I am on my way to Rapid City, SD for the annual gathering of Western States Folklorists. Normally this meeting takes place somewhere in the in the West. This year the meeting is in the Midwest and Folklorists form the MidWest have been invited to participate.

WESTAF supports this gathering each year and sends a representative. This year, that person happens to be me. I will be doing a little presentation of The Ties That Bind web site that I've been working on. The site has a few cleanup items, but is for the most part complete. I'll also be doing a workshop on Monday on Web 2.0.

I've been asked many times what Web 2.0 is.

• collaboration
• communication
• connection
• sharing
• editing
• linking

None of these really explain it.  This does.

Watch the whole thing.

Powered by Qumana

The business of grants is all about relationships.  Grantmaking networks are a variation on the social network.

Last week I was in Great Falls Montana and today I was in Salt Lake City.  In both cases I was intersecting with individuals who are interested in TourWest--WESTAF's grant program. 

In Montana, they have developed a culture of co-operative block booking--the activity of several presenters working together to bring in an artist or artists who then tour from place to place.  Often block booking is the only way to get a high profile performer to come to your community.  These block booking networks are social networks that rely on one another to resell product--the show. 

Openkapow's robot tool is designed to work in Windows and Linux.  Because OSX is UNIX at its core, I thought I would download the Linux version and see if I could install it.  No joy.  It threw errors in the command line.  It would be nice if they would port it to MacOS.

Today at work, I installed the tool on my Windows work station and started messing around.  The idea is that you create "robots" that aggregate, manipulate, and display data from other sites.  You can create specialised RSS feeds, clips (that display visual data), and REST robots (that apply rules to data).

It was bound to happen.  Since sites like YouTube, Revver, and Flickr started providing API access allowing reasonably easy embedding of functionality and content into other sites, we have seen some amazing mashups.  With a little programming know-how, some pretty sophisticated systems can be built at a fraction of the cost.