An open Web (via Liverpool)
Friday, August 27th, 2010To Liverpool Wednesday, for an enjoyable afternoon interviewing Aidan McGuire and Francis Irving of ScraperWiki, then an evening at Liverpool’s Social Media Café event.
ScraperWiki is a code wiki that provides you with a maintained scraper to extract data from any public source on teh InterWebs, for any purpose. A great example is the map showing oil drilling around UK shores at the same depth as the Gulf of Mexico Disaster. Thanks to Aidan and Francis for lots of info about what ScraperWiki is up to, and where it’s going - if I can’t find a publisher for the interview (my usual outlet can’t fit it in), I might post more here.
Talks at #smcLiv were given by Mike Nolan, on coping with social media overload, and Jon Bloor, on Publish & (Don’t) be damned. Social Media & the Law. Mike is certainly tapping a rich vein, given the number of information channels we’re all hooked into, and talk around the tables afterwards ranged from GTD through #inboxZero to using the good old-fashioned telephone to cut down on e-mail.
Social Media Café at Static Liverpool, 25 August 2010, pic by Mike Nolan
There was also a talk given by myself, on Open Social Networks - or what to do about FaceBook being Evil. I’ll be writing here soon about GNU social, Diaspora*, and other ways of taking back control of your social media use, but for now please see the article at LinuxUser magazine - and the extracted interview with Evan Prodromou.
