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Image by Kevin Flanagan.

Upfront disclaimer: From previous posts, many of our regular readers will have heard of 091 Labs here in Galway, Ireland. It is a hackerspace project that we at socialmedia.net support with regular shout-outs and by participating in other ways.

What may not be apparent from our previous coverage is that 091 Labs is run as a doocracy: a place where people can come together, self-organise, share, co-create and collaborate.

The sixties and seventies were times of a great many counter-cultural experiments in which many ideas were explored as to how best we could live our lives. Several such strands of exploration containing the elements of libertarianism, Zen in the momentness, and some good old fashioned American, "can do!" spirit, came to be mixed together bringing to the fore the startling and radical idea that the easiest way to do something is to do something.

I keep hearing the term Linked Data, but what does it mean?

More or less what it says. All the data on the Internet linked together.

And that is important to me because…?

Your company, like everyone else’s company has a number of separate processes going. Accounts, marketing, HR, government compliances, legal issues, transport considerations. The information that pertains to each process is stored for convenience in separate databases. These databases are associated with the various applications that are used to create them. SAP for accounts, various spreadsheet formats, and document pages.

All contain information vital to the running of your company. All contain information which is mutually inaccessible to each other.

It has worked so far because we have had the human workaround. If a report has to be written for the quarterly board meeting, then someone has to get the information from each of these ‘data silos’ separately and spend a goodly amount of time and energy on finessing the disparate contents into something understandable and useful to act as a basis for a fruitful discussion.

With Linked Data technology running on your system, you ask your system for the information you want in the format you want. The computer itself works out what is relevant and useful. Linked Data enables the various databases to talk to each other and work out what is needed.

(Our new socialmedia.net office.)

Through our very being and moving on this planet we create data. A lot of it is easy to see: how far it is to somewhere, how long it takes for something to do, how much energy is consumed for a given action, and so on. But there has been additional data - data overspill - that is also being created and that up until recently has either lacked the means to be quantified or the collation has just been too expensive.

Most of us have music collections, and while the albums and CDs were on our shelves, the only way to assess the quality and range of a given collection was by physically browsing the items. It was the only way to form what could only be an ad-hoc impression of the music owner’s tastes and proclivities. Who knows how many great relationships have foundered on the too-early discovery of one or two of the ‘good idea at the time’ but nevertheless extremely dodgy recordings we all possess? (I feel strangely better now the truth is out.)

I switched (drank the Kool-Aid) from Windows to Mac at the turn of the century and haven’t looked back. However, I am not a fanboy. All I want to do is just get on with things. With the proliferation of iPhones and iPads, more and more people are moving over to the Apple way of doing things. I have been asked a number of times in the last few months by folks making the leap across the operating system divide as to what I would recommend as essential applications to have.

This is the list I usually come up with:

• Flip4Mac: Sorts out audio incompatibilities with Microsoft audio .wmv files. The free version is all you need unless of course you do want to do all those other things. See how it goes first. [Link]
• Perian: Sorts out other unusual audio and video formats. Of course, it would be quite legitimate to ask, “why doesn’t the Apple OS come with all these compatibility issues resolved?” My answer is I don’t know and I haven’t found the answer yet. [Link]
• Growl and Growlmail: Notifies you of incoming e-mails etc., so you don't have to keep checking back to the original application. [Link]
  

The services Foursquare and Gowalla, while not for everyone, point to a new and important dimension to our online activity: the ability to apply the power of the Internet to our immediate geographical neighbourhood.

We can find cafes, ATMs, cultural activities with just a quick look into an application such as Vicinity. But shopkeepers and stores can also find us. We can be offered all sorts of goodies such as sales offers, discounts in cafes, lunch du jours at nearby restaurants, notifications of special events that are happening soon and just around the corner. “Come along if you have few minutes spare, why not?”

With these hyper-local services we now have a street full of shop windows in our pocket. It will get easier, social media strategist Ted Vickey says:

“By using little bits of technology, even the smallest business in Galway, [Ireland] can compete with the big companies who are advertising to the same customers. So it’s making it more personal. It’s taking that online community and putting a face to it. And it’s allowing businesses to attract customers. And the customer really is in the core of the decision-making process to buy something.”