(photo of the recent Social Web Barcamp in Paris from Henry Story's website)

I was chatting with Henry Story, creator of Babelfish, the translation engine, just after he presented his current work at the Social Web Barcamp conference in Paris, France. He directed me to his talk about the state of the Semantic Web, http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/camping_and_hacking_at_har2009 and suggested I view the video online of his talk using Firefox 3.5. The one I am referring to is the first of the 4 on his blog post. What's interesting is that you don't even see these .ogg format videos using another browser than Firefox 3.5, for example Camino on the Mac doesn't render these videos visible at all!

As an aside, Henry points out the Barcamp guidelines, which we'll follow at the upcoming OrlandoJUG meeting Thursday:

* Everybody is a participant
* You make the event
* Feel free to move between sessions if you feel you are not getting what you were looking for at one of them
* Write up your interests on the black board, this will be used to create the time table.

So the sessions were put together on the spot there and then. That seems "hard" but in my experience it's always a great time, and so much better than the norm.

His mention of Metcalfe's Law was an interesting sidenote. He discussed with me the idea of using FOAF + SSL as a single point of entry and signup for a social network. I'm just beginning to understand what he's talking about, and it's phenomenal! Have any of you explored the possibilities of the Friend of a Friend project and possibly used it on a website? Let's discuss...