In a 12 minute YouTube video, Manu Sporny explains Linked Data, Google's Knowledge Graph, and Facebook's Open Graph Protocol in a very non-technical way. Worth a listen to understand subjects that can sometimes be difficult to grasp.

If you want to give the freshly launched RDFa 1.1 standard a spin, try the RDFa real-time editor: http://rdfa.info/play/

... as from 30 October 2011, see:

http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/drafts/2011/ED-rdfa-lite-20111030/

On September 21st, the first ever schema.org workshop was held in Mountain View, California. There were 75 attendees from web markup & standards groups (including W3C, Microformats, RDFa, Creative Commons), as well as other search engines (Ask, Yandex, Baidu), and top content publishers and tools vendors (including NYTimes, Disney, Foursquare, Shopping.com, OpenTable, Drupal, Sharepoint). The objective of this workshop was to evolve the schema.org specification, solicit feedback from the standards community, and build momentum for web publishers. During the workshop, a proposal was put forth for a stripped down version of RDFa 1.1, called RDFa 1.1 Lite. The RDFa syntax is often criticized as having too much functionality, leaving first-time authors confused about the more advanced features. This lighter version of RDFa will help authors easily jump into the Linked Data world. The goal was to create a very minimal subset that will work for 80% of the folks out there doing simple markup for things like search engines.

To summarise, RDFa 1.1 Lite is a simple subset of RDFa consisting of the following attributes: vocab, typeof, property, rel, about and prefix.

See Ben Adida's presentation at http://ben.adida.net/presentations/rdfa-2011-09-21/#5

See more in article from Manusporny on RDFa 1.1 Lite

Did you know that in November 2008 we were uploading 13 hours of video every minute? Now in 2011, there's about 48 hours of video being uploaded every minute. Too much for a human being to view ever. Also the YouTube's 'promoted videos' are now reaching one billion views globally.

Portfolio have updated a flash movie showing how Google works... I like the step-to-step introduction with its mouseovers that show more information about the process etc. as well as the timeline illustrating what Google have been up to since 1997. Have a look at: Google - Interactive features.

George is leading the session on 'Maximising Institutional Webmaster Impact' at the Institutional Web Management Workshop on 27 July 11:00-12:30. For more details, see: B7 workshop session.

The goal of the session is to compile a maximising institutional webmaster impact (MIWI) checklist that will draw from the experiences and views of those attending. It will be posted later on the site once complete.

The next workshop for 'Maximising Online Resource Effectiveness' is in the University of Westminster, 115 New Cavendish Street, London.

The course will start at 10:00 Wednesday 20 July until 16:00 Thursday 21 July 2011.

This workshop is fully booked, but if you would like to be informed when the next workshop is on, please email Netskills to express your interest. Thank you.

The two day workshop held in June led participants to seek maximum value from online resources and activities. It provided an understanding of how the internet is evolving; the role of search engine optimisation; the importance of social networks; and acknowledgement of relevant smart technologies.

Go to the Slides section to view the latest presentations now available in PDF form.