Henry Story was until recently a Social Web Architect at Sun Microsystems. Previously, he worked on Babel Fish, a machine translation service at AltaVista. The babel fish was a small creature featured in "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy". When placed in the ear, it could translate all known languages. The author of the book, Douglas Adams, was also involved in the project.

Henry is the creator of WebID, and on a recent visit to 091 Labs in Galway, Ireland, he took some time out to tell us more about it.

Why is WebID important?

"Currently social networks are closed systems. You have to be part of a social network to friend or communicate with anybody on that social network.

Connemara, County Galway.

Tomorrow, it will be six months since I wrote my first article for socialmedia.net. The Winter Olympics had just closed and I felt that NBC - by treating social media as a billboard with a multitude of bells and whistles - had missed the opportunity for real engagement which is what this medium is all about.

This ‘not getting it’ by individuals and corporations alike turned out to be a major theme in many of the fifty-five articles I have written since then. My favourite, since you asked, is a very early article called "Galway Is A Mini San Francisco". It set the tone of what was to come in terms of accuracy and in the sense that we are all about; people doing new, creative things - particularly in Ireland but elsewhere too.

Bill Liao is the author of the “The Stone Soup Way” and is involved with Xing and WeForest. The latter is an organization set up to empower local communities to reforest their environment by offering training in permaculture techniques.

Bill spoke on the first day at BlogTalk2010. He was interviewed afterwards and we would like to share some of the things he had to say.

“I am a great believer in a thing called permaculture which is an ethical design science. If you want to look at the height of civilization in my view, then it’s design.

"You can design a future that’s beautiful or you can design a future that sucks. Most people don’t bother to design the next five minutes let alone a future they really want to live into.

"It’s about designing a future you really want to live in and then creating a narrative about it that other people really hear and treating everyone with compassion. Hearing them, having them feel heard. Because most of the time we’re [left feeling] right about something because no one’s listening."

On the internet and mobile phones

In just four short months from April to August, 2010, SpunOut.ie have raised the number of people on their Facebook page community from around the 400 mark to nearly 12,000 participants, as of writing. This is a remarkable achievement for a small Galway based charity whose stated aim is to educate and inform young people in the 16 - 24 age on the issues that concern them and encourage engaged citizenship through social activism.

Ruairí Mckiernan, with the help of some friends, started SpunOut.ie from his bedroom in 2004 using a dial-up modem which would sometimes take half an hour just to send an email. SpunOut.ie, (the term ‘spunout’ comes from the notion that youth culture is fed up with spin; political spin, religious spin, spin from teachers, the media and advertisers.and they are 'spun out',) was always intended to be web-based. Taking advantage of platforms such as forums and informational pages to share information and have discussions about issues such as sexual health, mental health, drugs, alcohol and other matters of concern to young people.

Click on image for video of Jogo in action

Play is an essential part of a person’s development from a child into an adult. Robert Hughes says that our biological drives are “genetic rivers, whose primeval forces come from deep within us and that play, as a drive exists to help children make sense of their immediate worlds.” One can’t help but intuitively accept this observation even without all the evidence that supports it but a question does need to be answered and that is what constitutes healthy play that aids positive development and growth in the individual? (It’s not only children that need to play.)

We can’t send children to play on the streets anymore to find and make their own entertainment. The times and social mores have changed too much for us to go back to that. Yet those concerned with how children are growing up know that constant interaction with a computer screen is OK as far as it goes but is no replacement for the wild rides of the imagination that can be construed from old cardboard, discarded bric a brac and a bit of space to move around and make some noise.