Today witnessed a number of thought-provoking news publications from various sources, from a newspaper in Madrid to ReadWriteWeb. My first observation this morning, in a newspaper circulated in Madrid’s metro, is worth mentioning, as it demonstrates the triumphant transition made by Web 2.0 into the general public’s eye, as well as recognising the need for technologies to aid users in activities such as managing their social profiles and their blog profiles. The daily cartoon sketch shows two female students seated in a university computer lab. One asks the other: “How’s it going?”. Her friend answers: “Ugh……..I’m updating my social profile in 18 social networks, changing my website’s photos, and renewing the contents of my blog”. The response is: “And on top of all that, they expect us to study”. Although the underlying issues provoked in this cartoon have been partly resolved by initiatives such as Google Open Social, there is still significant room for improvement.

Besides the spine-chilling news for Google that Powerset unleashed its test version of a semantic search engine for Wikipedia for public use on Monday (which I will not go into here, as there are currently countless articles floating around the Web discussing what some have coined the “Google Killer”), another search engine, entitled Uptake, was launched today. Uptake, formerly known as Kango, is a travel search engine which extracts information from more than 1000 travel sites in order to construct a database of over 400,000 US hotels and activities. Uptake has built its database from consumer reviews, opinions and descriptions on these sites, and has constructed an ontology from metadata applied to the content of these sources. One of the more recent Natural Language Processing Techniques Uptake applies is Sentiment Analysis, also referred to as Opinion Mining, which uses syntactic parsing to extract words to indicate, for example, favourable sentiment towards a hotel, such as “good time”, “fantastic view” or “relaxed atmosphere”, and distinguishes positive sentiment from negative sentiment.

Today also saw the move of Jeremy Carroll, lead architect on the Open Source Jena Toolkit at HP, to TopQuadrant, a leading Semantic Web company, as Chief Product Architect.

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On Monday 28^th April, cnn.com published an article highlighting the possible privacy threats for social network users, and the potential destinations of their profile information, which in many cases are not the locations intended or desired by the user. http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/04/28/social.networking.privacy.ap/index.html User profile information has been available to third parties since the emergence of social networking sites, clearly those profiles which are most freely available being those which are Public. However, since the rapid growth of “Applications” on social networking sites, even the users who set their profiles as Private provide their information to developers; either companies or private developers with the required technical skills. That is, if the user decides to download an Application from the site. Which, should be added, is highly probable, given the number of user-oriented applications available on social networking sites. When a user wishes to download one of these applications, they must check a box which gives developers permission to access their profile information.In particular, two of the most prominent sites, FaceBook and MySpace, give developers access to the profiles of users who download their applications. MySpace provides applications such as “Stickers” (In the “Photos” category of applications), which allows the user to “Choose from over 25,000 FREE stickerz to add your profile and show to your friends!” and “Sketch Me” – “Let our artists create personal sketches of you from you pictures.” The benefits of such sites are obvious – users avail of a network of contacts selected by them, personalized services, such as the growing number of Semantic Web applications tailored towards a personalized user experience, which combine aspects of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 – Twine, Baagz, Friendfeed, Twitter, etc. In summary, they profit from the communicative aspects in a revolutionary way which has not been previously witnessed since the advent of the Web. However, there are other more sinister uses (or should that be “re-uses”…) of profile information, accompanied by the fact that the legal specifications for this field are scarce and unclear. Uses include, for example, matching profile information with public records, or targeted advertising. These are two of the possibilities mentioned in the CNN article, however, it is not illogical to suspect that there are many other possible uses which have not yet been tapped into by developers or brought into the public eye. What about calculating the amounts of money a user spends on online purchases, grouped according to article type? Ultimately, the advantages and disadvantages depend on the users point of view – some users may embrace the idea of third parties having access to their profiles, to aid the creation of many positive services characteristic of Web 3.0 – recommendation and personalization of products and advertising, avoiding the nuisance of unsolicited advertising. See, for example, FaceBook’s most recent “App Endorsements”, which allows users to opt for receiving advertisements only endorsed by the user himself. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/identified_hits_facebook.php#comment-53373?referer=sphere_related_content

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