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20 June 2007

Mashup on Location

I spent the evening at the Mashup* event in London. Tonight's theme was location and specifically location-based services. We were treated to a long sales pitch from TeleAtlas as the opener which was followed by a rather lacklustre panel session. This was a shame because the others have been pretty good (such as the one on identity)

The evening was saved, in my opinion, by Tom Heinersdorff who posed a question about passive data matching in the middle of the panel session and enquired whether any of the panel were working on such a system. The example he gave was of someone walking past a supermarket which happened to be broadcasting information about a special offer on chocolate which the person's phone could detect and alert them if it knew they liked chocolate. Unfortunately this useful question got buried by the moderator who used it as an opportunity to talk about how he'd heard that Tesco gather so much information on its customers that it can tell that a woman is pregnant before she knows herself. The audience laughed and moved straight onto the next question, leaving Tom's point behind.

Which was a pity, because when I spoke to him after it turns out that there is a very compelling privacy story in this passive matching idea. Most location based systems fall down here because they require the user's device to transmit its location which, in the age of data protection acts, can't be used without the user's consent which often requires them signing a form. Putting any sort of barrier in front of this data simply reduces its uptake and hence usefulness. The whole issue isn't helped by the mobile operators' insistence on charging extortionate sums for access to the APIs around this data.

The beauty of Tom's suggestion is that there is no transmission of personal information between the vendor and the consumer. Thus it works without all that hassle of getting consumer consent because no private data actually leaves the user's mobile device and the user is fully in control of the experience. I can imagine this working in other domains too, such as online advertising. In that case the ad server would suggest some pertinent advertisments based on the page content and the user's browser would select which ones might be of interest to them. The browser would be configurable with user preferences or perhaps adaptive over time.

It's not a win-win scenario though since the advertisers and marketers don't get their hands on that lovely profile data that they so cherish. However, it's a big win for consumer privacy.

Apparently the next Mashup event is on TV 2.0 so maybe we'll see some Joost or miniweb presence.

Posted by Ian Davis at 12:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

12 June 2007

Tom Heath Talks with Talis about Revyu.com and the Semantic Web

Tomheathcrop

In our latest Talking with Talis podcast, I talk with Tom Heath about his Ph.D research at the Open University's Knowledge Media Institute.

During our conversation, we discuss the ways in which people draw upon the expertise of social networks, Revyu.com, the Semantic Web, and the importance of the current cluster of Linked Data projects of which Revyu is one.

Listen Now

Download MP3 [61 mins, 42Mb]

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

This conversation was conducted as a SkypeOut call on Tuesday 12 June, recorded with Ecamm Network's Call Recorder for Skype, and edited on a Mac with Garageband.

The picture of Tom Heath was taken by Gregory Todd Williams, and is shared on Flickr under a Creative Commons License.

For further Talking with Talis podcasts on the emerging Web of Data, see here.

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Posted by Paul Miller at 03:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

7 June 2007

Tim Berners-Lee discusses Linked Data in a ZDNet video

Tbl-Vid

In a short video interview with ZDNet's David Berlind, Sir Tim Berners-Lee talks lucidly about the value of Linked Data.

Have a look...

Update - David Berlind and Dan Farber chew the fat on this and more in this week's episode of the regular Dan and David Show.

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Posted by Paul Miller at 04:09 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack