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Recently I have made some serious changes to my homepage. SOme of those changes I have been planning from a long long time. Others were more sudden.
The central page is of course at pietrosperoni.it that leads to home.pietrosperoni.it. But then there was something that I wanted to do for a long time. Integrate my mind and thinking process directly on internet. When I think I often do that through mindmaps. I have used several type of software in the past. Starting from mindmanager (back at the time when I was on windows), then freemind. I also tried the mindmap from Buzan (which I found slow, costly and with a terrible costumer service). Recently I am using iThoughtsHD which I found do be the best mindmap tool for iPad. Also I find very good that every time I wrote them I received an answer directly from Craig Scott (the programmer of the application). I was in this way able to suggest and see implemented several ideas. In particular the only thing I really missed was the possibility to make html pages from mindmap, with nodes hosting URL links. This was possible in mindmanager, but not on any other system. So iThoughts made a release that permitted to export mindmaps in html format directly on dropbox.
At this point I organised a whole part of my public dropbox folder into a homepage for my mindmaps (in the form of a mindmap itself). Which then at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2754299/maps/Mind.html. But I did not like the long link. So instead I organised another subdomain: mind.pietrosperoni.it for those mindmaps. Added some rules in the .htaccess file to make sure people going there would be forwarded to my dropbox, and I was ready to rock.
Those lines were:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ $1 [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.php$ $1.php [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2754299/maps/$1.html [R,NC,L]
RewriteRule ^$ http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2754299/maps/Mind.html [R,NC,L]
Those rules make sure that any requesto for mind.pietrosperoni.it/x go to http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2754299/maps/x.html
which is where the x map will be stored. Of course if you use it, you would have to change http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2754299/maps/ to the address where your dropbox stores your maps.
After I did all this there were still some problems with how to publish those mindmaps. One this is to make a mindmap, another is to put it on the internet, but yet another is to let people know of this mindmap, and connect it with the others. The connect part was easily done by making sure every time I made a new mindmap I would also update the general mindmap. Still there was the problem on how to make people aware of them. The best would have been an rss field. But I did not know how to make an automatic one, nor did dropbox offer an rss field of its public directories. So instead I had to set up another directory on my dropbox. Then I had to enable sharing mode (here is an explanation, here you activate it) . When you share a dropbox folder you also can get an rss field for it (here). But just going from the rss field to twitter would look lousy. So instead I took the rss field for it and used it inside yahoo pipes, and the resulting rss was then pushed in twitter using ifttt. The only thing that was missing at this point was to connect the dropbox folder where iThoughts store the mindmap with the dropbox shared folder wheich releases the rss feed. This was done using SynchTwoFolders,
The idea is:
iThoughts–>dropbox public folder–>SynchTwo Folders–>dropbox shared folder–>dropbox releases an rss–>Yahoo Pipes–>IFTTT–>Twitter.
And as a result every time I save a mindmap on my dropbox public folder (/public/maps) it gets advertised on twitter with a link to it. If you are interested in the yahoo pipe I set up in all this you can find that here.
So now I have a homepage, a series of mindmaps, a twitter account where new mindmaps are echoed; two active blogs (one in Italian and one in English), and a list of publication. What was missing? Making a page for each of my publication, and this is what I started to do. Starting to store one after the other the talks I gave at conferences on a youtube channel. What follows is the mindmap of the whole structure.
While the mindmap of the tweet the mindmap-hack is
I am right now at the FET 11 conference. There I was attending a session from my old friend Josh Bongard on Crowdsourcing Science . There I commented that it would be already a good thing if scientists started to make themselves available to the wider public. This by giving a timetable when they are available to whoever wants to chat with them about science.
 There was a time when scientists lived in ivory towers. Now that ivory towers are starting to crumble, we should do our best to really tear them down completely. So I am here suggesting, and promoting a new project. An open science project. The idea is that I, and every scientist who is willing to participate in this, will donate some time to society for science.
I will be available one hour a week on Skype to discuss about science with anyone who is interested.
My Skype name is “pietrosperoni” and I will be available every tuesday from 13 GMT to 14 GMT. You must be able to speak in English or Italian. I speak a bit of French so that might work too, but it’s very poor. And I cannot write it.
In this time we can discuss about science. If you have an idea about my field of expertise you can come and talk to me about that. Maybe we can collaborate on developing it, and maybe making it into a publication.
Before any collaboration I expect you to know about the scientific method and how do peer-reviewed journals work. But I am willing to tell you about it. Those are some sort of basic things that needs to be known when you want to do science. A bit like you need to know the rules of the road when you start driving. If you are a colleague and you want to chat you are also of course very welcome. In fact you should start joining me, and start to offer 1 hour a week to help people discover about your field of expertise.
You can find my interests as a scientist here. But I am willing and interested to discuss on many other topics. You also can come to me and ask about any idea you might have found on my blog. If you are a colleague of course you can come and Skype, but you can do much more: I invite you to join me!
You can do this from your blog, or from the comment section over here. If you have a blog and you write about this, please remember to advertise about it here. And (either here or in your blog) please remember to write:
Name:
Availability:
Skype name:
Field of expertise:
Other interests:
For me:
- Name: Pietro Speroni di Fenizio
- Availability: Skype. Tuesday, from 2 pm to 3 pm GMT.
- Skype name: pietrosperoni
- Field of expertise: folksonomy, tags, organization theory, artificial life, artificial chemistries, voting theory, power index, the vilfredo project, e-government, e-democracy, e-participation, the open science project
- Other interests: global warming, robotics,permaculture, using quantum effect to have non local effect in different time, diy biology, the hormonal system and making models of it, the future, everything in the universe.
Scientists, tear down the wall!
Taxi in portugal are generally very cheap. This is why people, in particular tourists that come from richer countries, tend to take them a lot. But in Lisbon they are often not that honest. It is very common to take a taxi in Lisbon and end up paying much more than what you were supposed to. And what you are supposed to pay is what it is written on the taximeter (plus sometimes an extra of 1.60 euro if you have luggage), with the taxi having done the shortest or fatest route between the two points. It is not unfortunately uncommon to end up paying twice of three times what should be the real price by law. Interestingly Taxis in Coimbra are instead really really honest, and it only happened a couple of times that the taxi took a route that I thought was much longer. Of course I could notice because I live in Coimbra, and I can notice in Lisbon because I do the same route (from the Airoport to the train station) all the time.
So, speaking about Lisbon, this is how it happens, and this is what you should do to avoid it from happening.
Before event taking a taxi, you should know how much you are supposed to pay for the ride. Of course no one can know it for sure, but they will give you a range. Don’t ask tourists, but portuguese. And ask more than one. Separately. (1)
The first thing you should notice is where the taximeter is. In Taxi in Coimbra the taximeter is placed in the middle, between the two fron seats, under the windscreen. So everybody can see it. In taxi in Lisbon it is placed in front of the front passenger seat. Now in taxi in Portuagl you can only enter from the right side of the taxi. The other doors are locked. This is to prevent people from going down on the side of the street, and risking having an incident. So you enter from the right side of the taxi, and so, if you are alone, you naturally sit on the back of the front passenger seat. This sometimes is suggested by the fact that the front passenger seat is taken totally in front thus giving you a lot of leg room from that position (and much less on the other side), and preventing you even further to see the taximeter. The solution of course is to slide all the way on the other side, so to be able to see the taximeter (2). But as the taximeter in front of the front passenger seat should raise a warning bell to you, and the passenger seat totally in front will raise a second warning bell, the fact that in those conditions you go and seat on the back of the driver seat will raise warning bells to the taxidriver.
Notice that once the ride has started, if you are on the back of the passenger seat, you might try to look at the taximeter by moving toward the front seat. The taxi driver can (and did to me some times) asked me to put on the security belt. So really the solution is to go and seat on the back of the driver seat. If you have a backpack you can enter before the backpack, and then as the backpack enters you slide in to give space to the backpack.
Once the taxi has started you should check the taximeter at least once. Look that it starts at 2 euro, and that there is a “1″ on the left side. If there is a “3″ things are not ok (3). A “1″ means that the taxi is going through his area. A Lisbon taxi in Lisbon will have a 1. A Coimbra taxi in Coimbra will have a 1. But once you go out of the city, or into another city they should put a tarif “3″. This is a much higher tarif, and it is there because taxi drivers are only allowed to work on their area, so if you ask them to go far away from where they normally work they will have to go back all the way before taking up another passenger. SO if you are in Lisbon, and you are being served by a taxi which uses a 3, you are probably being robbed.
Oh, by the way, dont think that if you get friendly with the driver by doing some chit chat talk he will not raise the price. By all means, get friendly, if you want to. Just don’t have any expectations for that to work.
Then of course the problem is the path the driver decides to take. And here you can use an iphone with google maps or any navigator (by the way, at the airoport there is a vodafone shop that sells sim cards. With one of that you should be able to go on internet while in portugal). It is very uncommon for the taxidriver to go on a long journey. They don’t want to throw away time and petrol either. So I would say do not worry so much about this. You know (because you have asked in point 1) how much you are supposed to pay, so just enjoy the ride.
Once you arrive you need to pay attention. They often will turn off the taximeter (at which point it is impossible to recover how much the price was also for them) and will make up a price. If this happens you are in trouble. Because you will need to take a stance. A policeman explained to me that if they turn off the taximeter you do not owe them anything. You could just walk away, and go to the police. But this is of course not easy. Especially since they will probably have your luggage in the back.
So if the price is too high, and they have turned off the taximeter, you can just tell them that the price is too high. They will often lower it (showing that they just made it up). One time I took a cab to an hotel in the city. The cab asked me for 28€. I protested, and he lowered the price to 12€. The hotel later told me that the right price was about 8€. Once they lower the price do not think that now they are going to give you the right price. In my experience if they have not been honest at the beginning they will always try to cheat you again even after conceding some.
Here the solution is to ask for a receipt. Something which, you can say, you of course need for the job. The receipt should contain from where the drive was, to where the drive was, the total cost, and the number of the taxidriver. If you have such a piece of paper, with the wrong price they are going to be in real trouble. Because you can just bring it to the police, and they would lose their licence. So they will resist giving you the paper will all the informations. Usually the paper will just contain the price, and nothing else. If you insist that they write also the trip (from, to), they will then avoid writing their number on the paper. They will often write another number that they might make up on the spot. The number that they should write is written on the windsceen inside the taxi. So once they give you the paper, you should check if the numbers are the same. If the price is not right they will never give you a paper will the 4 data all correct. You can then protest. And then something happens. They will lower the price further to the right price, usually get really really angry, and throw at you the piece of paper.
Pay attention at this point because if they are angry for not being able to trick you into paying more like all the other tourists (that’s the problem with expectations), they might get violent. So far no one tried to hit me, but they might slam the luggage on the floor. Especially in a way to break the wheels.
Here are some stories:
One time I took a cab from the airport to Oriente (the right cost being 5-6 euro). The driver had the taximeter in front of the front passenger seat, the passenger seat all the way in front. I sat on the back of the passenger seat. Once we started I tried to look in front, and the driver asked me to put on the security belt. He then took a very unfamiliar route, so I asked him where were we going. He told me that there were many ways to go to Oriente. He then asked me if I was poor, and if I needed money. This was weird. He took off the wallet, showed me some pieces of 50 €, and told me he was very rich, and if I wanted he could lend me some money. I told him I did not need his money. We arrived at Oriente. Not at the usual place, but on the other side, he stopped, far away from anybody, and asked me 12€ (double the price). I refused to pay, and asked him a receipt. So he said that I must have been very poor, so he offered me the ride for 5€. I gave him 7 saying that that was about the right price. And left.
Another time I arrived at the airport, took a cab, and asked to go to Oriente. Once we arrived the taxidriver turned off the taximeter and asked me 15 euro. I protested, and he lowered the price to 9. I knew it was still not right, so I asked him for a receipt. He wrote a receipt, but wrote the wrong taxi number. I checked the taxi number, and told him that this was not the right number. Then he lowered the price to 6 euro, got very angry shouting against miserable italian people (I told him that I was italian), and gave me the correct receipt. Yes, it was only 3 euro of difference, but I made the point. And I was quite amused at how the taxidriver got angry just because I did not permit him to cheat me on the price.
Another time I arrived at the airoport. I saw two policeman at the front of the airpoport door.
I asked them (in English, which they spoke very well):
-Hello, I would like to to take a cab to Oriente.
-Yes, sir, they are over there.
-Thanks, but the problem is that each time I take a cab to Oriente they give me a very different price, do you know how much should I pay?
-They should not give you a different price each time. The price is defined by the law, and it is what the taximeter says.
-But do you know how much should this be?
-Hmm, probably around 5 euro.
-That sounds very low.
-Maybe 6, 6.5 with the luggage, but not more.
-Yes, that soulds about right, but they usually ask me something between 10 and 15.
-They cannot ask you something that is not said by the taximeter.
-Oh, they turn off the taximeter as soon as we arrive, so they just can make up the price.
-If they turn off the taximeter you do not have to pay anything (sic)
-Really?
-Yes, if they turn off the taximeter you do not pay anything, and you call the police.
-Thanks, this was very instructing. You are policeman… (I read his badge). So if they protest I can say that policeman … told me that I do not have to pay anything since they turned off the taximeter.
-yes sir (smiling)
-Another question, an I in the law if I record the whole trip.
-You can, but if they ask you to stop recording you need to do it.
-ok thanks.
Then I left, and went to the taxi queue. There were many taxi, and no one. Before getting near I turned on the video recorder from the phone. I pretended I was a stupid turist which was reconding everything. I can make a silly face like no one else. A policeman was bringing people to the taxis. I asked the policeman:
-Hello, Oriente? How much it would be?
-I don’t know, 9, 10, not more than 10.
-The police over there told me 5.50, 6. Not more than 5.50, 6.
-I don’t know. It might be too little.
-But he says there is a taximeter, if there is no taximeter I dont need to pay, is that correct?
-Yes
Then he shows me a taxi. Interestingly it is not the first one of the line, but one on the side. I am not sure if it is the one that usually would go. While I sit inside the policeman goes and says a few words to the taxidriver. They speak portuguese and at low voice. I keep the video on. I enter and I slide all the way behind the driver seat. Telephone video recording very visible in my hand. The driver gets in, and brings me to Oriente. The taximeter is on 1, the driver turns it on at the beginning then does not touch it at all for the whole trip. We arrive, rapidly. I ask how much it is (still the telephone recording in my hand. All the time I was pointing it out of the window. The taximeter signs 3.70. Adding 1.60 for the luggage we go to 5.30. The cheapest trip on record. I pay 6, turn off the camera. The driver walks out, opens the back of the cab, takes mu luggage, and slams it on the floor wheels first (If you are a frequent traveller you should know that the weak point of a luggage is the axle of the wheel. If that breaks the luggage is much more harder to carry). Luckily the luggage was a Samsonite, so it survived. But this was another final lesson. If you pay the right price instead of the price they would want you to pay, take the luggae yourself, and do not turn off the video recorder before you are far away.
So to summarise:
-1: know how much you are supposed to pay
-2: slide in all the way so that you seat on the back of the driver seat
-3: check that the taximeter is using tarif 1 if you are inside the city
-4: maybe check on google maps that you are not going all around the city. (or just relax and enjoy the ride)
-5: make sure that the driver does not turn off the taximeter once you arrive, before you have the time to see.
-6: if he does turn off the taximeter you are allowed not to pay anything. Insist to pay at least the right price.
-7: if the price is not right ask for a receipt, which should contain where was thr trip started, where were you going, the price, and the number of the taxidriver licence.
8: double check that the 4 informations are correct. If the price is too high, they will not be. Insist to have them correct. The price will magically go back down.
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 insurgency. But stronger.
Let’s focus on Copenhagen. The sensation is that there is a lot of people on the street asking for a strong carbon tax. Count me among them. But there is more. I am afraid people have ideas, and those ideas are not being heard. And then people assume the worse, and assume the world leaders, the ministers, and everybody who is inside is on the pay check of some big corporations. And then they demand change. But now they do not focus any more on the small change. The key point. Now they want a huge change, that will not happen. And then there are rallies, and people pushing, and the police resisting. And violence. Yes police violence should not be there. And I feel this is not the way. It is not by shouting “Shame on you”, that you win the heart of the police men. It is not by shouting to people that you get yourself heard. As it does not change if I write this in normal letters or in CAPS LOCK. It is the content that matters And when you are shouting, when you are polarized, you are already making violence. This is not the way.
Now, there are people who work hard to negotiate among different positions. The Center for Non Violent Communication is probably one of the best. It was created by Marshall B. Rosenberg. One of the student of Gandhi (or so I remember from his book. The wikipedia page does not seem to mention it). Now Marshall has worked in the past as a negotiator between groups, and I am sure there are a number of very good negotiator working inside the conference to negotiate between the key people. What I don’t think there is, are negotiator between the people in the conference and people outside.
It is like all the effort is concentrated in getting the communication going between those big players. But no work has been done to get enough communication between the inside of the conference and the outside. The assumption seem to be that either there are no good ideas outside or it is just impractical to engage them. I think both of those assumption are wrong. Yes, we still need to develop the tools to make an efficient brainstorm with millions of people. But the idea of having everybody writing their own ideas, and voting on the ideas they like is already a good start. Why is there no system like this to harvest the ideas from the people?
I was just looking at a youtube cnn conference where people sent questions, and voted on the questions. Again there is the assumption that normal people are just ignorant. This is not true. Not anymore (if it ever was). Not with the internet that let anyone study any topic.
In all those situations we need to set up systems where people can chip in their ideas. While it is happening, can read each other ideas. And the most voted ideas emerge from the noise to the people who are making the discussion.
I wonder how Caine would have commented David Carradine‘s death. Especially the modus operandi.
I can see it. The light dissolves, and a new scene is in front of our eyes:
Master Po walks. Young Caine is thoughtful…
-What’s the matter, Grasshopper? Continue reading In memory of David Carradine, what would Master Po say?
It seems to me that Twitter, Google, and Wolfram|Alpha, are really not competing at all, but are instead providing complementary services. I would go farther by adding wikipedia (and blogs?), and suggest that the 4 services really represent the digestive process of our information society. From the first Churning to the Backbone
Wolfram|Alpha represents the deeper part. It includes only what is really known inside out from our society. What has been fully digested. FOr something to be in W|A it needs to be known, semantically known, beyond doubt. And notice that I am here speaking about a deeper Wolfram|Alpha than what you have seen here. The Wolfram|Alpha as it should be, once we learned hot to interrogate it proprtly, and once it has epanded with the rest of the knowledge we have.
At a higher level we have wikipedia. Wikipedia permits much more stuff to be present. You have actors, and theories, and stories, and a lot of other stuff. You also have discussions and point of views. In short you have a lot of stuff that is not being digested anymore, but is also not the bones of our society. It is more like the muscles. The limit of Wikipedia is that since it does not allow for new research, by definition it is limited to what has already been discovered. Although not in a definite way as in Wolfram|Alpha.
And then we have Google. Google is really part of the digestive process. It has new stuff coming in every few days. But is is also less clear. You need to work to get to the results using google. But you can also find new threads. Things that are still not known. There is real food here, waiting to be digested.
And Twitter is the more superficial tool. Twitter has second to second update. It has multiple links in different forms that point to the same resource. Information is not organised in any way, shape or form. But it is information nevertheless. It represents the edge of the knowledge wave of our civilization. It is deeply alive, unpredictable, full of possibilities. You never know how it will react. It is the most alive part of the constant discussion that is going on in our civilisation. It is the civilisation equivalent to the constant chit chat that is going on in our head. Although it has memory, it is not really good with it. Anything that is in Twitter can be true, can be false, can be anything in the middle, neither or both at the same time.
If you are an alive and creative mind that wants to participate in the constant flow of creation of this society you will probably end up interacting in twitter in some ways. But if you want your creation to be grounded in reality you need to use the other levels as well. They are really not competing.
And Blogs? Blogs are ways with which we store personal longer stories. The untwittable (as Chris Anderson from TED called his). They work between the google level and the Twitter level. Letting information move between those levels, and letting complex information be churned before is ready to go deeper. Similarly you have journal articles (and books) working to bring the information to the wikipedia level.
As many of you know, I eat in Primal Diet from a long time. It is at least 3 or 4 years. I was very ill when I started, and feel much better now. I often look around to see when new articles appear on this diet, and I was very happy to read that a mainstream newspaper was writing an article about it. Too bad that the title was not very flattering: “The Primal diet: the silliest diet ever?“. The article was even worse. The worse set of factual errors, that newspaper has ever written. According to this article being in primal diet means to eat for 95% meat, and for most of it “high meat”. High meat is well off meat. Meat that has been kept in the fridge for days, weeks or months. I personally have never eaten high meat. But also people in primal diet who do eat high meat, do that very sparingly. Maybe a little bit, every 2 to 6 months to promote the response from the body. (FYI, this part of the diet is inspired by how some tribal people do eat some eat in their original diet. Confront on this Vilhjalmur Stefansson report on Eskimo diets).
After reading the article, I wrote a comment saying that the article contained factual errors, that I was on primal diet from a few years, and that it is simply false that people in primal diet eat so much high meat.
Guess what? The comment never passed the revision process. My comment was just before the comment of “Chris, Neath”. Yet it never appeared.
I find this behaviour from an online very dishonest, and feel the need to point it out.
We should all watch out from newspapers that censor informations that challenge them.
Pietro
I have been using mindmaps for quite some time. Wherever I go I am known as the mindmap person. My whole website was build using MindManager’s export-to-HTML function. But those where the times of Windows. Now I have moved to Mac and I have left behind MindManager. Now I use Freemind, and iMindMap.
I recently expressed my choise pubblicly on a twitter:
@gtdguy with all respect mindmanager sucks on mac. There I use freemind (4 speed) and imindmap (4 beauty). But neither makes HTML maps good!
I was then contacted by Michael Deutch (“Mindjet Chief Evangelist”), who asked me:
@pietrosperoni Buon giorno Pietro. What features / capabilities are you looking for in MindManager Mac? Thanks for sharing 
The answer was too long for a tweet, so instead I decided to blog it, and tweet a link to it.
Dear Michael, thank you for your question.
I was undeniably in a great desire to share what I think about the way mindjet was treating Mac.
I use to use Minmanager many years ago, when I had Mindmanager 2002. Now Mindmanager for Windows runs version 8, Mindmanager for Mac runs version 7, and version 7 for Mac is sensibly worse than version 2002 for windows, from 6 years ago. As you can imagine I am pretty pissed off, and you might have to make a huge work to evangelize me.
Nowhere is the discussion about Mindjet product for Mac more focused than on the Mindjet Forums themselves. So please let us go there. In particular in the MindManager 7 for Mac. And to really pinpoint the issue, I would like you to read the Board: Is Mindjet really serious about the Mac?. It is 45 posts, 16 months long, so far, and is the one place where we frustrated mindmanager users, who were used to have a Windows version vent our anger.
Please read it, I’ll wait. (By the way, the authors “psdf” is me)
The shortest answer to your question is that we need MindManager for Mac to be as good as the Windows version for us to take it seriously.
We need the same functionalities as windows, and we need them at about the same time. A few weeks later is acceptable. Few months is bad, and years after is enough for us not to use your software. But not to implement them, is unacceptable for us to even considering hearing someone speak good about mindmanager without feeling an incredible urge to chip in our experience. Especially from a company that pretends to be Mac friendly.
I personally need to be able to upload my old .mm files, from mindmamager 2002. I need to have an export to html with embedded in the image links as there is in all other versions of mindmanager. I am particularly angry with Mindjet because that functionality, the possibility to have links embedded in the map, is only present from mindjet products. This makes me suspects that you might have patented this functionality, effectively denying any Mac user from being able to have it. I will actually have to restructure my whole website because of this. And this because I refuse to run a Windows system just for a program.
I have deleted MindManager 7 for Mac long time ago so it is now too late for me to make a side by side comparison. Plus I don’t have a Windows computer with a MindManager program running inside. But please, I plead you, you are in Mindjet headquarters, take a laptop with a Windows MindManager 8 on the one side, another with a Mac MindManager 7 on the other and run them side by side. And then, in all honestly, tell me if you are not disgusted by the Mac version. It is a stub. Now run it against MindManager 7 for Windows and see if you do not feel the same way. Run it against MindManager 2002 (I am sure you must still have a copy somwhere), and tell me if you don’t still feel the same way. Run it against freemind. Run it against any other mindmap program for Mac and tell me if you do not feel just the same way: Mindmanager for Mac is a joke!.
On top of all this, it was mindnumbing to see how bad were Mac users being treated on your own website, with mindjet ignoring Mac users requests, pleads, protests; Mindjet employers do not post in the Mindjet Mac forum anymore. Worse than that, if Mac users share with other users outside their forum what is going on they get deleted:
Hi All,
Well, I actually posted on the PC MM7 forum about the poor service that Mindjet have given the MAC community and how in a world of migration from PC to MAC that this is a bad thing for IT managers. It got deleted. Perhaps by posting here I am risking being banned from the the forum altogether but I wanted people to know that things are not all well at Mindjet (I own 3 mindjet licenses + JV Gannt etc) . However, I encourage you to do the same and not lie down and take the fact that Mindjet have taken your money and ran. Perhaps this mail will be deleted before anyone sees it. Poor, disrespectful service to a long time customer.
We are now using that forum to share tips about competing softwares. What else can we do?
We tried to mail for support, and the answer we got were:
Thank you for your interest in MindManager. At this time, we do not have an exact date in place for an upgrade for Mac users. Please check our website http://www.mindjet.com for updates.
Best regards,
Susan
and
Sent: Saturday , August 30, 2008 05:21 am PDT (GMT-07:00)
Subject: What about the new MAC version?
Do you have a general date? Like 4th Quarter 08?? I won’t hold you to it.
September 3, 2008 11:08:19 AM EDT
Update for Case #59656 – “What about the new MAC version?”
Unfortunately, we do not.
Best regards,
Susan
Susan Kozak
Customer Service Representative
Mindmanager is being too well treated from Apple. In Apple shops MindManager for Mac is being sold and presented in nice views on stands. That’s where I bought mine, that’s where I brought it back (with my feedbacks) the next day. Eventually we are going to get your products out of Apple stores. It just does not belong there.
Now, the number of Mac users is growing. I come from academia, and I can assure you that almost everybody there is using Mac.
Can Mindjet really afford to have this growing black hole of disaffectionate users grow and erode your base?
I don’t think so.
Best Regards,
Pietro
Pietro Speroni
Ex Mindjet costumer, Ex MindManager user.
P.S. if by any chance the pages in the mindjet forum got deleted (you know, thos damn hackers are everywhere), just mail me, and I will send you a copy of them.
ADDENDUM:
Michael’s Reply:
@pietrosperoni Thanks, will share your feedback with our team! Lots of win users migrated to mac last year!
Another revolution is about to happen.
A revolution that is many times in size and importance bigger than the music revolution. I call it the e-book revolution.
In this moment a number of technologies are coming together:
On the one side OCR technologies are reaching a level of sophistication, where it is nearly as easy to photocopy a book as to make an ebook out of it. Do you remember when you would go to a photocopy shop, and ask them to make a copy of the book. Now it is that easy to have the ebook version of it, if you know how to do it. This means that more and more books are available in ebook format.
But the difference between the ebooks now, and the mp3, back then, is that when the mp3s came out, a song (5 minutes of fun) was about 5 MB. And since the internet was slower back then, it would take quite some time to download those 5 minutes of fun. Now a book, is often between 1 and 10 Mega Byte. And it can permit you to read it, study it, but also just to consult it.
More about this later.
I thought there were few ebooks around. That mostly you could find some old classics, but nothing really interesting. I was SO wrong.
Here is a collection available for download from pirate bay with more than 1000 ebooks, all on computer science. Here another with practically all of the ebooks from the “* for dummies” collection.
Those are not just some old classics. Those are good new books.
But why are users going through the whole work of digitalizing a single book to post it online? I guess this text will explain us: Continue reading Ebooks, the next revolution. But this time is BIG!
Some of you might remember that I wrote a post about the long tail of the ruling class. The post was in Italian and got translated in English by blogger Phil Edward. I took the translation copied it in my blog (with a link), but said that I did not fully agree with Phil understanding of my post. I didn’t enter more into details. And then there was silence, and in the silence I decided it was easier to just ignore the whole discussion. But a few days ago Nicholas Carr from Rough Type wrote a post on how the long tail permits to the service the puts in touch people to make massive amount of money, but to the people who produce the actual content not much money. Absolutely true, and this is why you don’t see google advertisments in my blog. But this is a very different problem from what I was discussing when I was speaking about the long tail of the Ruling Class. Mainly because I was not speaking about the ruling class but about the ‘classe dirigente’. Which is not exactly the ruling class, although I still can’t find a better translation. Ruling class smells a bit too much of kings and queens and prime ministers. And I was actually speaking about ‘classe dirigente’ as people who have authority over a certain field.
So when Phil commented on Nick post:
I blogged on this last year, in response to Pietro Speroni:
I felt I had to answer. Because my post was all about a multidimensional space (all our interests), which gets mistreated as a unidimensional space (money). Poor chap! For a multidimensional space to be treated as a unidimensional one is fairly common, but never fair. And the general excuse is ‘to understand better’, or ‘to simplify a bit’. But I suspect that multidimensional spaces might take it personally, bacause if you treat them bad, they can become quite convoluted, if you know what I mean. Maybe I should write a long post on the importance of not making models (even mental ones) with too few dimensions. But I think I shall leave it for some time next year. And then I can say that it was long due.
In any case I decided to copy my comment to Nick post here. Continue reading Where life is and money isn’t
Finally the time has come. Although I wanted to do this from a long time, only now did I found the time and the technical knowledge to do it:
I divided the blog.
I divided all the Italian posts from the English ones. I created a new blog at http://it.pietrosperoni.it, and my italian posts will, from now on, be posted over there. And only over there. Most of the people (3) who read me (5) either read Italian or English posts. And I am sure it must have been very confusing to scroll through a page and find some posts in English and some in Italian. Plus I always had the sensation that I could not write too much in one language, or possible readers of the other language will just assume the blog contains no information at all for them, and dismiss it. This in time made me slow down posting, as I could not always follow particular threads, that would have involved to post many times, in one language.
But now all this has come to an end.
Of course if you want to read entries from both blogs you should add the rss from the italian blog too. Some topic will remain confined to this blog (like tags, for example), others will remain there (like italian politics), while other will span through both medium (like diet, which already is present in both). The wiki in this case should act like a glue, creating a space where entries from both are aggregated. Plus, being a wiki, I (and whoever wants to come and play) will use it to keep notes, aggregate extra content, and generally make some pages stand out while others will only show the blogs entries, the bookmarks, and the context (i.e. the links from delicious popular page, and from technorati).
Generally it is not a smart idea to to come here every time to see if I have written something. I tend to write when I have something to say, so many days might pass before I say something, then for some days I might make one or more post a day. The solution is to add my rss feeds to your feed reader. Bloglines is a good one. I am sure there are better ones. Feel free to suggest them (as I am always looking for ways to improve).
Now let’s get a bit more technical: making this change also meant getting my hands dirty with MySql Continue reading The Italian blog is born: reasons and technicalities
If you go around the net, looking for information about enzymes and digestion, you often find detailed explanations. Explenations that generally say that enzymes come in a limited quantity, that if you eat raw food you are taking in new enzymes, thus not depleting your resources but if you eat cooked food you deactivate the enzymes, and eventually (over the years) you will have troubles digesting food. If you, instead, go to wikipedia nothing of this is present. Nor if you ask to a ‘normal’ doctor will they tell you any of this. What follows Continue reading My Sunday Treasure Hunt: Enzymes and Digestion
I wanted to start this entry congratulating with Joshua for the deal. But I won’t.
Tha facts: the web site delicious have been sold to Yahoo!.
I personally don’t dislike Yahoo. I positively hate them. For having eaten and raped startup websites, one after the other. For being totally obscure in terms of contact with the public. For refusing to answer e-mails. For being so big that they can just claim: “we are too big to answer your e-mails”. We can ignore you, and trample on you; we will not even notice. I have something personal with them from the moment they deleted my web page back in 2003; and with it all the material inside; which included some preprints of academic papers I wrote; some of them I had in single copy. I hate yahoo because they don’t get what is the web2.0 and they try hard to copy it. And when they fail in copying it, they try to buy it. As if you could buy a community. As if you could own a community. As if you could buy a language and the agreement to keep the data open.
So maybe I should congratulate with Joshua for having sold something which had no price for some real and tangible money. But I still will not. Because delicious was not only a community. It was also an experiment. A place for us geeks to meet and discuss. A place where we were changing the web. Yes WE were changing the web through our ideas. And Joshua was good in picking the best ideas. Inviting us to give more. Now do you really think this will continue under Yahoo!’s reign? Forget it! At least for my part.
But this is not the reason why I shall not congratulate with Joshua. No I shall not congratulate with him because he could have made it. Because delicious was clearly, and recognised, the best bookmarking service on the web. And with the whole community behind giving suggestion it was prosperous and growing. Because people have pleaded him to start charging, or put advertisments, or do something, but let us pay for it. Because we knew. We knew he could not possibly pay off it all by himself. And we were happy to join in. We were happy to pay. How many services are you aware of where the costumers ask to pay for them? Few indeed!
Of all the people who have commented the action I feel the person who better captures my feelings is Ronald Johnson, who comments:
Some lessons to learn here:
- Never trust a startup service to store your important data no matter how the owner seems honest to you. Sooner or later he/she will run away with the money and YOUR data.
- Never trust a corporate entity to continue storing your important data. Now that they stole your data, you are subjected to the user-specific ads and they abuse you no matter how strong you cry.
- Never act like a fanboy on services you don’t trust. Instead, invest your time and knowledge on open source projects to ensure your efforts are never sold to third party evils.
I have to add, one of the thing I found most disturbing was the form whith which Joshua announced it. In evidence the words that I found most disturbing:
We’re proud to announce that del.icio.us has joined the Yahoo! family. Together we’ll continue to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet, with a big emphasis on the power of community. We’re excited to be working with the Yahoo! Search team – they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web. (We’re also excited to be joining our fraternal twin Flickr!)
We want to thank everyone who has helped us along the way – our employees, our great investors and advisors, and especially our users. We still want to get your feedback, and we look forward to bringing you new features and more servers in the future.
I look forward to continuing my vision of social and community memory, and taking it to the next level with the del.icio.us community and Yahoo!
The post stinks of corporate declaration, and has already signed the destiny of delicious as just another piece in the yahoo puzzle. A more honest post would have spoken of the money that was passed. How they made an offer that could not be refused. Of the risks of the passage. It would still make people upset, but we might have felt that it was coming from Joshua and not through Joshua, from the Yahoo P.R. office.
All this calls for some actions, for I really don’t want to support Yahoo; and if all I can do is passive resistance, then that’s what I shall do!
- I shall look for a good alternative to Yahoo, ehm, I mean del.icio.us. The folks at slashdot suggest Simpy.
- I want to look better at microformats, and in particular at rel-tag. It might be possible to install a small bookmarking service on site, and then have it send standard info to the community at large. In this way I would not be vulnerable anymore to the next Yahoo! acquisition.
- While I am there I should also look for ways to get out of Flickr (who has been acquire by Y! too). Don’t miss the wonderful description of the mess Yahoo is doing with the Flickr signup page. There I also heard that 23hq might be a good alternative. Still I would prefer something on site that speaks a common language.
- I have to decide what to do with the Delicious Mind Map Maker. You see, I really don’t want to support Yahoo. Not even indirectly. So I am tempted to take it offline. But if I find a better service, and it is bound to be there now that other geeks will start migrating to come out of the belly of the beast, I might just modify it to sustain this other service. Nothing have been decided yet.
- And then I might instead develop my own service or help someone else develop their service, using the tagclouds ideas I spoke about early.
- And last but not least, there is the possibility that I might develop the famous search utility I have been speaking about. Up to now, apart the constraints in time, what really stopped me where ethical reasons. Joshua asked people not to screenscrape delicious, so I felt I would abide by his request. I surely did not want to tax the servers of a poor hacker. But now the ‘poor’ hacker have sold the golden eggs’ hen, and walked away with tons of cash. And I am sure Yahoo will not even notice if I start screenscraping them. At least until they start putting all sorts of advertisments which might make it too hard to do. Hmm, active resistance might have some attraction!
So I probably should congratulate with Joshua. He sold a bunch of quite simple and useless code to Yahoo. He prospected them the possibility to have a great and creative community. Now all he has to do is walk away with the cash, start a delicious clone and we will all be more than happy to join him in the new adventure. Hell! We will not even ask for our part of the booty. Although we might ask for a dinner in a good restaurant.
And I think that’s just fair.
ADDENDUM:
After reading all the comments on slashdot I found a link to a page with most bookmarking services compared. It is a bit old, so not totally updated. But yet it gives some good overviews and can be used for some good pre-screening. Also the maintainer of Simpy, Otis, wrote a long comment explaining how he might even adapt the code to make the mindmap work for that too!
A fast note to point out that Phil Edwards took the ball and translated the previous post. The post was an answer to a post from my father, and as such in Italian.
Phil uses the post as his launch pad for a very interesting one on how he sees the long tail having effect on the society and how he sees this not happening. I don’t think I agree fully on what Phil writes, but I need some time to gather my ideas, and answer properly.
What follows is Phil translation of my post. The translation is incomplete, but correct and faithful to the original spirit (although I am not convinced I would translate classe dirigente as ruling class), as such I am happy to copy it here. Continue reading Ruling Class translation
Hello everybody, I’m back.
The vacations were very good, and soon I’ll pull all the pictures on the moblog, with the descritpions and the embarassing details. Now I’m back to work in Jena.
One of the things that is happening to me at the time is that my computer is physically falling to pieces. It is an old laptop of a brand I don’t wish to nominate not to increase their visibility since it gave me all sort of problem freezing about one time a week at least. Having to look for a new model I started thinking about the products around, and I reached the conclusion that we are ready for another big jump. And generally a new product which will make a new base in the economy of Pda. (Yes I am looking for a laptop for me and I end up writing about PDA. So what? Sue me).
It seem to me that there are 4 different products on the market which really need to be integrated and when they will be integrated there will be a big jump in terms of potentiality. I am speaking of:
- Smart Phones (with Camera)
- PDA
- GPS
- IPod
Right now no product that I know of that is on the market have is really all four at the same time. There are some shy tentative to do the integration but no one has really managed.
Let’s look why those 4 instruments should all be present in one tool and what extra do we get. The smart phone will give the possibility to phone and more important to be in touch on the internet all the time. The more we go on the lower the tarif will be. In Italy is already possible to have a flat rate of 20 Euro a month that let you connect to internet anytime between 6pm and 8 am and during weekends and holidays (It is through TIM, if you are looking for it). It is very good. I wish here in Germany there was a similar possibility. With time the prices will inevitably drop. What all this mean is that the tool, that from now on I will call eBase, will have the possibility to be in contact with the internet pretty much all the time.
When I was in Prague at the European Go Congress I bought a small PDA, used, for 20 euro. It works fine and it permitted me to simply record all the official game I did. If the tool was already online I could have sent them to internet immediatly. But wait, if the tool is on internet I can also play go online directly from the PDA. Imagine, you are on your bus and you play online with someone, far far away, in a distant galaxy. And because more and more of the work is moving on internet, with del.icio.us, calendars on line, office on line, and so on, this would mean that you get all your data all the time. And this on a PDA. So on something that is big enough to actually do some work, read some web pages, and generally be useful.
And now the first critic will be, but what about making phone calls. Will not that be unconfortable? Oc course an eBasa have to be bigger than one of those miniaturized phones that are available right now. On the other hand I see more and more people using those bluetooth microphone to speak. You can still keep your eBase in your pocket while you speak.
Now PDA and phone integrated are already around. And they work quite well. In fact many smart phones are in a sense a PDA plus a phone. I use to be quite skeptic about those tools. Especially about how easy it is to write on the screen itself, but after my last PDA I had to change my mind. It works very well.
But now the last two elements, the IPod and the GPS. Already many smart phones have an mp3 reader inside. But the real novelty in the IPod is not the mp3 reader, but the memory. The fact of having 40 gb of memory means that everybody can carry ALL the music he likes with her. No smart phone that I know of offers this service. This is fundamental. If eBase have also to be a working tool it has to have a huge memory. 40 GB is the minimum. But what else would mean to have an IPod fully integrated with a PDA plus a smart phone. Well, for once it means that you can get your podcast directly on your phone. And since (see above) your phone is supposed to be on internet pretty much all the time you are getting your podcasting all the time from internet directly on your phone. Yes, we had reinvented the radio. And since this is going to have a bigger screen than a mobile (apart that flexible screens are coming out in an case), we can even consider having video podcasting with us. Essentially to have it we just would need some of the smart phone that we already have around and pack them with enough memory, and a flat rate connection to internet. Nothing too incredile.
And the last one is the GPS. We already have that too. Some smart phone have GPS included, and many can have it outside. It seem that until things are not integrated in the base object people don’t use them. It it was for me I would have never bought an external camera to use with my phone. But the model I needed had also a camera included, so I had to take it. And it ended up being what I use most, and I have the most fun with. I think the same goes with GPS. Wait until all phone have GPS. Wait until any phone can tell you the road to anywhere you want. Both in terms of streets, and in terms of physical distance (3 miles in direction 121 degrees). Wait until every picture that you make comes with the exact coordinates of when and where it was taken. And then you will have the possibility to put a picture on internet and everybody can find that exact spot (and of course you can obscure that possibility, to protect your privacy). Wait until you can make a search on internet on all pictures around a certain place. And then the integration of the internet and human beings that wish to be part of the internet can be really strong. And then you can search a post in your blog by where it was written, more than when it was written. And any document we write will not only have the date but also the location. And we start refering to places with their coordinates. Like we do now with time.
Think about it. Before the invention of the calendar people would refer to time by relating with big events. Two years before the flood. 3 years after the king got into power…
Now we have some universal ways to refer to time. 5th of October 2003. We still refer to things respect to an event (’3 months after the twin tower’,…) but mostly we use the western coordinates. And the fact of giving to each user the possibility to know what time it was (the invention of the watch) made it possible and practical for people to refer to time in a precise way. As soon as we have some simple object that is with us all the time and that tells us our spatial position we will start to use this coordinates in the same way.
So I think those 4 objects should come together. And they will. And whoever will do it will get a big share of the market (and maybe this is why it had not happened yet, as each company keeps hold of its own patents to avoid the other being able to make the integration themselves).
I only gave here a sketch of the possibilities of such a tool. In a sense something like an eBase could be enough for a person to interact with the social coomunity. Would be enough to let someone discuss with others and participate in the emerging democracy that we seem to have finally started creating.
I am sure this object will come out. The question is not ‘if?’, the question is ‘when?’, and ‘what should I buy in the meantime?’.
I think the time have come to write my third, and hopefully last contribution to the topic of tagclouds.
I have been hearing a lot of talk on how users should not use too many tags in linking to url. I also am the maintainer of the mindmap maker, and I often look at some of the maps generated (available to everybody). There is a number of people who tend to use an average of between one and two tags per URL. Their maps are often very ordered. No clustering, no hierarchy. (Forgive me if I don’t put a link to such a map, but since I am going to bash this way of using delicious, I’d rather bash a method than a specific human being. Just go to the list of maps and open a couple, odds are one of them will be of the type I am describing). This way of using delicious uses tags as folders, just with the modification that every now and then you can put an URL in more than one folder at the same time. A bit like big bookstore might carry several copies of the same book, and store them in more than one place (and the Tao Te Ching, ends up in New Age -God knows why- and in Religion).
Of course tags tend not to fit exactly. My Tag Clouds and Cultural Change will be under Tags or Folksonomy or Sociology… Whatever you chose you probably will not put it under Ajax. And yet most of the analysis was done studying the spreading of the term Ajax.
Let’s make a few simple calculations. Continue reading Tag Clouds are hard to Spam
In the previous post I discussed how we can measure the relative importance of tags in a post, by calculating their weight, as
- weight of tag t= (number of people using t)/(total number of people)
I also said that:
Not only we could study a culture by studying the differences in the power law approximated by the tag clouds used by people of that culture. But we could even measure cultural eartquake by measuring the difference between the tag cloud being generated before a certain event, or after a certain event.
Independently Clay Shirky was coming at a similar conclusion, although he more focused on temporal changes that seem more signature of a particular subgroup of people all bookmarking a site at a certain time:
During a period of about 120 users’ additions of OIO, 20 or of them used the tag ‘ia’, putting it between #7 and #10 during that period. Now it is down to #17. This suggests that one or a few IA-oriented sites or mailing lists posted the link, and it got a flurry of attention from those taggers in a narrower window of time. This in turn suggests a conversationally tightly-knit IA community.
Through this tool we can see changes in the culture we are living in. We are used to feel those changes, but generally we never were able to measure them. Maybe now we might start to be able to do it.
But let’s go back to the tag weight. Terrell Russell took the ball, and in one evening of programming presented a tool to actually see how the weights change in time.
Nothing to say about the tool. It works perfectly well, and although it can be enhanced in many little ways, it already is very useful. Not bad for one evening.
More interesting, from my point of view, is how, through this tool we can see changes in the culture we are living in. We are used to feel those changes, but generally we never were able to measure them. Maybe now we might start to be able to do it.
No change
First of all I would like to show you the graph of a part of the culture where no changes are happening:
From the site: Nifty Corners. 1859 people having bookmarked it by now. The values soon converge to what we can expect to be their definite value (for the culture we are in).
Little Social-Quake
Continue reading Tagclouds and cultural changes
Note: This entry is connected also to a mindmap. Some people were having problems in opening the page because of that. As such the mindmap has been stored in a separate page, and can be viewed from here.
Introduction
As correctly pointed out by Jeffrey Zeldman tag clouds are becoming more and more popular. Yet I keep seeing services which should be using tag clouds that keep on using tag sets. It is not just a problem of programming a tool which can only support tag sets, but also but also of programming tools which might in principles produce tag clouds, but such that the users are not invited to use a tag if one already exists, and as such don’t generate a tag cloud.
Example of the first type of tools are Flickr, 43things, consuMating, tagsurf * , example of the second is the tagged version of the BBC* . In all those cases a tag set is used, where instead a tag cloud would be more appropriate. Some of the differences between a tag cloud and a tag set where explained in Vanderwal.net: Explaining and Showing Broad and Narrow Folksonomies. Let’s see them again, and see some consequences of those differences, which should clarify when is better to use one tool and when is better to use the other. Continue reading On Tag Clouds, Metric, Tag Sets and Power Laws
I keep on being hunted by a nightmare:
Think about a post. You write a post, and this is in answer to some other posts, some other web pages, done by someone else. And your post will often be answered by other people. In a sense no post is an island. Given a post you can see all the post that answered it, or reviewed it. This through the trackback list. And they themselves has other post that answered them. And so on. But this does not work only one way. You can also go backward in time (which in fact is what we usually do when we follow the links.) You read a post, then you read the post that post is refering to, and so on. And in my dream this is a sort of tapistry, where each post is a node that links together different threads. So each post is not just contained in a thread, but connects to many threads that work through it.
Now think about a discussion group. In a discussion group each post is part of a tree. Each post can be answered by many posts, but it has only one father. One post it is itself answering to. And because of this structure it is possible, and actually easy to generate the classical hierarchical structure, that you can see pretty much everywhere in discussion group. (i.e. the Healing Dao discussion group)
But if you look closely you will notice that discussion groups are actually not having really a tree structure. Posts do yes have one father, but they refer to many other posts. They might not explicitly link to all the posts they refer to, but they surely refer to many posts. This is because in discussion groups there isn’t usually the need to link to all the relevant posts. After all the readers are generally a filtered group of people. Also often a person will use one post to answer a whole bunch of other posts, especially inside a closed community, where everybody reads everything.
Yet the hierarchical way in which posts are written in a discussion group is really useful. You can in an instant perceive how many people answered, what where the thread departing from that post, etc.
Now look at a post in the blogging world. It refers to many other posts. It explicitly links to them. And if it is succesful it will have many posts linking to it themselves. Now forget a moment about the upward link. Each post posts that link to it. In a sense they are replies to it. The link to those posts is saved in the trackback list. And each of those posts itself will have certain posts that refer to it.
Are you starting to see it?
Each post is in a sense the root of a tree, whose branches are the posts that refer to it, and whose sub-branches are all the posts that refer to the branch posts. In a sense nothing new. But now, if you see your posts in this way, you can also wish not to display just the immediate trackbacks, the posts that refer to your posts. But also their trackback too.
And here is the first part of my dea. Since each post is available in feed format, it should be possible to fetch, for each post, not just the trackbacks, but the trackbacks trackback. The post that refer to the post that refer to your post. Which means seeing the tree starting from your post up to depth 2. And in theory it should be possible to reiterate the process, and go deeper and deeper.
Why is this important? Well, when you read a discussion group, it is often useful to see the hierarchical view.
Example
Title of the post 0:
BLAH
Content of the post 0:
blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah
Blah.
-Trackback 1
–Trackback to the trackback 1
–Second trackback to the trackback 1
-Trackback 2
-Trackback 3
–Trackback to the trackback 3
—Trackback to the trackback to the trackback 3
-Trackback 4
… and so on.
It might seem an expensive research, but when we read a post, and it has a certain number of trackbacks, it is quite important to see which of those lead to other posts and which didn’t.
And now we go to the second part of the idea.
In a sense there is no reason why the whole tree view structure should only work one way. I mean, each post links to many other posts. Each of those posts link themselves to other posts. And here we have another tree. This time a tree that goes backward in time.
So I think that for each post it should be possible to see both those views.
- All the entries that are linked from it, and the entries that are linked to those entries, up to a specific depth.
- All the entries that link to it, and the entries that link to those entries, up to a specific depth.
- And maybe combine the two view having the first entries, in the format of one entry per line, above it. The later, again in the format of one entry per line, below.
I think this view would greatly increase the ability to see the local structure of the blogsphere. Of course the brothers of a particular entry (the entries that share the same parents) should also be available on the side. As well as the entries that are generally linked from the same offspring. But this is making it unnecessarily complicated. So let’s forget it for the time being.
So, we have reached the conclusion that each post uniquely defines two tree of other posts. The tree generated by it, and the tree that generates it. And I claim that we should work to be able to visualize those trees.
Doing it on Tagsurf
So, where did the idea came to me? Essentially working on tagsurf. Because, you see, tagsurf is maybe the first place where it would be really easy to visualize all this. You have many posts. There is the possibility (although I am not sure if it works right now) to send trackbacks from post to post. So each post does not need to have only one parent, but many. Many. It is true that, as it is now, trackbacks are not used inside the system. The reply is a different thing than the trackback. And each post only belongs to one thread which started with the first post that was not written as a reply to something. So there are quite some changes to be done, to let this vision ground in that system. But is is possible, and comparably easier to do than more generally in the blogsphere.
Those are the changes that I see have to be made to make it possible:
- Make sure that it is possible to send trackbacks between different posts.
- Organize all the reply so that they also send a trackback
- Make sure that each time a post A sends a trackback to another post B, this is also stored inside A
- Add a view down in time page, that from each post gives you that post, and all the posts that reply (that is trackback) to that post, and so on
- Hack this page so that the post appear in a hierarchical way, where it is very clear who is answering to what. Generally the way in which livejournal handles comments is a good way
- Since you stored all the trackback in both directions, organize a page view up in time, that from that post shows you all the posts that entry was answering to. And since they were themselves sending trackback to other posts, add those other posts as subbranches.
- Make it very easy, given a certain post to use those two views, and try taking away the usual thread view. All the information should still be there.
Once the idea is in place you can then cross the idea with the idea of the tag, you could, for example, investigate one tagsurf entry (blog entry), and one tag. Then only the entries that contain that tag will appear in the two tress. And if an entry does not have that tag, then all its subbranches would be excluded, even if they have the tag. (Thanks Andy for this idea)
Doing it on Technorati
Another one that has all the information to generate those views would be Technorati. Of course I would rather see it in a decentralised way. But it would be so easy for them to do it, while to do it in a decentralised way might be such a nightmare, that I am absolutely hopeful that they might make it before. Think about it. A Technorati page: investigate blogsphere local structure. You pass an url to this page, and the said structure appears. Up to depth… say 3.
Update: BN (in the comments) points out to BlogPulse‘s Conversation Tracker, as a limited solution to what I was suggesting. It still has many limits, but it is surely a step in the right direction. Beside is good to be reminded that Technorati isn’t the only service to observe the blogsphere.
As the price of houses rises, more and more people find that the best solution is to divide a house among friends. Usually each person gets a room. The problem then is: who gets what room and how much should he pay. Usually the total rent is fixed, and usually the rooms are not exactly all the same. Some might be bigger, some smaller. Some might have a better view, more privacy, closeness to the toilet, more silence, and so on. And what’s also important is that different people might value the various elements in different ways.
I present here two ways of splitting the rent and dividing a house. I personally favour (and has designed) the second, but while I was presenting this method to some friends to get some
feedback, I was told the other, it seemed simpler, yet interesting enough to add it. They both assume that:
a) the rent is fixed,
b) there are no favoritism among the will-be-housemate on
who gets to choose first.
The ‘find the objective value first’ method.
Before the rooms are assigned, get together and agree on what are the objective value of each room (i.e. 20% of the rent for this, 50% of the rent for this). The total value must of course be the whole rent. Then randomly select who gets what room (at the agreed price), and as a final action people are allowed to exchange rooms if they want to.
Positive element: it is simple and quite straightforward.
Negative element: it assumes that people can easily agree on the actual relative value of the rooms, and that such value does not change respectively to the persons.
The ‘each person gets the best room’ method.
As I said this is the method that I love most. First of all let each person inspect all the room. Then each person, writes, secretly, the relative value of each room in a piece of paper. The sum of the values must be equal to the requested rent. The idea is to divide the house so that each person gets a room, and pays for that room the value THEY wrote on the piece of paper, while the sum of the valued paid by each person totally covers the requested rent.
Obviously, very often, the collected money would then be higher than the rent. Let’s call the collected money minus the monthly rent, the ‘extra money’.
Often there is more than one solution, that permit to have a some extra money each month. When this happens, the solution that permits to maximize the extra money is chosen. The extra money is then used to pay for the light, any extra expenses, or whatever is needed for the house.
Sometimes there are more than one optimal solution, that is some solutions generate the same extra money, everybody is paying the requested cost for each room, and all other solutions are less optimal. In that case the adopted solution will be one of the optimal one, randomly chosen.
Examples, examples:
Let’s suppose we have a house with 3 rooms (a, b, and c) and 3 persons (A, B, and C). Let’s suppose the total rent being 100.
Person A might find the three rooms equivalent, so he might just write (a: 33.3, b: 33.3, c: 33.3). Person B might instead favour room B, because is more sunny, and she likes to paint, and then she thinks that room ‘a’ is slightly better than room ‘c’, infact she would prefer not to be in room c at all, so she would write: (a: 35, b: 40, c: 25). Person C instead does not care about the sun, but has noticed that room A has more privacy, plus is near the toilet, and since he likes to have his gf as a guest, thinks that having room A would be a better deal. So he votes (a: 40, b: 30, c: 30).
Then the papers are revealed.
Generally when a room has a person that values it more than all the others, and he values that room more than all other ooms, then that room gets taken by that person at the price he has choose.
In our example we have:
A: (a: 33.3, b: 33.3, c: 33.3)
B: (a: 35, b: 40, c: 25)
C: (a: 40, b: 30, c: 30)
which would give us that A would get room ‘c’ paying one third of the rent. B would get room ‘b’ paying 40% of the rent, and C would get room ‘a’ for 40% of the rent… and the collected money each month would be 33.3+40+40=113.3 . The extra money would be 113.3-100=13.3 and would be used to pay for the electricity, water, gas, or whatever.
It is also possible to rinormalise the prices, by lowering them so that the total sum becomes exactly the cost of the rent, while the relative ratio remains the same. In our example
A: (33.3/113.3)*100=29.4
B: (40/113.3)*100=35.3
C: (40/113.3)*100=35.3
and person A would pay 29.4 of the rent (since he took the room nobody wanted)
person B would pay 35.3 of the rent (and took the sunny room)
person C would pays 35.3 of the rent (and took the room with more privacy)
So, what if the situation is not that easy. There isn’t a person that prefers each room? For example you could be in a situation like:
A: (a: 45, b: 45, c: 10)
B: (a: 40, b: 40, c: 20)
C: (a: 40, b: 30, c: 30)
well in this case it is obvious that person A will get either room a or room b. But it is also obvious that room c will go to person C. So C get’s c at 30% of the rent. Both A and B value the room a and b equivalently. But once the room will be assigned person A will pay more than person B, so it seem fair to me that person A chooses a or b and pays 45, and person B gets the remaining room, but pays less (40).
But things can get even more complicated if some people
value some rooms exactly the same:
A: (a: 45, b: 45, c: 10)
B: (a: 45, b: 45, c: 10)
C: (a: 40, b: 40, c: 20)
in which case A and B have obviously to randomly choose who gets what.
Or if the situation is symmethric among the rooms:
A: (a: 40, b: 30, c: 40)
B: (a: 40, b: 40, c: 30)
C: (a: 30, b: 40, c: 40)
In which case you randomly choose if A gets a or c, and then the other follow obviously.
So here we have the first mehtod, where everybody chooses the value together, this is equivalent on the second method if everybody agrees on the relative value:
A: (a: 35, b: 40, c: 25)
B: (a: 35, b: 40, c: 25)
C: (a: 35, b: 40, c: 25)
After which, also in this method, you would randomly pick who gets which room.
Please, let me know if you have tried it and if it was succesful.
I went on programming at my favourite Python program: Delimind.
In short: Made a new release of the Deli Mind program. Here is the source code (just remember to change it from a .txt to a .py). Now similar tags are clustered together.
- Here is how it looks like.
- Here is how the previous version looked like.
- The original from Brownhen (may he live long and prosper) used to be here, although now it is missing.
All on the same data. Mine, now.
Go and enjoy.
(Later addition: while the program works well for small databases of links, like mine at the time in which I wrote this entry, it doesn’t scale well on size. For this reason it crashes for most of the people who try to use it with more than 1000 bookmarks. For this reason I was forced to change the link on the cluster example to a database with fewer nodes.)
Now the tecnical stuff for those that have a bit more patience.
Tags are not all the same, some are more similar than others. So, for example, the tag “September11″ and “GeorgeBush” have more links in common than “GeorgeBush” and “intelligence”. The idea behind this version of DeliMind was to cluster tags that had links in common. Since distance is generally not a transitive property (if I am near to you, and you are near to Jim, I am not necessarily that near to Jim), while clustering is (if I and you are in the same cluster, and you and Jim are in the same cluster, then me and Jim have to be in the same cluster… unless people belong to different clusters, but that’s a complication).
So I started by making a matrix of relations among tags (all_dict). Each tag, respect to each other tag could either be
- Once contained in the other
- Identical
- Disjointed
- With # bookmarks in common
Then according to the number of links each of the two tags, and the number of links in common I invented a measure of similarity. If #A is the number of links in tag A, and #B is the number of links in tag B, and #AB is the number of links in common.
The the relative similarity (SAB) will be:
SAB= sqrt((#AB/#A)*(#AB/#B))
I actually played with various measures:
SAB= ((#AB/#A)+(#AB/#B))/2
SAB= Max(#AB/#A,#AB/#B)
They all went from 0 to 1, and were quite similar… (I am not going to discuss the relative properties)
But the first one just seemed the one that made more sense, and at the end, the resulting map was the one more close to my personal intuition of what should be in what cluster.
Once the similarity matrix was done I started studying the clusters. Generally for each triplet of tags A, B, C I would modify
SAC:=min (previous SAC, max (SAB, SBC))
And I would continue going through all possible triplets, and then starting again from the beginning until no new change were happening.
Why? The idea is that the similarity between two tags measure how easy it is to jump from one to the other. Visualise each tag as an island, and then you have an animal who can jump from one island to the other. But it can only jump up to a certain distance. So if he can find a succession of tags between two tags, A and B, where the similarity (the similarity is the inverse of the distance) is always above its jumping ability (that is, the distance is below its jumping ability), then the animal can move from A to B. If not A and B are in different clusters. Effectively unreachable.
But we don’t know how far can our beast jump. So in this way we end up having a similarity number that sais: somwhere, between A and B is possible to find a succession of tags, such that the distance is never above x, so SAB is equal to the minimum between the original SAB and x.
If it does feel complicated don’t worry. I got confused a few (hundred) times programming it. And just could not understand why those damn tags were not clustering… until I got it right.
So, now you have this nice matrix, only between your main tags (the one that are not contained in another tag, cfr previous version), and you (or actually I) need to cluster the tags.
Not also that you don’t need to cluster the tags only one time. Once you made a clustering (for animal which can jump d), you can still partition inside the clustering for animals that can jump less than d.
The first time I just asked him to cluster each possible number. That is, if a number was present assume that someone was able to jump exactly that distance. In this way I got a heavily clustered map. It was a mess, but a promising mess. I then saw that most of the interestign things were happening between distances of 0.333333 and 0.6666.
That is, it made quite sense to ask for the clusters generated by putting together tags that had one third of the links in common, and tags that had up to two third of the links in common.
This is how I got clusters:
- porno, sex and eros
- GeorgeBush, September11, politics, economy, historical, terrorism, usa
- green, sustainability
- …
Then I just applied the same process in the subtags of each tag.
Ok, I can be satisfied, I can go and have something to eat.
As always, if you find it useful drop me a line, I appreciate.
Pietro
So, I just modified the deli.mind script, originally from brownhen.
The original would take the public bookmark from delicious and make a free mind map out of them.
(For those who have no time to read the whole post, I immediatly tell you that I modified the code. The new code can be found here, and an example is here -open some nodes to see the difference!-).
The program is written in python, and I wasn’t very happy with the result. I mean it was great to have the map, but at the same time I have so many tags, that it was pretty much useless. Now the fact is that we tend to reuse tags that we have already used. This generates a positive feedback dynamic, that tends to create a bunch of very common tags (even among your own tags) and many many tags used only one or two times. I bet you could also plot them into a nice power law picture (but, alas, you need at least 1000 tags, to make it statistically meaningful!). This is generally true, but is particularly true for people who, like me, tend to store each link with around 10 different tags. This means that this long list of tags, that was using up my screen, was mainly composed of completely unimportant tags, with only few interesting among them.
Not only this, but some tags, tend to appear only in conjunction with other tags. For example, the tag “python” comes always with the tag “programming”. In a sense it is a “sub tag”.
Oops, are we back into hierarchy, aren’t we?
Well, not exactly, first the same link can be present in different non hierachically related tags, and second two tags can have links in common, but not be completely hierarchically related (think about the tag ‘September11′ and ‘GeorgeBush’ as a good example). The last thing to note is that from time to time there are tags which have exactly the same links inside, either because they are synonimous (‘del.icio.us’ and ‘delicious’ for example) or because I had not stored enough links to differentiate between the two.
So the new program extracts the information about the relation among the tags, and uses it to build a more interesting mind map.
More precisly two tags can be:
- Identical,
- One inside the other,
- Viceversa,
- With a non empty intersection, but with some extra links,
- Completely disjointed.
This information is then used to create the new mind map.
With the following novelties:
- Sub tags are shown as a sub branch of their parent tag.
- Tags that are equivalent are shown together with a little empty branch as their parent, to connect them all.
- A sub tag can be sub tag to more than one tag.
- Each tag also is followed by two numbers: # of links & # of sub tags.
So you have an idea about how big is the tree you are going to explore.
 You can see my “hierarchical delicious free mind map” in java format here while the code is here.
I also fixed a couple of bugs. That would give some fake results. (i.e. being tagged as ‘socialsoftware’ does not mean being tagged as ‘war’, etc…)
This isn’t the end, I am planning to work on this some more, when I have time.
Disclaimer: This was also my first tentative hack in python. So I am sure I did plenty of things in a clumsy, slow and redundant way. But I am learning.
Acknowledgment: I am very grateful to brownhen., because if he didn’t release the first version of the script I would not have started at all.
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