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…”

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

Semantic Web for CEOs

A short overview for CEOs who want to start a semantic web related project can be found at BusinessWeek. This comprehensive tipsheet mentions for example that you shouldn´t forget your employee´s privacy when you start a semweb project: “Just because you can gather and correlate data about employees doesn’t mean you should. Set usage guidelines to safeguard employee privacy.”

This demonstrates one more time that the semantic web is not only about technology…

Social Semantic Web OR Semantic Social Web

Just the flipside of the same coin: But – I rather focus on the Social Web, cause the web is about connecting people, nothing else. And the Semantic part “only” helps to make communication and connections more efficient and better. So: I prefer to talk about the semantic social web… Nevertheless, the Social Web (aka Web 2.0) is “only” vehicle, making on the surface everything better… but not solving the problem at all.

Whilst helping to connect even more people, producing even more content, Web 2.0 offers no tools except social tagging for organizing all the “new” knowledge. So, let´s think about semantic technologies, how they can help us to make an even better Web 2.0, okay?