P. S.: Post Scriptum

The two talks I gave at the: International Workshop on Challenges and Visions in the Social Sciences, this summer, are now available at videolectures.net.
Not the best talks of my career, and hopefully not the last either. But the guys at VL did a great job in recording them.

One of the talk was about Tags, and the second about Democracy of the 21st Century.

In the one about Tags I presented the result from the entries in On Tag Clouds, Metric, Tag Sets and Power Laws and Tagclouds and cultural changes. I also refered on the very good job done by Ciro Cattuto & C at the european project Tagora. Part of their results consisted in taking some of those results and expanding them by finding a really good measure to cluster url entries according to their tag cloud. But deepr than that they also checked and showed that the measure they were suggesting was actually working.

I don’t understand why no one is using this information to write a kick-ass service on the net that uses Yahoo data to explore the long tail of the web by giving for each url, the resources that are similar. It’s practically begging to be done, by now!

The second talk is on a different subject. It is at the intersection of various different interests I have.
On the one side the discussion on how should Deomcracy of the 21st century be organised is a leit motif between me and my father. Also I keep on having this sensation that, if every generation should have its revolution, the revolution of our generation should be rooted on the understanding that the kind of technology that we use defines they type of society that emerges. And we have seen this in multiple example around the web, in different e-communities, from livejournal to wikipedia, to del.icio.us, and so on. So the idea is that the type of technology that the maintainer of a net community implements directly defines what the community can and cannot do. And thus implies the kind of society that emerges.

As a result of all this we go to my last passion. Metagovernment.org, where I get involved with a group of people who are writing a software to permit to communities to govern themselves. Something more direct than representative voting, based on radical transparency, accountability, and in general a system that is somehow in the intersection of wikipedia and slashdot. Where different ideas get integrated more than voted one at the exclusion of the other. But people interaction is also weighted by their karma. And the karma from one topic gets moved to the neighboring topic depending on how much two topics are similar.

And how do we get to find how similar are two topics? You got it! Through tags.

And my father? If you read italian you can read directly what he has to say on direct democracy. I mostly disagree, but that’s food for another post.

Related posts:

1. COP15 Needs an e-Government System This morning I received a mail from Copenhagen. It was very moving, and describing a situation of chaos, strong commitment, and braveness. It told the story of people fighting with non violence, and shouting that they want change. And I am afraid all this is useless. I feel once again what I felt looking at Iran [...]...