Syllogism. There are some words that I can’t get my head around. This one I did, finally. I have read about Aristotle and logic no end of times. Knowledge that happily flowed through me. I was caught up short as I perused Clay Shirky’s deep vault of delights. Articles that he had written several years ago.

Now I have been wide eyed at the Semantic web for a while now. I was wide eyed when I found out about email back in 1981, and distraught to see people agape at Fax machines. I toyed with the Internet, read about it in books anonymous ftp was amazing, and gopher? Blimey! People were aghast as I shrieked when I finally saw a web connection back in 1994 in the library at Heriot-Watt. An anecdote propping up no end of braying middle aged dinner parties.

So Semantic Web. The next big thing?

Medieval monks went to great lengths to illustrate their books, wonderous capitals spilling out in riotous ornate colours. Web pages too look quite amazing, but to a glum server choking on bits from around the world it knows nothing of natty pictures. But in a way the semantic web (via RDFa) illustrates the text of a web page.

More than words. It takes a lot of nous to get the meaning of a text. Data though can be larded in on the web, behind the scenes in the html unbeknownst to the reader can lurk labels and tags explaining what something is, or where. The reader can’t see it but search engines can, and so use it to deliver better results to advertisees.

OK. So only a tiny proportion of the Semantic web is embedded in web pages, virtually all of it resides in things called RDF triple stores. Triple because each piece of knowledge consists of three parts a subject, with a predicate giving rise to an object. “The sky  has the colour  blue” for example. Put enough of these statements together and you get a graph. Each part of these triple items is unique, it has its own URI to represent it. This is fine for  small area of knowledge but to meld these fields together one needs some way of translating them, and this is where OWL comes in, it allows one to work out how different vocabularies can fit together. So now you can search for similar patterns in large databases of Semantic data, using SPARQL (almost for the glory of Rome).

Now Clay Shirky’s article “The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview” predates embedded web knowledge. It is interesting to read his words, a lot has unfolded since then. The upshot is an extension of a criticism of AI, a branch of science devoted in making machines that can think. Logic is brittle, so the labels can quickly end up contradicting themselves making the whole thing pointless. As though the whole point is to deduce a deeper understanding of the world and not the rather more prosaic bait for agents scouring the web for the betterment of searches.

True now I think about it distilling an item into labels has its issues, and with that in mind you can’t construe too much. But there is plenty to be getting on with for the time being. Locations of restaurants, etc. One of the biggest users of the semantic web has been the biosciences, huge amount of data that needs to be cross referenced. The semantic web can feed their giant graph databases looking to turn up leads for new medicines. Now combing through data profitably looking for similarities, this isn’t AI to me but turning the cogs and wheels and crunching data. For AI to replicate a human I can only think of an imaginative machine. Perhaps this too is a mirage.

But murky knowledge muddies the pool. One piece of supporting evidence isn’t as much use as twenty more. This is how Cyc works, looking for a bit of evidence, but wary that what but me true might only be true locally, or just plain wrong. And now it has started to read, learning unaided by puny humans. The singularity started a year ago…

But is about to arrive in our lives, and in a big way. For example, what if I told you that when Best Buy embraced aspects of the Semantic Web its website saw a 30% increase in traffic.

Got your attention?!

Thanks to the following for their time and attention last night:

• Stephen Waddington @wadds
• Rob Brown @robbrown
• Robin Grainger @mistergrainger
• Stuart Bruce @stuartbruce
• David Dewilde @dewilded
• Richard Bagnall @richardbagnall
• Stuart Bruce @stuartbruce
• David Phillips @DavidGHPhillips
• Giles Palmer @joodoo9
• Chris Lee @cmrlee
• Brad Little @bradleyjlittle
• Ben Schneider @SchneiderBen
• Ged Carroll @r_c

But is about to arrive in our lives, and in a big way. For example, what if I told you that when Best Buy embraced aspects of the Semantic Web its website saw a 30% increase in traffic.

Got your attention?!

Thanks to the following for their time and attention last night:

• Stephen Waddington @wadds
• Rob Brown @robbrown
• Robin Grainger @mistergrainger
• Stuart Bruce @stuartbruce
• David Dewilde @dewilded
• Richard Bagnall @richardbagnall
• Stuart Bruce @stuartbruce
• David Phillips @DavidGHPhillips
• Giles Palmer @joodoo9
• Chris Lee @cmrlee
• Brad Little @bradleyjlittle
• Ben Schneider @SchneiderBen
• Ged Carroll @r_c

But is about to arrive in our lives, and in a big way. For example, what if I told you that when Best Buy embraced aspects of the Semantic Web its website saw a 30% increase in traffic.

Got your attention?!

Thanks to the following for their time and attention last night:

• Stephen Waddington @wadds
• Rob Brown @robbrown
• Robin Grainger @mistergrainger
• Stuart Bruce @stuartbruce
• David Dewilde @dewilded
• Richard Bagnall @richardbagnall
• Stuart Bruce @stuartbruce
• David Phillips @DavidGHPhillips
• Giles Palmer @joodoo9
• Chris Lee @cmrlee
• Brad Little @bradleyjlittle
• Ben Schneider @SchneiderBen
• Ged Carroll @r_c

The result is sparqlPuSH, an interface that can be plugged on any SPARQL endpoint and that broadcast notifications to clients interested in what’s happening in the store using the pubsubhubbub protocol. At a glance, anyone can register a particular query to the RDF store (e.g. list all microblog posts, or list any changes made by X, using the Changesets vocabulary) and results are provided in an RSS / Atom feed that is then sync-ed using pubsubhubbub: each time new data corresponding the register query is added into the store, the store itself notifies the interested parties of such updates.
Practically, this means that you can be notified in real-time of any change happening in a SPARQL endpoint.

The following video describes how the approach works as well as shows a related use-case and you can download its source at http://code.google.com/p/sparqlpush/.
It can be used as an interface on the top of any SPARQL endpoint and also comes with an ARC2 interface (if you’re using a different endpoint, the interactions happen via HTTP and use requires that your endpoint provides JSON SPARQL query results).

We believe that a push system like this for RDF notification can change lots of things regarding RDF data management and how to make sense of it, in real-time. In addition, we hope that such approach could be generalised not only to SPARQL endpoints, but to resource themselves, so that one resource can ping a pubsubhubbub hub when it changes, the notifications being then broadcasted to interested parties.

The main thread of ontology in the philosophical sense is the study of entities and their relations. The question ontology asks is: What kinds of things exist or can exist in the world, and what manner of relations can those things have to each other? Ontology is less concerned with what is than with what is possible.

The knowledge management and AI communities have a related definition — they’ve taken the word “ontology” and applied it more directly to their problem. The sense of ontology there is something like “an explicit specification of a conceptualization.”

The common thread between the two definitions is essence, “Is-ness.” In a particular domain, what kinds of things can we say exist in that domain, and how can we say those things relate to each other?

Clay Shirky: Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

I was surprised and more than a little pleased to see the level of interest that social search generated across the board at this meeting. My intuition is that we have all, at some point or another, been involved in conducting a query that reflected social search behaviors without ever being aware of it. Posting a question to an open forum, or asking your followers on Twitter for an opinion, or sharing your photos/tips/reviews on various sites like Facebook,  Foursquare and Amazon. In some sense every one of us has been either a producer or a consumer of social data that came up as a “relevant” result to a search query.

There is definitely a lot of interesting research and practice in this space and my talk was perhaps just the tip of the iceberg, serving more as a starting point for further exploration. My slides are available on SlideShare (link here) and Daniel Tunkelang also referenced the talk (post here) on his excellent blog www.thenoisychannel.com.

The slides were designed to be a backdrop for interactive discussion and may not necessarily provide all the context (and navigational links) in this format. To help reduce this cognitive gap, I thought it would help if I made some of my notes from those slides available. These pages also explicitly call out the hyperlinks for any referenced sites or recommended reading — hope you find them useful. 

“The Evolution Of Social Search (Handout)  (PDF) version of the notes with slides.

As always, comments and feedback are most welcome.

The Biohackathon is an annual meeting of bioinformatics developers. Toshiaki Katayama of the University of Tokyo, and founder of BioRuby, brought the hackathon idea to Japan, and lead the organization of the hackathon in the most perfect way. From the locations and the hotel, to the network and the catering (and the fact that there was catering!), it was all top notch. Not to mention the generosity of the sponsoring institutions to actually invite us all!

Now, where to start. It was such a packed and amazing week, and I feel very lucky for having gotten the chance to attend. Plus, it was my first trip to Japan, so the country itself was exciting enough! The schedule of the hackathon was simple enough: the first day was a symposium with lots of talks and the chance to learn about the other attendees and their projects. Day two to five were dedicated solely to hacking and discussion as people saw fit. It was my first meeting of that kind, and it was exciting to have that much freedom to turn the week into an interesting and useful time.

Arriving on Sunday morning, we first got our toes wet in Japan by placing an order in a noodle kitchen by randomly picking something on the menu. We wandered around the neighborhood of Tokyo University, or Todai, a charming part of town with small, old houses and narrow lanes I didn’t expect in Tokyo, and ended up in a quite amazing whisky bar and made some new friends. Good start.

The first actual hackathon day took us to the CBRC in Odaiba, a new and all shiny stretch of the city along the bay, dedicated to science and technology. But before enjoying the view from the cafeteria, we settled down to listen to talks and introduce ourselves to each other in the breaks. With about 60-ish attendees, the hackathon had a good size, allowing diversity but staying manageable. The idea of posting a mini-bio for each attendee along the walls was fantastic, as you could stroll around and get a good idea of who was there, and from what backgrounds they came.

A few of the participants presented the projects they’re working on, and they were all very interesting. You can find the list of speakers and their slides on the wiki. My colleague Jerven Bolleman presented our RDF efforts at UniProt. The day ended with a very nice buffet and some more socializing, and left everyone energized and motivated for a week of hacking.

The rest of the week took place at DBCLS on Todai campus, where people could form groups to their liking and pick among several rooms for quiet hacking. Inspired by the BioRuby and BioPython folks that were present, I started exploring the RDF support in Perl. We do all our RDF work in Java, as do most Semantic Web people, but I feel that puts off many people. Perl hits a sweet spot with its conciseness and pragmatism, and its position in bioinformatics is traditionally strong. I believe that good Perl support would be a major step forward to making biologists and bioinformaticiens warm up to RDF & co – I wrote a somewhat passionate mail about this on the hackathon mailing list recently, that I will post here, too. Anyway, so there are quite a few RDF-related modules on CPAN, most of them gathered at [http://www.perlrdf.org], and I set out to try and compare them, and write some example code, possibly something to explore the UniProt RDF. While I didn’t get that far due to participating in lots of other discussions, it was very interesting to try this out, and I put a State of RDF in Perl page on the wiki and some example code on github. I also exchanged a lot of mails with Greg Williams of RDF::Trine, which was great. I’ll blog about this subject later.

While there were many different groups hacking away, on text mining and RDF generation and all kinds of things, one subject struck me as the subject of this Biohackathon: URIs. How to publish one’s own data with stable, sensible, and dereferenceable URIs, and what to use in your RDF when linking to others who don’t have such nice URIs? This question was discussed many times during the whole week.

Francois Belleau of bio2rdf led many of the discussions (thanks!), which focused mostly on central naming schemes/services for URIs. There seems to be a conflict between keeping content dereferencable and keeping URLs very stable for use as resource identifiers. For the latter goal you don’t need URLs, any string will do as long as it’s unique and stable. So this goal would benefit from a central registry like, as advocated by Francois, lsrn.org/uniprot/P12345, because it would provide a predictable way of naming things uniquely. But it adds a single point of failure to the dereferencing of content. Andrea Splendiani remarked that he never followed a single URL from RDF anyway, while I argued that linking content is the point of the web and keeps the Semantic Web hackable – that will have to be yet another future blog post, I guess! Using providers’ actual URLs is often crappy because they don’t provide a predictable scheme (a=x&b=y vs. b=y&a=x), and you only get HTML anyway.

Opinions differed, and they still do. We arrived at an agreement on “Polite URIs” towards the end, but the discussion has been re-started on the mailing list.

And we haven’t even mentioned the dismal state of versioned URIs, (like UniProt’s non-existing ones…), which I also discussed with Andrea. He proposed including the entry version into the URI. Whole releases could be done via named graphs, although that sounds complicated. I was concerned about people who don’t care and just want to say “this protein” – for them (i.e., their reasoners), uniprot/P12345/v1 is not the same as uniprot/P12345/v2, but it should be. This seems impossible to resolve, it’s one or the other. Uh, ideas anyone?

I guess you got the idea by now – there was so much more happening this week that I can’t summarize it all. Fortunately, others also wrote about it. Brad Chapman wrote about his SPARQL and Python hacking, and the #biohackathon2010 Twitter tag has lots of interesting tidbits.

Let’s end with paraphrasing Toshiaki’s closing notes: a “clique of the world-top-level developers in bioinformatics” met, some great coding and discussion took place, and now that data providers understand the Semantic Web a lot better, services will come.

Thanks to all organizers, the people at DBCLS and CBRC who made this possible, to the participants who brought so much enthusiasm and knowledge to the event, and to Toshiaki in particular for tirelessly working throughout the week to keep everything running smoothly. And for taking us out for great dinners and giving us a tour of the Human Genome Center super computer in the week after the hackathon!

Sayonara!

Concretely, an sBook differs from a conventional ebook in two ways:

• readers can share rich notes with their friends, their communities, and other readers;
• an extensible embedded knowledge base helps readers search and explore the book’s content.

Sharing. Most e-books have ways to add and save simple notes for personal use, but sBooks makes it simple to share those notes with friends, colleagues, or communities, even engaging in conversations “in the margin” of books we care about.   sBook notes, called glosses, can also include references, rich media, and tags which can make the book easier to search and navigate.  Third parties can also use glosses to metapublish against an sBook, creating sets of notes, tags, or references that enhance the book’s value and evolve with time.

Searching. Most e-books also have some kind of full text search and (sometimes) a version of the printed index, but an sBook uses a compact embedded knowledge base — a knowlet — to combine those functions.  When searching an sBook, the reader doesn’t need to know the exact words used by the author and can even search for abstract concepts or themes.  The book’s built-in knowledge base can be further extended by the tags and knowledge created by the reader’s friends, communities, or interested third parties.

These distinguishing features of sBooks are based on three key ideas: that content and meaning matter more than form and flash, that technology can change (for the better) how we engage with complex information, and that publishers (large, small, and tiny) need to focus on editorial added value to remain relevant and sustainable in the digital age.

To explore more, you can visit sbooks.net, read some sBooks, or experiment with converting your own documents into sBooks.  Let us know what you think!

Four things struck me in 2009. They are part of a bigger picture that means that public relations practice is about to undergo another change that will be as great this coming decade as it experienced during the last decade…

1. Web 2.0 participation

I dislike the 90:9:1 ratio of passives:occasionals:enthusiasts with respect to the "write" part of readwriteweb. In other words, 90% of people online don't contribute anything, they remain passive consumers. 9% contibute content and interact now and then, and 1% are passionate bloggers, video makers, photo takers, wiki updaters etc.

Perhaps this split isn't so accurate these days given the ease with which Facebook and Twitter can be updated, but it is representative of a shape of participation.

I'd love to see greater involvement; I think it would have warm benefits at both the societal and individual levels. I began to call this the 1:9:90 objective, but then I still felt upset about the 1!

2. It's difficult to read meaning into Web 2.0 contributions

The second thing that struck me flowed from my work in social Web analytics and the conversations I've had with many of the vendors since my 2008 ebook about the difficulty of interpretting sentiment. Indeed, you could say that highly accurate, low cost, widely applicable sentiment analysis is a decade or more away, and sentiment is only part of "meaning".

Many services make no attempt to automate sentiment / tone analysis. But I much prefer that to those that puport to do so but do a crap job, sometimes to the point where their attempts are simply opaque and potentially misleading.

The most expensive and avant garde services today peak at around 65% accuracy for a narrow range of languages, which dismays any researcher clutching her normal distributions and statistical confidence formulae.

3. Web 3.0 has already made its first foray into social media

Web 3.0 is the name most often used to describe the Semantic Web. Web 2.0 is about community and content, and Web 3.0 is about the meaning of those community contributions and content. Literally, how can we augment the stuff so that the Web "understands it".

So far, XHTML Friends Network (XFN – a microformat) and Friend-Of-A-Friend (FOAF – a Resource Description Framework) are the most obvious manifestations. For example, when you maintain a blogroll on some blogging platforms, such as WordPress, you are asked to express the nature of your relationship with the subject of the link, not just provide the link alone. You give the link some meaning.

4. The need for consistent social media measures

The last of the four things that have struck me has become increasingly apparent to anyone involved in measurement and evaluation, and crystallised for me at the Influence Scorecard workshop I hosted in New York in December. The diagrammatic representation of the Influence Scorecard methodology highlighted the aching need for consistent social media measures to be plugged into business performance management approaches such as the Balanced Scorecard. To "close the loop."

I was delighted to hear that Radian6's David Alston circulated my post on the topic to his colleagues.

The Semantic Web ontology for feelings about things

So I have started to wonder how social media participants could be equipped to meet the social Web analysts half way to the advantage of 'both sides', and whether the same 'equipment' might not facilitate more people to tell others what they think, potentially without have to write posts or record videos because, well, it's not their nature.

The Influence Scorecard group is now combining expertise therefore to develop the first "Semantic Web ontology for feelings about things". So far this has consisted of me posting the first couple of pages to a wiki, the first here that includes a link to the second.

The ontology is non-proprietary (subject to Creative Commons attribution-share alike 3.0) and developed collaboratively. Indeed, whilst a proprietary ontology isn't quite a contradiction in terms, even the ontologies being developed by and for the pharmaceutical and electronics industries, sectors renowned for patenting and copyrighting everything and anything that moves, are open.

By the way, the UK's biggest retailer, Tesco, responsible I believe for taking £1 in £5 of high street spending, has just started to mark-up the content on its websites to give it meaning when viewed / queried / indexed by other software and services.

So we are by no means leading such ontological developments, but this is the first stab at developing an ontology related to the public relations profession to our knowledge.

What happens when we have an ontology?

For the WWW's social media participants to be part of Web 3.0 as well as 2.0, they need a set of easy-to-understand and easy-to-use extensions / add-ons / plugins / apps to augment their current applications and services. The ontology informs the design and user experience of such apps and services, and we're developing the software openly under the most liberal licensing available, GPLv3.

And so what?

This means social media participants can make their contributions resonate more loudly around the water coolers and in the boardrooms of the organisations whose business and brands and related issues they are discussing. Many of these organisations have to rely on software and services, social Web analytics, to keep track of all the mentions, questions and verdicts out there, and such services will now find more meaning to work with than before. This is the C2B benefit.

There is also C2C (or person-to-person) benefit. Imagine that every time you make a social media contribution that you have the opportunity to quickly and easily reflect the meaning of your written / recorded content in the metadata. Today, when you write a blog post for example, the search bots can index it and pick up on key words and phrases, but they can't understand what you f
eel about the topics. What do you mean?

By adding metadata that communicates this meaning to other services, your post can be married and juxtaposed to other contributions of like and dislike attitude. A new social graph emerges, not one based on X knows Y knows Z, but one based on A feels like B feels like C, and A does not feel the same as D or E.

I feel that this initiative has real moral purpose. We're helping everyone to improve how they can express their feelings, and helping everyone better understand everyone else's feelings.

How can I / my company get involved?

This is a game of two halves:

The ontology

By their very nature an ontology is never complete, or perfect, or finished. But we need to have developed something sufficiently meaty to get going. The work has just started, but the more public relations experts, both practitioners and academics, lending their insights the better. Come on over and register at the wiki or contact me.

The software

I'm delighted that the WooThemes team is onboard; in fact their Adriaan Pienaar (aka Adii Rockstar) is heading up this side of things. If you don't know these guys, you might see that they come second only to wordpress.org in Google's search results for "Wordpress themes".

They are simply a very talented bunch!

We'd love more code-heads to get involved. So if you are a crack developer, or your consultancy has digital expertise and some awesome developers, I'd be delighted to discuss our programme with you. Again, please register at the wiki or contact me, particularly if you think your company might be interested in sponsoring this endeavour.

We are about to change the practice of public relations, again

Since the Cluetrain Manifesto first pointed the way in 1999, Web 2.0 has changed how we go about PR. Web 3.0 is a majorly significant part of why PR is about to change again, and just as radically.

I hope you'll come on board this train as we're about to pull out of the station!

Four things struck me in 2009. They are part of a bigger picture that means that public relations practice is about to undergo another change that will be as great this coming decade as it experienced during the last decade…

1. Web 2.0 participation

I dislike the 90:9:1 ratio of passives:occasionals:enthusiasts with respect to the "write" part of readwriteweb. In other words, 90% of people online don't contribute anything, they remain passive consumers. 9% contibute content and interact now and then, and 1% are passionate bloggers, video makers, photo takers, wiki updaters etc.

Perhaps this split isn't so accurate these days given the ease with which Facebook and Twitter can be updated, but it is representative of a shape of participation.

I'd love to see greater involvement; I think it would have warm benefits at both the societal and individual levels. I began to call this the 1:9:90 objective, but then I still felt upset about the 1!

h22. It's difficult to read meaning into Web 2.0 contributions

The second thing that struck me flowed from my work in social Web analytics and the conversations I've had with many of the vendors since my 2008 ebook about the difficulty of interpretting sentiment. Indeed, you could say that highly accurate, low cost, widely applicable sentiment analysis is a decade or more away, and sentiment is only part of "meaning".

Many services make no attempt to automate sentiment / tone analysis. But I much prefer that to those that puport to do so but do a crap job, sometimes to the point where their attempts are simply opaque and potentially misleading.

The most expensive and avant garde services today peak at around 65% accuracy for a narrow range of languages, which dismays any researcher clutching her normal distributions and statistical confidence formulae.

3. Web 3.0 has already made its first foray into social media

Web 3.0 is the name most often used to describe the Semantic Web. Web 2.0 is about community and content, and Web 3.0 is about the meaning of those community contributions and content. Literally, how can we augment the stuff so that the Web "understands it".

So far, XHTML Friends Network (XFN – a microformat) and Friend-Of-A-Friend (FOAF – a Resource Description Framework) are the most obvious manifestations. For example, when you maintain a blogroll on some blogging platforms, such as WordPress, you are asked to express the nature of your relationship with the subject of the link, not just provide the link alone. You give the link some meaning.

h24. The need for consistent social media measures

The last of the four things that have struck me has become increasingly apparent to anyone involved in measurement and evaluation, and crystallised for me at the Influence Scorecard workshop I hosted in New York in December. The diagrammatic representation of the Influence Scorecard methodology highlighted the aching need for consistent social media measures to be plugged into business performance management approaches such as the Balanced Scorecard. To "close the loop."

I was delighted to hear that Radian6's David Alston circulated my post on the topic to his colleagues.

h2The Semantic Web ontology for feelings about things

So I have started to wonder how social media participants could be equipped to meet the social Web analysts half way to the advantage of 'both sides', and whether the same 'equipment' might not facilitate more people to tell others what they think, potentially without have to write posts or record videos because, well, it's not their nature.

The Influence Scorecard group is now combining expertise therefore to develop the first "Semantic Web ontology for feelings about things". So far this has consisted of me posting the first couple of pages to a wiki, the first here that includes a link to the second.

The ontology is non-proprietary (subject to Creative Commons attribution-share alike 3.0) and developed collaboratively. Indeed, whilst a proprietary ontology isn't quite a contradiction in terms, even the ontologies being developed by and for the pharmaceutical and electronics industries, sectors renowned for patenting and copyrighting everything and anything that moves, are open.

By the way, the UK's biggest retailer, Tesco, responsible I believe for taking £1 in £5 of high street spending, has just started to mark-up the content on its websites to give it meaning when viewed / queried / indexed by other software and services.

So we are by no means leading such ontological developments, but this is the first stab at developing an ontology related to the public relations profession to our knowledge.

What happens when we have an ontology?

For the WWW's social media participants to be part of Web 3.0 as well as 2.0, they need a set of easy-to-understand and easy-to-use extensions / add-ons / plugins / apps to augment their current applications and services. The ontology informs the design and user experience of such apps and services, and we're developing the software openly under the most liberal licensing available, GPLv3.

And so what?

This means social media participants can make their contributions resonate more loudly around the water coolers and in the boardrooms of the organisations whose business and brands and related issues they are discussing. Many of these organisations have to rely on software and services, social Web analytics, to keep track of all the mentions, questions and verdicts out there, and such services will now find more meaning to work with than before. This is the C2B benefit.

There is also C2C (or person-to-person) benefit. Imagine that every time you make a social media contribution that you have the opportunity to quickly and easily reflect the meaning of your written / recorded content in the metadata. Today, when you write a blog post for example, the search bots can index it and pick up on key words a
nd phrases, but they can't understand what you feel about the topics. What do you mean?

By adding metadata that communicates this meaning to other services, your post can be married and juxtaposed to other contributions of like and dislike attitude. A new social graph emerges, not one based on X knows Y knows Z, but one based on A feels like B feels like C, and A does not feel the same as D or E.

I feel that this initiative has real moral purpose. We're helping everyone to improve how they can express their feelings, and helping everyone better understand everyone else's feelings.

How can I / my company get involved?

This is a game of two halves:

The ontology

By their very nature an ontology is never complete, or perfect, or finished. But we need to have developed something sufficiently meaty to get going. The work has just started, but the more public relations experts, both practitioners and academics, lending their insights the better. Come on over and register at the wiki or contact me.

The software

I'm delighted that the WooThemes team is onboard; in fact their Adriaan Pienaar (aka Adii Rockstar) is heading up this side of things. If you don't know these guys, you might see that they come second only to wordpress.org in Google's search results for "Wordpress themes".

They are simply a very talented bunch!

We'd love more code-heads to get involved. So if you are a crack developer, or your consultancy has digital expertise and some awesome developers, I'd be delighted to discuss our programme with you. Again, please register at the wiki or contact me, particularly if you think your company might be interested in sponsoring this endeavour.

We are about to change the practice of public relations, again

Since the Cluetrain Manifesto first pointed the way in 1999, Web 2.0 has changed how we go about PR. Web 3.0 is a majorly significant part of why PR is about to change again, and just as radically.

I hope you'll come on board this train as we're about to pull out of the station!