On Tuesday night (2008-04-08), I took a couple of colleagues along to Tokyo2Point0 to present eSynapse to the community.  We just got the call at the end of last week, so we did a short introduction and a demonstration of the Blogging Platform.

Andrew Shuttleworth broadcast the event on UStream, and recorded the session.  The videos are below... We start at about 12:00 into the first clip.

Part 1. Intro - Site Setup Demo

Part 2. Site Setup Demo - Mobile eCommerce Admin Demo

Part 3. Mobile eCommerce Admin Demo - Closing - Q&A

On Tuesday I started working in Kojimachi, near the offices of Mozilla Corporation.  Gen Kanai, a friend from Tech Talk Japan chat and Tokyo2Point0, works at Mozilla and we got together for lunch yesterday chatted about various stuff including Mozilla Messaging, portable social networks and upcoming events.  He turned me on to the Tokyo Bloggers Dinner, a monthly get together of some of the local blog scene, where everyone has curry and perhaps a few beers, then gives a quick presentation about what they are doing, or some interesting sites they are using.  He introduced me to the organiser, Kohichi Aoki, and I was on the list.

It was a really fun evening with a great mix of people, and some cool, concise talks.  It's kinda late now, so I won't blog about the event in detail right now, but here is the slideshow.  You can click through to Picasa if you want to download larger resolution shots.  You can catch site of the about to be released Logicool Media Centre Remote, a Microsoftie caught operating a Macbook Air, Nagasawa-san from BlogPeople looking very surprised, and more!  (Turn on the captions and you'll see what's happening)

People and their URLs:

Masaki Ishitani from Mitaimon! and News2u Corporation

Matthew Skyrm, Brandon Wu and Takeshi Homna from Evevio showed off their video service

Hina Nakashima with HINALOG came up from Nagoya for the evening.

Takuya Terasawa and Takayuki Sato from Logicool showed off their new Media Centre Remote Control

Akky from Cybozu Labs

Hiroaki Totsuka from iPod Style

Pina Hirano from infoteria

Tomoo Mizukami from Uniden's Car Navigation Division

Ichiro Kiyota from Six Apart talked about their new content initiative and the first project, Blu-ray apart

Kazuyoshi Nagasawa from AIVY Communications and BlogPeople

Taizo Koide from ShoPro talked about the Shogakukan joint venture site for amateur cartoonists

Risa Nakanishi - PR Diva from Yahoo's new Search Ranking service - showed off all manner of rankings mined from various on and offline sources

Nobi Hayashi of Nobi.com 

... and many more!

Please send me a comment or skype me for any corrections or deletions.

Today was my first day as CTO for eSynapse, a start up based in Kojimachi, Tokyo, and creator of all manner of data driven web sites.  Our flagship product - LIMS - is an multi-level ecommerce and blogging platform that combines blog-marketing with online inventory control and sales.  Other services provided are integration and server monitoring.

My role here will cover several functions, for example -

Turn our current technologies into a fully automated, modular and customisable platform

Add geolocation. multilingual and semantic web features to make the shopping experience more "social"

Round out the ecommerce functionality by developing and partnering with other business services that can be delivered to retailers and small businesses over broadband

Localise overseas Web properties for the Japanese market.

After what was an interesting yet ultimately unrewarding two years contracting at Microsoft, it is great to be back in the thick of it.

Nifty Labs, the marketing research group within Nifty Corporation, has developed filtering technology to automate the detection of so-called "Spam Blogs"  - blogs whose sole purpose is to artificially inflate traffic and affiliate commissions.  Japan has been renowned for the number such sites, and it is certainly an issue when trying to gauge the true blogging population and activity level here. 

The survey combined several filtering techniques, and data came from a 100,000 article sample from 5 months of Nifty's Buzz Pulse Blog analysis service.  Nifty says Buzz Pulse indexes 90% of Japan's blogs, including over 450 million articles as of March 2008.  The average level of Spam Blogging was about 40% ...

Nifty plans to make this information available
on their BuzzSeeQer site - the online servce for BuzzPulse.

Press Release: http://www.nifty.co.jp/cs/07shimo/detail/080326003337/1.htm (Japanese)

Original Blog: http://bb.watch.impress.co.jp/cda/news/21375.html (Japanese)

It was my last day on vacation in Auckland today, and I took the opportunity to do the rounds a little this morning.  First up I went into town to meet Malcolm Stenersen, ex-colleague of mine from Clearfield days, to discuss his new e-commerce venture.  I can't yet divulge the details, but the concept is great, and am looking forward to seeing it take shape.

Next stop was to see brother-in-law Carl and some of the crew at Shift's Auckland office where old partner in crime Richard Ram is at the helm.  After being shouted the finest chicken sandwich within a 35 metre radius of the building, I arrived back to see the whole Shift crew ensconced in a pep talk from Adobe about flash lite and other related stuff. 

When that drew to a close, we sat down with Ross Howard to chat about the mobile scene in Japan, and their efforts in sites for Tourism New Zealand.  I couldn't provide much more than a dumb user point of view of some of the issues, but it seemed to be a useful exchange, and to validate some of their ideas.

Based on discussions I had today and recently, there certainly seems to be a latent need for local basic intelligence, localisation and support for a lot of web businesses, who might just hit it if they move into Japan intelligently.

Dr. John Breslin is a senior semantic web researcher working at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute in Galway, Ireland.  We met at the BlogNation Japan launch party at Web2.0 Expo Japan, and then again at BlogTalk2008 - a conference he was organising in Cork.  I was interested to learn a little more about DERI, and how it engages with business, so fired him some questions by email, for which he has kindly found time in his mad schedule to respond to.

How did DERI come about, and why the focus on semantic technologies?

DERI was established at the National University of Ireland, Galway in late 2003 as part of an initiative by Science Foundation Ireland, an Irish government-funded agency, to establish what are called Centres for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSETs) in the areas of ICT and biotech at various third-level institutions around Ireland.  The chosen focus for DERI was the Semantic Web, as there was and is a recognised need for research into how to manage the information explosion on the Web using semantic technologies.

How did the Seoul and Stanford branches get started?

The senior researchers and directors at DERI had long-established ties with Stanford University; DERI director Professor Decker previously worked there for some time.  In conjunction with Mike Genesereth and Charles Petrie from the Stanford Logic Group, NUI Galway agreed with Stanford University to establish "DERI Stanford" under whose umbrella formal research collaborations between DERI Galway and Stanford could progress.

As regards Korea, DERI researchers had been working with staff from Seoul National University for a number of years, in particular the Biomedical Knowledge Engineering Laboratory (BiKE) led by Professor Hong-Gee Kim.  There has also been a series of researcher exchanges between our two institutions (and DERI Galway also has a PhD student who originated in SNU), so a formal arrangement was confirmed in late 2007 leading to the creation of DERI Seoul.

Any specific reason for Korea in the Asia region?

With rapidly growing communications and scientific infrastructures in Korea, it was recognised that there are a large number of Korean institutions (academic and commercial) who are focusing on the application of semantic technologies to the ICT and biotech domains.  As such, it made sense to establish DERI Seoul to liaise with these organisations and to identify common challenges that could be tackled through various research projects (some of these in conjunction with DERI Galway).

I see on your website that your mission includes assisting the commercialisation of semantic technologies through "Business Development Outreach".  Can you tell me how you engage with businesses, perhaps with some examples?

As part of DERI's remit from Science Foundation Ireland, we have two "outreach" branches, the first being community and education outreach (working with local groups and schools) and the second is business outreach.  Business outreach means that we have staff at DERI who work with various local SMEs and multinationals, describing the research areas that DERI is involved in and investigating if there is a potential need for the application of semantic technologies to solve research challenges in these organisations.

Business outreach also includes efforts to bring together related companies to solve common research requirements (e.g., the Elite initiative brings together seven or eight companies in the domain of semantics applied to e-learning).  DERI has also attracted a number of companies to Galway based on our reputation and our expertise base; some of these have relocated staff and others are establishing new bases near NUI Galway.

What areas do you see semantic technologies being use commercially, and perhaps for online consumer applications in particular?

I think that we are now beginning to see the real commercial applications of what can be done when all kinds of things on the Web are connected together using semantics.  This is obvious in the attention being given to startup companies in this space like Powerlabs (Powerset), Metaweb (Freebase) and Radar Networks (Twine), and also since many big companies including Reuters (Calais API), Yahoo! (semantically-enhanced search) and Google (Social Graph API) have recently announced what they are doing with semantic data.  There has been a lot of talk recently about the social graph (notably from Google's Brad Fitzpatrick), which looks at how people are connected together (friends, colleagues, neighbours, etc.), and how such connections can be leveraged across websites.  In the Semantic Web, it is not just people who are connected together in some meaningful way, but documents, events, places, hobbies, pictures, you name it!  And it is the commercial applications that exploit these connections that are now becoming interesting.

Radar Networks' Nova Spivack recently gave a keynote talk at BlogTalk 2008 as CEO of one of the companies that is practically applying Semantic Web technologies to social software applications.  Radar have a product called Twine, which is a "knowledge networking" application that allows users to share, organise, and find information with people they trust.  I find Twine very interesting, and as well as using it to gather information about SIOC (more below), I intend to use it to gather and publish personal interests that I think will be of interest to the public.

Part of your work is with SIOC - a web standards submission for connecting online communities.  How is that process going?

SIOC is an initiative that I've been working on for the past four years at DERI (with Uldis Bojars, Stefan Decker, and others) that aims to make semantic data available from online communities and Web 2.0 spaces, and to use and leverage that data in interesting and useful ways.  As well as being the Irish word for frost, SIOC stands for "Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities" and the schema or vocabulary of terms that serves as its basis was recently submitted as a Member Submission to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).  We have about 30 or 40 SIOC applications and modules that use and consume SIOC data already.

The process to achieve traction with SIOC was as follows.  Firstly, we created the schema of terms (Site, User, Forum, Post, Container, Item, etc.).  Then, we made some SIOC metadata exporters for various open-source discussion systems and popular community sites, in the hope that we could "infect" the Web infrastructure with semantics - during the next upgrade cycle, gigabytes of community data can become available (a case in point will be the forthcoming SIOC producer for Irish message board site boards.ie).  To produce this mass of linked data from various online communities, we wanted to allow people to easily integrate SIOC with their open-source applications and services, such that there are now SIOC data producers and wrappers available for a range of systems including b2evolution, Dotclear, Drupal, phpBB, WordPress, mailing lists, IRC, Twitter, Jaiku, and others.  The next step was to produce easy-to-use APIs for writing your own SIOC applications.  We have APIs already for PHP, Ruby on Rails and Java.  As well as academic papers about SIOC, we then provided some easy-to-read documentation and usage examples at our SIOC website (http://sioc-project.org/).

Are there some interesting implementations of SIOC?  How is uptake of the blog service plugins?

I think that the interesting applications that are appearing now are those Web 2.0 or Semantic Web applications that realise the advantages of producing SIOC data (and other semantic formats, especially FOAF).  Companies like Seesmic, Talis, OpenLink Software and Radar Networks have either implemented SIOC support in their commercial applications or will do so shortly.

The WordPress plugin is probably the most popular SIOC data producer, but Giovanni Tummarello and his team will shortly release a very interesting plugin that shows one advantage of producing SIOC data from various sites.  This new plugin will allow you to click on an icon beside a blog poster or commenter and view a synopsis of their content and topics created across a range of semantically-enabled websites (as gathered by the semantic indexer Sindice).

Thanks again to John for sharing this with us.  For more information, check out John's Blog: http://johnbreslin.com/

Andera Gadeib (Dialego)
MindVoyager: an interactive journey through the collective thoughts of a selected target group

My old roommate from early 90's Ebisu, Gerry came down to Dublin, and drove us to Cork .. it was an awesome day's drive in his unassuming but highly nimble Civic. The highlight was the rainbow at Glendalough Monastery...

Back at Builder Techday ... the next speaker, Masashi Sawada from Nifty, was there to provide a little historical context.  He has been at Nifty for 10 years, and talked about Nifty's place in the movement from PC Communication networks to the Open Internet.

Openness at Nifty

Much of the talk was about how Nifty's were forced become more open with the explosion in internet use in the late 90s.  During that time they moved from proprietary file systems, proprietary mail and messaging.  Initially they created bridging systems and gateways to link their existing back ends to the Internet, but soon this became a maintenance nightmare, as more and more systems had to be bridged.  These were soon replace with the standards-based systems we  now take for granted. 

OpenID at Nifty

Initial adoption of OpenId has been tempered with caution.  They consider the risk of becoming an OpenID Provider (OP) too high, and have opted to just become a consumer, or Relying Party (RP), with their Aboutme product.  This approach contrasts of that of Yahoo, who are opting to be just an OP. 

One risk they identified was that as anyone can set up and OpenID provider, anyone could set up multitudes of users and use these to automate comment SPAM and other attacks.  To get around this, only OPs on a whitelist maintained by Nifty may be used.  As my OpenID provider is not on the list, I cannot sign in .... not so open after all :(, but certainly a valid concern for Relying Parties.

In addition to OpenID, they also support Yahoo ID, Livedoor, Hatena, Jugem and Typekey logins, and they expect to increase the whitelist providers over time.

I went down to Yokohama on Friday night to check out Zoholics - the seasonal offline event by AdventNet - producers of Zoho, one of the early ranking contenders in the online office collaboration game.

I had heard much about Zoho, but hadn't had much more than a rather unsatisfying dabble with Show, so now was a chance for a bit of a deep dive. 

1) Zoho CRM

First up was engineer Takumi Yasuda,  presenting on Zoho CRM.  This module is part of Zoho's business play, and seems very well featured, with a lot of the bells and whistles you'd expect to track sales and marketing activities with customers.  The first three users are free, them 1800yen per month per user after that.

2) Zoho Project

Next was Akiyoshi Matsumoto showing off Zoho Projects. Again part of Zoho's business push, this seems to be again a well featured online tool for tracking project status and artifacts.  First hit's for free ... here is the pricing schedule at time or writing:

3) Zoho Case Studies

Paul Kiyoshito NakaGome is an IT consultant who was spurred into Web2.0 and cloud based services when a hard drive on a notebook of his failed, costing him valuable files.   He gave his own experience of Zoho as case studies.

He showed how he used it to coordinate activities and bookkeeping for a church he is involved with, as well as plan and market events - using Show to create the floor-plan for a bazaar, and integrating with Microsoft Office to do mailouts.  He also uses it in his consulting to generate BI reports, and embed them in iGoogle. 

4) Zoho Create

Mami Shimizu gave the last demo with Zoho Create - a drag and drop application builder for semi-technical people to create simple applications.  She whipped up a form to collect post-event feedback in no time at all.  Nice demo, but I wonder how far you can take an app built though such tools.  The APIs should allow some interesting extensions though...

5) Zoho APIs

There was also mention of the Zoho APIs, and some implementations of them such as StartForce - a webtop that leverages the Remote API to deliver an explorer from where you can launch Zoho apps. 

= Remote API : Use Zoho's features, but store the data elsewhere.

= Storage API : Manipulate data stored on Zoho servers

While still a wee way from the menu maze of Microsoft, Zoho keeps deepening their feature set and adding cool stuff such as Skype integration for Meeting, iZoho - Zoho for iPhone, Firefox plug-ins, steak knives, and more... Show 2.0 has been released, and it looks a lot better than what I originally used.

After the programme finished drinks and food were provided and there was question time and a slide show of images from Chenai where Zoho is developed.

It was an informative and enjoyable evening ... thank you AdventNet, and keep up the great work!