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Recently, John Breslin, editor and publisher of Socialmedia.net, attended the federeated social web summit. A workshop held in Portland, Oregon. It was an invite only meeting which was denoted as being a “This is a “how” meeting, not a “why” or “whether to” meeting.”

The idea of the federated social web is to build upon open web protocols that allow for various web projects to interoperate.

As John says, we get the chance to create technology that will “allow many different websites to talk to each other, to communicate, to exchange information.” The point of the summit was to find out “what sort of technologies are out there and what sort of standards are out there to exchange information back and forth.”

Thought leaders from a variety of social web companies and organisations will converge on Portland, Oregon this Sunday to discuss the "federated social web": an extension to the current social web, built upon various open web protocols, that will allow social websites to interoperate and better communicate with each other in a decentralised, distributed manner. (More details at the Federated Social Web Summit page.)

People attending the Federated Social Web Summit.

This is the first time that so many of the big players in this area will be in the same room together - Facebook, studiVZ, Google, Automattic, Diaspora*, Vodafone - to name but a few. I'll also be there representing the SIOC project initiated at DERI, NUI Galway. The event is being organised by status.net Inc., the company whose software powers Identica and many other microblogging services.

Organisations represented at the Federated Social Web Summit.

A research project by John Conroy, a Masters student supervised by Josephine Griffith at NUI Galway, has gathered some interesting statistics on Twitter usage and the most tweeted users in Ireland (during February / March 2010).

The study acquired 307,168 tweets from a group of Irish Twitter users. These tweets yielded 93,022 resolvable replies (@someuser), and another 7,298 retweets. Therefore, a third of the tweets investigated contained either a reply to another user or a retweet. Of the 93,022 resolvable replies, the vast majority were directed at users external to the Irish group. 15,364 replies (16.5%) were directed at an Irish user, and 77,658 (83.5%) at a user outside of Ireland. (Just over 2,000 investigated tokens were spoiled, often due to typos or e-mail addresses being detected as replies.)

Signups are now being accepted for the boards.ie SIOC Data Competition, and data sets will be made available to verified accounts for download from the 1st September 2008.

From Ireland's Newstalk radio news today:

The Government's planning on using Facebook and Bebo to try to warn people of the dangers of illegal drugs.

The news comes as two people remain in a critical condition in hospital, and more than a dozen others were treated after a 21st birthday party in Waterford.

The Minister for State with responsibility for the National Drugs Strategy says it's alarming that so many people