Danny has initiated an excellent wiki page on microformats and faqs-for-rdf fans. A useful resource scoping microformats with RDF – a must read for Semantic Web fans.

To add some justification to my previous post, here’s a good summary of IBM’s adoption of Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web — from the “The Future of Social Networks” event at IBM, Cambridge. Summary of the panel talk and discussion on IBM’s adoption of emerging technologies for the intranet make a useful read.

(via David Weinberger)

“Semantic Web for Industry”, the keynote talk by Tim Berners-Lee during Industry Day at ISWC 2005 seems to have generated some interest. Slides make a fairly convincing argument for Semantic Web adoption by industry. The concept of RDF Bus and its positioning for the enterprise is very well depicted.
(Via captsolo)

Rob Clyde, Vice President of Technology, Office of the CTO @ Symantec Corporation presented his keynote today morning. Along with the usual security stuff he reported on some interesting statistics –

• Phishing is becoming an increasing threat as 3 to 4% of users respond to such mails — much higher than traditional e-mail spam.
• In the first half of 2005 phishing increased from 2.99 Million e-mails/day to 5.7 Million e-mails/day.
• 31% of online consumers are buying less due to increased web security threat.
• US leads in the number of hacked machine reports followed closely by Germany.
• Broadband penetration is actually increasing security threats. Many personal machines are now vulnerable to hackers using them as web bots for DOS attacks.
• DOS Attacks are now a business. Such attacks are now available for as low as US $300. Where?

Some other interesting comments ..

• The increasing speed at which worms propogate are now demanding better use of proactive measures.
• In the absence of such measures Akamai and it’s expandable bandwith pipes are the only solution against DOS Attacks. Looks like more revenues to Akamai in the days to come! Maybe Akamai’s stock is in for a ride.

Finally, and of importance to us — Symantec is now working on compating web (and blog) spam. They see this as being one of the next big security threat.

Paper presentations at CASCON 2005 started today. This annual event is sponsored by IBM Toronto Labs and IBM CAS in co-operation with National Research Council Canada. Initial impressions — a very good place to demonstrate/present work relevant to IBM.

CASCON 2005, the 15th annual international conference hosted by the IBM Centers for Advanced Studies, is the premiere computer science and software engineering conference in Canada. CASCON is an excellent venue for exchanging ideas, showcasing results, experiences and tools, and networking with researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government.

Check out CASCON blog for information as it happens.

BBC reports:

The web has grown more in 2005 than it did at the height of the dotcom boom, says a study … Growth also comes from the rise in blogging, in which users write regularly updated web journals on any and every topic. Some blog sites host the journals on their own domain but many bloggers have taken the step of setting up their own site and installing blogging software on that.
.. many spammers are setting up many domains that try to push their products to the top of search rankings.

Interesting is the additional note about how blogging is driving growth to an extent. Concern is the mention of spam pages (mainly in the context of blogs) and how they are skewing some of these numbers!

A few months back I had a discussion on an interesting concept initiated by our group, but was not yet public. Response from the person I was talking to was short — “We will uncloak soon”. He eventually did, and at the right time. This brings me to a interesting question — “What does it mean to uncloak on Web 2.0?”

A recent post we and others (here, here, here and here) made about Sphere – a new blog search engine based on initiation by Om Malik is an interesting example. Om, an A-List blogger now posts on yahoo blog search engine and how Sphere is better. Some readers would have noticed del.icio.us count at the bottom in our previous post. What was 3 then is now 47! Moreover it is (was) widely discussed on the blogosphere.

It’s all a result of Web 2.0. In this context the Blogosphere and Folksonomies. Both have been able to generate higher visibility and provide fresher content. You no longer have to wait for centuries before a traditional web search engine indexes them and find out what people were (! not are) talking about you. You know what is being said NOW — or rather as Technorati rightly puts it — We are in the The World Live Web.

Web 2.0 has then an important implication — there is a new way of uncloaking

• Initiate discussion on your product.
• Monitor Buzz (the key).
• Uncloak!

In the context of Sphere it’s when buzz is at the peak. One of the creators of Sphere, Tony Conrad says, they are still waiting and will uncloak next week. Is NOW the peak buzz — well, arguable. Are they waiting for the second peak following a trough — well may be, or are they waiting for the buzz to continue – well only time will tell.

Bottomline — Web 2.0 has made sure that the Web aspect is even more important and you know what is being said about you NOW. It’s not just about “discussions on the Web”, but also about “when?”. Hope Sphere Beta is uncloaked on time. That said, Technorati has been doing fairly well in the middle of all competition. Good job!

We all know how blog search engines have made themselves a name, by tuning traditional IR techniques to the Blogosphere. Enter Sphere. It is in “stealth mode” now — not even a Beta. Over at GigaOm, Om Malik has some interesting thoughts on Sphere. Some excerpts —

Think Blog Rank, Instead of Google’s Page Rank. The company has also taken a few steps to out-smart the spammers, and tend to push what seems like spam-blog way down the page. Not censuring but bringing up relevant content first. They have pronoun checker. Too many I’s could mean a personal blog, with less focused information. That has an impact on how the results show up on the page …

The coolest feature they have is matching Blog content with relevant web articles from mainstream media.

The bottomline is of course tuning (there is still a lot of opporutunity here) relevancy to the Blogosphere. They are expected to launch their Beta soon. Current del.icio.us count — 3(only). Watch this space!

UMBC website now publishes RSS for news and Podcasts.
(More )

Good move – subscribed!
Atleast now I will follow what should have been regularly checked by all students at UMBC.

UMBC is designing a new home page, about to be unvealed by the end of September. What was interested to note was the use of blogging as a mechanism to solicit user input. UMBC’s Webteam blog notes –

UMBC is providing a “sneak peek” of its new homepage, which begins the process of redesigning UMBC’s entire web presence by summer 2006. If you’d like to comment on the new homepage or the process for developing the site to follow, use the comment form below.

However I must add, I agree with many of the comments on the blog. It would be nice to see atleast some of these comments incorporated into the new design.

On a similar note, I wonder when UMBC will host blogs of students on the same lines as many other universities.

Google finally adds RSS/Atom support for Google News.

The new feature will allow Google News users to set up RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or Atom content syndication feeds for specific Google News sections, such as entertainment, business or world news, and for specific terms users search for on Google News, such as “George Bush,” “diabetes” or “space shuttle.

More..

I am more interested in “specific terms” and how good(fast) a job Google does on it. Very soon its going to cross paths with Technorati’s Watchlist.

(Via Andrew Lark)

Flickr delivers a new ranking mechanism. Results at Flickr Explore. A very good example of what social+technology can do — building on PageRank.

There are lots of things that make a photo ‘interesting’ (or not) in the Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing. Interestingness changes over time, as more and more fantastic photos and stories are added to Flickr.

More ..

A listing of top uploads in the last 24 hours is impressive. Explore / Interestingness / Last 24 Hours is surely worth a bookmark (del.icio.us count).

(Via John Battelle)