Technology & Patterns

Last week I was fortunate to attend the 2011 Semantic Technology conference at the San Francisco Hilton at Union Square.  Given the length (Sun – Thu) of the conference and its technical detail the notes from the conference will be divided into individual articles.

In this first post I need to thank the main organizer, Tony Shaw and the San Francisco Hilton at Union Square for the power situation.  It’s clear that airport designers and technical conference venues use the same electrical contractor/consultant.  Their goal (learned through years of observation) is to provide as few power outlets as possible per person.  The United gates at LAX provide about 3 outlets per 10k people which is a feat.

Not so at the 2011 Semantic Tech conference!

It might seem like a little thing but it’s not.  The tables in almost every session at the 2011 Semantic Technology conference had a string (two per table) of power strips.  Simple, relatively easy-to-do and yet surprisingly rare.

When you are away from the office for more than a day or two being able to plug in a laptop to wall power is so useful that it passes the threshold of being a nicety and gets to be a necessity.

Again, kudos to the San Francisco Union Square Hilton and Tony Shaw / Mediabistro (the organizers of the conference).  Thanks!

If you’re interested in things local and social (e.g., Zope Corporation‘s customers) you should read Chris Dixon’s excellent (and short) blog post about graphs.  As Dixon points out a graph is the real “secret sauce” at Facebook.

Example person-friendship graph

This graph lets us reason about Steve, Mary and Joe (they all know one another and are all friends).  They likely have something in common.

This graph also invites some inference.  Two of Joe’s friends are Sally’s friends.  In the algebra of social networks that suggests Joe and Sally might be friends.  This is (in an oversimplified way) how and why Facebook makes suggestions about people you might want to befriend.

Despite the only relationships in the graph above being “Friend” and “Possible Friend” this is all good stuff.  Moreover, the graph of human relationships is arguably the most valuable one.

BUT… it is not the only one.

Local media organization like suburban newspapers, radio stations, and tv stations are the switchboard for graph information in their community.  Consider the following graph:

Example community-everything graph

As you look at this graph see the Facebook graph extended with a day or week of news coverage and advertising in your community.  Imagine this graph growing every day for a year.  Now imagine how we might be able to reason about relationships between people, organizations, places, merchants, and schools.

Local media organizations are in THE best position to capture this graph.

Dixon ends his blog post with a hint at the value of social identity (via Facebook Connect and OAuth) and I think he’s right on:

Besides creating graphs, Facebook and Twitter (via Facebook Connect and OAuth) created identity systems that are extremely useful for the creation of 3rd party graphs. I expect we’ll look back on the next few years as the golden age of graph innovation.

Stay tuned.