cazmockett.com

I realise I’m hideously behind with blogging about lots of geeky stuff, but here goes. Apologies if you were expecting this sooner!

This year’s dConstruct was a lot larger than I was expecting: the last time I went in 2006 there was a comfortable number of folks there, and it felt really friendly. I didn’t go in 2007 as it clashed with the Rugby World Cup opening game in Paris. But this year there were about 500 attendees who gathered at the Dome in Brighton for the event. I found it a little difficult to find people, even though I knew they were there, as there were so many folks milling about during the breaks.

Here are a few photos I took during the event:

[Above] Aleks Krotoski on Playing the Web: how gaming makes the internet (and the world) a better place. Listen to the audio (mp3).

[Left] Joshua Porter talks about Leveraging Cognitive Bias in Social Design. Listen to the audio (mp3).

Daniel Burka [below] talked about Designing For Interaction. Listen to the audio (mp3).

Next up was Tantek Çelik, talking at length about Social Network Portability and how Microformats can help you to take your friends with you to a new network. Listen to the audio (mp3).

The two Matts, Biddulph and Jones, [below] did a two-handed presentation called Designing For The Coral Reef. They talked about “delighters” – little things which are present in design which can really make the difference to the user experience. Listen to the audio (mp3).

Clearlefter Jeremy Keith wrapped up the event with a thought-provoking session entitled The System Of The World. There doesn’t seem to be an adio transcript of that available.

The last week of May was designated London Web Week, and I aimed to attend as many events as possible during the schedule. I took the sensible step of staying at a friend’s house in Peckham for a good chunk of the week, as to-ing and fro-ing from Chelmsford would have been pretty costly and inconvenient.

The first do I managed to get to was Tuesday’s Microformats vEvent, where we were treated to presentations from Tom Morris and Dan Brickley.

Putting microformats on the Semantic Web with GRDDL
Another good session from Tom, his slides are now available as a PDF dowload.

One Big Happy Family
Dan’s slides from his talk can be found on Slideshare.

Semantic Camp Session 6 – Parsing Microformats
Gareth Rushgrove

Gareth gave us a quick rundown of the various parsers which are available.

Language Specific – most available apart from Java.
Language agnostic – web services

hKit – open source PHP stuff.
Mofo – for Ruby
Sumo Javascript (from Dan Webb) – generic parser for JS.
XSLT – at Brian Suda’s site
Optimus – is down at the moment
Google’s Social Graph API – parses XFN relationships

Semantic Camp Session 7 – WTF is RDF?
Tom Morris

Always worth hearing, Tom did an idiots’ guide to RDF, just the thing for a bear of very little brain such as myself.

RDF = Resource Description Framework! 1999 originally, 2004 updated into 6 docs:

• Primer
• Schema
• Syntax Spec
• Concepts & Abstract Syntax
• Semantics
• Test Cases

RDF files at their simplest form:

3 things – subject, predicate, object (see above). The simplest form is – Triples (N3)
Subject and Predicate are Resources – Not literals; Object – Literal sting of text
foo.n3 – text file containing triples.

Tools to parse are available in – Java, C, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby

He then talked some more about RDF validation and FOAF – which seems like the most friendly and usable aspect of RDF from this bear’s perspective. If you want to make your own FOAF file, why not use the foaf-o-matic

The Rest of the Afternoon

There were other talks going on, but I got distracted by a rather fab game, made by John Linklater-Johnson called Semantopoly. A fab idea [not in the least based on Monopoly] which had us all amused for some hours:

[Matt, Gareth and Isabelle get to grips with the rules of Semantopoly]