While in California, I had the opportunity to meet Adam Rosien (my mentor from PARC) who now works at Sharpcast, a Palo Alto based startup. They have a really cool product that lets you instantly share photos across multiple devices. Adam took a few pictures from his cell phone and these were directly available on the web and on his desktop through Sharpcast photos. You can also share the photos with your buddy list. The really neat thing about their product is that it is amazingly simple to use. I hope that they would be offering an API for developers to create more tools around this. For example it would be really useful to combine image annotations tools like PhotoStuff from Mindswap lab with Sharpcast. Another idea would be to export the image properties in RDF and develop a photo search tool like Alexa’s Camera Image Search.

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative is updating the RDF expression of DC and might add range restrictions to some properties. Mikael Nilsson wondered if we would use the Swoogle Semantic Web search engine to see what types of values are being used with DC properties.

This kind of query is just the ticket for Swoogle. Well, almost. The current web-based interface supports a limited number of query types. Many more can be asked if you use SQL directly to query Swoogle’s underlying databases. We don’t want to provide a direct SQL query service over the main Swoogle database because it’s easy to ask a query that will take a looooooong time to answer and some could even crash the database server. We are planning to put up a second server with a copy of the database and we give Swoogle Power Users (SPUs) access to it.

We ran a simple SQL query to generate some initial data for Mikael showing fall of the DC properties. For each one, we list all of the ranges that values were drawn from and the number of separate documents and triples for each combination. For example

Notice that the first property in this partial table is an obvious typo. You can see the complete table as pdf file or as an excel spreadsheet.

We’ve been working on the problem of identifying splogs (spam blogs) for the past six months. Our studies show that almost 75% of of the blog posts from weblogs.com’s feed and about 25% of fresh posts from a popular blog search engine are from splogs. We’ve been curious about the software used to create and maintain splogs. You don’t have to hang out on secret IRCs to find out about them — all it takes is a little Googling. Filling the Blogosphere with splogs is not illegal yet and there are many software packages to help you set up your own evil splog empire. Here’s information on nine splog packages from hell.

The schedule of presentations for the WWW2006 Workshop on Models of Trust for the Web is available. This one-day workshop at the 15th International World Wide Web Conference will be held on Monday May 22 in Edinburgh. The program features an invited keynote talk by Ricardo Baeza, the director of Yahoo! Research Barcelona and Yahoo! Research Latin America. A total of twelve research papers will be presented, six long and six short. Three mini-panels anchor the paper sessions, providing opportunities for focused discussions on topics and issues raised by the papers. The online program has links to the papers.

GMU has had its 15 minutes of fame, now it’s UMBC’s turn.

UMBC’s world-class chess team emerged from the “Final Four” of college chess with a hard-fought victory over its arch-rivals the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) at the 2006 President’s Cup Tournament. This follows UMBC’s victory at the 2005 Pan-American Collegiate Chess Tournament, also known as the World Series of College Chess. MORE

I found last week’s AAAI Symposium on Computational Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs to be a stimulating mix of theory, practice and speculation. Of the eight symposia in the series this Spring, this was most popular, with over a quarter of the 300 attendees. The symposium’s blog failed to ignite, probably for logistical reasons. But maybe to some degree it’s a case of “those who can, blog; those who can’t, do research on blogs”. Here were some of the highpoints for me.

• Geoffrey Nunberg gave a literate (surprise!) and interesting talk on blogs as a medium for “the public”. His hour talk ran 30 minutes over it’s one hour slot and into the lunch break, and no one in the audience stirred.
• The industry panel on Technologies to Understand it Now and Gain Insight in the Future was interesting and generally informative, but some of the responses to questions were quite guarded. One thing I learned from it was the concept of consumer-generated media which includes blogs, of course. (See Mathew Hurst’s post on social media.) Another idea I found intriguing was the corporate use of blogs, such as the internal blog used by Intel CEO Paul Otellini to communicate and interact with Intel employees.
• There were several disappointments in the panel, though. When asked what what problems researchers could help solve, nothing significant was mentioned. Maybe they panelists were keeping their cards close to their chest. When asked about the possible role of the semantic web, e.g., in support of structured blogging, data blogs or more metadata, no one seemed optimistic or even interested.
• I was surprised how many of the papers were based entirely on data from LiveJournal blogs. While LJ makes its data and metadata easy to get, it represents a narrow view of the Blogosphere.
• That said, I found the paper, demo and presentation on MoodViews fascinating. MoodViews is a collection of tools for tracking the stream of mood-annotated text made available by LiveJournal.
• Matthew Hurst and Natalie Glance of Intelliseek/BuzzMetrics gave three (!) presentations that were all very interesting and useful.
• 

  UMBC’s own Pranam Kolai did a great job of talking about our work on splog identification. The environment wasn’t good for pictures, but I got one shown on the right. Pranam had the brilliant idea of wearing a UMBC sweatshirt for his talk. I think we should make this our lab’s standard dress for presentations.

• There were lots of other good talks and papers. Hopefully, these will be available on the CAAW site before too long.

Jim Parker pointed us to a BBC story on a spreading trend where people ask to be buried with their mobile phones.

“Martin Raymond, director of international trend-spotting think-tank, The Future Laboratory said that this had started off “in the realm of the urban myth”, but was fast becoming fact. … He explained that the first cases of people asking to be buried with their phone originated in Cape Town, where some people’s belief in witchcraft meant they feared that “they could fall under a spell, be put to sleep and actually be buried. “In fact, they were asking for the phones to be put into the coffins with them in case they woke up.”

According to Raymond, the most common reason is the desire “to be buried with the totems that they felt represented their lifestyle,”

In addition to the obvious practical problems of keeping the cell phones charged and having to continue paying for service, Jim points out some issues that call out for study:

“Not sure exactly what type of reception you might get from inside a coffin, not to mention 7 feet deep underground. Would there be a niche market for underground mesh networks, maybe trust and security would be a problem? Would anybody with caller id actually knowing the person really answer a call from said cell phone?”