IWMW blogs

How well-used was the IWMW 2010 blog? Looking at the Google Analytics summaries for the month of July 2010 the following information is available.

During July there were 2,696 visits. As might be expected, and illustrated in the graph, the blog was visited the most during the three days of the event, with the peak of 474 visits taking place on Tuesday 13 July 2010, the second day of the event.

<a href="http://iwmw.ukoln.ac.uk/blog/2010/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/“>

But how many visitors came to the blog?

As shown in the accompanying image once again the peak occurred on the second day of the event, with 363 visitors.

Overall during July 2010 there were 363 visitors, according to the statistics provided by Google Analytics.

The browser statistics  are not very interesting: 37.7% of the views came from Firefox; IE was in second place with  21.5% followed by 17.8% for Safari and 17.6% for Chrome.

64% of the views came from browsers running MS Windows with the Macintosh OS in second place with 25%.  However Apple were also in the 3rd, 5th and 6th places with 5%, 1.4% and 1.2% of the market for the iPhone, iPod and iPad devices. Linux was in 4th place with 1.6% with Android devices trailed at 1%.

I’m note quite sure what these statistics might tell us, but I feel it is worth publishing these summaries as this information might be used to support decisions on the provision of blog to support events in the future and to enable comparisons to be made.

The sigm.ma search engine is described as a ‘Semantic Information Mashup’ service.   If you search for ‘iwmw10‘ you will find a whole host of resources, most, if not all, of which appear to relate to the IWMW 2010 event.  The search results tend to come from structured information sources such as blogs, popular Social Web services and various RSS feeds.

If you are looking to see what other shave said about the event sign.ma might prove to be a useful starting point for your search.  Note that at the time of writing there are 46 sources which have been found.  If you search for iwmw you will find many more resources (200 at the time of writing) including those about previous IWMW events.

Search on sig.ma for 'iwmw10'

We hope you find this a useful resource.

The IWMW events have always sought to provide an opportunity for experimentation  on various aspects with emerging new Web technologies.  In the past couple of years we have encouraged use of Twitter to support discussions at the event. Whilst the use of a Twitter event back channel  may no longer be regarded as innovative (although the event may provide an opportunity for those who haven’t yet used Twitter to explore its potential)  the use of semantic tweets is a relatively new concept.

I first came across the concept of using lightly structured tweets to support an event at the WWW 2010 conference in a paper on “Real-time #SemanticWeb in <= 140 chars” (available in PDF format) presented by Joshua Shinavier in the Linked Data on the Web 2010 workshop.  Joshua provided a demonstration of use of this approach at the conference. As he has described his demonstration is “based on TwitLogic, an aggregating service capable of collecting user-contributed semantic nanotations from Twitter“.

He provided the following summary of how to use the service at the Linked Data on the Web workshop which was co-located with the WWW 2010 conference (for which the conference hashtags were #ldow2010 and #www2010)

… open up your favorite Twitter client to write down whatever you want to say about this WWW 2010 conference, or about any subevents of it. As a LOD enthusiast, you might want to tweet about this LDOW workshop:

#LDOW2010 (part of #www2010) is about to start, expecting a bunch of great presentations!

You migt also want to tweet about a particular talk:

Next will be @joshsh talking about #TwitLogic (see http://bit.ly/aOnQb7). #ldow10 (ie #ldow2010)

TwitLogic understands your tweet, extracts the embeded structured data, processes them to generate RDF streams and finally, your tweets appear in our demo, becoming part of the real-time view of the LDOW workshop!

Joshua has kindly agreed that his service can be used to aggregated the #iwmw10 tweets, thus provided a Linked Data representation of the discussions on the Twitter back channel at this year’s event.

In order to provide the initial content for the service I have tweeted the following factual sumamries about the event. Initially I described the event using a syntax which should be understandable by both humans and software:

The Web site for #iwmw10  (homepage http://iwmw.ukoln.ac.uk/iwmw2010/)

I then provided links between the various plenary talks,the speakers and the details on the Web site:

Welcome session at #iwmw10 is by @mariekeguy and @briankelly #P0 (homepage http://iwmw.ukoln.ac.uk/iwmw2010/talks/welcome/)

Welcome session #P0 (partof #iwmw10)

Biographical details for @briankelly  (homepage http://iwmw.ukoln.ac.uk/iwmw2010/speakers/#kelly) #iwmw10

Plenary talk #P1 by @cloggingchris (homepage http://iwmw.ukoln.ac.uk/iwmw2010/talks/sexton/) (partof #iwmw10)

I also provided links to my interests and key resources:

Blog for @briankelly (homepage http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/) #iwmw10

@briankelly is based at UKOLN (hompage  http://ww.ukoln.ac.uk/) #iwmw10

Interests of @briankelly (studies Web2.0) (studies Standards) (studies Accessibility) #iwmw10

Joshua’s software processes tweets containing the #iwmw10, analyses the tweets and parses the structure and stores this Linked Data in RDF.  A Linked Data visualisation tool can then be used to browse through this structured resource.

If you would like to join in, you can post your tweets with the #iwmw2010 using the syntax defined in the Syntax Convention and illustrated above. Note that the Twitter aggregation software is following Twitter users which are listed on the iwmw10facilitator, iwmw10facilitator or iwmw10participant (or iwmw10remote) list – so if you wish your event tweets to be included as semantic tweets please let us know so that we can add you to the appropriate group.

Our intention is to provide a demonstration of the results on the final morning of the IWMW 2010 even, between 11:30 and 12:30 on Wednesday 14 July.

The IWMW events provide an opportunity for the evaluation of new technologies and this year’s event is no exception, allowing delegates to gain experiences of various aspects of the mobile Web.

We will be providing an opportunity for delegates to  familiarise themselves with location-based sharing services such as FourSquare and Gowalla.  I will visit the main locations we will be using at Sheffield just before the event begins and geo-locate the main auditorium, the registration areas, the rooms used for the parallel sessions, the accommodation and some of the social venues – an idea I have described previously in  a post on Social Location Sharing Services.

If you have installed a FourSquare or Gowalla application on your mobile device (e.g. iPhone, iPod Touch, Android Phone, etc.)  and obtained an account, when checking in you should see details of other people who have also checked in.  If, for example, you have arrived early and have decided to visit The Fat Cat pub (well worth a visit) potentially you could see other IWMW 2010 delegates who, may be already there (details about the pub are available on FourSquare).

Of course there are lots of issues about privacy, personal safety, security, etc. But having a few days away at a friendly event can provide an ideal opportunity to evaluate such technologies.   If you wish to use this opportunity feel free to get in touch with me, either on FourSquare or Gowalla.

Note that a particular location-based sharing service is not being recommended. I personally prefer Gowalla but I know others who prefer FourSquare. I should also mention that in January Harvard University announced an official presence on FourSquare, so if you dismiss such services as trivia bear in mind the comments made by Perry Hewitt, director of digital communications and communications services for Harvard Public Affairs and Communications: “We believe that Harvard’s participation will allow our community to engage with friends, professors, and colleagues in new ways. We also hope visitors and neighbors will benefit from the platform as it grows through use”.

The JISC Greening Events  Project

Greening Events is a small exploratory project funded under the JISC Greening ICT programme . It is investigating how to minimise the negative sustainability impacts of academically related events (such as conferences and seminars, training, administrative and project meetings, etc.) whilst gaining the maximum benefit from them. The two main objectives of the project are:

1. To develop a prototype ‘systemic’ impact analysis methodology. By systemic we mean not only the direct impacts of an event but the knock on and incidental impacts (both positive and negative). Factors would include more concrete impacts such as energy, carbon, water and waste footprints and finances but also and the less tangible but no less important social, personal and organisational costs and benefits of people attending the events, thus enabling a more rounded exploration of the balance between costs and benefits.
2. To explore the use of a variety of technologies to help minimise the sustainability impact of events. To do this the project builds on two earlier JISC-funded software development projects and will lead to prototype software that will allow the event organisers to effectively plan their events and attendees to get connected and/or get information (including via mobile devices) towards “greener events”. Damien Steer, who is speaking at the event, will include a reference to how we are using Mobile Campus Assistant in the Greening Events project in his presentation.

The project is using real academic events as case studies and will be interviewing three virtual delegates from this year’s IWMW event as well as, if access if possible, study the Web logs of the video and Twitter feeds to see how virtual delegates are making use of these tools.

Finding Out More

If you would like more information about the project or would like to get involved in one of the interviews please contact the project analyst Paul Shabajee (paul.shabajee@bristol.ac.uk) or the project manager Debra Hiom (d.hiom@bristol.ac.uk).

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?

Use of Blogs and Social Networks at Previous Events

For the IWMW 2008 event we made use of a Ning social network to provide a forum for discussions and also an opportunity to evaluate the potential of social networking software to support an event.  The service was easy to set up and (at the time) there was no costs for use of the service.  However we found that the discussion forums were little used and, with the exception of the group on “Web CMS and University Web Teams Part II – the Never Ending Story?“, there was also littler takeup of the Ning groups.

Last year we decided that IWMW 2009 would be supported by an event blog. This proved successful, enabling the event organisers to keep participants informed of developments in the run-up to the event and, during the event itself, to publish summaries of the various talks and also include video clips and interviews with a number of the participants.

However use of the WordPress blog meant that the content we published was under the control of the organisers; we had lost the ability for participants themselves to initiate discussions.

Developments for IWMW 2010

This year we are again using a WordPress blog.  However we have installed the BuddyPress WordPress plugin as part of the blog environment.

BuddyPress is an open source social networking software package and the plugin transforms the blog into a social network platform.

Using BuddyPress will provide an opportunity for delegates (and remote participants) to network before, during and after the event. BuddyPress allows you to become a member of the site, add a user profile, create groups and group discussion forums, become ‘friends’ with other members and message them.

We will be interested to see if greater usage is made of the social networking environment at this year’s event. Is there, I wonder, a real demand for social networking software to support an event?