Ashish Patel

Tomorrow I’ll be doing 3 things at CASCON (in the following order)

1) Free Lunch. They have catering from The Host

2) Checking out the Technology Showcases. There are a few compiler, DB2, WebSphere, and Rational ones I really want to see.

3) I’ll be attending the “The Business of Blogging: Being Social in a Pervasive, Networked World” workshop. Should be an interesting one because of the background of the speakers. They will be featuring: Joey de Villa (Tucows), Dr. Ian Graham (Enterprise IT Strategy, BMO Financial Group), Alvin Chin (University of Toronto), and Veronica Holmes (Bell Canada).

The abstract reads:

Many components of pervasive computing are already in place, including collaborative and communication applications such as instant messaging, e-mail, text messaging, and conferencing. In addition, mobile devices are providing ubiquitous computing and communication capabilities. Improved methods are now needed to support collaboration that goes beyond explicit authoring, messaging and conferencing. Techniques such as collaborative filtering (e.g., in book recommendations by Amazon), social networking (using systems such as Orkut), and blogging, are part of an emerging domain of social computing. We are interested in the impact of blogging and related communication and collaboration activities, and how social aspects such as community building can enhance the performance of business activities.

This workshop will provide a forum for the discussion of issues related to the development and usability of social computing systems and applications. Part of the workshop activity will include requirements analysis for applications of social and pervasive computing. Speakers from academia and industry will describe their experiences in researching and deploying social computing applications.
Topics of interest include: blogs and wikis, semantics, creating and building a community, e-commerce, and information epidemics. Specifically to blogs, the workshop will address bottom-up (grassroots, personal, diary) blogs versus top-down (topic-oriented, corporate sponsored, political party, etc.) blogs. Other topics to be covered will include musicblogs, photoblogs, mobile phone blogs (moblogs), and videoblogs. The syndication and aggregation of blogs using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) will also be discussed.