Web 2.0 Expo NY presentations and videos

Even though I did not attend Web 2.0 Expo in NY, but my work colleague did, it's nice that there are videos and presentations already on the Net on this. There are videos from Blip.TV and presentation slides from O'Reilly (which sponsored and hosted the Web 2.0 Expo conference).

The most notable keynote I watched was that from Tim O'Reilly, the founder of O'Reilly Media and the person who coined Web 2.0, on Enterprise Radar. Tim was talking about how the Web meets the World, in that the valuable contributions and impact on Web 2.0 is not creating a gaming application for Facebook but using Web 2.0 technologies to help the world like for example in global warming, for helping detect weather storms and informing people, etc. Tim gave a challenge to users out there to make something that is useful for the world that is life changing. I think that is good advice.



Another video I saw was of Jay Adelson from Digg talking about the growth of collaborative filters. There wasn't really anything new here I found.



On Technorati: Web2.0ExpoNY

Top 10 wedding videos on YouTube

Seeing that now my wedding is over and my wife and I did a first dance, it does not compare with what these couples did for their first dance. The one that is the craze right now is Baby Got Back.



Personally, I like that one, the wedding thriller video is awesome,



as well as Dirty Dancing.



Check all of the top 10 wedding videos on YouTube as compiled by ViralBlog.

Social Networking conference at U of T

I just finished presenting my talk on "Structural Analysis of Social Hypertext for Finding Sense of Community" at the Social Networking conference at U of T this morning. The gremlins of presentation attacked me today. During the last couple of slides of my talk, I accidentally kicked the AC plug (which seemed to happen to the previous speaker), and then the digital projector turned off. So, I had to finish my talk without slides, but I was fortunate that I could still read the slides off the laptop and my notes, though I wasn't quite happy with that and it kind of throwed me off. Second of all my slides didn't show up properly on the laptop in the room, normally I use the laptop in the room instead of mine to avoid switching and having my laptop reboot in the process (it's actually happened couple of times, the last time at the CASCON conference). Third, I recorded the talk on my iPod but for some strange reason it actually didn't save on the iPod (it actually didn't even start recording). Aghh!

But I do have the slides from my talk so the slides that I wanted to show, are available on my web site.

This is the first time where I could not rely on the laptop in the room, than use my own laptop.

Anyways, if you have any comments on my talk, feel free to contact me at my e-mail (achin AT cs DOT toronto DOT edu).

CASCON 2007 Conference, Day 1

I just finished co-chairing a session on Tagging as a Social Contract along with Mark Chignell and Sara Darvish, where we had 4 talks about issues surrounding tagging in a business environment. This was the second session as part of the Second Working Conference on Social Computing and Business at the CASCON 2007 conference. It was a great workshop and great session, and great discussion. I talked about how community can be inferred from tagging using the YouTube vaccination videos as an example. Podcasts and slides from the workshop should be available, so check the CASCON blog.

I also showed a demo of a community-based web portal that our lab created to support vaccination groups in our exhibit at the Technology Showcase called "Video Web 2.0: Collaborative Tagging in Web Video". If you're at CASCON, check it out!

Photos from CASCON are on my Flickr account.

Facebook on your Rogers mobile phone!

Yes, besides having YouTube on your Rogers mobile phone through Rogers Vision, now you can get Facebook as well. Of course with Rogers Vision, you need to have a phone that supports that. This is what Rogers says about accessing Facebook on your mobile phone:

Everything you love about Facebook is now on your wireless phone. Poke, get messages, find family and friends — it's all here!

To access Facebook, launch your mobile Internet browser and click on Facebook or text FB to 4751 and we'll send you the link!

Facebook costs 5¢ per KB or as per your mobile Internet plan. Can't get enough of Facebook? Get a mobile Internet plan and browse for less. Plans start as low as $5/month for 5MB or $10/month for 10MB.

I suppose if you really need to be in contact and have to use Facebook, then this is a good service. Otherwise, you could probably just wait to get back to a computer with Internet access to use Facebook. I mean do you have to really have Facebook on your mobile. I guess if you're paying an mobile Internet plan, then it's ok.

It looks like Facebook is becoming the social network OS, and with the ability to create Facebook applications and opening up the API to developers, it does look like Facebook has the capability to become the social OS of the internet on the web. Now, since Facebook is getting into the OS and applications arena, it's going to compete with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Facebook resisted the buyout from Yahoo, so it looks like Mark Zuckerberg has something up his sleeve with his creation.

On Technorati: Facebook, Rogers, YouTube

Is MSN Soapbox Microsoft's answer to YouTube?

Today I just discovered a new video social networking site from Microsoft, called MSN Soapbox, which looks like Microsoft's answer to YouTube. It sports a much cleaner interface than YouTube (especially without all those annoying Google ads everywhere). I really like how MSN has included an IM link to instant message the video link to your friends on Windows Live Messenger and also to share the video on Windows Live Spaces.

I'm going to have to try this out and see how if Microsoft has a chance at grabbing some bit of market share for user-generated video content from YouTube. It seems like video social networking is the next thing (first it was blogs, then podcasting, now it's video) in the Web 2.0 arena. Yahoo as you might guess, also has a video service as well called Yahoo Video. So, the big three names in search are also into social networking as well.

It's interesting that a fellow U of T grad student's work from DGP is on Soapbox in the Technology category section, it has to deal with a bumptop 3D desktop where the desktop mimics a real table space where you can put documents into piles and put them in different parts of the desktop like you can do with papers.


Video: BumpTop 3D Desktop

January 31, 2007

Note: I just finished uploading my Masters grad research video onto Soapbox to test the service out. You can see it here and give me comments on what you think.


Video: My Masters graduate research presentation

On Technorati: SoapBox, YouTube, Yahoo Video

What is Google doing with YouTube?

I've been asking this question ever since the acquisition and it was one of the questions that I asked in the breakout discussions of the Social Computing: Best Practices workshop at the CASCON conference. This has made me wonder if Google will replace their Google Video with YouTube, seeing how successful YouTube is. However, Google would not be stupid enough to replace their Google Video, like Google says in their blog post, they've given a glimpse as to what they will do with YouTube.

YouTube and Google Video will be separate, but the Google Video search feature will allow to search on Google Video clips or YouTube clips. Monetization will happen with video ads using YouTube or Google Video in Google's AdSense, there is a new AdSense video test that they are trying out. What would be really neat and useful, is not searching video for text, but metadata embedded in the actual video. That is, I search for some content within the actual frames of the video, using image recognition and vision algorithms. Metadata can be encoded and annotated within each frame, but that is extremely time consuming for the content producer of the video. That's why tagging video like in YouTube is so popular, it's easy, it's intuitive and it allows for building community and finding related topics, and makes it easily available for search.

On Technorati: YouTube, Google Video, video tag, video search