of their backgrounds, location, moods, relationships, and positions on matters of importance -does the world become a deeper place or have our feelings become shallower?
- (And of course his favourite mantra…) Time is inconstant. We are adapting to Continuous Partial Attention.
It seems Stowe is on sparkling form and I for one am already looking forward to what he will have to say at Reboot 10 at the end of June.
All about DERI
May 27, 2008 at 8:26 pm
DERI (the Digital Enterprise Research Institute) is an ICT research institute that was established at the National University of Ireland, Galway in June 2003.
The main research focus of DERI is the “Semantic Web”.
In fact, it is the world’s largest Semantic Web institute.
So what’s semantic web?
Semantic web can be thought of as the next generation of the web where computers can aid humans with their daily web-related tasks. Where meaningful structured information can bring meaning and data to life.
For example, using a combination of statements like “John works_at NUI Galway”, “Mary knows John”, “John is_a Person”, “Mary is_a Person”, “NUI Galway is_an Organisation”, “A Person can work_at an Organisation”, and “A Person knows a Person”, you can allow computers to answer relatively straightforward questions like “find me all the people who know others who work at NUI Galway” which at the moment is quite difficult for us to do without some manual processing of information returned from search results.
Anyone I’ve ever met from DERI is extremely intelligent and working on super exciting projects. I wanted to know more so I spoke to John Breslin, senior researcher and leader of the Unit for Social Software. You might also know him as the guy who set up boards.ie. You can read the wiki history here.
Me: Tell me about you’re up to at DERI?
John: I am looking at the ways in which “Social Web” applications can be enhanced using semantic technologies (forums, blogs, wikis, social networks) to produce what we term “Social Semantic Information Spaces”.
DERI is carrying out research beyond the state of the art into areas such as Social Semantic Information Spaces and “Semantic Reality” (leveraging the semantic data from networks of real and virtual sensors), and we have had a significant output of publications and contributions at major conferences. We are involved in more than a dozen standardisation groups in bodies such as the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium) and OASIS. Much of our technology is disseminated royalty-free to enable a market, since certain assets can increase in value when they are shared amongst a community of interest. We have strong industrial relations with local SMEs and multinationals, who are picking up our technical work and applying it in commercial contexts.
Me: Read/Write Web have already branded semantic web to be ‘web 3.0′. Without getting hung up on buzzwords, where do you think it’s all going?
John: It’s a dangerous thing to make predictions, as you either end up looking like a genius or an idiot when they do / don’t come through!
Me: [Thinking... nice answer, but given that he's based at DERI, it's likely to be the former... ] Says – do go on Dr John….
John: I think that we are now beginning to see glimpses of the commercial applications of what can be done when all kinds of things on the Web are connected together using semantics (I attended the Semantic Technologies Conference in San Jose last week, where there was a huge industrial presence accounting for the majority of the 1000 attendees). This is obvious in the attention being given to startup companies in this space like Powerset, Metaweb (Freebase) and Radar Networks (Twine), and also since many big companies including Reuters (the Calais API), Yahoo! (SearchMonkey) and Google (Social Graph API) have recently announced what they are doing with semantic data.
There has been a lot of talk recently about the social graph (notably from Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick), which looks at:
- how people are connected together (friends, colleagues, neighbours, etc.), and
- how such connections can be leveraged across websites.
In the Semantic Web (or the Giant Global Graph, to throw out another buzzword!), it is not just people who are connected together in some meaningful way, but documents, events, places, hobbies, pictures, you name it! It is the commercial applications that exploit these connections that are now becoming interesting… Radar Networks’ Nova Spivack gave a keynote talk last week at the Semantic Technologies Conference – he is CEO of one of the companies that is practically applying Semantic Web technologies to social software applications. Radar have a product called Twine, which is a “knowledge networking” application that allows users to share, organise, and find information with people they trust.I hope that in ten years we will see a lot more usage of applications like Twine that will help you manage the information that is of interest to you and that connects you to communities formed around that interest (rather than what we do at the moment: form social networking connections for stronger [connecting to old friends, work colleagues] or weaker reasons [social pressure to reciprocate friend requests, boosting numbers of connections]).
I’d also like to see a move from the current situation where the big sites determine how and where you use your data towards control by the person who made the data (as requested by the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web), allowing data portability or at least views on your data when and where you want it. Building on such moves towards people connecting via “social objects” of interest and also allowing people to control how their data is used, it should then be possible to have a more integrated view of the stuff that is really of interest to me – the content and connections that I and my friends make across a variety of spaces. This is something that we discussed in a recent tutorial we gave on the future of social networks (http://url.ie/e46).
Me: Finally, tell me about some of the other interesting projects that are going on at DERI.
John: Some of our interesting projects include:
- SIOC (interlinking online communities sites): DERI has created a proposed standard for exchanging Web 2.0 data as an experiment in “Web Science”, i.e. as an effort to understand how one establishes a standard on the Web. This has been deployed in over 50 applications on hundreds of sites.
- SWSE (Semantic Web Search Engine): This is one of the largest Semantic Web repositories in the world, operating on a cluster of 16 machines and enabling analysis of data in web experiments. A spin-off is currently in preparation.
- JeromeDL (Social Semantic Digital Library): A redesign of digital libraries to leverage semantics on multiple levels, which has received significant industrial interest and deployment.
- Nepomuk (Social Semantic Desktop): An effort from DERI which is changing personal information management on the desktop. It has transitioned into a €17.5 million EU project that has been adopted in the Linux operating system (as part of the new KDE 4 release).
Me: Wow. That’s pretty cool stuff. Thanks John for taking the time out to shed a little light on what DERI’s all about. Good luck!
Need To Get Out More
May 27, 2008 at 3:46 pm
There’s a lot of talk going on right now about Ammado and their recent spamming of a number of top bloggers. It seems that they harvested a whole bunch of names and emails and then sent them a mass email asking them to blog about something they’re running relating to UNHCR.
There are a couple of accounts of it here:
Damien’s [parental guidance!! Warning this blog carries strong language]
It looks like there’s one person called Natalia who’s carrying the Ammado torch on Alexia’s blog. Her attitude is ALL WRONG. When the blogosphere turns on you because you have BROKEN THE LAW, this tone of voice just doesn’t cut it:
Oh come on people….Did Ammado hurt you when they sent those e-mails or what????
They made a huge mistake – they sent those e-mails to you as they thought you would be interested in their appeal….. but it seems you only want to make Ammado’s work harder….
Meanwhile, over on Mulley.net, in response to another Ammado person, Anna Kupka, who claimed that they didn’t expect their appeal to be regarded as spam:
What a load of bollox. If you talk yourself up at the IIA Congress and all over the press over the past few months as having a clue about people and the web you have no excuse whatsoever for spamming and for your lack of understanding of one of the most basic tenets of the Internet.
I agree.
I think it’s a case of the Marketing Department being allowed to run wild! Is Ammado full of developers and finance people, with only a tiny team of marketing graduates who don’t have the foggiest about the internet? I’ve never ever met a single Ammado person out and about, which in my opinion shows how cut off they are from the world. Like-minded people (or in this case people who are passionate about the net) tend to bump into each other again and again. The Anna’s and Natalia’s of this world ought to get out more!
New Blog Features
May 26, 2008 at 11:14 am
In the continuing quest to enhance your blog experience, here are a few plugins recently added to the Brightspark blog:
- Subscribe to Comments – if you leave a comment on a post and want to know what subsequent commentators have to say, then click this box. A great way of ensuring the conversation goes on and that commentators can retort if they want to! In the notification email you can unsubscribe whenever you like.
- Recent Visitors – this is a little box that shows who’s recently been having a look round. More to satisfy my own nosiness.
- What Would Seth Do? This little widgit has been on for quite some time now. It invites new visitors to add the blog to their RSS the first 3 times they visit. I like it that it gives up after 3 go’s so isn’t annoying.
Thanks to Gordon in Cork who efficiently translates all of my whims into reality!
If you know of some other plugins that would enhance the experience, I’d love to hear from you. Please share your knowledge in the box below.
Doritos Does Good
May 23, 2008 at 2:53 pm
I like this campaign from Doritos. Email gets sent to entertainment.ie mailing list (young cool hip people!).
Offer is – make an ad for Doritos and if it’s voted as the best, you win €27,000.
More info here, including a rather nice send up of how Doritos perceive their ad agency!
Successfully embracing pro-am movement – read more here if you don’t know what I’m talking about!
Change of Tune
May 19, 2008 at 10:46 pm
I have been known to comment that I’m envious of ‘the kids’ these days. They live in a wired world; it is all they know. When I read about educators like Ewan McIntosh and how they are positively using technology in the classroom, I think wistfully to the ‘drumming in’ method of learning I was subjected to and go – wow…
I’ve just watched the Prime Time programme on bullying in schools, including cyber bullying, and I think it’s time to change my tune. Despite what the media may call it, it was not all about cyber bullying; in my opinion, it was the mobile phone rather than Bebo that was the facilitator in many cases.
So while things haven’t changed -the predominant name-calling for girls is still ’slut’; anyone who’s slightly different gets singled out for attack – the ones who refuse to conform, or the kids who are a little larger or look different. What struck me most vehemently was that now it’s non-stop. These poor kids can no longer escape because the abuse continues to happen. Threatening SMS’s all times of day and night. Fights that are never over because they are passed around and published on Youtube and Bebo. There for all the world to see. It’s no longer a case of getting home and getting away from it until the next day at school or on the bus. Because those little feckers that do the bullying are insidious – they’re on Bebo bad-mouthing, they’re posting embarrassing footage to youtube. They’re reinforcing their message of fear through texts.
My heart went out (and my eyes overflowed) for the boys from Donegal. They are so brave and deserve the utmost of respect for going public on this. They are more ‘Men’ than their principal is. Hopefully some of their classmates who have seen this programme will also come round to perceiving them in this way.
Content Management Options
May 19, 2008 at 6:49 pm
Because we’re all about delivering high quality for good value, this also comes across into our recommended content management options:
- Get us to do it for you. Easy option. You send us the content, we turn it around within 12 hours. Your site benefits because we apply our design eye to every content update and ensure consistency. We also throw in copywriting for free because it would be against our religion to put up content that doesn’t work well online!
- Do it yourself. Benefit lies in the immediacy of making the changes and acquiring the skill in-house. Downside is that you’ll spend more of your highly valued time on it than we would, so it’s not necessarily the most efficient option. That said, here are your options for DIY content management:
- Using Adobe Contribute. Software costs about €300 but you can download a free 30 day trial. You’ll need an hour’s training in how to use it. But once it’s set up for you, you’ll be flying!
- Using Ewrite Lite. From Cork software company, eWrite, this easy to use content management system was created especially for SME’s. If you’re looking to edit content on your site, without the expensive bells and whistles you’d usually pay for with an enterprise CMS, then this could be the option for you. Priced at €200, it’s probably best suited to you if you are the only individual editing your site.
Image Suppression – How It Impacts You
May 18, 2008 at 8:35 pm
There’s no doubt that we all prefer image-rich emails over plain text, but thanks to the proliferation of scumbag spammers (the ones who send ‘adult’ themed emails to kids), most ISP’s now block images as a default. Apart from the visual, here’s why you need to know about image suppression:
- This impacts on Open Rates because open rates are calculated when an invisible graphic pings your server. So when you’re not getting the graphic, there’s no ping, and no reporting. But I wouldn’t be getting too hung up on Open Rates as a key measure of Email performance; they’ve not been the most reliable of metrics ever since the invention of the preview pane.
- Image suppression can make your email look awful. You have to go back to in-line styling for design, something we’ve been at for quite some time, but have only just applied to our own template. This is a crucial point; have a look at your email delivered to a gmail address and you’ll see what I mean.
- Because many people are visual and not verbal, image suppression of your super duper offer is going to hurt your response rates. Visual people are more likely to delete your email without a second thought. That is why punchy headlines, super sub-headlines, and an awareness of how to get your message across in a teeny-weeny space is a must. Learn more about writing for the online environment here.
In a nutshell, how can you deal with this brave new world?
- Design a new email template (talk to us about layout and other features)
- Don’t be hung up on open rates; focus instead on trends such as who’s reading regularly,who’s forwarding, etc.
- As always, content is key. Write well. Don’t oversell. And you’ll be grand!
Embarrassing Omissions
May 14, 2008 at 9:29 am
Who are the culprits behind these sites?
July 2nd – BMI repair their site. Well done guys! It’s only been 3 months.
When that new BMI site went live a few months ago, I noticed a few glitches and my overall sense was that it was a step back. I didn’t say anything though, because you’ve got to believe that professional people with an eye for detail would pick up the mistakes and fix them. Months later, I spotted this yesterday while looking to see if they fly to Italy. There’s no excuse for that. Whoever developed the BMI site and sold in their (probably very expensive) content management system should be ashamed because it’s very clearly a case of build, sell, and go. They took no care in ensuring that all the less exciting pages are complete.
Visit Offaly? Well you’d kind of expect that wouldn’t you? And that’s not an urban Dublin racist slur. That’s obviously a site built with less budget. Although it’s still no excuse.
Both sites smack of lack of passion. They say to me that there wasn’t one Super Committed person on either the client side or the development team who painstakingly went through every page to check the content. Lack of passion on the web in my opinion is a cardinal sin.
PS – how about this? Would you trust a company to manage your wealth if they can’t even spell check their home page? Or maybe they are asking us to click on a woman in the events section?
PPS – and don’t go waiting around for the Fiorelli competition either because this baby has been promised to us for ages now. Looks bad. Why didn’t their web person put the foot down and say ‘if you’ve not got a competition, then let’s not include it in the main navigation’.
PPPS – if you’re looking for an instant quote for your car insurance, don’t go looking on the Quinn Direct site. Shocking guys – on your home page, instant car quote (probably the most used button on the page) links to a dead page. Why? Because of an invalid security certificate.
Hosting Scam
May 13, 2008 at 3:25 pm
If you receive a telephone call from a UK hosting company claiming that your company name is under attack in the UK (or other regions), ignore it.
A client rang me on Friday because they had received a call from a company called Net Easi telling them just that. They girl on the phone acted as if she was trying to help my client by telling them that someone else was trying to buy their company name as a .co.uk and a .net domain, as well as some other combinations. She said that she could secure the domains for my client if they bought them by 5 o’clock on Friday. The cost? £800
The people at Net Easi are preying on people’s lack of knowledge about domain name registration. Instilling a false sense of fear and attempting to profit from it. They are mere scumbags.
Luckily my client telephoned me and I put them right. If you get a similar call, can I suggest you seize the opportunity to vent?
