Blogging Roller

(I just returned to work after vacation and a week of conferences in the SF bay area. Instead of posting my trip reports to the limited audience that reads my internal IBM blog, I'm going to post them here so that everybody can benefit from them.)

On Monday Nov. 2, I attended Social Web Camp at Sun's Santa Clara campus. There were about 40 people in attendance. The event was organized by Sun's Henry Story, an expert in semantic web technologies and inventor of the FOAF+SSL approach to implementing Social Networking features (relationship based privacy). Unfortunately, Henry was not able to attend the conference because he was detained by US immigration.

• Social Web Camp, Santa Clara, CA
  http://barcamp.org/SocialWebCamp-Santa-Clara
• Sun's Santa Clara Campus - AKA the Agnews Insane Asylum
  http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/santaclara/agn.htm
• FOAF+SSL distributed/open social networking
  http://esw.w3.org/topic/foaf+ssl
• Henry detained for 6 days, case dismissed in 30 seconds
  http://twitter.com/bblfish/status/5509198135

During the camp, I lead a session on OpenSocial using my "What's up with OpenSocial" slides from BarCampRDU. Surprisingly, very few people were familiar with OpenSocial, so this was an introductory level discussion.

• What's up with OpenSocial preso from BarCampRDU
  http://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AWuMBlP1tnN6ZGcyY2ZuendfOThmcXMydjdmcQ&hl=en

I participated in a session on enterprise social networking and shared a little about we do with micro-blogging inside IBM, mentioning BlueTwit and the new features in Lotus Connections. A couple of folks from Boeing were present and described the home-grown social networking and micro-blogging system.

• BlueTwit mentioned in Business Week
  http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_22/b4086056643442.htm

John Panzer of Google pitched his new Salmon protocol, a distributed commenting system that allows comments made on items in downstream systems (e.g. aggregators, social networks, FriendFeed, etc.) to find their way back upstream to the source item. The protocol is based, in part, on AtomPub. Comments are signed and posted back upstream. Seems like this could be useful in both Lotus Connections river of news feature, Jazz-based products and Roller; so I'll going to track this one closely. It might be fun to try to implement Salmon for Roller.

• Salmon: comments and annotations to swim upstream, spawn more commentary
  http://www.salmon-protocol.org/

I missed a little of the conference because I had lunch with some of my former co-worker from Sun and I left a little early to return my vacation rental car and make my way to Oakland for ApacheCon US 2009. More about that later...