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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!
Speaking about things that should happen, and that have not happen, one thing that I still have not seen is a browser with a feed reader such that when you go to the web page that is linked to a certain feed, it updates the feed and assumes that you have now read that feed. So for example I add Jim feeds, but on a certain period I am just passing through his web page very often. Obviously if he is updating his blog I would see it. The feed reader does not need to give me that information.
I have added the feeds of some major newspaper, but I also often go to the web page, and the result is that bloglines keep on telling me that those feeds have 200 entries that I should look at.
The BBC is present in 43 languages. Incredible I would say. What is more incredible are the naguages that are missing, more than the languages that are present. In particular for Europe we have:
Russian, Uckrainian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Slovene, Slovak, Albanian, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, Greek, and Turkish.
Impressive, isn’t it? And yet don’t you feel that we are missing something? I mean… what about French, German, Spanish, and Italian? Well, French is there. Just not in the European list but in the African one. As well as Portuguese and Spanish (which is called Mundo just to make things more interesting, but the url recites ‘/spanish/’) for Latin America. But there is not just a difference of language but of focus. So, for example, there are two edition in Portugese: Portuguese (focused on South America) Portugueseafrica (focused on Africa).
Still French, German, Spanish, and Italian are missing as BBC pages focused on Europe, while German and Italian are just missing, fullstop (Japanese is also missing from the Asia languages, but I am sure it is a coincidence!).
The question remains, why is it so? And I suppose that from a strictly economical point of view it makes sense for BBC to invest in opening up to nations where they will not find a big competition with local media. Also the people who would
choose BBC in those countries are generally people from a highly educated background that surf often on the Internet. In short people who have little problems in reading their news in English.
Yet it would bve so good to have this other possible source of news for media-controlled-Italy. In the meantime Euronews offers news in 7 european languages. A message that it might seem a small niche for the BBC but the request for european news in Italian, German, Spanish, and French is there.
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
Internet is really great. How you can take a topic, or an article and dig in it for as much time as you want is wonderful.
Yesterday I read the “Open the Archive” on how archives need to both be protected and be cosulted. And how Microsoft bought Corbis and now it is conserving the huge image archive by sinking it in 220 meters of limestone (out of time and out of reach), while Rick Prelinger is making his archive accessible for everybody at http://www.archive.org.
I already knew about archive.org as it is the house of the wayback machine, the archive that stores old internet pages. What I ignored was that it contained also open source movies, footage, music pieces and so on. A real gold mine. So here was I, passing the afternoon downloading old footage from the USA government. In particular Duck and Cover (parody) from 1951 who teached to kids how to behave in case of a nuclear attack. Each footage included a comment section, and sometimes the comments were more interesting than the footage itself. Some people took Duck and Cover as a propaganda tool trying (and probably suceeding) in keeping the population psycologically duck (submitted) and covered (blind). Others just ridicularised the idea that a simple newspaper could be of any cover help in case of a nuclear attack, while others still remind how survivors from Hiroshima showed signs of worse burns where the kimono was black as dark colors absorb more radiations. Quite interesting. I remember having seen the movie the first time in a French curse in 1987. Why they would show such a movie ina french course I don’t remember, but I always wanted to see it again. Personally I feel that the greates danger was not in Nuclear War, but in breeding a generation of paranoid person who feel that ‘war can come at any time’. And we have no responsability or possibility to act on it.
Along the same line came “Boys Beware“. Another paranoid movie on what could happen to you if a stanger gave you a lift. It equated Homosexuality with Child Molestation. And described the first as: “a sickness of the mind that can be transmitted”.
While the two movies where quite instructive in thinking how much road have we travelled from that time, it also inspire to think what other lies or unnecessary paranoia are we believing and buying. From “Terrorists can strike at any time, and we have no responsability over it” to “don’t look at the sun or you will turn blind”, “don’t masturbate or you will turn blind also”, “don’t look at the sun while masturbating, or you will turn blind on both eyes”, “don’t eat raw eggs/meat/milk”, “Pedophiles are all child molesters”, “someone having sex with a teenager is a pedophile”, “man are all rapers”, female sex abusers do not exist”, and so on.
The mood was then raised by an old cartoon of Popey Making an advertisment for the Oldmobile (automobile, car):In My Merry Oldsmobile. The advertisment also includes an older song from 1905. I laughed out loud at the cartoon and clapped (although I was alone in the room!) at the end of it. I also liked the song so much that I had to look for the lyrics and had to resist the urge to phone all my female friends to sing to them:
Come away with me, Lucille
In my merry Oldsmobile
Down the road of life we’ll fly
Automobubbling, you and I
And don’t trust when they say that at the time people were so virtuous: 
…They love to “spark” in the dark old park
As they go flying along
She says she knows why the motor goes
The “sparker” is awfully strong …
Then today, Sunday, I promised myself I would not spend too much time in front of the internet, so I went for a ride with my oldsmobile but then the raw milk had to be brought to the fridge so here I am. Just in time to discover the ‘OPEN LETTER TO KANSAS SCHOOL BOARD‘ which raises the important issue: in Intelligent Design should be taugh in school why not other creationist theories, in particular the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) theory. That teaches that the whole universe was created by the FSM with his noodly appendage.
I read the whole letter, the answers from the K.S. School Board, most of the mails, until the one from Chris who explains that ” Although not a believer in He Who’s Name Cannot be Pronounced Because it has No Bloody Vowels, I try not to piss him off, just in case. ” Made me laugh too hard to be able to continue. Most of the mails are from scientist who very creatively see how they always got it wrong and now they started believeing in the flying spaghetty monster.
The new religion is getting much pubblicity, being present in Wikipedia,
The Guardian, Uncyclopedia, BoingBoing, and a number of other blogs, and news around.
Great Quotes:
“We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.”
and
” I think we can all look forward to the time when these three theories are given equal time in our science classrooms across the country, and eventually the world; One third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.”
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
Terrell Russell asked for some suggestion on how to improve his tool, Cloudalicious. He asked for it 3 times, one on the del.icio.us mailing list, and one on a comment on my previous entry, and one on his site (link missing as he wisely took this one off). Now I really think three times are too much, and Terrell should be heavily chastised for this. So I will write him a loong list of things that I think his tool should do, and maybe next time he will think better before asking people how should he employ his time as a programmer. I am always happy to give ideas to people, provided a) they remember me when the idea makes them incredibly rich b) they do the coding. Continue reading Cloudalicious suggestions
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.
Dear Dr. Pietro,
Thank you for sending us your review. Your contribution to Artificial
Life is greatly appreciated.
you’re a rockstar.
ciaociao,
signed mail
Some time ago I posted about how artificial scarcity applied to travellers. Today I read about Clay Shirky who has a hard time in copying his own material, of which he is copyholder, because modern tools have been adjusted not to make this copy feasible… to protect copyright.
His comment was:
This is because copyright laws do not exist to defend the moral rights of copyright holders — they exist to help enforce artificial scarcity.
I think the concept of artificial scarcity is a key concept. Fighting it high in my priority list. And yet it is a concept who is quite unknown. I made a search on delicious for artificialscarcity, artificial+scarcity and not one gave any result. Well I suppose there will soon be 3 results. But it is still a drop in the ocean.
I go back one week and what od I find:
Flickr being bought by Yahoo.
Joshua getting fultime on del.icio.us but not disclosing anything of the deal who is permitting it. A rich landlady? A corporation.
Regarding Flickr I think it’s the time for me to move on. I don’t trust yahoo. If I were to trust them double of what I do I still would trust them the same: none. They screwed up enough sites. (Just think of geocities, with the TOC changing overnight, for goodness sake). Think of my previous website, being deleted, while I kept on using their fucking email system. And their user unexistant, invisible, impossible to find, user support, from where they never answer. So it’s time to move on, I am happy for the previous owner of Flickr who could deduce from the big corporation enough dindi, but they are not going to get my support from now on.
Wikisource is a repository of open source materials. Various texts are present, all totally open source. This resources repository is necessary, as the commons are getting daily smaller. Well, browsing among the present texts I spotted: The declaration of war on Germany dated 1917.
We keep the document in this repository to give to all the nations the possibility to wage war. Imagine if now someone were to declare a war… copying some of the concepts from this historical declaration on war, and the US were to require a percentage.
Too bad we didn’t patent war when we were in time.
Funny, I am in the program commitee without anybody ever telling me. No problem, I am happy to be in the list and happy to help. But it did surprise me quite a bit.
So if you didn’t know about it:
Call for Papers:
WORKSHOP on Artificial Chemistry and Its Applications (ACA)
Submission deadline: May 27th 2005
Organized by
Hideaki SUZUKI [S] (ATR Network Informatics Laboratories, JAPAN)
Tim HUTTON (University College London, UK)
Jian-Qin LIU [S] (ATR Network Informatics Laboratories, JAPAN)
Part of ECAL 2005 – 8th European Conference on Artificial Life
Monday 5th to Friday 9th September 2005
University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent (UK)
I feel the duty to make a short comunication.
My windows system finally crashed under the weight of virus, worms, and similar. I had to recover under linux, but for some weeks I will be unable to have an OS of any kind working properly and completely. Eventually I will install a Suse 9.2. For now I am working with an old Suse 8.0 and many thnks do not work. For this reason, for now, I am unable to make any of the wonderful hacks I planned to do. (I cannot even look at the maps myself right now  )
But I keep on studying Python, so eventually everything will turn out well.
I am happy that some users have actually started to use the site on a regular basis, and I would appreciate if they were to make a link to the map maker if they link to their own map. This since the map maker is not that easy to find, from an individual map.
Interesting.
I was making a search on process algebra, and still I am new to the field I was also looking for a tutorial.
So I searched Google for “process algebra” tutorial
And look at the result. In some tutorial is not even present (for example here).
Instead Google used the words how to, as a synonym for tutorial. You can see it by the fact that it had even bolded how to in some of the excerpt that it gives in the search page.
I wonder:
- How general is it?
- In what cases will it use a synonyme?
- How could I turn it off, or on, or even ask for a broader range of synonims to be accepted?
My dear friends, I bring you bad news. The IMF offered to help the countries affected by the Tsunami.
Good! Will say most of you (naive!).
Bad, sais I. Because the IMF is not just giving money… It is lending it:
For our part, the IMF stands ready to provide financial assistance to affected countries, in the first instance through our Emergency Natural Disaster Assistance facility. This financing, which could be on the order of US$1 billion for the most affected countries, could be made available quickly and without an IMF program.
In other words: It is not a gift, it is a loan.
Emergency assistance loans are subject to the basic rate of charge, and should be repaid within 3¼ to 5 years. Since May 2001, for post-conflict cases which are eligible for the IMF’s Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF), the interest rate on loans has been subsidized down to 0.5 percent per year, with the interest subsidies financed by grant contributions from bilateral donors, Recently, the Executive Board agreed to consider a similar subsidization of emergency assistance for natural disasters.
And they also want interests on it. How generous!
Looking at the press. I noticed that the story had been taken by various news, yet only one clarified that it was not a gift.
You know, yesterday evening I was speaking with a friend who told me of a new book “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”(english review here). It is the story of John Perkins…
…John Perkins, a former respected member of the international banking community. In his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man he describes how as a highly paid professional, he helped the U.S. cheat poor countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could possibly repay and then take over their economies
Also note how the order of magnitude of the loan that is being offered right now:
This financing, which could be on the order of US$1 billion for the most affected countries, could be made available quickly and without an IMF program.”
Is of the same order of magnitude of the one that John Perkins was offering:
my real job was deal-making. It was giving loans to other countries, huge loans, much bigger than they could possibly repay. One of the conditions of the loan–let’s say a $1 billion to a country like Indonesia or Ecuador–and this country would then have to give ninety percent of that loan back to a U.S. company, or U.S. companies, to build the infrastructure–a Halliburton or a Bechtel.
So, the IMF has offered a loan.
“Thanks, but no thanks” should those country answer.
While the rest of the world collects the money (this really as a gift) to help.
Will those countries be strong enough to refuse it.
Today a big disaster hit south east asia. My heart is there, as I have been there many time in my life. At times I felt Thailand as a second (or third) home. Right now I do have friends there. I think they are all out of the danger zone, but I cannot be sure. As soon as I heard the news I started looking for blog entries. Finally this entry started giving me some threads to follow. I posted most of the links under my del.icio.us links. Look under:
http://del.icio.us/pietrosperoni/tsunami
http://del.icio.us/pietrosperoni/localnews
http://del.icio.us/pietrosperoni/earthquake
But the key ones seem to be:
This entry from Jeff Ooi constantly updated also links to some local bloggers.
In Malaysia there is a local ping service called Petaling Street that let you see local blog as they are updated.
And in Penang, just where the Tsunami hit you can check the Penang bloggers.
What struck me is that everybody seem to shout: the authorities should have warned. I feel that, yes, you may want to shout so. But it’s not always easy or possible to do so. Hierarchical power structure are slow. It’s just their nature.
So maybe it is time to reclaim another little piece of out power.
As we all get more connected, the fastest way to tell to people, is not through the authorities, but just directly. If you have a warning, tell it. And now, if you miss someone, and you find a blog from someone near there, you might try to contact the blogger. They might be happy to help.
Update. I also wrote a comment to Joi Ito. With the key links. He seem to be able to move massive amount of people with his posts.
I finally did it. I bought myself a new phone (nokia 6670). Or shoudl I say a smatphone. Infact you should not think of this as a phone at all, but rather as a computer. A small wearable, easy to connect to the internet in any time, computer. Who happens to be of the same size of a phone. Happens to be usable as a phone. But not let it trick you. It is a computer. And nothing else. It runs an operating system: (symbian). When it freezes (and it happen) you need to reboot it (it seem that microsoft did not patent that feature).
It took me quite some time to learn to use it. And I don’t see how anybody who is not good with computers could do it, unless properly helped. In the first week I just learned to use it as a normal phone. phoning, answering, sms, … Then I started to study the more fancy stuff. I knew what I was after. Possibility to:
- send and receive e-mail
- update my blog
- check my feeds
- chat
And all this possibly at a low cost. I was not after pictures and those fancy and idiotic application.
The beginning was quite problematic. Starting from understanding that surfing via wap or via web is NOT the same thing. And if you have paid for wap you should not surf via web or find all your credit gone pretty soon. And do not believe those people at the help line that might be telling you that if you are surfing from your phone than it must be wap, thus you are covered. They don’t know what they are speaking about. Or to be totally honest, they know, unfortunately they speak for the average person. Not for your new, kickass smartphone (a.k.a. computer disguised as a phone).
Soon I learned how to get my mail from the phone (forwarding it from the gmail account to the tim account), and even get an sms every time I received an e-mail. The next step was to totally divide my mails into personal mails (gmail) and automatic mail deliveries (yahoo account). So that I only got sms for interesting stuff. I still get a couple of sms a night for spam, but all in all the system works quite well.
I then looked for a good rss reader. Rss orbit, although I have to say with quite some problems. From incorrect spacing (makes reading poetry freaky), no links in the text (useless for so many feed, del.icio.us to start with), and some feeds that would simply not work. Also it required me to ask for the feed manually each time. All the comodity of having the site come to you when it had updated, disappeared. I started using it only on few important sites, who update quite often. I also mailed the programmer, asking if some of theose bugs/feature could be fixed. and he very kindly responded. Eventually most of them will. The automatic update instead will not happen until internet flat rate for mobile will be widespread enough.
For a chat program I use IM+. I tried many, but none seemed to work well. And IM+ seemed to be professional enough. I was also very lucky. Being their first costumer with a Nokia 6670 I asked them for a free licence in excange for me testing some of their software on my phone. It worked fine for both. It was a fun extra hour of work, and I was happy to be paid with that licence.
But before moving to the blog feature let me say that soon I had started usng the camera installed, let’s say, a bit too much. In short I started taking a picture of everything. It was so fun to just be able to take picture and scrape them, all while not having to carry any extra piece of technology (i.e. camera) at all.
I tried various type of software to post to my blog, … and eventually I learned how to send pictures to flickr (via email). I also learned how to do it so that flickr would then post both the picture and my comment to a blog. SO that is what I did, I started a new blog, that I updated only from my mobile . The picture also appear at my page in flickr. And can be feed scraped from both sites.
So the result is:
I have a new cameraphone.
I have a new moblog.
And I am having lot’s of fun.
How was it:
Yoda: “When 900 years old you reach, look as good you will not, hmm?”
Star Wars
Which we could rephrase as:
Gollum: “When 587 years old you reach, look as healthy you will not, my treasure.”
which should be Gollum Answer to his check up.
Gollum displays pervasive maladaptive behaviour that has been present since childhood with a persistent disease course. His odd interests and spiteful behaviour have led to difficulty in forming friendships and have caused distress to others. He fulfils seven of the nine criteria for schizoid personality disorder (ICD F60.1), and, if we must label Gollum’s problems, we believe that this is the most likely diagnosis.
British Journal of Medicine
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 am at the Semantic Web Applications and Perspectives. Is the first Italian Semantic Web Workshop. It took some time, but finally Italy is moving along too. The talks are mostly in English, and more and more people here speak English really good, which use to be rare in Italy.
My first impression is that there is a big gap between the applications that try to enforce a unified onthology from above and the one (very rare) that have an open mind and gap different onthologies, or even work with open onthologies. I am still half way, but so far I feel I found really interesting:
Peer-to-Peer Semantic Coordination and Platypus Wiki: a Semantic Wiki Wiki Web.
On the second:
Google Search, c2 page and the sourceforge project page.
More to come
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