Visual: an awesome implementation of group video. This is a killer function not only for "hanging out" with friends and family, but for business as well.
Freedom: I can just follow anybody I like by adding them to a circle and start seeing their posts immediately. The followed person receives a notification, but doesn't have to reciprocate - similar to Twitter.
Anolim makes extensive use of the Drupal Content Management System and we have summarized the top ten most important reasons to use Drupal here:
Reliable: the use of proven, market leading technology means low risk. Drupal is used by the President of the USA for the http://whitehouse.gov web site.
What is content? Is it data? I like to think of content as the machine (computer) representation of information.
The word data usually conjures up visions of tables in relational databases, SQL, stored procedures, various normal forms, keys, indexes etc. Data in relational database tables is great when it comes to sifting through millions of rows spread across many tables to give us what we are looking for.
This event will be offering lots of interesting presentations about Drupal and the Media. Themes being covered include things like how Drupal can help with developing solutions for media platforms or the technical nitty gritty about Drupal's media modules for photo, video and audio handling and of course how to mashup / tie this all together with communities and existing services on the web like flickr, twitter, youtube, facebook etc.
There is still room for interesting presentations - head over to Call for Speakers if you have something interesting to share with (potential) users and the Drupal community. This is an international event and there will be presentations in English and German.
A lively discussion followed. Judging by the number of questions, there was a lot of interest among participants about the potential of the semantic Web. I highlighted two of the standards, RDFa and SPARQL that are available today e.g. in Web Content Frameworks like Drupal. Semantically marking up content can also lead to better search experiences using for example Yahoo's SearchMonkey.
An important component of Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the semantic web is to enable more automated processing of information. This would allow us to start thinking about the web as a giant database which is what makes SPARQL an interesting standard. See Tim Berners-Lee's talk about his vision for linked data in this TEDvideo
At the recently concluded Drupalcamp in Cologne in January, 2009, I organized a workshop about building a community site with Drupal. It was a lively workshop with lots of questions and suggestions. I didn't get through as many features as I wanted to cover, so I have put the workshop online at http://dropper.anolim.com for those of you who are interested to follow it and continue the workshop online.
Drupalcon Szeged 2008 demonstrated that the Drupal community is as vibrant as ever and Drupal itself is maturing as a product and as a community. (See references for a list of links relevant to the conference.)
