I participated in the first teleconference for the DataPortability steering group this morning (at the unearthly hour of 6 AM GMT!) and am glad to say that we had a productive session with participation from an interesting mix of developers, companies, academics, evangelists, researchers and practitioners. Here is the audio recording of the teleconference from J. Trent Adams:

(Edit: If the above link is playing at “chipmunk” speed, try these other versions below. It’s a bug in the Flash media player.)

(Edit: I also recorded a “DataPortability and me” video today!)

In a previous post, I listed some interesting articles I found about the application of social networks to business scenarios. This was based on research I did for a presentation on “Social Networking and Collaboration Tools for Enterprise 2.0” in October. Referencing these articles, I also prepared some answers for questions at the event, which I am sharing below.

How important do you feel it is for a company to be represented on social networking sites (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.)?

It depends on the company, and if you need to be represented or not. Social networks can help you to investigate and know about your target audiences, and to participate in / contribute to conversations about your specific product or service (e.g., the “commercial interaction” forums on boards.ie).

“Companies must decide whether to take the build-it-yourself approach or simply hitch on to social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. Private networks offer greater control and protection, while the Web approach makes it possible to reach more people.” (TMCnet)

Should financial services firms be looking to build their own communities (for example, from an existing customer base), to syndicate services to existing community sites (using Facebook et al.) or to try and build sub-communities on existing sites?

If a company’s customers are already using site X, then leverage it; else do it from new. It is difficult to build a community from scratch (i.e., to gain critical mass), unless there is a very strong attractor to the site. Building a sub-community on an existing site being used by a company’s customers (whether it belongs to the company or is external to the company) would be a good idea if there is high usage.

Do you feel that social networking applications are going to move into niche areas (age group, business, interest related), or will the largest prevail?

Niche SNSs already exist, and if the niche site is more relevant and kept updated for users, it will survive. Niche SNSs have been set up for age demographics (Multiply), home countries (Silicon India), gender (CafeMom), occupations (TheFeng.org), interests (StreetCred), etc.

If you have a clearly defined and unserved / underserved target market, there could be a place for a niche SNS to connect and serve your audience. But if your users are already using a large SNS, then a niche can be housed therein.

From an enterprise usage point of view, should companies allow their employees to access and encourage the active use of existing social networks, or should they build their own internal social network?

It should be based on the company’s focus and size. If you are a major enterprise, there are great opportunities for private corporate networks as a critical mass can be gained more easily. For example, Starcom MediaVest Group has a 33% usage of their internal SNS.

As regards encouraging employees to use external networks, if the worries about time wasting can be overcome, companies can benefit enormously from employees using social networks and social media sites externally.

Firstly, in terms of promoting products / companies / services, you can reach many more users that you could otherwise, and get valuable feedback as mentioned previously.

For the employees themselves, the informal learning aspect is very important. Figures estimate that 75-80% of learning is done informally, and with 40-50% of employees accessing information and knowledge from social media sites, Web 2.0 is potentially responsible for a large proportion of this informal learning (up to 30-40%).

One of the biggest barriers I see to some of the social networking and collaboration sites is trust. How do ‘believers’ convince others that these are useful tools?

If you mean trusting the users you connect to, in comparison with e-mail, SNSs have many mechanisms for verifying the user you are about to connect to is trustworthy (friends lists, recommendations / endorsements, content creation histories).

Despite trust issues, the interaction mechanisms and content objects on the social networking sites have to be interesting to maintain persistent use.

Does the whole idea of collaborative sites open the door for problems with mis-information?

You have to trust the source of the information, and balance that with some common sense as to how frequently updated / how many contributions have been made to that source (if it is on a wiki for example). As online identities become closely integrated, it becomes easier to see if a source is trustworthy based on their contacts or previously-created content.

You would expect that an article about George W. Bush would be fairly reliable (being under constant scrutiny) whereas an article about Kate Bush or Vannevar Bush may be slightly less so.

What systems or technologies should companies be looking to in order to harness collective wisdom and help individuals make decisions?

A corporate wiki would be a good start. Something like SocialText, which combines wikis and blogs, where wiki pages or team blogs can be commented upon and this can help in the documentation of decisions required to progress, for example, designs, projects, proposals, etc.

What are the usage scenarios of microformats for the financial sector? Are there financial services-specific microformats or more general microformats (e.g., to improve accessibility) that financial services could potentially use?

Typical usage scenarios relate to saving companies time in keeping third-parties (such as customers or price comparison sites) updated (see more at http://tinyurl.com/3xk82g). An example is using microformats (mfs) to power a system which shows a customer’s loan with the interest calculated daily on the outstanding amount based on an interest rate (taken from a mf-enabled site) and the fixed amount.

Some discussion has occurred on the mf mailing list around using mfs to represent data ranging from online statements to ecommerce receipts, e.g.: a debit figure, a credit figure, a total of any kind; an interest figure. There is a currency-brainstorming area on the mf wiki (http://tinyurl.com/3ax8m6).

There has also been some discussion about using hCalendar for investor relations event entries (http://tinyurl.com/2r3yrl).

Finally, microformats can be added to Excel spreadsheets as a means to embed some “reusable, stable semantics” (http://tinyurl.com/2a3ohp).

What are the key challenges in managing and deploying Semantic Web 2.0 implementations?

• Deciding if the semantic data is just used internally or exchanged between your application and something / somewhere else.
• Choosing a Semantic Web ontology or set of ontologies to describe the data used in or by your application (this may require some additional custom vocabulary creation for your domain).
• Designing an interesting Web 2.0 application, helped somewhat by knowing the semantics contained in the underlying data. See RealTravel for a relevant success story.
• Promoting usage and encouraging adoption.

What is the best way to structure and expose information (using RDF) to allow the easier generation of mashups of both proprietary and public information? How easy is it to make HTML-type contents compatible with RDF and use semantic search effectively? And how efficient will that conversion be?

If you just want to enhance your existing pages, you can embed RDF directly in the page, using RDFa (which is in XHTML like microformats, except that it can be operated on like RDF). GRDDL can be used to extract RDFa (and also mf) data from these pages into RDF for use by RDF-enabled applications. Otherwise, you could have some RDF data in the background linked from the HTML page.

The idea of the Semantic Web seems to suggest two parallel webs of information (i.e., machine readable and human readable). Will this mean the Semantic Web will only ever service a small niche market?

No, if the foreground application is interesting enough then the background machine-readable data can remain invisible. Think blogs and RSS. It can be widely deployed if the usage scenarios are convincing.

What potential is there to use IM bots as channels of communication with their clients?

See Zimbie.

Cork will play host to the 5th International Conference on Social Software - BlogTalk - from the 2nd to the 4th of March 2008.

The BlogTalk event – see 2008.blogtalk.net - allows practitioners, developers and academics to connect and discuss the latest trends and happenings in the world of social software (blogs, wikis, social networks, etc.). A workshop on the hot topic of “Social Network Portability” will be co-located with the event.

BlogTalk has attracted prominent speakers in the past, and this year is no exception. The conference will feature three keynote speakers from Silicon Valley talking about their Web 2.0 experiences and future plans for the emerging “Web 3.0″:

• 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 the conference directory service Confabb and blog feed collector PubSub. He currently leads Yahoo!’s internal start-up think tank. Salim will talk about entrepreneurship and social media.
• Rashmi Sinha - Founder, Uzanto - Rashmi is a designer, researcher and entrepreneur in the area of user experience and interactions with web technology. She led the team that produced SlideShare.net, a popular presentation-sharing service that some have dubbed “YouTube for PowerPoint”. Rashmi will talk about lessons learned from designing social software applications.
• Nova Spivack - 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 is a leading voice of the Semantic Web or Web 3.0. Nova co-founded EarthWeb in 1994, which led to the first big tech IPO. He will talk about semantic social software for consumers.

Other presenters and panellists at the event include: hypertext pioneer Mark Bernstein; the CEO of coComment Matt Colebourne; and “Mobile Web 2.0″ expert and consultant Ajit Jaokar. Topics to be discussed include the impact of social media on politics (and vice versa); the use of social networks and blogs in corporate environments; mobile internet solutions for education; issues to be aware of now that anybody can design and produce social media; the “long tail” effect from having multiple online identities; and blogs about dieting.

Co-located with BlogTalk will be a workshop on “Social Network Portability”. Nowadays, people have accounts on a variety of social networking sites. However, many users are experiencing problems when they register for a new site: they don’t want to re-enter their personal profiles from scratch, and they want to be able to easily discover their existing friends from previously-used social networking services. There’s a real need to be able to port profiles and social relationships (i.e., whom we are in touch with on a particular site) across various services. This workshop will discuss how we can solve this need by making both social network profiles and associated data portable.

The event is being sponsored by Microsoft, the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway and BT. Places are limited to 200, so those interested in attending should signup as soon as possible.

Call for Participation for XTech 2008

Proposals for presentations and tutorials are invited for XTech 2008, Europe’s premier web technologies conference. The deadline for submitting proposals is January 25th, 2008.

XTech 2008 will be held from May 6-9th 2008, in Dublin, Ireland.

XTech’s theme this year is “The Web on the Move”, focusing on the emerging portability of data, applications and identity on the internet. We will explore the benefits, issues, practicalities and fun of a web built on open standards, open source and commodity technology.

XTech presentations should inspire, educate and challenge. Your audience will be people like you, responsible for steering the technological direction of their organizations and the web as a whole.

Last year’s schedule can be viewed on the XTech 2007 web site.

Please direct any questions to the conference chair, Edd Dumbill.

View the calls for participation and submit a proposal

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

• Social platforms
  • Design patterns for social software
  • Social network interoperability
  • Internet application platforms (Facebook F8, OpenSocial, etc.)

• Identity management
  • OpenID
  • Practical security
  • OAuth

• Ajax
  • jQuery, YUI, other toolkits
  • Offline applications
  • Comet
  • Professional Javascript
  • Flex

• The web of data
  • Collective intelligence
  • Semantic technologies
  • Search
  • Markup and meaning
  • Freebase, Twine, Google Base
  • The place of XML on the web

• Data and databases
  • Client-side databases
  • REST-oriented databases (e.g. CouchDB)
  • XML and RDF
  • Messaging architectures
  • XQuery

• Operations and programming
  • Web application frameworks
  • Virtualization and appliances
  • Application scaling
  • Multicore and concurrency oriented programming

• Mobile devices
  • Commodity mobiles
  • Android, iPhone
  • Hardware hacking and personal prototyping
  • Geolocation
  • Getting the mobile mindset

As co-organiser of the WebCamp workshop on social network portability, I am happy to announce two invited talks by experts from the fields of the social web and the Semantic Web.

• Ajit Jaokar is a mobile web pioneer and a researcher on identity and reputation in social networks at University College London. Ajit is founder and CEO of FutureText publishing, and his latest book was entitled “Mobile Web 2.0″. Ajit is also a member of the RSA and of the web2.0 workgroup. Currently, he plays an advisory role to a number of mobile startups in the UK and in Scandinavia.
• Dan Brickley is a Semantic Web advocate and researcher. He joined the W3C in 1999 to help establish the Semantic Web project. In 2000, he co-founded the FOAF project, and he has been working on interconnecting the social web ever since. Post-W3C, Dan has been working as a part-time contractor at Joost, is active in the open standards world, and he serves as a visiting fellow at the University of Bristol.

Here are links to longer biographies for both Ajit and Dan.

I was interviewed during the summer for an interesting documentary about Bebo and online social networks (or “social networking services”) by the Multime Group from DCU. I prepared some answers for their questions, which I am sharing here.

What is your interpretation of an online social network (OSN)?

My interpretation is that it is a place where people can define their offline relationships to others – family, friends, schoolmates, etc. – online, and as well as defining existing real-world relationships, they can begin to form new ones or strengthen others with people they may have had less contact with previously.

Do you think users realise the public nature of OSNs?

No, most are unaware of how public OSNs are, especially through new social network search engines like Bigulo, Wink and other systems like Google (Ed.: And now Spock!), it’s very easy to deliberately or accidentally happen across someone’s profile, with all sorts of information there that they would not expect the public to be able to view.

Do you think users feel they are in control of their page? Do you think they actually are in control?

It depends on the OSN in use. Some offer very primitive control over what you can allow people to see – some just allow profiles to be public or private. Other OSNs offer more sophisticated access control, based on the number of degrees away that a contact is.

In research conducted you mentioned the need for “reputation management for the exchange of information in these networks”. Do you think there is a pressure for users to present a certain image in order to feel part of the community?

I should explain that the reputation management I mentioned is more a way for deciding which people can access the stuff that you are creating and sharing, but in terms of how you are being perceived, there is certainly a drive towards making yourself more interesting, and of course some people will go to extremes to make that point by posting pictures on their site that they definitely wouldn’t hand out to any old stranger on the street. As long as people remember that possibly anyone can see their profile, and if they are happy that the potential side effects outweigh the benefits of being in a particular community, well then there’s no more you can say…

Do you think that virtual reputation is becoming an obsession with OSN users, e.g., the hits counter on Bebo or “share the love”?

One of the most common ego boosters is the number of friends you have, and the number of comments or scraps that people are leaving on your profile. Luckily, most OSNs only allow positive increases in reputation – it’s the systems where you can add negative points to someone (like eBay, bulletin board karma systems) that really cause problems! Yes, it’s very important and as someone who often looks at others for potentially unconnected friends, I can understand the drive!

Do you think the interactions on OSNs like Bebo resemble real-life social encounters or is it just escapism?

Web interactions haven’t quite reached the level of real world interaction just yet, but features like being able to respond to people’s videos with video comments of your own (e.g., on YouTube) are going in this direction. Some theorise that some OSNs will eventually move towards 3-D worlds like Second Life, where networks of friends are interacting in much more realistic ways. 3-D gaming has had groups of people working towards common purposes for more than a decade, but they may never have met each other. But, I also believe that online networking can often lead to real-world group meetups, and if one strengthens the other, it should be a good thing.

Do you think people are bypassing the establishment of a trust model in favour of promoting themselves, e.g., Bebo’s “hottest babes”?

It depends on what they are trying to achieve by this. I’ve haven’t seen the Bebo section you mentioned, but if it’s being used as a quicker way of getting people to your profile rather than serendipitously happening across your profile via a friend or search, then some people will happily go for it and I’m sure those people may often not realise how persistent information on the Web can be. If you’re looking for a job in the future, well, maybe your OSN page has been edited, but services like the Web Archive or Google may well have a copy to show your future generations!

Do you think the image-centred nature of OSNs may lead to an unhealthy focus on the self and self-presentation?

It may be the wrong approach because you could probably attract better matches to your profile by expanding on your interests, events you liked, films you went to, or even by just blogging about yourself.

Do you think there is a ritualistic element to OSNs, e.g., entering daily thoughts on a community blog, checking on a daily basis, creating, what could be considered, a shrine in the form of their personal page?

For some, OSNs can border on addiction, as people have to login to check what has changed on their own pages and on those of their friends. Facebook have a nice system whereby you can see at a glance from your own friends list who has been updated, so they are making things easier (less clicking!). For those who are just trying to make themselves more popular, its not just important to contribute to your own page, but to drive people back to your own shrine, you must comment on other people’s sites and thereby create more backlinks to yourself. I don’t think people would continue to participate in some sort of ritualistic maintenance of their own sites without feedback from others, and luckily that means interacting with other people either online or offline.

Do you think OSNs like Bebo worship individualism? Is this community unique in this sense?

No, I think all social networks are now striving to allow people to express their individuality through widgets, skins and other “pieces of flair”. From the individual’s perspective, being able to customise your page like this means you can attract like-minded or random curious people to visit and keep on visiting your page, making you more popular in the process. From the service provider’s perspective, its driving up the revenues from the display of advertising on the site.

Do you think the social norm of the Bebo community, that is to say, the safety in the community, allows or affords individuals the right to be more ego-centric than in other situations (because ‘everyone is doing it’)?

I think that may be true in some respects - and the drunked photo phenomenon is a good example of this - but also, it can depend a lot on the personality of the individual. People will often say things online that they would not say face to face, but the reverse is true and others will not get the same buzz from interacting through a web browser as they would in real life.

Do you think OSNs present or reflect the fragmented nature of the postmodern society we live in? And if so, how?

(Ed.: I am no expert on postmodernism, sorry!) They say that OSNs are causing more young people to watch less television, so from that point of view they are no doubt causing people to become disconnected physically from families in the evenings while they are logged on. In the opposite direction, more conversations are being formed offline about what such and such put on their page last night – but I suspect that the extra time spent online outweighs that being spent offline as a result.

In your opinion, what are the best and worst parts of OSNs?

The best part is the fact that a community of like-minded people can group together and talk about things and interests that they would never have been able to do via phone conversations or e-mail. It’s a lot easier to get involved, and having these social networks centred around objects of common interest means that you can get the answers and chats you want about things you are actually interested in rather than switching on the TV and waiting for something interesting to come on. They are also great for networks of geographically-disconnected friends, who may have been in school but are now all around the world. They are very useful for getting in touch with someone who’s advice or skills you need, through the friend of a friend or friend of a friend of a friend. The worst part is probably the inadvertent uses that OSNs have been put to that they were never intended for: bullying, stalking and other types of abuse.

What do you think is the future for OSNs?

There are a number of things that are needed and that are already beginning to appear. The first is a way to manage your identities across all these social networks. Services like PeopleAggregator, 30boxes and Klostu are the first step towards collecting your identities, and then using systems like OpenID you can have a single sign-on to any of the networks that you are a member of. The second interesting idea is that of object-centered sociality, which says that people will only connect to others who have a shared object of interest – it may be content they create or tag together, it may be a place where they discuss their job or hobbies, or it may be some geographical or interest-related community they are members of.

Garlik, a UK company that focuses on personal information control, have recently launched the QDOS site (pronounced “kudos”, and no, it’s nothing to do with the old operating systems of the same name) for measuring your “digital status” or estimated online rating.

According to the creators:

With QDOS, 45 million UK adults now have a unique online identity score (a score which tells them what they look like in the digital world so they can manage it).

I tried searching for Tony Blair and found out that he “fits in” just above singer Rihanna and below Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales and Heroes’ Haydn Panettiere. So it seems that the media does have more power than politics after all…

I think I’m probably not alone when I say that Technorati may have put too much in at once when they decided to move from focussing on blogs to many other types of tagged content some time ago.

Luckily, they also implemented a stripped-down version for those who remember and just want to use Technorati as a “Google for blogs”. Its available at search.technorati.com. By the way, this isn’t new news: it has been there for six months, but the link is kind of hidden on the “Advanced Search” page.

A WebCamp “Social Network Portability” workshop has been announced to be co-located with BlogTalk on 2nd March 2008. You can view the wiki page for this event.

“Social network portability” is a term that has been used to describe the ability to reuse one’s own profile and contacts across various social networking sites and social media applications. At this workshop, presentations will be combined with breakout sessions to discuss all aspects of portability for social networking sites (including accounts, friends, activities / content, and applications).

Topics of relevance include, but are not limited to, social network centralisation versus decentralisation, OpenSocial, microformats including XHTML Friends Network (XFN) and hCard, authentication and authorisation, OpenID single sign-on, Bloom filters, categorising friends and personas, FOAF, ownership of your published content, SIOC, the OpenFriend format, the Social Network Aggregation Protocol (SNAP), aggregation and privacy, permissions and context, and the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP).

You can register for this workshop in conjunction with BlogTalk 2008. If you are interested in speaking or otherwise participating in the workshop, please add your name under the Speakers or Participants headings on the wiki page at http://webcamp.org/SocialNetworkPortability.

BlogTalk 2008, the 5th International Conference on Social Software, will be held in Cork, Ireland on 3rd/4th March 2008. The event is designed to allow dialogue between practitioners, developers and academics who are involved in the area of social software (blogs, wikis, forums, IM, social networks, etc.). A workshop on Social Network Portability will also be co-located with the event.

The organisers (me included) have just sent the final call for proposals to present at BlogTalk 2008. The end date for submissions is 7th December 2007, and these should be over two pages in length (no fixed template). Reviews will be completed by the end of December 2007, and the organisers will notify successful authors in early January 2008.

You can view the full call for proposals at http://2008.blogtalk.net/proposals and can submit your proposals at http://www.easychair.org/blogtalk2008

As well as peer-reviewed proposals, BlogTalk 2008 will have a number of prominent invited speakers (including Rashmi Sinha of SlideShare and Nova Spivack of Radar Networks, with others to be confirmed).

Mashable recently listed BlogTalk as one of the top 10 events for bloggers in 2008, and you can register for BlogTalk 2008 with Mashable’s 10% discount code “mashtalk”.