We’ve set up a ISWC 2008 social networking site for participants of the Seventh International Semantic Web Conference. Conference attendees can register for free and use the site to connect with other participants, coordinate meeting plans, share comments on events and talks, figure out who is who at the conference, etc.

We are using CrowdVine for this site. Our package allows us to define a calendar where we can list talks and other events, which we’ve only just begun populating. Users can rate, comment on or discuss these calendar items.

If you plan on attending ISWC 2008, please check it out and register.

Dr. Tufekci is an assistant professor in UMBC’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology and has interests in the social impacts of technology and social computing. What is somewhat unusual for a Sociologist, I assume, is that her undergraduate degree is in computer science and she worked as a programmer before getting her PhD in Sociology.

Her talk made some very interesting points about how the new environments created by social computing systems differ from the ones we have evolved to adapt to.

“Everyday, tens of millions of people chat, text, email, poke, twitter, IM and facebook (and, yes, that is a verb). They do what people have always done: they make friends and mark enemies, they assert and seek status, they look for affirmation and for connection, they check out the competition and, above all, they seek the comfort of community. Contrary to earlier predictions, people do not undertake revolutionary, unheard of acts just because the medium is new. In fact, the rise of social computing is hardly surprising to social scientists: we know this is what people do. The significance of this development lies from not the acts themselves but in the characteristics of the environment.
      The social physics of online communities are starkly different than those of the offline world — and that has far-reaching consequences. A different type of optics, audience, persistence, traversability and other structural attributes combine to create a different kind of social architecture. However, all evidence so far shows that most people bring to this new medium the cultural vocabulary of the regular, offline world (and, indeed, what else could they do?). This talk will explore the potential consequences of millions of mundane acts performed in a new kind of medium, as well as research opportunities presented by this revolution in the shape of our sociality.”

She was able to illustrate her points with examples gathered from the students in her classes about how their social lives are lived out through systems like Facebook.

Zeynep’s presentation slides are available.

Here’s a great picture of my deployed arm with the scoop on the end: http://tinyurl.com/3s354p I can’t wait to dig in the dirt next week. 10:14 PM May 29, 2008 from web

Phoenix is even carrying on conversations with some of its more than 10,000 followers.

@infoholic Yup, I can dig into frozen ground as hard as concrete. The scoop has special blades and a powered “rasp” to scrape ice. Cool! 11:09 PM May 29, 2008 from web in reply to infoholic

My first thought was that I wouldn’t want to be there when NASA gets the cell phone bill for little Phoenix. But then I read the story in the NYT, Phoenix to Earthlings: I’ve Landed! Awesome!, and found that,like a lot of important entities, Phoenix has people who do this for it.

“For users of Twitter, a Web microblogging service, the Phoenix Mars lander has been sending pithy news “tweets” to the cellphones and computers of interested ‘followers.’ As of late Friday, the Phoenix lander had 9,636 followers at Twitter, more than triple the number of a week earlier. According to twitterholic.com, it ranks No. 30 among all Twitter feeds in the solar system.
…
Of course, the messages are not coming from Mars. Instead, Veronica McGregor, the news services manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., has been playing the part of Phoenix each night after she gets home from work, forwarding questions to the science team and then posting answers.”

This is good news. The newspaper business continues to lay off staff and offer buyouts as they predict declining revenues. These are talented and trained reporters, photo journalists and editors who do the hard work of discovering and writing the news. What they do can not be, and should not be, crowdsourced. The Times has the resources and experience to do this right. If they can show how to make up for some of the losses with innovations in their online presence, it will help the entire newspaper business by showing a way forward.

(Spotted on ReadWriteWeb)

“Psychologists have long studied social networks, and the growing popularity of sites like MySpace and Facebook provide fertile territory for research. Stanford University even has a class called “Psychology of Facebook.” What do our online profiles say about us?”

The hour long segment was originally broadcast on May 12 on the KQED Forum program. Host Michael Krasny interviewed two guests:

• B.J. Fogg, director of the at Stanford University and the author of an upcoming book on the psychology of Facebook
• Sam Gosling, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin

It’s a good show that explores why social networking sites gave become ubiquitous and popular, ow they work, and why they work.

“… Certainly personal branding isn’t a new concept, but the future of personal branding could be in at your fingertips—with a blog. One of the first steps in creating a brand for yourself is to make your blog visible. Post meaningful entries, comment on your industry’s top blogs, or simply gain a regular readership. “Visibility creates opportunities,” says Schawbel, a social media specialist at EMC Corporation. He believes that when you brand yourself, the competition becomes irrelevant. “The goal of personal branding is to be recruited based on your brand, not applying for jobs,” Schawbel says. …”

This is especially good advice for students.

“The 1st Social Data on the Web workshop (SDoW2008) co-located with the 7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2008) aims to bring together researchers, developers and practitioners involved in semantically-enhancing social media websites, as well as academics researching more formal aspect of these interactions between the Semantic Web and Social Media.”

Social media systems is all about information sharing, so its inevitable that it will have strong ties to Semantic Web technologies. Moreover, the ties will go both ways. Social media needs ways to annotate information objects with sharable data and meta data that can be understood by machines. Semantic computing systems focused on sharing data and ontologies can benefit from social computing systems that offer users easy ways to collaboratively develop, publish, comment on and link to their output.