judith meskill - soc.media.rocks

Stacy Cowley, IDG News Service, writes of New Web Structure Promoted in PCWorld.com.
Stacy writes about the Semantic Web vision that Tim Berners-Lee's unfolded in a keynote speech at the 13th annual World Wide Web conference, along with an important milestone for Semantic Web--the development of two foundational standards, the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the OWL Web Ontology Language (OWL).
 
...Projects involving Semantic Web technologies are already under way at several organizations. Boeing is exploring semantics-based applications for information and application integration and interoperability, and for knowledge management. Adobe Systems has built into its products Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP), an RDF-based metadata system that links contextual information with content files...
Berners-Lee urged the conference attendees to pitch in on the Semantic Web-enablement of online artifacts to help "bootstrap things in the short term".

I have been posting about the WWW2004, the Semantic Web, and new knowledgemanagement projects over on my knowledge notes weblog over the past few days. Whilst researching those posts I found anarticle Berners-Lee Keeps WWW2004 Focused on SemanticWebby Paul Ford on O'Reilly's XML.com.
 
Paul opens thusly:

A peculiar buzz is back in the halls of WWW2004 the mix of hubris and geek name dropping, cheap suits and over-eager handshakes that last prevailed in 2000. "I nearly invented the web," says a fellow with a large stack of promotional postcards advertising new social networking software. "People are downloading our new XML API almost before we upload it," said another, making introductions to anyone who wanders within distance.

Will YASNS be getting on the Semantic WebBus?

It's not very often that I find Social Computing in the news buttoday in the Globe and Mail there is anannouncement that Bell Canada has made a commitment to fund research that will focus primarily on wireless technologyand social computing:

VANCOUVER, May 20 Bell Canada has announced a $1.25-million commitment to the University of British Columbia to support technology research. The five-year commitment is the first in Western Canada for the Bell University Laboratories program.

Bell is exploring a number of potential projects with researchers at UBC and creating a governance process with equal UBC and Bell representation. Research projects will focus on wireless technology and social computing. The $1.25-million for UBC represents a five-year, annual commitment of $250,000.

Sion Barry, The Western Mail, writes about the University of Glamorgan's Welsh Institute for Competitive Advantage (WICA) and its aim to translate the latest research and development in strategic management into sound organisational principles in--ic Wales - University turning theory into workplace reality.
...Simon Brooks, senior lecturer at the university' s business school and head of the new unit, said, "We have surveyed over 130 businesses and assessed them on their use of strategic tools and techniques, strategic decision making, use of knowledge management, corporate social responsibility and organisational culture and leadership issues.
"We will be presenting an overview of what the key strategic issues facing businesses are and how they are dealing with them."
 
WICA, although based in Wales, will work with clients across the world on a collaborative basis.
 
Mr Brooks said, "We insist on engaging clients in the process, to ensure that they feel a greater sense of ownership of the findings and solutions and that the project remains within their requirements."...

Stacy Cowley writes for IDG News Service about IBM, HP and Microsoft talked autonomic strategies at the first International Conference on Autonomic Computing in New York earlier this week, mapping out fairly similar and harmonious strategies for working toward self-managing IT systems.
...IBM claims credit for coining the name "autonomic computing" three years ago, to describe its new focus on automation as the key to addressing the growing problem of computing infrastructure complexity. That initiative became a core element in the on-demand vision IBM unveiled in 2002, a campaign that prompted many other IT suppliers to craft similar strategies. HP calls its spin the "adaptive enterprise" strategy, while Microsoft spoke Tuesday of its Dynamic Systems Initiative...

Janet Sun, Vice President of Marketing for Experience, Inc.,tipped me on May 10, 2004 (oops… guess I've been traveling too much lately… (-:=):

Experience Inc. Unveils First-of-its-Kind Alumni Career Service Online Networking, Smart Web Search and Robust Jobs ResourceOur key differentiator is that we work with schools and foster community around the college experience, and also provide job board and career resources. We launched last Wednesday and already have 5,000 people using it!

The press release that Janet attached also mentions that:

Experience has been a leader in the alumni career services market through its eProNet service, an alumni recruiting site that serves 30 of the nation's top schools, including Caltech, Columbia, Duke, MIT, Stanford, Northwestern and Yale. Experience Network for Alumni is being initially rolled out to over 500 universities that currently use the company's eRecruiting system to support undergraduate career services, offering their alumni enhanced career opportunities and guidance.

Kaliya Hamlin tipped me to The PlaNetwork InterActive that will betaking place at the San Francisco Presidio on June 5-6, 2004:

Planetwork's next large scale annual event will bring Ben Cohen from True Majority, Joan Blades from MoveOn, and other leaders of online activism together with a multidisciplinary community of social change agents and technologists who are using the Internet to organize for positive change in this election year. Themes will include:
• Internet Activism: Online Organizing Strategies
Opportunities and Lessons for 2004
• Electronic Voting: Vote Early, Vote Often
New Technological Challenges for Democracy
• Social Networking for Social Good: Linking Social
Network Software as a New Global Commons

To read more about this 2004 conference, please visit the PlaNetwork website which cautions that space is limited, and advisesus to register now...

According to a Yahoo! press release Evite Selected asFandango's Online Invitation Service.
 
Through Fandango's Evite your friends! service you pick the movie, invite yourfriends, your friends agonize over whether they want to see the movie you want to see, you all vote on which showtimeworks best, and then everyone can click back to Fandango to purchase their tickets in advance.
 
Movie Night out with the Fandango Bag Puppets… Mmm, charming… (-:=

...or InternetDating Goes Gray...
 
Online dating is bigger than everand growing exponentially among 'Graying Americans'.

According to CatherineSaillant for the Chicago Tribune: The singles trend is expected to explode after 2011, as the baby boomgeneration enters its golden years with liberalized attitudes about sex, cohabitation and personal satisfaction. Attheir peak, boomers will drive the over-65 population up to 25% from just under 13% today.
 
Through my ongoing research, I have been noticing a definite uptick in Gray-oriented social networking anddating services 50 Something, 50 YearsPlus, Mature Dating.org, Senior Dating Exchange, SeniorsCircle, Senior Friend Finder, Spicy Senior Singles, M4MSeniors, and Single Seniorsbut according to Catherine Saillant,seniors are also regularly utilizing mainstream sites such as Eharmony.com and Match.com (where registrations bysingles >65 grew 122% last year) for their dating adventures.

AARP's future is looking bright… (-:=

Stanford University inCircles their alum, as does the University of Southern California, and now the University of Michigan intends to inCirle their alumni as well.
 
These three university alumni associations are utlizing AffinityEngines' inCircle product which was developed at the computer science department at Stanford University and offers,among other features, a graphical representation of the connections between members that is user determined andsearchable.
 
Affinity Engines describes their product as:

inCircle ™ the product suite engineered to drive traffic to an affinity group such as a college alumni association – was developed within the computer science department at Stanford University with an emphasis on privacy, security, and integration with legacy systems.The proprietary software can be customized, although the design is straightforward and easy to use. For example, a graphical image displays the connections between members, including their friends, friends-of-friends, and so on. Any member can search the graph and find people in their network who like to play golf, travel to Cuba, or work at Google.

An excellent context for the viral nature of YASNS.

In ebizQ there is an article today--IBM: We're Making Strides With Autonomic Computing--outlining a few of IBM's business partners in their 'Autonomic Computing' initiatives:
...IBM says three IBM Business Partners will integrate autonomic computing technologies into upcoming products available this month. Additional business partners have committed to release products later this year using IBM autonomic computing technologies. IBM also announced key research projects in progress designed to further drive innovation in autonomic computing.
IBM offered these details:
 
Corente, NetFuel Inc. and Singlestep Technologies are scheduled to introduce products this month with the Common Base Event format, previously submitted by IBM to the OASIS standards body, which is envisioned as the basis for standardized exchange of problem determination data. The companies also integrated the Autonomic Management Engine (AME) into upcoming products. The AME monitors events, analyzes them, then plans and executes corrective action on a computing resource. When integrated with the other autonomic technologies, the AME is the facilitator of a self-managing system.
 
Addamark Technologies and Network Physics have declared they will debut products later this year with IBM autonomic capabilities.
 
A few weeks ago, IBM and Cisco jointly announced the Cisco Business Ready Data Center Optimized with IBM for the on demand operating environment. Autonomic computing technology was implemented for the log conversion of Cisco's IGESM in the BladeCenter, which will provide customers the unique capability to pinpoint and resolve potential networking related problems using autonomic problem determination technologies...

A tip from Pete Rojas in an Engadget visits NYU's ITPSpring Show post yesterday:

Next up is Socialight, which we'd describe as an amped up version of Dodgeball (which is itself sort of a mobile version of Friendster). It involves signing up for yet another of those friend of a friend social network websites, but if you have a phone that can run the Socialight software and that supports location-based services (right now only the Nokia 6600 fits the bill) you can see if your friends (and your friends' friends) are in the area or leave messages for your pals around town that they'll only pick up when they actually pass through that specific location.

On the socialight sitetake your social life everywherethis service is described as: a number ofsubtle and overt tools which enable unique modes of real-time and time-shifted communication.
 
Socialight includes great features such as:
 
Tap & Tickle (A Tap is a brief vibration that a socialightuser may send to a friend. A Tickle is a vibration sent with a variable length determined by the socialight usersending the Tickle), and
 
Sticky Shadows (A Sticky Shadow can be a picture, a piece oftext, a snippet of audio, a video clip, or a combination of these types of media, left for another user in a specificphysical location. Users may choose the location, lifetime, and content of the Sticky Shadows they leave for theirfriends).

Alisha Berger for the New York Post certainly does not display a Neutral Point of View( NPOV) inher Sex Sickos' Wireless 'Hookups"headliner.(-:=
 
Great alliteration though in "sleazy subculture of sex addicts." Alisha speaks, however briefly, oftoothing's migration to US shores from EU shores.
 
In anotherarticle ToothingFadLuisa Lim, a Malaysian writer for The Star Online, posits: "With their colonising days behind them, perhaps theBritish sense of adventure and enterprise has just turned inward as they seem to be leading the way in terms of weirdsexual frolics."
 
Tony Deyal (Barbados Nation Online), in CellphonesAnd Englishmen, begins to build a bit of a timeline "dogging" to "bluejacking" to "toothing".
 
And the ever dependable Wikipedia's entry for Toothing states:This article is not about teething, the growth of teeth by infants. In true Wikipedia form, the Toothing entry goeson to make connections to Bluechat, Bluedating, BlueJacking, and Dogging.
 
The New York Post could learn from the Wikipedia's NPOV. Ah, but then,alas, it would not be The New York Post, eh?

Shane Schick writes: Cultural library to gauge how Canadians use technology, for itBusiness.ca.
...The University of Prince Edward Island Tuesday said it will be the first organization in Canada to use an IBM-built digital library to study how culture influences the way people can use technology to learn.
A custom-configured system, built on an IBM eServer Bladecenter running Content Manager and a number of applications out of the vendor's research division, is expected to arrive from IBM's Vancouver lab sometime later this month. IBM also announced a $1.3 million in-kind contribution to the project as part of a five-year agreement with the university.
 
The project is two-fold. Researchers within UPEI's Institute for Interdisciplinary Research in Culture, Multimedia, Technology and Cognition will create the library with cultural artifacts from PEI and New Brunswick. They will then use this material in multimedia teaching environments and study how effective they are, developing courseware and methods of evaluation. Items in the library may include local folklore, musical literature and oral histories.
 
"We look at behaviour patterns, literally watching people learn," said Richard Kurial, dean of faculty of arts at PEIU. "Whether it's brain waves, heart beat, eye motion -- all of the kind of stuff that brings a certain psychological rigour." Kurial said the research team hopes to put together audio/visual records of how people learn to create exercises in positive teaching that will capture the nuances of Atlantic Canada...

...or tracing the SNA DNA of weblogging posts…

Back on March 25, 2004, Lilia Efimova made mention that she was pondering the visualization ofweblog conversations. And then, in an IM chat session, Lilia and I recently conversed in more depth on this topic. Ibegan researching and found a number of neat visualization tools, but none specifically designed to map and followweblogging conversations over time and space.
 
Later on that same day I asked Betsy Devineof Funny Ha-Ha and Feedster fameif she knew of anyone who was either working on or had produced aweblog conversation visualization tool. Betsy just emailed me a reference to Mary Hodder's Paparazzi project proposalat UC Berkeley's SIMS (School of Information Management and Systems).
 
Coincidentally, yesterday, Mary Hodder wrote of being comment spammed on her MT napsterization weblog (her comment spam was in the thousands and minein the hundreds on my knowledge notes weblog over these last few days). How do we go about visualizing theseweblogging conversations sans the insane and inane static of senseless comment spam? But, Ido digress.
 
From Mary Hodder regarding the design goals of her Paparazzi project:

One of our major design goals is to provide blog readers with a tool that will allow them to follow a conversation that takes place over the course of days or weeks on many different sites. Current blog readers can follow these conversations because they are active participants in the conversations and can follow the conversation as it occurs. However, once a blog entry is no longer the current topic of debate, the conversation becomes lost in the archives. We would like our tool to effectively display the relationships between entries and topics amongst bloggers to anyone who desires this information.

One method that we have discussed would involve a site that aggregates blog data and allows searching by keyword. The results would be displayed in a keyword-in-context format; however, we want to avoid a list of discrete entry, instead showing a thread-like display of the entire conversation. We are interested in a design that combines a search interface with a visual representation of blog conversations. We believe that a text-only representation of search results and blog linkages will hide the complexities of these conversations as well as conceal valuable data. Additionally, there will be opportunities for other features, such as dynamic filters, zooming, and so forth, pending early testing and prototypes.

Who else is working on the visualization of webloggingconversations?