Marc Canter, founder of Broadband Mechanics, opera singer and larger than life evangelist for the mesh, is on a roll. If you want some notion of how widgetized content fits into a larger context, Marc’s your man.

The value of open social networks for widgets
Everybody is in favour of open social networks where widgetized content can roam freely from one place to the next - but not everyone agrees on what the definition of open social networks is. This session will take a look at the myths and reality of social networks and ask what can be done now and what do we have to do next to achieve openness - if that is indeed a good idea.

Marc’s voice How to build the mesh - #3: Shared Structured Content Servers

OK - now that we’ve shipped a few networks and I’ve written up how one’s ID, Persona and Groups (#1) and persistent ubiquitous content (#2) are important domains in building out the mesh, I’d now like to focus on a domain which has been bubbling up for years and which will also play a key role in the mesh - shared structured content servers (#3). Call it micro-content, micro-formats, tagging, meta-data, semantic web, shared knowledge bases or what have you - the idea is that content comes along with extra ’stuff’ associated with it and that all that content and data is available on public, shared servers - where a community can contribute to it - and it’s overall value goes up.

Marc Canter is the CEO of Broadband Mechanics, purveyors of a white label social networking platform called PeopleAggregator. Marc started a company called MacroMind - which became Macromedia. That means Marc and his team created the world’s first multiple player (now called Flash), the world’s first multimedia authoring system (Director) and the first system where one could create a file once – and play it back on multiple platforms.

That was in the 80’s. Marc created Interactive Music Videos, Interactive TV Talk shows, scalable content and what’s now called Ajax in the 90’s.

PeopleAggregator outputs widgets and personifies all of the standards and principles of open social networking - eg. providing control to end-users to output and control their own user data. Marc will talk about how to “build the mesh” and how open standards and proprietary formats must live side by side. Marc blogs at marc.blogs.it

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