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Monday, October 29, 2007 The Semantic Web Goes Mainstream Continued from page 1 By Kate Greene Print E-mail Audio » New! Listen - Flash Listen - MP3 Subscribe to podcast What is this? Powered by Share » Digg this Add to del.icio.us Add to Reddit Add to Facebook

Twitter + Location Based Feeds = TwitterWhere October 25, 2007 — 10:01 PM PDT — by Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins — Share This Amongst the hundreds of mashups and utilities for Twitter, there are very few that I find particularly useful. In fact, most of my interfacing with Twitter either takes place in my feed reader or in a GTalk window. Matt King’s TwitterWhere is a definite exception to the rule, however. TwitterWhere is an elegantly simple tool that allows you to generate an RSS or XML Feed  that will provide you with Tweets around a given geographic area. Not to be confused with TwitterWhere.com (a tool allowing you to easily update your current location), in Matt King’s TwitterWhere, search criteria can be entered by city, state, and postal code, then designate the range in miles you wish to include. Once search criteria is entered, you’ll be given links to feeds in RSS format, or in an XML file in the format of the Twitter public timeline. This can be quite useful for not only finding Twiterers in your general area, but in the event of some major news event, it can be an easy way to get instant feedback from folks based in the location where events are unfolding.

Three products in the social-software toolbox -- blogs, wikis and RSS -- have begun to gain traction inside companies. Blogs are probably the best known, thanks in part to their popularity on the Web and partly because of the handful of executives who use blogs to address customers and employees and to muse about industry trends. Lately, blogs are showing up inside companies -- including Procter & Gamble Co., Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co. and ad agency TBWA Worldwide, among others -- as a way for rank-and-file employees to discuss important industry trends, to bring project team members up to speed, or for employees to vent about changes within the company. Wikis aren't as familiar as blogs, but they may be even better suited for business use. They're versatile tools for doing almost any sort of collaboration, from project management to building vast repositories of knowledge. (That's what the best-known public wiki, Wikipedia, has done.) At Walt Disney Co.'s Pixar studio, for instance, wiki technology is being used to help coordinate new computerized animation tools for the studio's planned 2008 release of a film called "WALL-E." Finally, RSS (for Really Simple Syndication) knits together all the material created on blogs and in wikis and delivers it in easy-to-find fashion. RSS lets employees keep up to date on the latest blog post or change in the project-team wiki. It also can alert users to changes in business-critical information like an entry in a spreadsheet or even the computerized output from production equipment, such as error messages from semiconductor machinery. Other Web 2.0 te

NY-based Kaltura has received a good bit of buzz since I first reported about their presentation at the NY Video Meetup last April. Since then they have gone on to win the people's choice at Techcrunch40 and have launched a useful Facebook application. I had a chance to grab a coffee with co-founder Ron Yekutiel and here are my notes: Ron describes Kaltura as "wiki meets YouTube". He believes there is a movement going on from text publishing to video publishing and that collaboration in the video space is where Kaltura leads the pack. Kaltura is seeking to empower other social networks by their use of the Kaltura application. Ron says that while Kaltura.com is a destination site, the real power is how other sites use the tool within their framework. What I get about Kaltura is that small contributions can equal big productions where everybody has a vested interest in the final product. Ron spoke about four reasons people collaborate on video: For social progression and to see interaction Text is dead (Allen's note: I sure hope not!) The number of contributors help to decrease the barriers to contribution The swarm effect of advertising - he sees this as the new model where instead of a 1-1 advertising or many-many, companies will use collaboration to reach their desired customer The Kaltura team has four co-founders, two are in New York and the other two are in Israel. The team totals 25 people and are in Israel. From what I gather, the leadership of Kaltura might be the most educated group I have come across. Lots of post-graduate degrees from Ivy League schools. We spoke about the Kaltura business model which is largely based on rev share. It's an interesting model because it puts the trust in the sites using the application to report the income back as they use their own advertising not Kaltura's ad platform. For sites that don't have their own advertising platform, Kaltura can provide one with strong advertising players involved. Ron left me with some juicy bits about the future for Kaltura but he asked me not to share them at this time. He said they are coming very soon and as soon as I can share with you, I will.

Sharepoint, Among Other Upgrades October 17, 2007 — 08:18 PM PDT — by Kristen Nicole — Share This NewsGator, the RSS company, has announced at the Web 2.0 Conference that NewsGator Social Sites are now available for users to incorporate for business use. Social Sites is an add-on for the NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES), which is a tool that businesses can use as a way to interact, share news, search for items and generally keep up with what’s going on in the company. Included in this launch is the support of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and 3.0. So now you can let your employees use NewsGator Social Sites for communicating in a circular manner around important information. Incorporate RSS feeds, profiles, self-published articles, tags and more into the network to be searched be employees. The syndication of content from SharePoint Server lets users keep up with updates from their desktop, email service or mobile device. Some other enhancements come in the way of actual social networking options. Profiles have been improved so that more relevant information is more readily available, making it easier to find people with the necessary area of expertise, for the necessary information. NewsGator has also recently launched its Facebook application.