Back from BlogTalk Reloaded
Back from BlogTalk Reloaded a few days ago, where I enjoyed a lot of interesting talks and presentations[1] about social software and weblogging, especially :
- danah boyd’s keynote and especially remarks about relations between users and the way social networking websites are currently developped (hacks, reaction to users demands …);
- talks by Lee Bryant / Headshift and by Rod Smith / IBM about social software and use of open APIs and “Web 2.0″ technologies as AJAX, Google Maps … in corporate contexts;
- social aspects of blogging; even if I attended the conference mostly for its technical and corporate talks, it as a good opportunity to get different views about its impacts;
- monday evening meeting, and discussions with zeroK, Ton Zijlstra, bazaar guys, and more. A nice way to know more about activites and interests of everyone;
- Matt Mullenweng’s keynote. I was wondering since the program was published what what this “Jazz” about: new API ? Framework ? … No, simply music. Nice jazzmen quotes and pictures to describe the life of a software project - and maybe life itself ? The kind of keynote to relax after lunch !
Regarding my talk - apologizes for the english 
- what I felt is that Semantic Web still fears people (especially using and maintaining ontologies / knowledge bases), but I hope attendees were interested in the approach. I also got this feeling during SIOC presentation (.ppt) by Uldis and John, especially regarding the questions about microformats and SIOC differences and advantages. John wrote some ideas about creating links between both communities.
So, thanks again to Thomas, Jan and BlogTalk organizers for these two days.
Just a few suggestions:
- let speakers choose between different formats for their talks. While some presentations are indeed more appropriate for a 10 minutes talk and a debate, others are better with a more formal talk and Q/A way;
- proceedings. Even if a book is planned, it would be nice to get the papers at the beginning of the conference;
- shirts, please provice blogtalk shirts for us geeks next year
Finally, for those that didn’t attend, there’s a lot of stuff to look at on BlogTalk wiki, Technorati, Flickr …
Notes
[1] All talks where video-recorded and uploaded a few minutes after, and are still available on the program page.
Comments
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Current highlights
Alexandre, thanks for the roundup and the constructive feedback. I enjoyed meeting you in Vienna. The different formats for the presentations were indeed confusing, that was a lesson learned for us. You should have received an E-Mail by now regarding a more formal evaluation survey; feel free to enter these and any other (positive as well as negative) feedback issues there so we will have a comprehensive overview. Thanks and until the next conference
Bonjour Alexandre,
I enjoyed meeting you in Vienna. I am one of those that struggles with the semantic web. A lot of discussion is way too much focussed on the classification of information, where I think that the human relationships provide a much more natural framework for the evaluation of informationflows. Social software is I think about putting those human relationships first, before information. On the other hand, we need a lot of relatively smart plumbing to make the ‘human’ web work. RSS/XML, OPML are tools that are part of that plumbing in my eyes, and if the Semantic Web can be the fundament for smart plumbing then at least for me it will be very valuable.
best
Ton
Hi Ton,
You’re right, user interactions and communities of practices have an important role to play in information discovery / flow. Yet, we insisted on classification here as this is a first way to let users of the platform know that others work / publish on the same topics, and then see some communities emerge (or infer them using what people read or blog about).
Regarding human relationships and Semantic Web, you should be interested in FOAF, an ontology to describe people, interests, and relationships. More on http://foaf-project.org