BarCamp East Saturday May 10

I heard (via an old-school radio broadcast- Mario Armstrong's Digital Café short program) about an interesting SocialDevCampEast event this coming Saturday, May 10 (8:30 am - 1o:00 pm) at the University of Baltimore. This is described as "an Unconference for Thought Leaders of the Future Social Web". It would appear that over 160 participants have signed up in advance, including UMBC folks (UMBC is a sponsor). This is one in a series of BarCamp workshop conferences distinguished as low-overhead, self-organized, user-generated, open participation style events. The event site lists a number of diverse proposed sessions, many of which should be of interest to our class members. Frankly, I'm shocked I've not heard about this event via class or our blog! (Wish I could attend, but it's not to be).

Disqus: social commenting system

Disqus is a very good social commenting system that you can integrate with your current blogging system. It lets you to better track comments on your blog posts. Generally, you are required to subscribe to the entire thread. But, most of the times, you only want to see if there are any replies just to your post. So, you usually don’t subscribe to the entire thread and would think that you’ll just come back to the article and see if there are any replies to you. With Disqus, you only get replies to you emailed.
Disqus also provides other useful features, like RSS feeds for comments, building clout based on the votes to your reply comments, and widgets that display top commenters, recent comments, and articles with the most comments on them etc.

Comparison between Asian social networks and Facebook

Benjamin Joffe of Plus Eight Star offers a great summary of leading social network in Asia - namely QQ, mixi, Cyworld in the presentation at Media08 in Sydney. The presentation also gives insightful comparison of Facebook vs Asian SNS as business models.

Editor of ReadWriteWeb - took an interview with Benjamin Joffe following the presentation.
Interesting point is that these social websites are much more profitable than Facebook is, being rated at #4.

social web + charities

More and more charities are utilizing social networking sites. ReadWriteWeb discusses how sites like Facebook and MySpace allow users to donate through their sites and recruit other donors through their social networks.

The top Facebook Cause, Support the Campaign for Cancer Research, has over 3,086,062 members, but only $60,155 donated so far. While $60K is not a trifling sum of money, the average donation per member is pretty small.

FreeRice is taking a more interesting approach. By creating a Facebook app they use Facebook social networks to advertise and promote their site. Instead of asking users to donate, though, advertising revenue is used to support their cause.

profiting from your 15 minutes of infamy

As a follow-up to Mike's post about the media's usage of social networking sites, ArsTechnica has an article about how Ashley Alexandra Dupré is using those social networking sites to advance her music career.

After the Eliot Spitzer scandal broke, Ms. Dupré added a link in her profile to her music on Amie Street, an online music store. Amie Street is interesting in itself for dynamically pricing it's songs depending on their popularity. This page describes Amie Street in more detail.

"All songs start free and can rise in price up to 98 cents. The price of a song depends on how many times it's been bought - if a member buys a song for free, he or she probably got a deal for getting to the song first. If the song is at 98 cents, then it's a given that a lot of people on Amie Street think it's a great song."

Currently, Ashley Alexandra Dupré's songs are hitting the $0.98 maximum. According to Reuters, an estimated 1 million copies of her songs have been downloaded. That translates into more than $680,000! I guess she may as well profit for her "15 minutes of infamy".

Web 2.0 and Journalism

This week's latest sex scandal brought to you by... MySpace and Facebook. Well not completely. Just every piece of information about the woman at the center of the ordeal.

The article is about your standard important government dude + not so important non government woman except this specific article chronicles her Facebook usage. It seems that the social web is one of the first stops for journalists these days.

Social Semantic Tagweb Ontology is not a Dewy Decimal System Taxonomy

I stumbled upon a very interesting presentation that Tom Gruber gave at The 5th International Semantic Web Conference about how the Social Web and the Semantic Web are not two opposed visions for the web, moreover, they are so compatible that we can form a Semantic Web that enhances our Social Web experience, and the Semantic Web can be more meaningful with the input (the Collective Intelligence) of people on the Social Web.
He raises many interesting points such as:

• The difference between taxonomy, ontology, and folxonomy and how they relate. He especially points out that the goal of the Semantic Web isn't to create a taxonomy (a rigid categorization of the web), but an ontology (a means for different data from different sources to be understood, related, and used).


• He observes that tagging consists of a relationship between an entity (tagget), a URI (what is being tagged), and a phrase (the tag).


• There are issues that arise in tagging (having to do with each of those entities), especially when one wants to search through tags from different websites:
  
  
  • Tag spelling, whitespace, capitalization, and pluralization - which "different" tags should actually be considered the same?
  
  
  • What if there are different URI's for the same "thing": How do we detect this? What do we do about it?
  
  
  • Different kinds of taggers: What if we let machines tag things - should those be considered to tags by humans?
  
  
  • What happens when you change your mind: what if something is un-tagged?
  
  
  • Tag polarity: Should users be able to tag things as not-something?
  
  


• Another interesting concept presented is the idea that browsing can be viewed as browsing along the dimensions of a hypercube: location dimensions, tag dimensions, time dimensions, etc.


• Useful things can be done like letting tags be inherited: if a picture was taken in Paris, it was also taken in France - so we can add the tag "France" to anything tagged "Paris", right? (what if it's Paris, Texas... or some other Paris?).


• More fun topics like structured data and how with Google we are getting locked into the string-of-words style of searching.

In short, there is a lot of focus on the potential of improving tagging systems, and on the potential of the future of tagging and the web in general.

If you have an extra hour of nothing to do, or if you just want to put it on in the background while you're doing chores, it's definitely worth watching/listening to.
I'd also be glad to hear your thoughts on this.