I was at TOC08 back on the 11th and 12th February. I spoke on the Tuesday on social software and publishers, giving a talk on how publishers can take their existing book catalogues and turn them into social catalogues tracking the activity happening on the web about their books back into their catalogues. The slides and my speaking notes are on slideshare.
The ideas in the talk come from a wide variety of sources, but the BBC work I did with Tom Coates, Matt Biddulph and Mags Hanley was certainly formative in my thinking about this area.
To follow up on this area, Tom's web of data talk is a great summary of how to attach meaning to entities on the web. His 2006 Future of web apps talk gives a good framing around why and how people create content and share it online and how you can interact with that. Matt Biddulph did similar work with thinglink (pdf) and and a talk on weblike design for data. I got interested in the political angle on this and made the European Constitution into a social document via the project talkeuro, I wrote a paper on that work for xtech05.
The aim of the TOC talk was to get book publishers to realise that they all had something which could be turned into a shared object by interacting with their readers directly and not just treating them as buyers. I've had some really nice feedback about the talk from a range of people, so thanks. One last point, this is possible, I didn't say it would be easy.
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