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The recordings from the fabulous Webstock 2008 conference in Wellington NZ are now online. I would highly recommend tuning in and learning from these. A few from my favourite list were:

-Kelly Goto: “Getting Unstuck” - This is far beyond techy webness (which is great in itself but you need to understand your audience!) and dabbles in the realm of organisational culture and health. This is a fantastic presentation and will give you a lot to think about around application to your own role and context.

-Amy Hoy: “Usability for Evil” - Again this was all about people. The presentation was focused on principles of human psychology; understanding how we actually function, process information and basic motivations before thinking about anything else, that including what is on a website and how it is designed.

I ended up missing Russell Brown’s presentation, so looking forward to listening to that one as very much in my sphere of interest. Will also be good to catch up on those missed when I had to make a tough choice at the break out sessions!

All Webstock 2008 presentations are available online here

• Web 3.0 and what it includes
• Semantic Web
• Semantic Apps
• Open Data
• Mobile Web
• Mobile Web Apps
• Recommendation Engines
• Also, some web predictions for the future and other resources

View Slideshow presentation from Readwriteweb’s Richard Macmanus on Slideshare

The Web solved a frustration, made life easier, created solutions for us and gave us a lot of information a lot faster.

It is my understanding that the semantic web has the potential to be a whole new shift all over again, to solve problems and provide solutions for our current frustrations. I’ve done quite a bit of reading on this topic, but must admit that the concept is still proving to be quite elusive and rather technical. Internet founder Tim Berners Lee said it holds both huge potential for enterprises as well as a very exciting long term.

In this article he claimed that Google could be superseded as THE preeminent online brand by a company that harnesses the power of next generation web technology.
This article also defines semantic web with some clarity, “The semantic web is the term used by the computer and internet industry to describe the next phase of the web’s development, and essentially involves building web-based connectivity into any piece of data - not just a web page - so that it can “communicate” with other information.”

This week Yahoo announced a shift to adopt some of the key standards of semantic web. “The company said it would start to include some semantic web identifiers when indexing the web for Yahoo search.” Read latest news about this here

“Calais” is powered by Reuters and the tagline states, “We want to make all the world’s content more accessible, interoperable and valuable. Some call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the semantic web or the Giant Global Graph - we call our piece of it Calais.”
So, lets see….

First Stop: Wikipedia on Semantic Web.
“The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.”

Stop Two: Readwriteweb, 11 things to know about Semantic Web

Stop Three: And if you are over reading, see if you can gain some understanding of Semantic Web from this YouTube video, Tim Berners Lee on the Semantic Web

Bonus for those with ample time: Also check this one out from Google Tech Talks on YouTube if you are up for a full 50 minute lecture!

The Long Tail Blog: Wired Cover Story on Free now live… Read it Here

Or jump straight to The FULL Wired Cover Story Online Read it Here (There is a video of Chris Anderson too)

What does the “Media Business Model” mean? From the Wired How to Wiki Read it Here

As always, Loving Wired.

Also on the Wired Cover story be sure to read the comments at the bottom (as I write this there are 29..). There is some very strong contention and counter arguments - constructive of course - to this article that widen the scope of the topic quite significantly.