About

socialmedia.net is a new news site that aims to bring you the latest views, reviews and interviews from the world of social media and social software. We are coming from a European and Irish perspective, but we will provide global coverage of social media developments.

socialmedia.net aims to provide:

• A positive view of the technological developments in the world around us.
• A place where interested parties can contribute articles.
• Some positive and useful ideas that readers in Ireland, Europe and elsewhere would find inspiring at some level.

The writers are:

Tom Murphy (contact tom@socialmedia.net) has worked as a producer/cameraperson specialising in current affairs and documentaries filming in many different environments, hostile and otherwise, throughout the world. In 1982, he spent three months behind the Russian lines in Afghanistan with the Mujahidin making a documentary. He has won Emmy awards for his coverage of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, a Moscow documentary shoot and for his footage of the Iraq War, filmed over more than three months in Baghdad in 2003, some of which was used in the Michael Moore film "Fahrenheit 9/11". He was at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on 9 November 1989. All the earliest pictures of Germans breaching the Berlin Wall were Tom's. His assignments have included the Bosnian War, US operations in Somalia, the 1994 Sarajevo marketplace bombing and, from 2004 through to 2008, location filming in the Korengal Valley and Helmand Province, Afghanistan with American military forces. More recently he received a Polk Award for secretly filming in Burma in the aftermath of the Saffron Revolution. His most recent assignment took him on a tour of four African countries documenting the growing influence of both China and America in the region.

John Breslin (contact john@socialmedia.net) is a lecturer in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the School of Engineering and Informatics, NUI Galway, and a researcher with DERI, a Semantic Web research institute at NUI Galway. He is leader of the Social Software Unit at DERI. He is co-author of the book "The Social Semantic Web" (Springer, 2009). John is General Chair of the forthcoming BlogTalk 2010 conference. He is also the founder of the SIOC project (Wikipedia article), which aims to interlink online communities with semantics. John has received a number of awards for website design, including a Golden Spider for the Irish community website boards.ie (Wikipedia article), which he co-founded in 2000. The Irish Internet Association presented him with Net Visionary awards in 2005 and 2006. John is a director of boards.ie Ltd. and co-founder of Adverts Marketplace Ltd., and is also an advisor to some social media companies including CrowdGather and Social Bits. He has been interviewed or cited by various media sources including New Scientist, Computer, PC World, The Sunday Times and RTÉ. He is the editor of socialmedia.net.

socialmedia.net is owned by Social Media Ltd., a limited company registered in Ireland (company number 482512).