Semantic Web Company

On May 28 & 29 2008, Google I/O, the developer gathering around Google’s applications and APIs, took place in San Francisco. Most of the slides and videos of the session have now been posted on their website, and it’s quite a stack of interesting thoughts, instructions and proposals to dig through, published in six different categories: AJAX & JavaScript, APIs & Tools, Maps & Geo, Mobile, Social and Tech Talk. I highly recommend to have a look at the menu yourself – for the moment, I am only going to highlight one talk about OpenSocial as a standard for the Social Web by Chris Schalk, Kevin Marks and Patrick Chanezon.

Patrick opened the talk, picking up on a definition of social objects as proposed by Jyri Engeström, founder of Jaiku (acquired by Google in October 2007). A social object is an object that is socialized, e.g. a photo on Flickr. These are the five questions that one needs to tackle, according to Jyri:

1. What is your object?
- For instance a photo on Flickr, a slide on slideshar.

2. What are your verbs?
- E.g a photo on Flickr is uploaded and tagged, on eBay, an object is sold and bought; these verbs must have a a prominent position in the design of the user-interface).

3. How can people share the objects?
- Each object must have a unique URL; Flickr was only successful once it introduced URLs for each photo.

4. What is the gift in the invitation?
- Patrick always spams messages such as “Please join platform XYZ and help me save time filling in my addressbook”, because there is no gift in the invitation for the recipient.

5. Are you charging the publishers or the spectators?
- this means: What is your businessmodel?

Here is Jyri’s original presentation that Patrick draws on.

Patrick then raised the question: How do we socialize objects online without having to create yet another social network? The OpenSocial Foundation, not surprisingly, is his answer to this challenge, whose claim is to “Keep the specification open.” The image above shows which platforms have already joined the OpenSocial Foundation – German language social network StudiVZ is also part of the crowd.

Media. One of the sexiest businesses there is. Such is also true regarding the definitions of media within the last – let´s say – ten years.

Let´s catch a few glimpses. Explore the latest Web 2.0 developments at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco end of April. Web 2.0 has come to a close and now the work begins.

Change of scenery. Vienna has been a town of congresses ever since. A few days ago journalists and media experts all over Europe discussed the Online-versus-Print-topic at a European Newspaper Congress in the Wiener Rathaus (Photo: pte). Naturally, there are numerous interpretations and perspectives – dependent on the individual position, viewpoint and employment – but also on objectives: Who is the target group? Amazingly enough, I can notice all over the place – and across all businesses – that this primary topic within marketing is often being neglected. Lots of managers lose sight of this in their daily business.
In media terms: Who is going to read, watch or listen to my content? That´s THE question for media people. And being a journalist myself, I have been keeping an eye on this matter for many years. But whether something is sexy or not – who is going to judge? Even media experts might differ in this question.
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