1. DM110 Emerging Web Media Dr. John Breslin [email_address] http://sw.deri.org/~jbreslin/ Week 2: Blogs

2. A phenomenon for a new generation?

Cincinnati Enquirer, October 2004

3. Introduction

Weblog ,web logor simply ablogis a web journal

A web application which contains periodic time-stamped posts on a common (usually open-access) webpage

Individual diaries -> arms of political campaigns, media programs and corporations (e.g. the Google Blog)

Citizen journalism

Posts are often shown in reverse chronological order

Comments can be made by the public on some blogs

Latest headlines, with hyperlinks and summaries, aresyndicatedusingRSSorAtomformats (e.g. for reading favourite blogs with a feed reader)

4. 5. The state of the blogosphere

Source: Technorati (March 2003 to October 2006)

6. Some statistics from Technorati

The blogosphere is 120 times greater than it was only 4 years ago (60 million blogs)

The blogosphere is doubling in size every 230 days

100,000 weblogs are created daily

A blog is created roughly every second

1.3 million blog posts made in a day

Around 55% of bloggers are still posting three months after their blog is created

Around 10% are spam blogs or splogs

7. Some quotes about blogs

It'll be no more mandatory that [CEOs] have blogs than that they have a phone and an e-mail account.If they don't, they're going to look foolish. - Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems

Tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. If your competitor has a product that's better than yours, link to it.You might as well.Well find it anyway. - Robert Scoble, Microsoft, Corporate Weblog Manifesto

Famous people have enough space to talk already.Blogging is interesting because of non-famous people. - Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law School

8. Some non-famous and famous bloggers

Made famous by blogging:

• Washingtonienne (http://washingtoniennearchive.blogspot.com)

• Salam Pax (http://dear_raed.blogspot.com)

• Robert Scoble (http://scobleizer.wordpress.com)

Already (semi-) famous:

• David Miliband (UK Labour Minister, Coming Soon)

• Jamie Oliver (Chef, http://www.jamieoliver.com)

• Jeremy Thompson (Sky, http://jeremythompson.typepad.com)

• Liz McManus (Labour Deputy, http://lizmcmanus.blogspot.com)

• Moby (http://www.moby-online.com/cms/viewalldiary.asp)

• Zach Braff (Scrubs, http://gardenstate.typepad.com)

9. Citizen journalism versus mainstream media 10. Making money from blogs?

controversy flared up in December, when a Portland, OR, company called Marqui announced that it would pay select bloggers $800 a month to publish at least four entries per month about its software

Nokia, for example, recently gave away Nokia 7710 wide-screen smart phones to more than 1,000 VIPs around the world, including many bloggers

• http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech/wtr_14587,258,p1.html

Many bloggers use Google Adsense advertising on their blogs to get extra revenue

• Search engine optimisation (SEO) is important to get visitors

11. The Irish connection

There has been an explosion in the awareness of Irish blogs in the past two years

Irish blogosphere (boggersphere!) size is in the thousands

Irish blog resources:

• http://groups.yahoo.com/group/irishblogs

• http://www.technorati.com/tag/irishblogs

Irish blogs awards in its second year:

• http://www.awards.ie/blogawards

12. Get your own blog

journals.ieprovides free hosting of Irish blogs

Simple three-stage signup for a new blog at www.journals.ie

Started life as Planet of the Blogs in 2005

The planet aggregator has nearly 1300 Irish blogs

13. From websites to blogs to semantic blogs

We will now discuss how personal websites have moved from ordinary blogs to semantic structured blogging platforms, using:

Syndication formats and blog tags

Structured input mechanisms

Semantic Web technologies

14. Syndication and news readers

Content is provided from many websites in a common format that can be used by other sites in a syndication process

For example, content from RT and Ireland.com is syndicated so that headlines can be integrated by other people into their own websites

Syndication format is usually RSS

Some sites use a different syndication format (e.g. Blogger.com uses Atom)

Use news readers to read multiple blogs:

• feedreader.com, bloglines.com, etc.

15. Syndication of blog content (1)

Syndication is used forpublishing new contentregularly

Content is provided from many blogs and news sites in acommon formatthat can be reused by other websites and applications in a syndication process

Rather than mass-spamming via e-mail, interested parties can subscribe to feeds to be notified about changes or updates to information ( self service !)

A common syndication format can havemany uses , including connecting services together, mashing together of data, etc.

16. Syndication of blog content (2)

More thanjust blog headline syndication, since RSS can be used for:

• Newspaper articles(one of the original usages) , library updates, recipes, shared calendars(RSSCalendar.com) , podcasts, videos, job posts, weather reports, financial updates, bug reports, wiki page changes, new photo uploads, forum thread replies, etc.

Syndication format for blogs is usuallyRSS(although some sites now use different syndication formats, e.g. Blogger.com usesAtom )

17. Blog aggregators and readers

Syndicated content allows one to check multiple feeds on a regular basis using aggregators or feed readers:

• Previously, semi-regular visits to bookmarked sites

• Feeds of syndicated content can now be pulled into readers

• Also, intelligent pushing of feeds (e.g. with pingback )

18. What is RSS?

The most common syndication format(s)

Acronyms:

• Really Simple Syndication

• Rich Site Summary

• RDF Site Summary

Eightflavours:

• Not including Atom!

19. RSS 1.0

RSS 1.0 is in RDF (preferred format for Semantic Web as it can be used in conjunction with other ontologies)

Class channel:

• Property title

• Property link

• Property description

• Property items (rdf:Seq)

Class item:

• Property title

• Property link

• Property description

20. What is Atom?

Another syndication system

Based on XML (not RDF), but efforts towards AtomOWL

Emphasis has shifted from the format to the API

Specification:

• Constructs: content, people, dates and links

• Elements: feeds, with entries

• http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/atom-format-spec.php

• http://www.atomowl.org/

21. Linking blog posts by topic tags

Blog posts are often categorised (e.g., Scotland, "Movies) by the post creator

Those on similar topics can be grouped together, using:

• Freetext tags or keywords

• Hierarchical tree categories

For example, Technorati tags or keywords:

• • Tags are category names, for people to categorise blog posts, photos, links, etc.

• • Technorati.com wants to build a tagged web

Utilising SW technology, can create categories using the SKOS vocabulary:

• • http://www.wasab.dk/morten/blog/archives/2004/09/01/skos-output-from-wordpress

• • http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/

22. Tags propagate to RSS feeds 23. Tags and related tags across blogs 24. Towards structured blogging?

In structured blogging, packages of structured data are becoming post components

The virtue of blogs has been their simplicity

At the moment, each blog post only needs one field for content, and maybe a title and URL

Not everyone is served well by this lowest common denominator

Therefore the Structured Blogging working group was established last year:

• http://www.structuredblogging.org/

25. Structure-enhanced blog posts

Sometimes you have a burning need for more structure, at least some of the time

When you know a subject deeply, and your observations or analysis recur, you may be best served by filling in a form

The form will have its own metadata and its own data model

Uses:

• People get to express themselves, and

• Blogs start to interoperate with enterprise applications

26. Soccer coach example

An after-game soccer report typically includes:

• which teams played

• where and when

• officials, and

• a list of game events:

• • who scored (and when and how)

• • who received penalties (when and for what), etc.

Wouldn't it be handy for the coachs blogging tool to understand this structure, present an editing form, render the form in HTML to their blog, and render the post (including the form) to their RSS feed?

• Great for the forthcoming World Cup!

27. Structured blogging using WordPress 28. Integrating readers with structured blogging

And in the future, news aggregators and news readers should be able to:

• Auto-discover an unknown structure

• Notify the user that a new structure is available

• Learn the structure, including entry forms, pick list sources, rendering guidance, and default style sheet

• Make it available when the blogger is ready to write

29. Past and future structured blogging

Past:

• Qlogger: http://www.qlogger.com/

• Lafayette Project: http://www.megnut.com/weblogs/002594.asp

• JemBlog: http://ideagraph.net/jemblog/

Future:

• Use Semantic Web technologies to ontologise any available post structures for more linkage and reuse

30. Traditional blogging vs. semantic blogging

Traditional blogging:

• Publishing for theeyeball Web

• Content is text, images, video (i.e. data targeted at people)

Semantic blogging:

• Enrich traditional blogs with semantic metadata

• Structural : what relates to what and how?

• Content related : what is this post about (e.g. a person, an event, etc.)?

• Blogging targeted at machines as well as people

31. How is this related to structured blogging?

Structured blogging is mainly based on Microformats (http://www.microformats.org/)

• Therefore restricted to specific schemata, not open

• Positioned inline on HTML page (and in feed)

• Can be directly rendered using CSS

• Structured and semantic blogging do not compete

• • Metadata can be added as RDFandusing Microformats

• Web-based implementations for generating structured blogging metadata

• • e.g. for WordPress and Movable Type

32. Why semantic blogging? (1)

Traditional blogging:

• Little or noquery possibilities(except keyword and flat tags)

• Little or noreuse of data(except textual copy and paste)

• Little or nolinkingbetween posts (except simple hrefs and trackbacks)

Semantic blogging:

• Facilitates betterquerying :

• • More precise

• • Allows aggregation from various sources

• Betterreuse potential

• Richerlinks

33. Why semantic blogging? (2)

Users collect and create large amounts ofstructured dataon theirdesktops

This data is oftentiedto specific applications and lockedwithin the user's computer

Semantic blogging canlift this datainto the Web

34. Releasing your data to the Web scenario Ina John Inas Computer Johns Computer Blog Post Blog Post Blog Post Blog Post Metadata Metadata Metadata writes Post annotates Post publishes Post reads Post imports metadata Web 35. Creating a semantic blog post with semiBlog Annotating a blog entry with an address book entry. < foaf:Personrdf:ID="andreas"> < foaf:homepage > http://sw.bla.org/~aharth/ foaf:homepage > < foaf:surname >Harth foaf:surname > < foaf:firstName >Andreas foaf:firstName > < rdf:value >Andreas Harth rdf:value > foaf:Person > 36. Using the metadata

Once a blog has semantic metadata, it can be...

Used toquery :Which blog posts talk about papers by Stefan Decker?

Used tobrowseacross blogs and other kinds of discussion methods:

• We will talk about this in more detail in section 7: Semantics in Community Portals

Importedinto desktop applications of blog readers (AKA The Web as a Clipboard)

37. The Web as a clipboard using a semiBlog reader

A user canimportmetadata from here into his/her own applications