IWMW blogs

If you are attending IWMW 2010 would you be interested in sharing your interest in the event on your personal networks or on a number of popular social recommender services?  Or perhaps you would like to recommend particular talks or sessions at the event.

We are currently evaluating the OpenLike protocol which is described as “an open protocol to allow sharing the things people like in a simple and standard method between web applications“.

We have implemented the OpenLike widget on the IWMW 2010 home page which provides the illustrated icons on the home page. So if you want to recommend the event on the Hunch, Digg, Reddit or Stumbleon services this is now a simple way of doing this.

We have also embedded this interface on the individual pages for the plenary talks and intend to do the same for the workshop sessions.  So if you want to share  your thoughts on, say Paul Boag’s plenary talk, you can now do so.

In addition to OpenLike we are also evaluating the Facebook’s Like mechanism which allows Facebook users to share their recommendations with their Facebook followers.  This is  available on the IWMW 2010 home page It has also been implemented on the page for the workshop session on  ”Engagement, Impact, Value: Measuring and Maximising Impact Using the Social Web“. As you can see, if a Facebook user clicks on the Recommend icon which has been used in preference to the default Like option) this will be displayed in their Facebook news feed.

Note, though, that as the pages providing information on the plenary talks and workshop sessions contain RDFa data, it does not seem possible to include the Facebook Like code into these pages without making the pages invalid (the Facebook Like code contains an <IFRAME> element which cannot be used in an RDFa+HTML page.  We will investigate whether it is possible to embed the code in a valid way.

Are these approaches which others think are useful?