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The Social Web
Alexandre Passant
DERI, NUI Galway
DM110 Emerging Web Media
20th October 2009
♥ Copyright 2008 Digital Enterprise Research Institute. All rights reserved.
Chapter

So far, in the previous lectures ...
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 Using HTML and XHTML to generate Web pages
 Time consuming
 Setting-up a Content Management System
 Requires some basic system administration skills
 How to create content on the Web without high-
level technical skills ?
 Focus on the content rather than on the technical issues
 How to use the Web as a medium to share data and
get new relationships ?
 The Web as a platform for social interactions

Agenda
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 General introduction to Social Media and Web 2.0
 From the Web to a Social Web
 Popular Social Media services
 Blogs, Wikis, etc.
 Media-sharing and Online Social Networking
 Overview of various Web 2.0 services
 Microblogging
 The Twitter phenomenon
 Licensing issues
 Creative Commons
 Web 1.0 / Web 2.0 / Semantic Web
 Next steps for upcoming lectures

From the Web to a “Social Web”
• The New Yorker, 1993 The New Yorker, 2005
“I had my own blog for a while, but
• “On the Internet, nobody I decided to go back to just
knows you’re a dog.” pointless, incessant barking.”
4

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.”
 Popular examples (details later)
 Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Upcoming,
SecondLife, Digg, del.cio.us, 43things …
 Related terms
 Web 2.0, Social Web, social software,
 Social networks, social bookmarking, user-generated content

What is Web 2.0 ?
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 A term made popular by Tim O’Reilly
 http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/
2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
 “A set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable
solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those
principles, at a varying distance from that core.”
 ... but also a copyrighted term for conferences

Web 2.0 principles (O’Reilly)
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 The Web as a platform
 Harnessing collective intelligence
 Data is the next “Intel Inside”
 End of the software release cycle
 Lightweight programming models
 Software above the level of a single device
 Rich user experiences
 The long tail

Web 2.0 meme map
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Web 2.0 tagcloud
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Social Media in simple terms
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 Users  Users post content
 Content  Users share content
 Tags  Users tag content
 Interactivity  Users comment content
 Users browse content via tags
 Users connect directly

How many Web 2.0 services ?
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 A lot !
 See http://techcrunch.com
 Most of them will not survive

Weblogs and weblogging
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What is a blog ?
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 A blog, or weblog (web log) is an online journal
 “A web application which contains periodic time-stamped
posts on a common (usually open-access) webpage”
 Posts are often shown in reverse chronological order
 Usually, blog posts can be commented by the readers
 Generally features RSS feeds to syndicate latest news
 A wide range of use-cases:
 Individual diaries, group blogs on technical topics
 Political campaigns, media programs and corporations
(e.g. the Google Blog)
 Grassroots journalism
 Well-known bloggers may even blog as a daily-job

Anatomy of a weblog (frontend)
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Anatomy of a weblog (backend)
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State of the blogosphere
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Why ? Who ? How ?
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http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/

How to create a blog ?
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 Free online services
 blogger.com, wordpress.com ...
 Open-source tools
 WordPress, B2Evolution ...
 You will need you own hosting space on the Web,
generally with ability to embeds PHP in webpages and
MySQL for data storage
 Some CMS also offer blogging capabilities
 Drupal, Joomla ...
 You may need to install a particular blogging module
 If you already created your Drupal website
 Simply activate the blog module, and you’ve got one !

How to discover blogs / content
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 Many people blog, but data is spread on the Web
 By nature, the Web is distributed, so is weblogging
 Anyone can create a weblog, but how to find it ?
 Blogrolls and hyperlinks
 Will help to find related blogs from a particular one
 Dedicated search engines
 Technorati - http://techorati.com
 Google Blogsearch - http://blogsearch.google.com
 Using those search engines, you can then use your
RSS aggregators to follow interesting news
 On-line aggregators, e.g. http://google.com/reader and
desktop applications, e.g. http://netnewswire.com

RSS Syndication (1)
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 RSS feeds can be used for direct interaction
between producers and consumers
 Even without any web-based application

RSS Syndication (2)
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RSS Syndication (3)
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Tagging blog posts
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 A simple method for user-generated classification
 Anyone can use his own term
 No need to learn a predefined vocabulary
 Evolves among time, thanks to users themselves
 Tagging
 A tripartite relationship between a User, a Resource, a Tag
 Folksonomy
 The result of tagging actions in a given platform
 Tagclouds allow visual representation of folksonomies
 As we will see later, many media-sharing platform
also extensively use tagging

Serendipity through tagging
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Wikis
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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki
 A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable
anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a
simplified markup language.[1][2] Wikis are often used to create
collaborative websites and to power community websites.
 WikiWikiWeb (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki) was the first site to
be called a wiki. Ward Cunningham started developing
WikiWikiWeb in 1994,

Wiki principles
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 A wiki is an informational resource, like a reference
manual, encyclopedia, or handbook
 The most famous is Wikipedia, a highly used, online, free-
access encyclopedia
 It consists in a group of web pages that allows
users to add content and also allows others to edit
the content:
 It relies on cooperation, checks and balances of its
members, and a belief in sharing of ideas
 Contrary to weblogs, wikis focus on community agreement
rather than on personal views of a topic
 This creates a community effort in resource and
information management, disseminating the 'voice'
amongst many instead of concentrating it upon few

What are wikis used for ?
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 Lots of various use-cases
 online encyclopaedias
 free dictionaries
 book repositories
 event management
 software development
 writing research papers
 project proposals
 But be careful
 What is said in a wiki is not
 necessary the truth !
 Always check other information sources

Anatomy of Wikipedia
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Wiki editing and auto-regulation
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 In a Wiki, anyone can edit exiting content, create
new pages, and delete existing content
 WikiWords are used to create new pages and a simple
syntax allows to write pages without HTML
 A versioning mechanism allows to browse and retrieve
older versions to avoid vandalism (+IP blacklisting,
protecting some pages, etc.)
 Auto-regulation
 People voluntary maintain the wiki to avoid vandalism
 Let’s try !
– Choose a Wikipedia page regarding a topic that you like
– Edit the page and add a personal comment
– Let’s come back in a few minutes ...

Media Sharing and OSN
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 Many Web 2.0 websites allow to upload and share
data:
 Pictures, Videos, Slides, Events, Playlists, Bookmarks, ...
 Tag content so that it can be discovered
 Most of them include an online social-networking
(OSN) component
 Meet people because you share the same interests
 Object-centric social networking
 While some websites are pure OSN
 Meet people through others
 Various purposes: dating, friendship, business contacts

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Last.fm use-case
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 Create an account
 http://last.fm/
 Share your musical tastes
 Plug-ins for iTunes and iPod
 Discover new content
 Based on what you’re listening to
 Find people you may like
 Because you’re listening to the same bands
 And create your social network
 Announce concerts, subscribe to events
 Chat with people online and enhance your social network

Connecting things ... and people
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Online Social Networking
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 While the previous websites feature social-
networking components, this is not their main
purpose
 You can use them only to publish / discover data
 Some websites are pure Social Networking:
 Friendships and relationships
 Offline meetings
 Curiosity about others
 Business opportunities and hob hunting
 They allow a user to create and maintain an online
network of close friends or business associates for
social and professional reasons

41

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Popularity of OSN
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• The 10 most popular Alexa rankings:
domains ~= 40%
percent of all page #5: MySpace
views on the Web
(Compete, November #6: Facebook
2006) #8: hi5
– Nearly half of those views #10: orkut
were from the social
networking services #18: Friendster
MySpace and Facebook – #119: Bebo
wow!
#212: LinkedIn
– And that’s just in the top
10…

Microblogging ?
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 Short updates of your activity lifestream
 Publish from various devices and share it to anyone, at
anytime, from anywhere
 A new form of agile communication
 Twitter.com
 The most famous microblogging website, +1 billion tweets !!
 140 characters max per update
 Let’s try
 Go to http://twitter.com and create an account
 Start publishing some data that will be available on your
public timeline http://twitter.com/myusername
 Find people that you want to follow

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Twitter, RT, @followers and #tags
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 By default twitter does not provide a way to
“retweet”, reply to people and add tags
 But these features have been added by the community
 Some of them are now integrated in Twitter
 Retweet
 Republishing of Twitter post, generally beginning with RT
 Answering someone
 Using @username (+ direct private messages)
 Tag content
 Hashtags – #tag
 Hashtag of the lectures - #DM110

Twitter and third-party applications
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 Based on the Twitter API, lots of services emerged
 Twittervision, TwitPic, TwitterFeed, etc.

Social Aggregators
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 How to let people browse my social data from a
single entry point
 Social aggregators can help, Eg: FriendFeed
 We will see in a next lecture how the Semantic Web can
provide alternatives, but thanks to open standards and
process
 Privacy issues
 What do you want to publish ?
 Who can access it ?
– Do you really want your lecturer to see your latest party
pictures from Facebook ?
 Work still must be done in that direction !

Other Web 2.0 services
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 Blogs, wikis, OSN and media sharing are the most
popular form of Social Media websites
 But many other services are available on the Web
 Videoblogging, Podcasting ...
 In addition, mash-ups allow to combine data from
various Web 2.0 services to create your own
 Most of the Web 2.0 service provide an API to access their
data
– http://programmableweb.com
 Eg: Display upcoming concerts on a GoogleMap
– Topic of a future lectures

Licensing issues
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 When you publish content online, you may allow
people to reuse it, but you want to keep some kind
of ownership
 So that your work can be recognized
 Licensing does not unallow to give your work ‘for free’
– E.g.: Free-source software licenses (GPL ...)
 Creative Commons - http://creativecommons.org
 Share, Remix, Reuse — Legally
 Decide what people can do with your content:
– 6 different contracts
 Some bands put their songs using a CC-licence
– http://jamendo.com

Creative Commons
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Find, identify and re-use CC content
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Web 1.0 / Web 2.0
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Platforms Netscape, Internet Explorer Google Services, AJAX, Flock
Web Pages Personal Websites Blogs
Portals Content Management Systems Wikis
Encyclopediæ Britannica Online Wikipedia
Talk Netmeeting Skype, Asterisk
Knowledge Directories, Taxonomies Tagging, Folksonomies
Referencing Stickiness Syndication
Content Akamai BitTorrent, P2P
Events Evite Upcoming.org
(updated from O’Reilly)

... 2.0 or 0.1 ?
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 “Web 2.0” is not far from the initial idea of the Web
 “The idea was that anybody who used the web would have
a space where they could write and so the first browser
was an editor, it was a writer as well as a reader. Every
person who used the web had the ability to write
something. [...] When you write a blog, you don't write
complicated hypertext, you just write text, so I'm very,
very happy to see that now it's gone in the direction of
becoming more of a creative medium” - Tim Berners-Lee -
Interview with the BBC (2005) -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4132752.stm
 We’ll see in a next lecture that the Social Semantic
Web is even more near from the initial vision of the
Web !

Assignment
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 Choose a particular project / interest that you have
 Describe and implement your Social Media strategy
to promote it to a worldwide audience !
 Define and argue which tools you will use (blogs, OSN ...)
 Then create some account(s) and publish content ... keep
it alive if you can, and you might be able to create a
community around it !
 Finally, provide a single entry point so that people can
discover all your Social Media regarding to that topic
content from a single entry point
– Using your Drupal website
 mailto: alexandre.passant@deri.org before 1st Nov.

Credits
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 Some slides based on:
 Former lectures by John Breslin
 Social Semantic Web tutorials
– WWW2008
– RWSS2008
– DERI Tutorial 2009
 CC-Pictures:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Image:HNL_Wiki_Wiki_Bus.jpg
 http://flickr.com/photos/laughingsquid/462105429/
 http://flickr.com/photos/stabilo-boss/93136022/