Blogs

On behalf of the programme chairs for BlogTalk 2008, I would like to thank all participants at the conference. We would like to ask you if you would be so kind as to complete our post-conference survey at: https://www.unipark.de/uc/blogtalk2008/

As regards next year's conference, we have had an interesting offer to host the event in Korea. We are also looking at Seville for BlogTalk 2010.

We have an IRC backchannel at #blogtalk on irc.freenode.net.

We've created a map showing the main places of interest (event locations, restaurants, pubs, shopping locations and tourist sights) during BlogTalk 2008. The conference venue is shown on the left-hand side of the map. We will also have a hardcopy for all attendees.

We are happy to announce our fourth keynote speaker, Michael Breidenbrücker, one of the co-founders of Last.fm, and now a director of Lovely Systems. You can read more about Michael here.

Due to an unforeseen clash, Rashmi Sinha will be unable to present at BlogTalk 2008.

A quick message to say that there are just five days left to register online for BlogTalk 2008. You can do so at Amiando.

If you are interested in attending the optional blogger's dinner on March 2nd, you can sign up by editing this wiki page and adding your name. The invite key is "Cork". Thanks!

Just a heads up that half of our available tickets (75/150) have been allotted, so if you intend to register for BlogTalk "last minute" we cannot guarantee that there will be full tickets available.

We do hope to have a limited number of onsite registrations available, but these may be restricted to event attendance only (no meals), depending on availability.

I'm happy to announce that we have four interesting and varied keynote speakers lined up for the BlogTalk 2008 conference on social software in Cork this March.

• Nova Spivack - Founder and CEO, Radar Networks
  Nova is the entrepreneur behind the Twine "knowledge networking" application, which allows users to share, organise, and find information with people they trust. He will talk about semantic social software for consumers.
• Rashmi Sinha - Founder, Uzanto
  Rashmi led the team that produced SlideShare, a popular presentation-sharing service that some have described as "YouTube for PowerPoint". She will talk about lessons learned from designing social software applications.
• Salim Ismail - Head of Brickhouse, Yahoo!
  Salim is a successful investor and entrepreneur, with expertise in a variety of early-stage startups and Web 2.0 companies including Confabb and PubSub. He will talk about entrepreneurship and social media.
• Final speaker has been selected but has yet to be 100% confirmed.

You can see further details and longer biographies of the keynote speakers at 2008.blogtalk.net/invitedspeakers. We will also have two invited panel sessions, the details of which will be announced shortly.

As organiser of the co-located WebCamp workshop on social network portability, I am happy to announce two invited talks by experts from the fields of the social web and the Semantic Web.

• Ajit Jaokar is a mobile web pioneer and a researcher on identity and reputation in social networks at University College London. Ajit is founder and CEO of FutureText publishing, and his latest book was entitled "Mobile Web 2.0". Ajit is also a member of the RSA and of the web2.0 workgroup. Currently, he plays an advisory role to a number of mobile startups in the UK and in Scandinavia.
• Dan Brickley is a Semantic Web advocate and researcher. He joined the W3C in 1999 to help establish the Semantic Web project. In 2000, he co-founded the FOAF project, and he has been working on interconnecting the social web ever since. Post-W3C, Dan has been working as a part-time contractor at Joost, is active in the open standards world, and he serves as a visiting fellow at the University of Bristol.

Here are links to longer biographies for both Ajit and Dan.

We've had submissions from authors in 19 countries for BlogTalk 2008: Argentina, Austria, China, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Guatemala, India, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Serbia, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

We are currently in the reviewer assignment phase, and will notify the authors of successful proposals in early January.