David Peterson - Semantic web for distributed social networks
Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 2.40pm.
/Hear how Drupal, Semantic MediaWiki and other bleeding edge tech were enlisted along with pixie dust, FOAF, RDF, OWL, SPARQL, Linked Data (basically all the Semantic Web stuff) to build a distributed social network. The focus will be not on evangelism (I don’t really care about that) but how disparate open source platforms can talk and work together. This stuff actually works and makes development more fluid. These technologies make local development easier, but when it is time to broaden your scope, classic search is still king. How can you leverage this? Newcomers such as Yahoo Searchmonkey can play an important role in the creation of a truly distributed information system.
Most great web applications have a few key things in common. But can you name them? Better yet — can you achieve them consistently in your own projects?
Mapping and other mashups have taken the web world by storm - driving innovation in business and government alike. While much of the focus has been on the actual mashup applications, without the data to mashup, we have no mashups. Government, from local to Federal level, collect and manage a significant amount of data, across a very broad range of areas. But giving access to this data to web application developers has technical, policy and legal challenges. In this presentation, Jenny Telford of the 
These days people expect more from a website than a handy set of tools and a pretty interface — they want an experience. From the moment somebody enters your site they’ll be judging you on everything from the way the site looks to the tone of your error messages. And they won’t just be judging you against other sites. They will be judging you on every customer experience they have ever had, from the rude man at the train station to the lovely hotel clerk that checked them in on holiday. So in order to compete, we need to up our game and look at experiences both on and off-line.
Last year, Google released an experimental Greasemonkey 
Not only are most Web applications going to have (or utilize) social components — they’re also going to have start sharing social information like profiles, contact lists and such with other services. The ’social network fatigue’ users feel and the inefficiencies of keeping this information in multiple spots will drive us to play better with other social apps. This session will focus on using simple building blocks and emerging design patterns to keep it simple for users, for you and for the open social Web at large.
There comes a time when web developers need to reach beyond the browser to allow users to go offline, use local files or get rid of the hideous browser chrome. The Adobe Integrated Runtime (
Seattle-based Jackson Fish Market helped deliver the Silverlight based search engine Tafiti, one of the earliest commercial Silverlight applications.
Hear all about the exciting possibilities created by these technologies from Google Australia.
RedBubble is a social networking platform and marketplace, not to mention a successful homegrown web app. In this session RedBubble’s software architect Mark Mansour will present the challenges the team has faced, and talk through some of the solutions they’ve discovered, during the building and scaling one of Australia’s largest Rails applications. Along the way you’ll learn RedBubble’s tenets for software design, the what’s and how’s of their database and web servers, plus processes that made their team more effective. If you’re a developer dreaming of going out on your own and building a successful online business around a web app, don’t miss this session.
