socialmedia.net

SMXQ: Dave Marash

socialmedia.net — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 18:22:29 +0000

Dave Marash is an acclaimed American television journalist. He has reported on many major stories, both domestic and international, over a period spanning decades. When he joined Al Jazeera English as the network's Washington, DC anchor it caused much public debate. Prior to that he worked with ABC News on Nightline, their flagship current affairs programme. Before Nightline, he spent more than a decade in local news and sports, and worked at ABC's 20/20 and CBS Radio. The broadcaster won an Overseas Press Club Award for his 1972 radio reports on the Munich Olympic Games terrorist attack, and also received Emmy Awards for his Nightline coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing and for his coverage of the explosion of TWA Flight 800.

Lin Clark On Why Drupal Matters

Tom Murphy — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 21:50:13 +0000

Drupal is a content management system that is free and open source. It allows you to build and configure complex and multi-faceted websites without first learning how to code or program. A new version, Drupal 7, is due for wide release very shortly. The system itself is stable and is in use on some major sites such as Examiner.com. However, there are still some bugs in the upgrade process which are awaiting resolution.

Lin Clark majored in Communication Design from Carnegie Mellon University and is engaged in her Master’s program at DERI, NUI Galway in Galway, Ireland. Her thesis is entitled “Semantic Web Technologies and Content Management Systems”. For those interested in working with Drupal or who are just starting out, she has made a series of video tutorials which can be found on YouTube and at semantic-drupal.com.

The Internet Becomes The Interdata: Interview With Stefan Decker

Tom Murphy — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 20:28:41 +0000

Stefan Decker is the director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI). One of its key funders is Science Foundation Ireland. It is based in Galway, Ireland, and with a staff of over 130, it is the largest web research institute on the planet.

DERI works with industrial partners such as Ericsson and Avaya to road test and develop new ideas in Semantic Web research. Cisco, for one, is rapidly moving from a company which used to produce hardware and routers to a company that is connecting people much more than machines, and who are basing new technologies on work that has been done at the institute. Developments like SIOC are becoming a global standard in representing information about how humans communicate, and for the foreseeable future this sort of research can only grow in importance and relevance.

SMXQ: Ina O'Murchu

John Breslin — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 12:55:46 +0000

Ina O'Murchu is an occasional contributor to socialmedia.net. She will be speaking at Ignite the West this Friday, September 10th, and at Bizcamp Galway the next day.

Could you tell us about your background (where you're from, what you've done)?

I’m originally from Galway City. I grew up here but spent some time in London and Dublin. I’ve worked in the technology sector for fifteen years, and I have worked in the Social Web space this past seven.

What was your route into social media?

A degree in chemistry started it all off. I was twenty-two and had just bought .net magazine. I had to select a final year project as part of my course that summer. Always interested in new things, I applied to design the chemistry department’s website as my final year project. The more time I spent on the Web during that year, the more I realised the huge impact the Web was going to have on society, and the more and more I got into it. I abandoned my chemistry skills and ended up working in tech. After a number of years working I went back to retrain, and I completed a Master's degree at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in NUI Galway.

Fergus Hurley And The Silicon Valley State Of Mind

Tom Murphy — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 22:21:23 +0000

Images of Clixtr HQ.

Fergus Hurley, a native of Galway, and a graduate of University College Cork and MIT, now resides in California. He is the CEO of Clixtr. His new venture - Picbounce - is in beta and will be live shortly. In a very short time, he has acquired a lot of experience doing business in Silicon Valley, and he shares some of his thoughts with us here.

We started off by discussing the role of venture captialists (VCs) in Silicon Valley.

”In businesses there are certain things that have to be done every time that are replicable and repeatable, and the same for every business and other things that are unique to that business. You have to excel on the things that are unique and that makes you different because other people are going to be very, very good at doing the business side of things and executing very well. So the VCs are able to execute well on the business side while you are able to innovate well on the product side.

Henry Story And WebID

Tom Murphy — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 21:04:38 +0000

Henry Story was until recently a Social Web Architect at Sun Microsystems. Previously, he worked on Babel Fish, a machine translation service at AltaVista. The babel fish was a small creature featured in "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy". When placed in the ear, it could translate all known languages. The author of the book, Douglas Adams, was also involved in the project.

Henry is the creator of WebID, and on a recent visit to 091 Labs in Galway, Ireland, he took some time out to tell us more about it.

Why is WebID important?

"Currently social networks are closed systems. You have to be part of a social network to friend or communicate with anybody on that social network.

Highlights From BlogTalk 2010: Day Two

Emer Lawn — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:28:25 +0000

Ruairí McKiernan speaking at BlogTalk 2010.

The second day of the conference proved just as valuable as the first, starting with Stowe Boyd talking us through his "web of flow" theory and how it is all about the streams.

He was followed by Ruairí McKiernan inspiring the crowd with the story of SpunOut.ie. Fergus Hurley talked about his experiences doing business in Silicon Valley and Laurent Walter Goix spoke of bringing it back to "context" from a telecoms perspective. Ronan Skehill outlined how "Apps Are Bad", and after a healthy debate around this idea we went to lunch.

Perhaps one of my favourite sessions from the conference was Deanna Lee‘s talk about engagement and The New York Public Library.

Various other presentations filled the afternoon; but again the highlight of the day was the panel discussion on location-based social networks.

Location-Based Social Networking Panel Discussion

Six Month Review

Tom Murphy — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 22:16:30 +0000

Connemara, County Galway.

Tomorrow, it will be six months since I wrote my first article for socialmedia.net. The Winter Olympics had just closed and I felt that NBC - by treating social media as a billboard with a multitude of bells and whistles - had missed the opportunity for real engagement which is what this medium is all about.

This ‘not getting it’ by individuals and corporations alike turned out to be a major theme in many of the fifty-five articles I have written since then. My favourite, since you asked, is a very early article called "Galway Is A Mini San Francisco". It set the tone of what was to come in terms of accuracy and in the sense that we are all about; people doing new, creative things - particularly in Ireland but elsewhere too.

Highlights from BlogTalk 2010

Emer Lawn — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 21:11:19 +0000

Emer Lawn attended BlogTalk 2010 in Galway, Ireland last week, and she has very kindly agreed to share her original post with us here. This account is from day one. Day two will be posted shortly.

Arriving in Galway yesterday with little expectation for what Thursday and Friday would bring at BlogTalk 2010. I was delighted with day one… compelled me to write a blog at least, despite the conference having little or nothing to do with “blogging.” The day started for me with considerations for our identity online and whether we should have one ID for all properties across the Web. Facebook were bravely represented and I’d comfortably stand by them for a while. They are not going anywhere just yet! Credibility is the third thing that stuck out, which, of course, stems from being relevant and interesting.

Bill Liao: Unsustainability is a Euphemism for Doomed

Tom Murphy — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 06:33:13 +0000

Bill Liao is the author of the “The Stone Soup Way” and is involved with Xing and WeForest. The latter is an organization set up to empower local communities to reforest their environment by offering training in permaculture techniques.

Bill spoke on the first day at BlogTalk2010. He was interviewed afterwards and we would like to share some of the things he had to say.

“I am a great believer in a thing called permaculture which is an ethical design science. If you want to look at the height of civilization in my view, then it’s design.

"You can design a future that’s beautiful or you can design a future that sucks. Most people don’t bother to design the next five minutes let alone a future they really want to live into.

"It’s about designing a future you really want to live in and then creating a narrative about it that other people really hear and treating everyone with compassion. Hearing them, having them feel heard. Because most of the time we’re [left feeling] right about something because no one’s listening."

On the internet and mobile phones