Planet Semantico

Ed Summers has recently been active in exposing Library of Congress Subject Heading data as Linked Data using Semantic Web technologies and RDF, through his experimental service at lcsh.info.

In this conversation we find out how Ed’s career, not always on a traditional library path, has led him to his work in the Library of Congress, his pragmatic interest in things Semantic Web, and why he has needed to experiment outside of the LoC.

In this conversation we reference:

• code4lib 
• Library of Congress
• National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP)
• National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP)
• Chronicling America
• The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
• The BagIt File Package Format
• Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit (SWORD)
• Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS)
• LCSH, SKOS and Linked Data
• lcsh.info
• Cool URIs for the Semantic Web
• How to Publish Linked Data on the Web
• Ed Summers’ web site: Inkdroid

This conversation was conducted as a Skype call on Thurday 26th June 2008, recorded with Ecamm Network’s Call Recorder for Skype, and edited on a Mac with Garageband.

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English Congress, Library of Congress, Library of Congress Subject Heading, Linked Data using Semantic Web technologies, Web technologies, Web-service Offering Repository Deposit

Spanish Stephen Downes

Alejandro Garza over on the Stupendous Amazing Library blog, extrapolates the fact that there is very little partnership between library system vendors to conclude that they are not interested in interoperation between their systems.  He is picking up on extracts from the JISC/SCONUL Library Management Systems Study as commented upon by the Disruptive Library Technology Jester.

Coming from a history of integration protocols, in the library world, where they were more a framework for agreement than a standard, it is easy to assume that the only way to get two systems to talk is for their suppliers to establish a partnership to get it to work.  My least favourite standard NCIP is a classic in this regard. 

As I commented on the Jester’s post, the questions for the study were:

… in the present tense. Answering with ‘our products will integrate, etc., etc.’, would have no doubt drawn equal scepticism, but for different reasons.

The answers you picked out are symptomatic of an industry in transition. Transition from products without exception based on architectures that never envisioned light-weight loosely-coupled integration. Transition to a REST based service oriented architecture where integration between library and non-library applications should be simple and based on simple and open standards.

The “Do you have partnerships with other LMS/ERM vendors?” question in the survey demonstrates an attachment to traditional thinking towards integration. So far, with the traditional heavy-weight protocols we are used to in the library world, the only reliable way to get integration that works has been through a partnership between suppliers. Web 2.0 has demonstrated that with simple light-weight protocols, integration is possible without the need for commercial partnerships. There are many benefits that arise from partnerships, but they shouldn’t be a prerequisite for successful integration.

It is not all doom and gloom though. Initiatives such as the DLF’s ILS API defining simple REST base protocols that all vendors should be able to support, have started to gather momentum in the last few months. A momentum that appears to be supported both by vendors and open source groups.

Since I made that comment I attended a JISC and SCONUL Library Management Systems Study Consultation Event in London.  This event was a get together of stakeholders in the UK academic library community, which were joined by representatives from system vendors for the afternoon session.  For those with a sadistic streak in must have made an entertaining spectacle, watching six vendor representatives (Ex Libris, Infor, Innovative, OCLC, SirsiDynix & Talis) trying to squeeze their views in to 5 minute slots.  From most of those presentations and the discussion that followed, it is clear that the vendors are just as much stakeholders in this as the rest of the community.

I feel there is a refreshing openness in opinion and approach that is starting to spread through the conversations in the world of library systems.   This openness has been in high evidence in the recent Library 2.0 Gang conversations on ILS APIs and Bolt-on OPACs. 

It was a good meeting in London, I only hope that the organisers can keep the momentum going and build a community around the concerns of all the stakeholders, vendors included.  If the initiative started by the study falls back in to the traditional model of projects and reports that we are used to, it will be a massive waste of an opportunity.

Back to my original question - do we need partnerships to enable interoperability?  No we don’t.  With loosely-coupled integration, facilitated by web native light-weight open APIs, interoperability should ‘just happen’.  Vendors should, and are starting to be in the position to, say my systems are open for you to interoperate with - who ever you are, partnership in place or not.  This won’t happen over night, but we are already on a new path, with a healthy does of credit for the DLF’s leadership in giving us some direction.

Photo from Flickr by Just.Luc.

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English Alejandro Garza, API, integration protocols, library systems, light-weight protocols, London, non-library applications, SOA, Stupendous Amazing Library, United Kingdom

Further (if weak) evidence that appeals to puppies are rather non-technical (and not even socio-technical):

...HTML owns that process of extracting a valid URI-reference from an attribute’s value string. A simple string parsing description, with associated context-specific error-handling, is more than sufficient to satisfy the needs of HTML5 without appearing to override an existing standard that has recently been agreed to by all vendors, including the few browser vendors that care about HTML5

In contrast, pretending to define a new URL standard as part of HTML5 is not acceptable. HTML5 is a user of the Web, not a definer of it. HTML will never define the identifiers for the Web. That would be a fundamental violation of the Web architecture.—Roy Fielding

This just seems to mix up process/spec structure with system structure. It’s a bit like saying that the architecture of a building is ungainly because the blueprints are all smeared up.

The first paragraph isn’t insane. There could be a dispute as to whether the existing standard is in fact agreed to and, even if it is, whether it is de facto (or merely de jure) and want to do about it.

The second paragraph doesn’t seem to appeal to any facts at all. Sentence one is just Roy saying he doesn’t like it (though expressed in pseudo-factual terms). The second seems just false on any remotely literal reading (HTML5 isn’t the kind of thing that can use anything, much less the web!). The third sentence seems more like a declaration of his intent (i.e., it’ll never happen because he’ll make it never happen). The last seems factual, but it definitely contentless, at least without serious serious supplement (i.e., it should be a conclusion, but we haven’t even seen whether it’s a violation of the standards for writing blueprints or of what the blueprints say; whose blueprints are they anyway? can we sensible talk about blueprints for the Web?)

Thus, Roy is not giving public reasons, primarily. He’s just expressing strong dissent with some coloring of expertise to hide the bruteness of that dissent. That’s not happy discussion technique, IMHO.

Uncategorized HTML, Roy Fielding, web architecture

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Basil, the individual who handles the day-to-day product management of the Firefox add-ons site.

Our hour-long conversation covered a broad range of topics and I appreciated that Basil took the time to meet and share so much information.

Of particular interest was the idea that they eventually want to “free” the add-on reviews, so to speak, to enable them to be surfaced on the developers site and have reviews that originate on the developers site sync back to the review page.

This made me realize two things:

(1) despite reading the blog you’re most likely missing out on reading some great BlueOrganizer reviews;

(2) despite reading the blog you most likely have not written a review (which I’d appreciate if you did, right here)

Here are three great reviews that have been written in the past week:

“Ever wonder the IMDB movie page didn’t to it’s NetFlix page? The internet finally makes sense and is easy to use.” - Metacore

“I absolutely love this tool. Some favourite features include the ability to automatically create a tiny URL from any page and the “save to del.icio.us” option… This add-on has totally changed the way I use Firefox!” - camillei

“For those who spend half their lives on he world wide web, you can finally organize your life. Recommended!” - pdens

English

English

We’ve changed the required format for posters and demonstration papers from LNCS to ACM format. This allows authors to include more content in the two page papers. The deadline for submissions remains July 25, 2008. See the ISWC 2008 poster and demonstration CFP for more information.

Uncategorized

English

Spanish YouTube

In January 2007 I started playing with the Flickr API - the HTTP-based web service that lets you manipulate Flickr. At that point I was using it to play with machine tags and to see how the most popular Web Service API worked, especially in the area of authentication. This was in the days before OAuth if you can remember that far back.

I started with a test program in C that called libcurl and did some of the signing and parameter marshaling of the flickr.photos.getInfo call which is where all the juicy metadata about photos is. I started thinking about ways to map photo metadata into RDF for manipulating and querying; there is an existing Perl Flickr RDF mapping but it didn’t contain everything. This state of sources was useful; it contained a small library with the one API method plus a command-line utility to call it. Since I was using libCurl to call Flickr, I named it Flickcurl. Also CFlickr was taken! (Flickcurl also uses libxml but flickcurlibxml is just nuts).

Apart from playing with photo metadata I also had some personal reasons to make something new. I wanted a lighter weight and less formal project than the way I had been building the Redland RDF Libraries. More of it compiles, ship it model and less of the unit tests, test cases and continual make check, worrying about portability approach. Maybe more fun would be a way to put it. I’m happiest as a free software / open source software tool-builder and at this point in 2007 I was spending a lot of time at work doing non-coding things such as designing specifications and doing technical leadership and the chance to work on some different code now and then was appealing to counterpoint the work stuff.

Redland is a set of libraries that have been growing since mid-2000 with more and more features as the semantic web technology stack grows so at any point in time there is no clear end state. For this project I wanted a clear goal to reach so I could be clearly done at some point. This is possible with the Flickr API since there are at any time a finite number of API calls (something like 100) so progress can be measured… although Flickr did add API calls while I was working on it. The result was I made a Flickcurl API coverage page with embedded API changelog (automatically generated from source code comments).

Flickcurl 0.1 was “released” 2007-01-21 although I didn’t announce it to anyone at that point. It was more of a tarball than an actual release.

One more thing I wanted to do was to experiment with different ways to tell people about software, compared to the ways I as using with Redland which was mostly email based but also via SourceForge and Freshmeat. So for Flickcurl I tried a bunch of different ways:

• Mentioned 0.2 on Twitter 24 Jan 2007. (3% of API)
• Announced 0.5 (and all later versions) on the yws-flickr Flickr API mailing list in a single paragraph email on 4 Feb 2007. (3% of API)
• Announced 0.6 on the #swig IRC channel 11 Feb 2007. (6% of API)
• Announced 0.7 (and all later versions) via Freshmeat releases of the Flickcurl on freshmeat project 18 Feb 2007. (10% of API)
• Announced 0.11 in a blog post Flickcurl - C API to Flickr on 3 August 2007. (50% of API)
• Announced 0.12 to the Flickr API group on 11 August 2007. (72% of API)

That was kind of fun, and I also followed a similar light weight process with Triplr but that’s another story. I think caring less worked out fine; people did use it and submit patches. Right now I still use the Flickr mailing list, API group, and freshmeat project.

As the library headed towards 100% of the API and beyond it did get a bit more formal and I imported what I think are the best practices from the Redland libraries:

• objects in C design
• always refactoring the source code: refactoring is not just for dynamic languages
• source code docu-comments generating an HTML API reference via gtk-doc
• folding in portability fixes
• make it work with optional libraries for extra functionality (Raptor in this case, to allow serialising to other RDF syntaxes)
• built in portable ANSI C
• taking care about memory leaks with valgrind
• comes with a utility program able to exercise the entire API (called flickcurl)
• Debian packages (created by somebody else, yay!)
• manual pages for the command line utilities

The general aim was to get 100% of the Flickr API done by the end of 2007 and I actually reached it for Flickcurl 1.0 on 2008-01-12 which was pretty close.

So right now the library has gone beyond 1.0; the latest release is Flickcurl 1.4 which was released last Tuesday 24th June (see release notes) which primarily added video support but I also updated the photo metadata mapping to RDF by adding a serializer class for abstracting the photo-to-triples process.

The RDF triple mappings is something that has always been there but not part of the core library. It could be optionally used inside Raptor to automatically read Flickr photo URIs as RDF data sources. I doubt it’ll ever be presented inside a public web service like Triplr since it would require passing in Flickr API authentication tokens and user credentials.

The RDF triples mapping I’ve made for the Flickr photo metadata has mixture of vocabularies which are in 3 buckets:

1. Existing Vocabularies: well known RDF schemas (class and properties) that have been developed over many years by multiple people and organisations, sometimes with a lot of formality.
2. Flickr-specific Vocabularies: vocabularies I made up mostly for Flickr video and places API terms.
3. Machine Tag Vocabularies: I made them up using machinetags.org/ns URIs as a root for the namespaces associated with the vocabularies. The terms in the vocabularies come from how people used machine tags on Flickr and are not always defined.

This is a range of what might be called semantic web heavy to light although there is absolutely nothing wrong with mixing things up if you are not worried about inference. This is OK! I should probably put some html/schema documents at the vocabularies and get the redirects and all that # and / business sorted so that the linked data works out properly but what I have now is just a start and I’d be interested to see what people think. There are more details of the vocabularies and terms I’m using in the Flickcurl 1.4 release notes although I should probably add vocabulary information to the documentation too.

That’s all for now but I’ll expand some more in another post about the Flickr API itself and my experience with it and impressions of it as a both a software developer and HTTP Web Service designer.

Uncategorized ANSI C, API, command line utilities, free software, HTML, HTTP, open source software, Perl, public web service, RDF, semantic web heavy, semantic web technology stack, software developer, web service, Web Service API

via Sumit Kataria on the oauth list:

I am very happy to announce that Drupal’s OAuth module is now ready to use. Right now it just acts as server because we don’t need client support at this time, Client implementation will be done soon by the time release of Drupal 7 as ServicesAPI in Drupal 7 will be needing it. Endpoints for Drupal are:

REQUEST URL : http://www.example.com/?q=oauth/request
AUTH URL : http://www.example.com/?q=oauth/auth
ACCESS : http://www.example.com/?q=oauth/access

At this time Services API is necessary to use OAuth (also it is the only module which is gonna use oauth as well - so not a big deal). This module also provides a test browser to produce OAuth tokens (whole Drupal way using multi-page form). Right now only PLAIN-TEXT signature method is supported but soon support for other methods will be added as well.

I’m slowly learning my way around Drupal, so this is rather good encouragement to learn faster…

See the announcement for more details and links.

Uncategorized API, Sumit Kataria

“You can spot the Americans in any airport. They like to undress.“

Uncategorized

delicious

delicious

Spanish inicio real de la web, Microsoft

I realized this evening, while waiting in another airport, that it has been nearly 9 months to the day since I joined AdaptiveBlue. Nine months. Three quarters of a year. Wow.

Generally, I find that reflecting over a period of time exhibits a predictable duality: viewed through one lens the amount of time elapsed feels surprisingly short; viewed through another, it feels surprisingly long.

Tonight, regardless of the lens, I’m unable to experience the duality of time. Every perspective feels surprisingly short.

I can’t believe what the team has accomplished in such a short amount of time. Nor can I believe the amount of experience gained or the education learned. In just nine months.

The number of interesting and bright people met, the amount of new friendships, and the number of intense highs and lows, again - it all makes it feel so short.

What does this mean? I don’t know. But I do know that I’m loving it and I’m looking forward to the days, weeks, and years ahead.

How were your last 270 days? What was the highest high and the lowest low?

English

Spanish

“A genetic theory of homosexuality.” by William Saletan in yesterday’s Slate suggests an inevitable analogy.

The article reports on recent work (pdf) addressing the ‘if homosexuality is genetic, why hasn’t it died out?’ debate, which suggests that the ‘gene for male homosexuality persists because it promotes—and is passed down through—high rates of procreation among gay men’s mothers, sisters, and aunts‘.

In other words, gayness in men can be as natural and as the male nipple, even if both are initially puzzling when thought of in evolutionary terms. OK I’m stretching things slightly, but I can’t help but wonder whether the nipple analogy might be a good basis for informal arguments for a bit more tolerance:

Let He Who is Without Nipples Cast the First Stone?

Or maybe not.

More on the Great Nipple Question from straightdope.com; a moment of science; and the evolution-101 blog.

Uncategorized William Saletan

Echoing recent discussion of Semantic Web “Killer Apps”, an “are Topic Maps dead?” thread on the topicmaps mailing list. Signs of life offered include www.fuzzzy.com (’Collaborative, semantic and democratic social bookmarking’, Topic Maps meet social networking; featured tag: ‘topic maps‘) and a longer-list from Are Gulbrandsen who suggests a predictable hype-cycle dropoff is occuring, as well as a migration of discussions from email into the blog world. For which, see the topicmaps planet aggregator, and through which I indirectly find Steve Pepper’s blog and an interesting post on how TMs relate to RDF, OWL and the Semantic Web (though I’d have hoped for some mention of SKOS too).

Are Gulbrandsen also cites NZETC (the New Zealand Electronic Tech Centre), winner of The Topic Maps Application of the year award at the Topic Maps 2008 conference; see Conal Tuohy’s presentation on Topic Maps for Cultural Heritage Collections (slides in PDF). On NZETC’s work: “It may not look that interesting to many people used to flashy web 2.0 sites, but to anybody who have been looking at library systems it’s a paradigm shift“.

Other Topic Map work highlighted: RAMline (Royal Academy of Music rewriting musical history). “A long-term research project into the mapping of three axes of musical time: the historical, the functional, and musical time itself.”; David Weinberger blogged about this work recently. Also MIPS / Institute for Bioinformatics and Systems Biology who “attempt to explain the complexity of life with Topic Maps” (see presentation from Volker Stümpflen (PDF); also a TMRA’07 talk).

Finally, pointers to opensource developer tools: Ruby Topic Maps and Wandora (Java/GPL), an extraction/mapping and publishing system which amongst other things can import RDF.

Topic Maps are clearly not dead, and the Web’s a richer environment because of this. They may not have set the world on fire but people are finding value in the specs and tools, while also exploring interop with RDF and other related technologies. My hunch is that we’ll continue to see a slow drift towards the use of RDF/OWL plus SKOS for apps that might otherwise have been addressed using TopicMaps, and a continued pragmatism from tool and app developers who see all these things as ways to solve problems, rather than as ends in themselves.

Just as with RDFa, GRDDL and Microformats, it is good and healthy for the Web community to be exploring multiple similar strands of activity. We’re smart enough to be able to flow data across these divides when needed, and having only a single technology stack is I think both intellectually limiting, socially impractical, and technologically short-sighted.

Uncategorized Are Gulbrandsen, Bioinformatics, David Weinberger, flashy web, Institute for Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, Java, library systems, meet social networking, New Zealand Electronic Tech Centre, RDF, Royal Academy of Music, Ruby Topic Maps, Steve Pepper, technology stack, Volker Stümpflen, Web Killer Apps, Web community, www.fuzzzy.com

Allegedly. Powerset are natural language processing specialists. See also last year’s ISWC talk from CTO Barney Pell, “Natural Language and the Semantic Web”, discussions with Barney from last month’s Talis Semantic Web Gang chat, and earlier commentary from Paul Miller.

Uncategorized Barney Pell, Microsoft, Natural Language Processing, natural language processing specialists, Paul Miller, Web Gang chat

Via Dave Beckett in #swig IRC,  Manu Sporny’s handy 10 minute overview of RDFa Basics (see also other versions, source materials).

Here’s a screen grab of the full FOAF example used. Note that the WG renamed ‘instanceof’ to ‘typeof’ recently.

For the video-averse, a full transcript is available. Here’s the full XHTML markup example from the above image:

<body xmlns:foaf=”http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/”>

 <span about=”#jane” typeof=”foaf:Person”
       property=”foaf:name“>Jane McJanerson</span>

 <span about=”#mac” typeof=”foaf:Person”
       property=”foaf:name“>Mac McJanerson</span>

 <span about=”#jane” rel=”foaf:knows”
       resource=”#mac”>Jane is friends with Mac.</span>

</body>

Uncategorized Jane McJanerson

Building on last month’s announcement of OAuth for the Google Contacts API, this from Wei on the oauth list:

Just want to let you know that we officially support OAuth for all Google Data APIs.

See blog post:

You’ll now be able to use standard OAuth libraries to write code that authenticates users to any of the Google Data APIs, such as Google Calendar Data API, Blogger Data API, Picasa Web Albums Data API, or Google Contacts Data API. This should reduce the amount of duplicate code that you need to write, and make it easier for you to write applications and tools that work with a variety of services from multiple providers. [...]

There’s also a footnote, “* OAuth also currently works for YouTube accounts that are linked to a Google Account when using the YouTube Data API.”

See the documentation for more details.

On the YouTube front, I have no idea what % of their accounts are linked to Google; lots I guess. Some interesting parts of the YouTube API: retrieve user profiles, access/edit contacts, find videos uploaded by a particular user or favourited by them plus of course per-video metadata (categories, keywords, tags, etc). There’s a lot you could do with this, in particular it should be possible to find out more about a user by looking at the metadata for the videos they favourite.

Evidence-based profiles are often better than those that are merely asserted, without being grounded in real activity. The list of people I actively exchange mail or IM with is more interesting to me than the list of people I’ve added on Facebook or Orkut; the same applies with profiles versus tag-harvesting. This is why the combination of last.fm’s knowledge of my music listening behaviour with the BBC’s categorisation of MusicBrainz artist IDs is more interesting than asking me to type my ‘favourite band’ into a box. Finding out which bands I’ve friended on MySpace would also be a nice piece of evidence to throw into that mix (and possible, since MusicBrainz also notes MySpace URIs).

So what do these profiles look like? The YouTube ‘retrieve a profile‘ API documentation has an example. It’s Atom-encoded, and beyond the video stuff mentioned above has fields like:

  <yt:age>33</yt:age>
  <yt:username>andyland74</yt:username>
  <yt:books>Catch-22</yt:books>
  <yt:gender>m</yt:gender>
  <yt:company>Google</yt:company>
  <yt:hobbies>Testing YouTube APIs</yt:hobbies>
  <yt:location>US</yt:location>
  <yt:movies>Aqua Teen Hungerforce</yt:movies>
  <yt:music>Elliott Smith</yt:music>
  <yt:occupation>Technical Writer</yt:occupation>
  <yt:school>University of North Carolina</yt:school>
  <media:thumbnail url=’http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YFbSxcdOL-w/default.jpg’/>
  <yt:statistics viewCount=’9′ videoWatchCount=’21′ subscriberCount=’1′
    lastWebAccess=’2008-02-25T16:03:38.000-08:00′/>

Not a million miles away from the OpenSocial schema I was looking at yesterday, btw.

I haven’t yet found where it says what I can and can’t do with this information…

Uncategorized API, BBC, Elliott Smith, Google, media:thumbnail url=, North Carolina, United States, University of North Carolina, Web Albums Data API, YouTube

Spanish Bill Gates

From Galway First:

Star Trek fans are called Trekkies, but watch out for the Losti-es. Fans of the inexplicable and never-ending TV series are planning to come to Galway this week to honour the conferring of the star of several episodes of the series, who is receiving an honorary degree at NUI, Galway.

Fionnula Flanagan is an Emmy Award-winning and Tony Award-nominated Irish actress. She trained in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin and has appeared in numerous films, including The Others with Nicole Kidman, Transamerica and Waking Ned Devine, as well as television series and stage productions. She came to prominence in Ireland in 1965 as a result of her role as Máire in the Teilifís Éireann production of the Irish Language play, An Triail. Ms Flanagan established herself as one of the foremost interpreters of James Joyce in the 1967 film version of Ulysses.

But as far as fans of Lost are concerned, she will forever be that mysterious white-haired woman Ms Hawking who appeared in the “Flashes Before Your Eyes” of Lost. Message boards online pertaining to the series have revealed that dozens of Irish Lost fans are to come to Galway to congratulate her on her conferring.

So, if you see any black smoke, polar bears or see Mutton Island being moved mysteriously this Friday, don’t panic. It’s just all in a day’s happenings on Lost.

The honorary conferrings are on tomorrow here in NUI Galway. Funnily enough, I think the first thing I saw Fionnula Flanagan in was actually Star Trek (The Next Generation). But I loved her best in Paddywhackery on TG4 in her role as Peig Sayers!

In other news, it was announced yesterday that the 2008 Galway Film Fleadh will play host to some international stars including Peter O’Toole, Jessica Lange, (President!) Bill Pullman, and Alex Gibney, the 2008 Oscar winner for Best International Documentary.

English Alex Gibney, Bill Pullman, Dallas Stars, Dublin, Hawking, Ireland, James Joyce, Jessica Lange, Mutton Island, Ned Devine, Nicole Kidman, online pertaining, Peter O Toole

Spanish

Web 3.0 es la versión avanzada de la Web 2.0, hasta ahí parece que estamos de acuerdo. Pues bien, ya tengo la tan buscada fórmula de la Web 3.0, la que hará una Internet mejor y nos llevará al concepto de la Web Semántica.

Web 3.0 significa:

3C = Contenido, Comercio, Comunidad | 4ª C = Contexto | P = Personalización | BV = Búsqueda Vertical

(hay mas…)

Spanish

That was the title of my session last week at the Widget Web Expo. Lousy title, good session. The session started by discussing the fallacy of the “widget promise” - the notion that “if you build it, they will come.”

Widgets have been sold as a way to achieve broad distribution easily. The sale has been that slapping a “copy me” button onto the widget = viral distribution. Unfortunately this simplistic equation neglects important other factors that influence the ability of a widget to promote itself, encouraging replication and duplication across the web.

By ignoring the other factors widget developers have created a world where, as Fred also noted in his keynote, widgets are “increasingly seen as ad units and increasingly ignored.”

The solution? Achieve an equilibrium across three vectors.

1) Value for publisher: the website’s publisher has to find value in the widget in order to integrate it onto their page. The value derived can range from self-expression, to revenue (or, at least, the potential of), increased page views, etc.

2) Value for browse: the widget has to encourage engagement and interaction by delivering value to the visitor otherwise it will be viewed as an ad unit and ignored. The value can play on ego, deliver ‘fun’, etc.

3) Ease of replication: any friction introduced to the grab and install process introduces drop-off points and will constrain the level of duplication. Reduce friction, support single-click installation, respect transaction timing, etc.

The web is littered with widget carcasses that nailed one of the vectors (often “ease of replication”, including a big “copy me” button is easy and it’s easy to believe). Unfortunately because the widget developer failed to pay respect to this “great equilibrium model” the widgets failed to promote more widgets.

When looking at a successful widget it’s easy to see the respect paid to the three vectors. When looking at an unpopular widget it’s often easy to identify which vector(s) is to blame.

Any one want to challenge me to work through a case study in the comments? Have at it — name a widget and I’ll dive in.

English Web Expo

Spanish Google

http://www.nuigalway.ie/news/main_press.php?p_id=760

TripPlanr will be aimed at the more adventurous traveller who wants more than a weekend for two in one of Paris’s main hotels

NUI Galway’s Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) is to develop a new intelligent trip planner in collaboration with Irish start-up Tourist Republic Ltd. The internet tool, TripPlanr, will allow travellers to plan more complex trips than existing technology allows, such as combining multiple destinations on a fixed budget and timeline. The cost of this initiative is €200,000 and has received support funding under Enterprise Ireland’s Innovation Partnership programme.

TripPlanr will be aimed at the more adventurous traveller who wants more than a weekend for two in one of Paris’s main hotels. The technology will combine Touristr.com’s traveller recommendations with information from airlines and accommodation providers, suggesting the most perfectly-attuned trip possible.

Jan Blanchard is CEO of Tourist Republic and sees huge benefits in the partnership: “We knew that to build the intelligent trip planner which we have in mind, we needed a team to rival the in-house expertise at Google or Yahoo! Through Enterprise Ireland we have this opportunity to bring our vision to reality with DERI, which is the largest Semantic Web research institute in the world”.

DERI’s specialised expertise in Information Mining, the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 applications will allow TripPlanr to filter data and make recommendations based on the preferences of the traveller and their social network. Building on Touristr.com’s existing destination review site, the new solution is expected to increase the probability of the traveller booking the targeted option suggested.

According to Dr. John Breslin, Project Leader with DERI at NUI Galway, and founder of the popular online forum boards.ie, “The pre-internet problem of information deficit has been replaced with the problem of information overload. We are faced with an overwhelming surfeit of similarly sounding destination descriptions and offers. We hope to make online trip planning much more personalised by enabling networked knowledge using the latest technologies developed here at DERI.”

The TripPlanr project has a skilled team in place to research and develop the application, and the project is currently recruiting for web developers to join this exciting work. TripPlanr is expected to be in beta testing by the end of the year.

-ends-

English destination review site, Digital Enterprise Research Institute, EUR, Google, Jan Blanchard, John Breslin, online forum boards.ie, online trip, Paris, pre-internet problem, Social network, The internet tool, Tourist Republic Ltd, web developers, Web research institute, Yahoo

Via Damien, I tried out Google Trends for boards.ie in comparison to the two main Irish newspaper sites.

Here are the stats for Ireland only from Google Trends (blue = boards.ie; red = ireland.com; yellow = independent.ie):

Here are the stats for all regions from Google Trends:

Here is the worldwide graph from Compete:

And finally, here is the worldwide graph from Alexa:

There are a lot of variations! Although ComScore also do rankings, I am not sure is the service publicly available, and Quantcast’s analysis seems more US-focussed. While some people are not so sure about the figures (1, 2), it is an indicator of sorts - even if it’s just to see if you are in the same league…

English Google, Ireland