New Springer-Book: Social Semantic Web

It took a while and I was waiting for the book to come like a child waiting for Christmas. But now it´s out – our new book: Social Semantic Web (Web 2.0 – was nun?).

Springer: Social Semantic Web

Web 2.0 – and now? This question is answered by 49 authors in 24 articles.

One hypothesis which is discussed in this book: Especially the idea of “transferring” Web 2.0 into an Enterprise Environment should be backed by semantic web technologies.

Read more about this book (in German) in our Semantic Wiki.

Digital natives are here…

When Nova Spivack says: “It’s the wisdom of crowds and the wisdoms of computers working together” it sounds a bit like a romantic imagination of a young man or – more likely – it sounds like the next new marketing slogan.

Crowds can´t be wise at all. It´s always a single human being who is (or can be) wise. It´s rather a matter of HOW people organise themselves. The use of web technologies to improve communication isn´t really new but, it´s the kind of mass collaboration which is new and it´s based on the way the internet is perceived by digital natives.

The only bottleneck on the way to Web 3.0 are human beings (not technology) and their tendency to reflect on their mindsets only from time to time. And it´s a matter of fact that people rather spend a lot of time with thinking about strategies to gain personal advantages than with strategy building for better ways to communicate. With digital natives it´s a bit different: They were socialised within networks, so they have already learned that cooperation also improves the personal situation.

So it´s rather like the “blindness of crowds”: When will all the digital immigrants finally learn, that they must co-operate in many cases, since it´s the only way out? And there is another principle natives are already aware of: “It´s always very dangerous to listen for the gurus…”

The “career” of a website can be strange sometimes…

When I first stumbled upon “StumbleUpon” about two years ago or so, I was fascinated by the idea of this application using “collaborative filtering” – the wisdom of the crowd. But after a while more and more friends were using del.icio.us, which wasn´t that brilliant at all to my opinion but simply more often used. Most of all I am missing a function which helps you to identify new interesting websites by simply clicking on one button. Moreover delicious doesn´t help to identify “Friends with same interests” like for example Facebook offers with music taste etc.

Now, a year after del.icio.us had its tremendous boom StumbleUpon seems to catch up.

Sometimes websites have strange “careers”: it´s a bit the word of mouth, a bit – of course – media which helps to boost websites, and finally with a little help from one of the big Web 2.0 companies (in this case Ebay´s US$75Mio.) you can do it!

Is there a Social Semantic Web?

From September 26 – 27 a Conference on the Social Semantic Web (CSSW) will be held in Leipzig. The conference will end with a panel discussion on the question “Is there a Social Semantic Web?”.

My opinion is: Yes, there is only a social semantic web. The internet as a whole is of course a social system (what else? drop some bombs and the internet becomes senseless…) which starts reflecting about itself. This process we call the social semantic web.

It is like a little kid starting to talk and to find out that language is about abstracting real things like emotions or feelings. This little person also starts to find out that language is not only about connecting some words, no, there are rules how to connect things.

The novel thing about the semantic web is that the first time in humanity we create a space where human beings will create reality together with computers. Since computers have on advantage compared to people that´s helpful indeed: They have a better overview. They “know” what´s going on in the internet from a higher altitude. YOU will always be the one who teaches the machine and if this collective process won´t be manipulated by some people this will be an even more effective symbiosis on the social semantic web than it´s already now on the Web 2.0.

Reminder: Call for papers TRIPLE-I

TRIPLE-I
The Innovation Conference for Knowledge Management, New Media Technology and Semantic Technologies

5 – 7 September 2007
Graz, Austria

http://www.triple-i.info

The TRIPLE-I Conference series is a joint venture of the conferences

•   I-KNOW – International Conference on Knowledge Management
•   I-MEDIA – International Conference on New Media Technology
•   I-SEMANTICS – International Conference on Semantic Technology

Regular paper submissions for I-KNOW may include but are not limited to:

- Identifying Relationships between different kinds of Knowledge Entities
- Service-oriented Architectures for Knowledge Management Systems
- Service-based Knowledge Management
- Orchestration of Knowledge Management Services
- Distributed Knowledge Management
- Social Network Analysis
- Knowledge Work Productivity
- Communication and Collaboration in Knowledge Management
- Context and Usage Pattern Identification and Management
- Agile Approaches to Knowledge Management

Regular paper submissions for I-MEDIA may include but are not limited
to:

- Web 2.0 Applications for Content Providers
- Business Models for New Media
- Social Media Platforms
- User-Generated Content
- Cross-Media Content Production and Delivery
- Cross-Media Search and Retrieval
- New Media Services
- Innovative User Interfaces for Media Devices
- The Geospatial Web
- Marketing of Products and Services via New Media

Regular paper submissions for I-SEMANTICS may include but are not limited to:

- Semantic Social Software
- Semantic Wikis and Weblogs
- Semantic Desktop
- Social Tagging and Folksonomies
- Ontology Engineering
- Terminology Management
- Visualisation of Semantic Models
- Interoperability, Integration and Reasoning
- Semantic Web Applications
- Experiences, Studies and Metrices

Deadlines
21 May 2007: Full paper submission (4-8 pages)
18 June 2007:   Notification of acceptance
13 July 2007:  Final version (8 pages)
5-7 September 2007: TRIPLE-I Conference

Nova Spivack gave an interview…

Nova Spivack gave an interview to the Semantic Web School where he points out again, that it´s time to bring the Semantic Web to ordinary non-technical end-users. Read more….

Vilém Flusser`s comments on Web 2.0

The always inspiring Flusser has anticipated Web 2.0 about 15 years ago: His “telematic society” is what we call the blogosphere today.

“Social network dialogues would no longer be dominated by discourses, but would be fully dialogic and supported in their democratic character by a technological infrastructure that is organized itself as network dialogue.” (C. Fuchs: The Internet as a Self-Organizing Socio-Technological System)