If you’ve tried to understand what the semantic web means – sometimes referred to as Web 3.0 – and haven’t got very far, this video will help.
The documentary-style video – surely as good as anything you might see on TV – created by journalism/psychology graduate Kate Ray includes insights from some big names in the web world including Tim Berners-Lee, David Weinberger and Clay Shirky.
It runs over 14 minutes but I found it highly compelling viewing. It’s worth the time.
Content summary: Shel’s travelling; FIR Listener Contest winners to be announced on Feb 6; new FIR Interview posted; FIR live on BlogTalk Radio Feb 9; Dan York reports on podcasting gear, Facebook, and more; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; in conversation with Dave Briggs about BarcampUKGovWeb, and more; Subway/Quiznos lawsuit; Ryanair’s hottie ad: a PR disaster?; Ask 500 people; listeners’ comments discussion; Neville at the Social Media Cafe in London Feb 1; music from The Weakerthans via Bernie Goldbach; and more.
[Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.]
Show notes for January 31, 2008
Welcome to For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, a 67-minute podcast recorded live from Wokingham, Berkshire, England, and almost live from Basking Ridge, New Jersey, USA.
Download the file here (MP3, 30.3MB), or sign up for the RSS feed to get it and future shows automatically. (For automatic synchronization with your iPod, subscribe with iTunes; good podcatchers include Juice and DopplerRadio, and RSS aggregators that supports podcasts such as FeedDemon.)
In This Edition:
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So, until Monday February 4…
(Cross-posted from For Immediate Release, Shel’s and my podcast blog.)
If you had to pick just 100 blogs that would provide you with all the content you need to stay informed on everything that interests you, which 100 would you pick?
And by which criteria would you determine that 100?
Some clever researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University in the USA have done the work for you with the publication of a ranked listing of 100 blogs.
This is not just any old list – it’s been arrived at through a complex scientific analysis involving outbreak detection, submodularity, node selections and sensor placements among many other things.
If that and the image above – taken from a presentation the researchers prepared – don’t give you a sense of the complexity of the research, how the abstract in the published research paper (PDF) begins ought to:
Given a water distribution network, where should we place sensors to quickly detect contaminants? Or, which blogs should we read to avoid missing important stories?
The 10-page paper, entitled “Cost-effective Outbreak Detection in Networks,” is a detailed reporting of what the research aimed to achieve, the methodologies employed and the findings that resulted.
Here’s the researchers’ rationale:
[...] Our goal is to select a small set of blogs which “catch†as many cascades (stories) as possible. A naive, intuitive solution would be to select the big, well-known blogs. However, these usually have a large number of posts, and are time-consuming to read. We show, that, perhaps counterintuitively, a more cost-effective solution can be obtained, by reading smaller, but higher quality, blogs, which our algorithm can find.
A very long tail approach.
I should mention at this point that my blog is in this list, at number 84. Actually, as far as I can tell (I haven’t checked every single blog), only one other UK blogger is in this US-focused list: Hugh MacLeod, at number 76.
So two Brits cut the mustard of blog indispensability 
Did you watch the lunar eclipse last night?
Perhaps ‘watch’ isn’t the right word, unless you did spend a couple of hours just staring at the sky.
It was quite something to experience seeing the moon gradually change from a bright white orb to something that looked a bit like a coppery-coloured 5-watt lightbulb, and then transition through to bright white again.
From my vantage point – roughly 51°25 N and 0°51 W - we had a completely clear sky last night so could observe the phenomenon in its entirety. I took a couple of photos with my Nokia N73. Posted one to my moblog. Rather a pathetic picture, actually, compared to some others! See the Flickr eclipse set for more really great photos.