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22 February 2007
Future of Web Apps retrospective
So what did I learn from two days at the Future of Web Apps, large chunks of which I blogged here at the time whilst Malcolm twittered? Here goes with some concluding thoughts and observations;
Community, community, community.
We're all creators now... if we want to be. How many of us want to be, and what is the likely split between time I want to spend creating, and time I want to spend more passively, consuming?
Most users don't care about benefiting the community; they keep del.icio.us bookmarks for themselves, they scrobble their own music so they can track what they are listening to, etc. If the community also benefits with no additional effort on their part then that's fine; and they're happy to consume the efforts of others, of course.
Any suggestion that the UK development scene is lagging behind the (Californian) curve is woefully misinformed. There's plenty of good stuff here, too.
OpenID is going to be big (I've been letting sxipper handle mine for a while, but do share some of a colleague's reservations around getting too excited about yet another in a long line of 'solutions' to this problem).
On the web, product differentiation often owes more to a compelling (and quirky?) back story than to your product being better/cheaper than the competition. The moo guys described this well, as did others, and reminded me that I really need to get some more pictures into Flickr so that I can try their service.
Creating a site and calling it a community is easy. Nurturing a self-sustaining space that its participants will recognise and value as one is an awful lot harder, but Tara Hunt at the Citizen Agency had some great messages about how to do it, and I'll be asking her to tell us more in a podcast.
Most of the popular consumer-facing web sites do one thing, do it very well, and can describe it in very few words.
The blogosphere looks like this.
For a revolutionary Platform to succeed, it needs to nurture an ecosystem. Open sourcing parts of the Platform seems a popular tactic at the moment...
WebMail is more popular than search.
Find ways to 'reward' members of a community.
Keep initial switching costs low - or nonexistent.
Use commodity hardware and software where feasible, and scale with growth rather than ahead of it.
Value is shifting. Or, as Werner Vogels put it, “compete on ideas, not resources”. Another one to invite to do a podcast, I think!
There is a real need to be able to expose and interact with complex data out in the cloud, drawn from disparate data stores. That's lucky then, isn't it? :-)
Carson Systems lay on good events.
Not having free wifi at a tech event is likely to annoy the audience, whatever the reasons...
I get twitchy with nothing but coffee to drink all day.
Every trip to London reminds me why I'm so happy not to live there.
I have a lot to think about...
Assorted odd things about my colleagues that probably don't bear repeating in polite company.
Technorati Tags: FOWALondon07, FOWALondon2007, Talis
Posted by Paul Miller at 11:45 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
mashup* event, BT, London
As mentioned earlier this week, I headed back down to London this evening to attend mashup*.
With the title of “What's next, Web3.0? - The coming semantic web”, the event was highly relevant to our activities around the Talis Platform.
The event was chaired by Vecosys' Sam Sethi, and opened with presentations from Mark Birbeck, Talis podcast subject Paul Walsh, and Tony Fish, followed by an open discussion. I had to leave before we got to the post-discussion wine, but maybe next time!
Sam got the ball rolling by defining the Semantic Web (which Wikipedia describes thus, and W3C thus, demonstrating just why SWEO is so important!) as allowing people to “query the web like a database”. Not bad, for those who get what a database is.
He then embarked upon a useful illustrated tour of some microformat-consuming tools, describing microformats themselves as “making data re-usable” and suggesting that microformats are a practical instantiation of core Semantic Web principles. Highlighting microformats.org, and specific microformats such as hcard and hcalendar, he then showed browser extensions that read microformats, illustrating his points with Tails and WebCards specifically.
Sites such as upcoming.org and worldcupkickoff.com embed microformatted data within their markup; invisible to humans who just see a 'normal' web page, but very useful to microformat-aware browsers. Although we need browser extensions like Tails just now, there is a suggestion that Firefox 3 will include native microformat support this year.
Next up was Mark Birbeck, CEO of X-Port. Mark showed two products from his company that make use of some Semantic Web technologies from the W3C. formsPlayer leverages the XForms recommendation and is a;
“full-featured XForms processor that provides a complete implementation of the W3C's XForms specification, made available in today's browsers.”
The demonstration we saw suggested that it's similar in concept to Sam's microformat parsers, extracting value from RDFa markup in web pages.
Sidewinder was one I really didn't get; it
“is a new kind of desktop application framework. Like many frameworks it makes the task of producing desktop applications easier, but whilst other frameworks will use C#, Visual Basic or Java, Sidewinder uses high-level, standard languages, such as XHTML and XForms.”
Mark made much of its power to take applications in the cloud, and run them like desktop apps. Erm... why would I want to?
Next up was Paul Walsh of Segala, a fellow member of W3C's Semantic Web Education & Outreach group (SWEO). With only a few minutes on the stage, it's probably better to point you to his comprehensive podcast on the same subject... :-)
Finally, Tony Fish took the stage, to offer a (possibly too?) contrarian view.
He suggested (reasonably) that most users don't care about the detail, and simply want
“everything we want, where, when, and how we want it”
No argument there.
He went on to suggest that the big question is one of how we facilitate delivery of these requirements, and broke delivery down into three broad strands of;
- supply & demand
- create & consume
- input & output
The first, he suggests, is simple economics, and well understood.
The second is a (re-?) discovery that people are instinctively creators rather than passive consumers.
The third is where things went off the rails for me, ultimately arriving at an assertion that people want a sensory web, not a semantic web. I'm not sure I understood the argument, as I assume he meant something more than creating a web of content that we can smell, taste, and touch as well as (currently) see and hear?
In Q&A, Mark suggested;
“the data is what people are after [not the website offering access to it], and that causes problems for today's business models”
Too right, but it's fun making the incumbents wobble...
Andrew Hardie from DemSoc suggested that the Semantic Web has difficulty gaining traction because it
“shifts the effort to return ratio”
It's hard to add all the structure and metadata that many of today's Semantic Web applications require, the datasets are pretty small, and the use cases tend to be niche.
After some protracted pounding of Paul Walsh (they should have listened to the podcast first!), the conversation degenerated somewhat to the level of many Semantic Web discussions; I could swear there were people with microscopes out, counting the angels dancing on the head of their badge pins... A conversation that started well, with recognition that the end-user story was more important than any particular technical solution became remarkably caught up in itself, and in notions of what is/are (?) 'semantic', which was a shame.
Andrew Hardie made a good point toward the end, though, emphasising the role of the Semantic Web (whatever 'semantic' might be!) in moving from machine readable to machine understandable data, and in enabling the user to ask 'high quality questions'.
A good event, in a good venue (although you would have thought BT could provide free wifi in their own conference centre, even if they couldn't cope with selling a decent wifi connection to another conference venue), and I hope to make it next time, too. The more events like this that I attend, the more convinced I am that we're on the right track with the Platform; and a track where no one else has a better solution.
Posted via a GNER train's wifi network, too late at night, diverted off the main line and somewhere in Lincolnshire, heading home to my own bed after a week spent in a different hotel room every night...
Some concluding thoughts from FoWA may have to wait until the morning.
Update: David Lenehan also covers the event for Read/WriteWeb...
Technorati Tags: microformats, Podcasting, Semantic Web, Talis, Talking with Talis, TDN, Vecosys
Posted by Paul Miller at 11:28 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
21 February 2007
Visualising the blogosphere
Just seen this. Wow. Check it out.
Technorati Tags: Blogging, FOWALondon07, FOWALondon2007, Talis, twingly
Posted by Paul Miller at 10:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
A bit more about zimki
I wrote yesterday about zimki, and Simon Wardley's presentation on what they're doing.
We just got a closer look at some of what they're system can do, and it really does look interesting and relevant.
Oh, and they gave us yak t-shirts... :-)
Technorati Tags: FOWALondon07, FOWALondon2007, zimki, Talis
Posted by Paul Miller at 10:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
20 February 2007
Kevin Rose, digg
Kevin Rose from digg is now up on stage to close the day, and it's his birthday tomorrow! Happy 30th, Kevin.
He's talking about 'how you make the crowd care', and basically incentivising use and active engagement.
He reckons that people participate in digg to share content they enjoy, and to 'see their name in lights' on the front page. I can't help feeling that the latter is probably more important...
Digg has over 900,000 users. Looking at ways to reward 'good' contributors to the site... Also exploring ways to mine the data more effectively, matching you up with other people who regularly digg in a similar fashion, etc.
Technorati Tags: FOWALondon07, FOWALondon2007, digg, Talis
Posted by Paul Miller at 05:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo!
Bradley Horowitz, VP Advanced Development Division, Yahoo! Inc, is now speaking at Future of Web Apps. His talk is titled “'User' rehab: A story of redemption”.
We need to turn 'users' into people.
One model of 'use' might suggest;
1 creator
10 synthesisers
100 consumers ?
Web 2.0 dynamics make it possible for there to be 100% participation in all three roles.
'Happenstance artistes'
Anyone with a keyboard is now an author
Anyone with a camera is now a photographer
Anyone with an iPod is now a DJ
Anyone with a browser is now a publisher
etc.
Bradley's demonstrating the power of 'interestingness' in Flickr. Interestingness isn't compiled by an active process such as voting/digging; instead they leverage organic behaviours such as viewing, tagging, linking. It's implicit rather than explicit, and has value. It's also less susceptible to gaming than explicit processes might be.
He then goes into a tour of various Yahoo! products, including their latest - and very interesting - Pipes, which various people have been getting so excited about.
A cold drink - instead of yet more coffee - would help me to concentrate... Pity there aren't any, and it's HOT. {grumble}
Technorati Tags: FOWALondon07, FOWALondon2007, Talis
Posted by Paul Miller at 04:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, on stage now at Future of Web Apps
Amazon's CTO is on stage now.
“Web Scale computing - compete on ideas, not resources”
Werner is talking about the importance of getting the boring infrastructure out of the way, to enable organisations to concentrate on their unique value/function. He's using the recent example from Doug Kaye, about building Gigavox on the back of Amazon infrastructure components such as S3 and EC2.
As Werner says,
What if... launching a new business on the web was simple?
What if... you only had to focus on the business
What if... you could manage growth more easily
What if... you only had to compete on ideas, not resources?
He's recommending a paper by John Hagel and John Seely Brown, from 2005. Ah, thank you Google; Here it is [pdf].
The paper talks about a move toward being able to 'pull' resources when you need them, in a model that is flexible, modular, loosely coupled, participatory, rapid, and more. Sounds pretty relevant to Amazon's model, and to ours...
Forces driving alternative resource models...
- Increasing uncertainty
- Growing abundance
- Intensifying competition
- Growing power of the customer
- Greater focus on learning and improvisation
Resource management in an uncertain world...
- Acquire resources on demand
- Release resources when no longer needed
- Pay for what you need
It can be difficult, traditionally, to develop and scale a web business; you need to put so much infrastructure in place before you can launch, and you need to anticipate growth and demand well in advance. It's unrealistic, it's hard, and it's ridiculously expensive.
It's easier, Werner argues, to pull resources on demand. Just in Time manufacturing for the IT generation? JIT didn't always work, of course...
Werner recommends Getting Real.
Resources in the Pull Model - scalable infrastructure that allow your applications to meet infinite demand, cheaply and reliably.
Amazon S3, EC2, SQS; scalable, cost-effective, reliable, simple, compatible
Example of smugmug; storing an additional 10Tb of data in S3 every month; and costs rise as usage rises, rather than ahead of use. This one's been widely talked about before, and there are more details from SmugMug's Don MacAskill here, and in some subsequent posts.
I blogged about one of Werner's podcasts earlier this year. At the time, I wrote
“The points that Werner was making sounded very similar to internal discussions at Talis as we continue to grow the Calypso Platform.”
Having seen/heard him in the flesh, I stand by that. I'm glad we're talking to Amazon...
Technorati Tags: Amazon, FOWALondon07, FOWALondon2007, Talis
Posted by Paul Miller at 03:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Jason Chuck - Open APIs
Jason Chuck from Google is up on stage at Future of Web Apps; he's based in London, and responsible for Google Maps, Google Earth etc development in Europe.
Jason's talking about the increasing ability to embed KML in Google Maps as well as its original use in Google Earth, and showing some of the models built in SketchUp.
He's stressing the importance of open and useful apis, to make it as easy as possible for developers to build new apps unanticipated by Google. Increased usage is good for Google, and others. Tight deployment of their apis in our apps is also - of course - a form of lock-in, that persuades us to keep building upon their foundations...
Technorati Tags: FOWALondon07, FOWALondon2007, Talis
Posted by Paul Miller at 02:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
ThinkFree - browser-based office app with MS Office roundtrip compatibility
Next up, here at Future of Web Apps; Thinkfree is one of several web-based office replacements. Unlike most of those I've looked at it includes a reasonable presentation package (and the speaker is eating his own dog food, and presenting with it...), and it also claims full round-trip compatibility with Office.
We're being shown a viewer api to allow bloggers (and others!) to display spreadsheet files etc online, without the need for downloaded viewers or apps. That could be useful, and I might have to give it a try...
Technorati Tags: FOWALondon07, FOWALondon2007, Talis
Posted by Paul Miller at 02:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Future of Web Apps - Last.fm
Matthew Ogle and Anil Bawa Cavia - Lessons from Building the world's largest social music platform
Last.fm is very popular with the younger members of our house, although some of the older residents are perhaps getting a little tired of hearing S Club Seven blaring out of the computer in the living room! It works nicely on laptops in hotel rooms, too, bringing a little bit of the real world to the dreary corporateness of a Hilton or a Holiday Inn...
Matthew Ogle is up on stage here at Future of Web Apps, talking about some of the lessons they learned in building and growing this UK-based social media success story.
Some numbers;
15 million tracks scrobbled per day
175 scrobbles per second
Over 6 billion tracks scrobbled since 2003
10 million artists
70 million tracks
700,000 30 second clips streamable via the Last.fm radio
17 million items tagged
145,000 wiki pages about artists
Early growth lessons;
- Don't overextend - scale with growth, not before
- Make sure the revenue model scales as usage increases
- Involve users in you and your story; make your growth a selfish aim for your users
- Be as open as you can afford to be
Openness and growth
Early audioscrobbler protocol, to consume data from established audio players, rather than trying to persuade users to switch to a new and content-light service. Incentivise developers, and allow users to gain value with little pain.
Promote a community around your application, and talk to your users even when the news is bad.
Anil is talking about the realities of growing a small company into a larger one, identifying the importance of appropriate processes as developer teams grow. He also makes the point about the importance of opening up apis and other means of access, to speed the move from 'application' to 'platform. Familiar! :-)
Back to Matthew, who's talking about the difference between scrobbling ('myware') and other tracking technologies which tend toward the more traditional 'spyware'. He's making reference to the Attention Economy (see an early podcast of ours with Ed Batista of the AttentionTrust), and pushing the value of leveraging your own behaviour (what I listen to), combined with the aggregate attention flows to create something of value to the individual and the community. [sorry - hard to string a coherent sentence together whilst listening...!]
Anil is talking about ways of making money on the back of the Last.fm model; Monetising Attention in essence. He's referring to a blog post by Fred Wilson, which he summarises thus;
microchunk it - reduce content to simplest form
free it - put it out there without walls around it or strings attached
syndicate it - let anyone take it and run with it
monetise it - put the monetisiation and tracking systems into the microchunk
Some interesting stuff about leveraging attention data to clean up tag clouds, etc.
Last.fm plans;
More - growth, streamable music, ambient findability, personalisation/ things you can do with your data
Less - interfaces, barriers to entry, gradients
And yes, Last.fm will be an important part of tonight's hotel room stay... if there's affordable wifi! :-)
Technorati Tags: FOWALondon07, FOWALondon2007, Last.fm, Social Networking, Talis
Posted by Paul Miller at 02:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Tara Hunt - Citizen Agency
Update - Tara's slides are now available (pdf)
Building Fostering Online Communities
Tara Hunt from the Citizen Agency has just been up on stage here in London, talking about online communities. Many good points, that align with the things we are doing around our developer network. Here are the raw notes, which I need to think about a bit...
what makes a community?
'a virtual space supported by computer-based it, centred upon communication and interaction of participants to build relationships' (Lee and Vogel)
personal homepage/profile
personal content creation
ability to interact with the content of others - comments, etc
ability to 'friend' and share content
visitor -> customer -> community member
benefits of community
heightened customer loyalty (emotional lock-in)
self-policing
amplified word of mouth
better feedback
stronger and more interesting filters on content
examples of communities
lightweight social processes
- low-barrier social involvement like voting and recording of participation (digg, last.fm, Amazon readers who bought, del.icio.us etc)
collaborative information structures
- developer network
high end collaboration
- groups utilising systems to make sense and share complex materials and data (wikipedia, linux, etc)
common community themes
looked at Flickr, twitter, wordpress, threadless, BarCamp
sense of fun/play important
- have fun. Founders having fun. Playful messages/imagery
keeping dialogue going
- personal use of the product, involved personally in support, greet new customers and welcome them to the site (“if guests come to a party and don't know anyone, they'll leave”)
wouldn't it be awesome if...
- take experimental approach to dev, throw away the business plan and learn to embrace chaos [Flickr the side project to building a game, Google, etc]
the power of word of mouth
- built-in variety of ways to share [invitations to friends, blog widgets, rss, ], participants are creators too [so help them to help you], instead of adding more features add more on-ramps [jabber, email, web-based, sms-based etc in twitter]
involving community in decisions
- listen to your users and be flexible, let the community create the content, put the audience in charge,
simple platforms for building on
- google maps v Yahoo! maps [Yahoo richer application, but Google simpler and easier to build upon - WAY more mashups...], building blocks built by experts and combinable easily by non-experts [Pipes etc], make the platform simple and extensible, provide a simple but rich API, keep it simple and document it openly, focus on one function and do it well
compelling stories
-
rewards for members
- featured members, parties, etc...
Setting fertile ground for your OWN community
motivation [what's in it for THEM]
sense of community [feeling of membership [do I belong/fit ?], feeling of influence [your voice is heard, feedback responsiveness, rule enforcement], integration and fulfilment of need [feeling of being supported by the community, rewards of membership, shared values, feeling of competence - maslow's hierarchy of needs stuff, esp social, self esteem/ego, self-actualisation - karma points, vip status, etc.], shared community feeling [relationships, high quality and frequent interaction, personal investment of time and resources, the effect of honour and humiliation, spiritual bonds - this last level CANNOT BE CREATED - although physical interaction will help, and patience is essential]]
“Fostering healthy communities is complicated, time consuming and requires dedication to your members, but the rewards are high and long term.”
Slides to go up on slideshare.
Technorati Tags: FOWALondon07, FOWALondon2007, Talis
Posted by Paul Miller at 12:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Commoditisation of IT and what the future holds
Simon Wardley from zimki has just been up on stage here at the Future of Web Apps. A good presenter, with plenty of amusing pics to support some very valid points that certainly resonate with us at Talis.
Simon talked about commoditisation in the IT sector, and starts by offering a few definitions...
“change from monopolistic to perfect competition”
“yesterday's hot stuff becomes today's boredom”
“rare thing becomes ubiquitous and distributed”
“competitive advantage becomes cost of doing business”
and
“new thing moves to leading edge which moves to standard product which becomes a utility service”
He uses the standard example of the electricity industry, which we've used quite a lot at Talis in the past, and then moves on to introduce zimki, which is one attempt to commoditise the delivery of Javascript web apps in ways somewhat similar to Amazon with compute power on EC2 or Talis with data in our Platform.
Simon wraps up with
“Later this year we'll open source everything”
effectively addressing the usual concerns around lock-in, and reliance upon third parties.
This looks to be one that's worth a closer look.
Technorati Tags: FOWALondon07, FOWALondon2007, zimki, Talis
Posted by Paul Miller at 11:59 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Future of Web Apps - The Changing Face of Online Communities and Communications
Edwin Aoki, Chief Architect, AOL
Current state of web applications
webmail single leading driver of page views (9.32%, search is 7.32%)
IM/chat moving from client apps toward the web browser
Traditional community apps - blogs, myspace, etc.
Non-traditional communities - wikipedia, reviews on Amazon, eBay auctions, etc.
Industry trends - disaggregation and syndication
“A bit scary” in the traditional content market. Customers moving from the destination portal toward moving from place to place, following the content.
Loss of control. Loss of managed experience.
Web apps can become syndicated; embedding content into third party sites, content/community apps following users off the desktop and onto their mobile device... presence, intelligence, etc.
Technorati Tags: FOWALondon07, FOWALondon2007, Talis
Posted by Paul Miller at 11:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
No free wifi at FOWA
I'm at the Future of Web Apps in London with some colleagues from Talis.
Mike Arrington of TechCrunch is on the stage just now, but I get the feeling that people are too busy grumbling about the surprise news that the conference is not providing free wifi, despite the site implying (but not stating explicitly) that we'd get it.
“We will be providing an exclusive wifi cloud for your blogging pleasure.”
Instead, we have to pay for (slow) access via BT Openzone. Hmm...
Technorati Tags: FOWALondon07, FOWALondon2007
Posted by Paul Miller at 09:56 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
19 February 2007
London again
And then, after tomorrow's trip for Future of Web Apps, it's back to London again on Thursday evening for mashup*, where one of our recent podcast guests is amongst the speakers.
Again, if you're around, why not say Hi?
Technorati Tags: FOWA07, FOWA2007, Podcasting, mashup*, Segala, Talis
Posted by Paul Miller at 01:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
London-bound
Tomorrow morning, I join the Talis contingent heading south to the hell we call London. We're attending the Future of Web Apps, an extremely interesting-looking event from Ryan and Gillian Carson's Carson Systems.
Alongside me on the train, inhaling Virgin coffee to counteract the effects of getting up early, will be Andy Latham, Malcolm Landon and Luke no-blog Painter. Our colleague Ian Davis lives down in that direction, and tells us that he will “find us on irc” when we get there.
Watch out for coverage of the interesting bits here, here, and on the blogs of my colleagues. And if you're also in the room why not find us and say Hi?
Technorati Tags: FOWA07, FOWA2007, FOWALondon07, FOWALondon2007, Talis
Posted by Paul Miller at 12:48 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
16 February 2007
Open Data at XTech
Like my colleague Ian Davis, I was pleased to hear that my presentation proposal for this year's XTech conference has been accepted.
My proposal offered;
“‘Open Data’ has been a track at XTech for some time, but has gained broader traction over the past 12-18 months as individuals and organisations grapple with its implications to the business models of (often large) incumbents.
Moving beyond the religious dogma around the ‘rightness’ of open access to data, how do existing players and new entrants balance the possibly rising costs of data provision and storage against the lost revenue streams from subscriptions and lock-ins?
Drawing upon the experiences of an organisation that is going through a migration from subscription to open participation, this paper explores some of the realities behind Open Data, and offers pointers to ways in which the ideal can be delivered, sustainably and repeatedly.”
I look forward to sharing some of these ideas with those of you who make the trip to Paris in May.
Technorati Tags: open data, XTech2007, Talis
Posted by Paul Miller at 02:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Community Projects for the Semantic Web
One area of W3C activity with which we're involved at Talis is the Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group.
As reported on one of the SWEO pages,
“The W3C Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group wishes to encourage a community of developers to come together to work on some Semantic Web projects. This rally has the goal of using our collective input to generating real running code, that can help us to demonstrate the value of the Semantic Web to a wide user base. We want to encourage developers to work together to create something that will make a real difference to people's lives today. This is not a competition like the Semantic Web Challenge, rather an effort to bring together people to share ideas, with the added possibility of being able to realise the ideas by working with like minded programmers.”
The call has now closed, and we received ten expressions of interest which the group is now discussing.
Given our other interests within Talis, I was particularly taken by the POWDER browser extension (see my recent podcasts with Paul Walsh and Phil Archer for more on the possibilities there) and by the two Open Data projects. Of the two, Bizer and Cyganiak's proposal would appear to be garnering more public support than Chen's and it's perhaps unfortunate that two such similar sets of ideas are in competition. I've been impressed by the speed with which the former has gathered attention to itself, with burgeoning wiki pages and an active mailing list, and very much look forward to seeing how a group of like-minded individuals can build upon components such as flexible licensing, changing attitudes, and increasingly powerful infrastructure to expose, maintain and leverage the wealth of data that we currently do such a good job of locking away behind supposedly 'public' web interfaces.
Open Data is becoming ever more important in underpinning a new generation of applications and services. Open Data doesn't 'need' the Semantic Web... but maybe the Semantic Web needs Open Data.
Technorati Tags: Semantic Web, SWEO, Talis, Talis Community Licence, Talis Community License, Talis Platform, Talking with Talis, W3C
Posted by Paul Miller at 02:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
8 February 2007
Phil Archer of ICRA talks with Talis about content labelling and the Semantic Web
In our latest Talking with Talis podcast, I speak with Phil Archer, Chief Technical Officer at the Internet Content Rating Association, ICRA. We discuss some of the background to ICRA, looking at past, present and future involvement in the whole arena of content labelling, content ratings and trust marks. As well as describing the use of technology in protecting vulnerable users and viewers, Phil outlines some of the many ways in which we are able to assist all users in finding the types of content most relevant to their circumstances.
We conclude our conversation by looking at some of the ways in which content labels are demonstrating the broader potential of the Semantic Web.
Listen Now | Download MP3 [42 mins, 29 Mb]
During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;
- 4 on Demand TV download service from Channel 4
- Google Co-op Annotations
- Bleak House
- British Board of Film Classification (BBFC)
- contentlabel.org
- Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB)
- European Commission press release, “Mobile operators agree on how to safeguard children using mobile phones”
- Health on the Net Foundation
- Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA)
- The BBC Trust's ongoing Public Value Test for the proposed iPlayer
- The UK Government's Office of Communications (Ofcom) activity around Media Literacy
- microformats.org
- Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)
- Pan European Game Information (PEGI)
- Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS)
- Resource Description Framework (RDF)
- Recreational Software Advisory Council (RSAC). Now part of ICRA, but described via Wikipedia
- Segala
- Titanic
- World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
- W3C mobileOK
- W3C Semantic Web Activity
- W3C Semantic Web Education & Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group
- W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
- W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
This conversation was conducted by telephone on Wednesday 7 February 2007, edited in Audacity, and tidied up with Levelator.
Technorati Tags: ICRA, Podcasting, RDF, Semantic Web, Talis, Talking with Talis
Posted by Paul Miller at 03:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
