This weekend was SemanticCampLondon (alt) – a grassroots conference of semantic web developers.

Semantics is all about meaning – and the idea of the “semantic web” is to use techniques that add greater and greater meaning to web content. The intention is for computers – as well as humans – to “understand” something of the content, allowing them to make associations with related content and to present options to the web user based on those associations.

When web developers agree about standard ways to add semantic meaning to content, then some pretty amazing things become possible.

Tom Morris and Daniel Lewis did an excellent job of pulling the event together. It seemed to me that they acted as a bridge between developers who approach the Semantic Web from quite different angles. There was a spectrum of perspectives and some tangible synergy taking place…

Niche TV

On a whim, I started using Yahoo Live to stream live video of the conference from my webcam. The service launched last week and is so easy to use – just plug in the webcam and “Go Live”.

It was pretty effective. There were viewers from different parts of the world tuning in, asking questions and educating each other on the fine points of the technologies being presented. In this way, something of the event spread beyond the confines of London. I will try to encourage a handful of people to stream video from next month’s BarCampBrighton…

Compound Microformats

For my session, I put together an interactive demo of Compound Microformats – a way of combining simple building blocks of HTML, so that their combined semantic meaning becomes greater than the sum of their parts:

(Image from Microformats wiki)

We talked about people innovating on new patterns for combining microformats. We also discussed whether software that understand microformats should consider the configuration of compounds, to glean something more of the semantic meaning intended by the coder.

Tags: barcamp, compoundmicroformats, livecasting, london, longtail, microformats, SemanticCamp, SemanticCampLondon, semantics, semanticweb, semantopoly, streamcasting, upcoming:event=402789, video, videoblogging, vlogging, yahoolive