Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Social Media:
Why and how to take advantage of it
Alexandre Passant <alexandre.passant@deri.org>
Digital Enterprise Research Institute,
National University of Ireland, Galway
HEAnet's National Networking Conference 2008
14th Novembre 2008, Kilkenny
 Copyright 2008 Digital Enterprise Research Institute. All rights reserved.
Chapter

Introduction
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 Alexandre Passant
 Postdoctoral researcher
 DERI, NUI Galway
 Social Software cluster
 Research Interests
 Web 2.0 and Social Media
 Semantic Web and Linked Data
 Combining both to provide advanced / intelligent
services on the Web for end-users

Agenda
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 Social media ?
 The wisdom of crowds
 Popular features, services and platforms
 Blogs, Wikis, Social Networking, Tagging
 How to get benefit from it
 Information sharing, community building ...
 Going further with the Semantic Web
 Interlinking online communities
 Questions and discussion
 Experience sharing, feedback

What is Social Media ?
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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
 “Social media uses the ‘wisdom of crowds’ to
connect information in a collaborative manner.”
 “Social media can take many different forms,
including message boards, weblogs, wikis,
podcasts, pictures and video.”
 Web 2.0
A term made popular by Tim O’Reilly
 Harnessing collective intelligence

Web 2.0 tagcloud
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Popular features
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 Publish
 From data consumers to data producers
 A read-write Web
 Share
 Publishedcontent is generally readable by anyone
 “knowledge = power” => “feedback = power”
 Tag
 Add keywords to your content to make it retrievable
 Interact
 Comment blogs, edit wikis, join networks ...

Serendipity through tagging
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Popular services and platforms
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 Blogging for personal data management
 Blogger, WordPress ...
 Wikis for collaboration
 Wikipedia, pbWiki ...
 Share content, from text to multimedia
 del.icio.us, Flickr, Youtube ...
 Social Networking to build or extend a
community
 Facebook, LinkedIn ...

Social Media is a reality
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Personal and group weblogging
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 Unrestricted topics
 Announcement, feedback, reflexions ...
 Email vs weblogging
 Open audience
 Worldwide feedback
 Long-life archiving

Wikis for collaborative work
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 Using a wiki for
 Project proposal, software documentation ...
 Wiki philosophy
 Open editing
 Auto-regulation
 Consensus

OSN : LinkedIn use case
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 LinkedIn
A business-oriented social-network
 Expand your contacts
 Rate your colleagues and get recommendations
 Being suggested people you might know
 New opportunities

OSN : Facebook use case
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 Facebook
 Identify friends and join groups
 Build a post-event community
 Keep contact, federate people, initiate projects
 Outreach the event and gather new people

Microblogging
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 Microblogging
A lightweight and agile
form of communication
 Status notification
 Between blogging and I.M.
 Twitter
 140 chars max (Web, txt ...)

Data sharing : SlideShare use-case
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 SlideShare
 Dedicated to presentations
 A showcase for talks and lectures
 Upload and tag slides
 Join groups
 Extend your audience

Licensing issues
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Going further
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 Social Media has some limits
 SocialNetwork Fatigue
 Computers cannot understand the meaning of
created data, which makes information retrieval
and querying difficult
 The Semantic Web can help !
 An extension of the current Web with machine-
readable and interlinked data
 A global graph of knowledge
 The Web as a giant database

Social Semantic Information Spaces
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DERI and the Social Semantic Web
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 Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities
 http://sioc-project.org
A common model to represent social activities of
online communities on the Semantic Web
 Federating distributed social data
 Adoption
 Morethan 40 tools, from Web 2.0 to Bioinformatics
 W3C Member Submission
 Recommended by Yahoo! SearchMonkey

Thank you !
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•
Questions ?