Have you ever read “privacy policy” of your preferred social media?

Today we had an interview date with Markus Mooslechner from ORF (Austrian Broadcasting). The TV-Show “Newton” will discuss next Saturday how social media affects our lives, especially how one can make sure that private data won´t be used improperly, e.g. by certain internet providers.

My colleague Tassilo Pellegrini gave some nice examples how some providers like Facebook explicitly state in their privacy policy that they are allowed to hand over all personal data to any other third party (“…our service providers may have access to your personal information for use for a limited time in connection with these business activities”).

It´s a shame that some fundamental rights regarding privacy have dissipated in just a few years.

Also today, I asked Chris Bizer, doubtlessly one of the key-players in the semantic web community, some questions for an interview. Among other things I was also wondering if he thinks that the Semantic Web could solve some privacy issues or if Linked Data will rather become a synonym for “transparent user” (Gläserner Mensch).

We will see, what Chris thinks, the interview will be published soon.

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!

“Knowledge Relationship Discovery” with Google

One of the most important class of applications within the semantic web are services which help users to find out “hidden” relationships between resources like people, concepts or documents.

I´ve been trying out Google Sets from time to time which was an always impressive application to me. You enter one or more members (eg. persons, companies, technologies etc.) from the same class of your choice and Google “predicts” what else could fit into this set.

To me it seems like this service has been improved constantly in the last few months. If you type in just one member of an imaginary class like a person´s name you´ll see that Google has not only categorized search phrases but also knows a lot about social relationships.

http://labs.google.com/sets?hl=en&q1=andreas+blumauer – wow, Google knows a lot about my social network…

Scripting for the Semantic Web

This year´s ESWC hosted the 3rd International Workshop on “Scripting for the Semantic Web” (SFSW 2007). I really enjoyed that event, also because of the very friendly and relaxed atmosphere in that community. Danny Ayers started with a talk called “Two Webs!“. He pointed out the ways to use the “Semantic Web” (again: it´s NOT a completely new web aside Web 2.0!) as an “RDF-Bus” where existing data sources can be interlinked quite easily (see: LinkingOpenData @ SWEO).

• Michael Hausenblas presented “PSIMeter” which is a demo to show alternative ways to RDF-ize the flickr API regarding machine tags.
• Chris Bizer outlined once more the importance of the “Web of (open) data” and presented The RDF Book Mashup: From Web APIs to a Web of Data (For a demo go here)
• Eyal Oren was talking about two services which play an important role in a Semantic Web infrastructure: Sindice and Ping the Semantic Web
• Uldis Bojãrs and some others from the SIOC project presented their ideas and I really liked the SIOC Browser.
• And finally the brilliant Ripple won the Semantic Scripting Challenge (Paper).

I also enjoyed talking with Sören Auer, Chris Bizer, Danny Ayers, Tom Heath and some others very much. Thanks to the organizers!

On top of the Viennese library

together with Leo Sauermann talking about the Semantic Desktop “war mir ein großes Volksfest”. Thanks Leo!

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

Still no FOAF File?

FOAF Files become more and more widespread… Like years ago, when people started to ask “Do have an email?”, now the question comes up “Do you have a FOAF File?”. Well, actually people should ask “Do you have a URI?”, but this discussion seems to be only the next step …

Quite interesting is the fact, that people with FOAF Files obviously don´t have a weblog quite often and vice versa. So, do you have both?

A well done service to navigate FOAF Files is FOAFer – please compare the results with those from Tabulator – using your own FOAF-File . (Or if you´re a DB-Admin look at this post!)

A comprehensive overview how your life will change as soon as you´re FOAFed gives Danny Ayers.