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Some of you know that I left ProtoLife. I hope in the future to keep on colaborating with the P.A.C.E. project, but for now that’s it. I want to go back to Germany, and finish my Ph.D. .
Somehow this seem to have a higher priority. Beside is getting clearer for me each day that I am hardly a ‘company’ type of person. I’d rather make research inside the university, or nowhere at all. While I was in Venice I met with the local group of Go players. Sandro, one of those made a big impression on me, being a person of great knowledge, whose only excuse was: “I don’t look at television, I read.”.
I decided that it made sense to read more… that it made sense to read ‘cum grano salis‘. With intelligence, choosing carefully what to read,
When I came back to Rome I decided that it made sense to read more. More than this, that it made sense to read ‘cum grano salis‘. With intelligence, choosing carefully what to read, and not reading any bullshit the latest friend suggested me. I remember telling a friend, “you know, I decided to stop just following my nose, on what books to read…”
His answer was quite funny: “If you don’t follow your nose, what do you follow? Other people’s nose”. And then he added: “This is actually a serious question, you might for example, find some people that you really don’t like, ask their suggestion, and then took off the book they suggest you from your reading list”. As you will see by the end of this entry, this ended up being very near the mark.
So I started asking around what where the books (or document) they felt where more important to understand the world we are living in
So I started asking around what where the books (or document) they felt where more important to understand the world we are living in. As an example I often gave where the acts of the Second Vatican Council (in particular Dignitatis Humanae). Since I am not catholic (nor even Christian), by suggesting something that was not traditionally seen as a classical text, I was implicitly suggesting: the documents that are behind the world we are living in, the documents that most people refer too, but few really read.
I did not receive many lists, but here and there someone would suggest a book or two, that I would dutifully add to my note. I then started keeping track of this list in a separate page on my blog. Since I did not publicize the page no one would read it. The list is nowhere ended, and I feel its inadeguateness knowing all the wonderful books that should be there, but I preferred to keep it small, and add new books slowly.
While I was keeping the list in the back burnere, and slowly going through some of those books, I found another list a much better one from which I am about to fatten my list. And the story of how I found it, and how it relates to my list is very funny, so let me tell it to you.
The list have it all, it’s the most complete list of texts I found that were really important to understand the world we are living in. Each of those book inspired millions of people.
A right winged newspaper: Human Events online, asked
a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders to help us compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th enturies.
They crossed the information between the various people and came to a list of 10 really dangerous books, and 21 ‘honorable mentions’. The list have it all, it’s the most complete list of texts I found that were really important to understand the world we are living in. Each of those book inspired millions of people. Just to understand where those people come from the book is important. Fundamental I would say. You have it all: Freud, Darwin, Gramsci, Marx, Engels, Mao, the Kinsey report (the Kinsey Report! That I wanted to read from so long). Dewey, that I have been told set the foundation for modern relativism thinking (so dear to our new pope). There is also Mein Kampf, which I am not sure if I’ll have the guts to read, but I probably should. And many others, Betty Friedan (don’t you want to understand Feminism? Read it, too), Keynes, Adorno… Is a wonderful list.
Interesting enough I was not the only one to see this as my next reading list. On the delicious page of the people who bookmarked the article the most common comment is “my next reading list”, ” A very interesting list of powerful books that have changed history.”, “some good reading”, “…some of these would make my required reading list…”, “…would make an excellent library booklist.” and so on.
Buy ‘The Kinsley report in the human male’, and help sustain the neocons battle.
One of the things that you should not fail to notice is that each book in the top ten most dangerous book is presented with a link. The link to Amazon. But is not just a normal link to Amazon. Amazon let you sign an agreement so that you can advertise some books from your website, and if people buy your book, they get a discount, and you get a percentage. So, yes you got it, each of those book is presented in that format. If you click on those links to go to Amazon, and you buy the book, the right winged journal will get a percentage. Will get a percentage out of you buying Mein Kampf, and The Communist Manifesto. “Buy ‘The Kinsley report in the human male’, and help sustain the neocons battle.”. Ah, the irony of all this.
no I don’t ask people I don’t like which books to read and cross them out. I ask them which books not to read, and add them to my reading list. Way more efficient!
So, to answer my friend, “no I don’t ask people I don’t like which books to read and cross them out. I ask them which books not to read, and add them to my reading list. Way more efficient!”
And if you read all this, and want to add something to my reading list, feel free to suggest:
“what books or document would you suggest to understand the world we are living in”. And tell us why, in what way was this book so unique that reading it is a must. Now the line is yours.
Addendum: La seguente entry é ormai sorpassata. Molti dei cambiamenti proposti sono stati integrati.Questa entry ha peró un seguito: “Beppe Grillo e la Democrazia Diretta: pericoli e proposte” che vi invito a leggere.
—-
Ultimamente beppegrillo.it sta facendo molto rumore. Continue reading beppegrillo.it deve cambiare
The mind map maker is at the moment out of order. This due to Joshua, who is trying to fix a minor problem with the delicious API. Please for the present time DO NOT make new mind maps (and if you do do not complain if they come up like mine).I will let you know when the situation is fine again.
In the meantime, why not spending some time reading others mind map? You can bookmark a mind map that you like using the tag ‘delimap‘, and as other tags the most important tags in that mindmap. Here are mine, for example.
Update: The mind map has been fixed, thanks to Joshua who promptly responded.
Thanks,
Pietro
Great results! Great results!
I finally managed to find a way to integrate my mind maps with my blog. Not just as static images or as external pages, but as living entities inside the blog. I learned it from the code in Wikka. And as always in those cases, once you find the solution, it just look at it, and it seems obvious… after.
Of course it requires that the reader has Java 1.4 installed.
This is the code, but please do not use http://maps.pietrosperoni.it/freemindbrowser.jar as the address for your freemind browser java code, but copy the freemindbrowser.jar file in your directory, and use it from there.
This is the code:
<applet code="freemind.main.FreeMindApplet.class" archive="http://maps.pietrosperoni.it/freemindbrowser.jar" width="100%" height="450">
<param name="type" value="application/x-java-applet;version=1.4" />
<param name="scriptable" value="false" />
<param name="modes" value="freemind.modes.browsemode.BrowseMode" />
<param name="browsemode_initial_map" value="http://maps.pietrosperoni.it/TaoistBooks.mm" />
<param name="initial_mode" value="Browse" />
<param name="selection_method" value="selection_method_direct" />
</applet>
And here is how it looks like (on my map of all my taoist books)
Continue reading Blog your mind map
Some things are bound to happen. And they tend to happen at the right time. We have been using tags from years now, but the momentum have builded up, day after day. Always seeing more and more computer programs using them. Starting from deli.icio.us and flickr. Then 43 things.com, consumating.com, tagsurf.com and all the clones of the above (BTW if anybody can find me a small open source server program that emulates Flickr for personal use,I would be grateful). And of course technorati tags, and GutenTag that give rss feeds to technorati tag.
But something was missing. Somthing that some people might have noticed. The news were not playing with tags. News were still presented in the old top down way: politics, economics, international…
On Google News, as well as CNN. On Yahoo News, as on BBC.
But finally something is starting to move over there too.
Two services, pretty much at the same time were presented: Yahoo News with tags and BBC with tags.
But there are some serios differences between the two services. Yahoo content is being automatically indexed by a program, who imposes the tags according to what keywords are found in the text. As such Yahoo tags is a Top Down keyword classification of stories.
Instead (and here you can see the revolutionary spirit blowing through English news services), BBC program is a truly down up grassroot program. A program where everybody can add any tag to any article.
The difference is not a minor one, as in the first case it is the user that have to adapt to the world view of Yahoo, while in the second it is BBC that includes in his wider world view the user one. In a sense it is a case of Tagsonomy vs. Folksonomy, or
narrow folksonomy vs. broad folksonomy.
Of course both the program are still in their first days. Full of bugs, and of suggestion from us on how to make it better, smoother, and nearer to our personal desires.
Of course having anybody being able to add any tag to a copy of the BBC content is full of political dangers. What is stories about important politicians start to be tagged as ‘dictator’ or ‘wanker’. This is in fact inevitable, but politicians showld well use this as an indication of their popularity, than something to be changed.
At the moment anybody can add a tag in the BBC news page by login in as ‘guest’/'guest’. And already we have some people who have tagged some stories as ‘wanker. But if we go to delicious we see that nearly no one have used such epitome.
Why is that? My personal position is that people are more careful when tagging something for their own personal use. On delicious everybody have an account. And although you could have as many account you like, they cost. They cost time and memory to set it up. So we all tend to have just the minimum amount of acount needed. But on BBC, at the moment, only BBC person are allowed to have their own account. We normal human being, can just be guest. Ans as such we might feel deresponsabilized respect to what we wrote. So I think that, although the experiment is great, it will only work properly when everybody can set up his own account, and serch his account, or the account of another, well defined person.
Of course this also open up all sort of extra possibilities. After all, if anybody can tag any article with his own tags. Then to each article a set of tag will be defined. What is I want to receive (maybe on my mobile) all the articles tagged with a certain keyword. The possibilities are really endless.
And to look at those possibilities BBC had started a whole new project, called BBC Backstage where geeks are invited to collaborate with the staff of BBC to develop the API to permit to everybody to reuse the BBC material. Cross this with the fact tha much of this material is copyrighted with a copyleft copyright (copygotit?), and you see how the whole situation can positively explode.
Imagine, much of the material from BBC, offered for free, in the way wanted by the best geeks and hackers, to produce information in any noncommercial way they please.
Already many ideas are flowing? An RSS for the results from sport match. Crossing google maps with BBC News.
Possibility to have BBC news accepting trackbacks.
And many many others.
All this would mingle BBC with the common people. Think, all the news, mixed and remixed. Commented, trackbacked. Until you can read an article from BBC news from any device (through rss), in any format you want (through your rss reader). Filtered anyway you want (through folksonomy), and seeing the world response to that article(through trackback and comments).
Thank you BBC
(and no, I am not paid by BBC)
Thanks also Wired for some inspiration.
Questo blog sostiene la candidatura di Beppe Grillo come Direttore Generale del WTO. Ulteriori informazioni possono essere prese sul sito di Beppe Grillo.
Tra le altre cose non vi perdete gli audio dell’intervento di Beppe al convegno sull’informazione
As I predicted a service on the net that offers an rss feed of blogs with a certain keyword / tag has appeared. It is It’s a Tag world from Stephane Lee.
The system seems still in its infancy (the name needs to be shorter, for start, to be used as a tag itself) , but by offering the rss feeds of blog entries they give a really valuable tool to the blogphere.
Now, either Technorati starts offering the rss feed itself, or sues Creative Mobs (enstranging a big part of the blogsphere), or accepts to coexist with another, potentially aggressive, competitor.
And indeed, it’s a tag world,
worse than that:
it’s a tag eat tag world!
Pietro
P.S. The system has also a certain humor and pragmaticity, the general tag page is called: ‘Guten Tag’ (german for ‘Good Day’). And each tag, has, in its header, a link to the equivalent Wikipedia entry (which works fine only in English, unfortunately, but still…).
Thanks Stephane.
This evening I played with calendars. In particular with the calendar published by Mozilla. SunBird. It is pretty amazing. Also here they managed to install an open standard with which anybody can write his own calendar. The program let you then save it into a file or publish it on the web. You can also upload claendars from other people, and they will appear superimpressed on your events, so that you can see your event as well as the other calendar event.
Think about it, it is extreemly easy, and extreemly powerful. I can just write down the dates that for me are important, and people can use the info to define meeting, set up ambush, or find out when the campervan is unattended. Infinite power.
More, it is possible to set up calendars for particular type of events. For example we could, at work, set up a calendar for all the conferences on artificial life, artificial chemistry, complex system. etc. Or even a separate calendar for each of type, and each person could just subscribe to the calendars that he is interested in.
The calendar is still very limited in many ways. For example events can be assigned only to one category. The whole idea of tags and folksonomy has here yet to come. For example eventually people should be able to set each event in multiple categories, or even suggest categories for events of others.
In any case, my calendar is at http://www.pietrosperoni.it/calendar/agenda.ics. If you have firefox with the calendar plugin inserted you can just see it. If not you probably need to wait until I integrate it with my blog, which will take quite some centuries.
Update: Another thing that is definitly missing is an integration between this software and the smart phone technologies. What’s the point of having a cool phone that can connect to the net, so you can be everywhere anywhere you are, and have such phone have all your appointments, if you cannot let this phone speak, on the net, with your calendar. It does not seem such a hard thing to obtain, although I would not know where to start, so I would predict that within 6 months, no, no 4 months, a program should me around that let me integrate the 2 things. If it isn’t already there.
I did some spring cleaning on the delicious mind map maker. I deleted some of the oldest maps, also from the period when the program was not working fine. If your map got deleted, please don’t be too angry, and just make it again. Unfortunately the only way I had to find the old maps was according to when the directory was created. This meant that if you kept on using the utility, and recreated the map more recently, your map could still be among the unlucky ones.
I am finally having a bit of free time (although is rapidly filling up, as I take from my box the list of all the things I wanted to do and did not have the time to do it). There is quite a list of things I wish to do on this program, to make it more efficient. If any of you have special requirement, now would be the right time to ask.
Pietro
I have been reading Boing Boing lately. It came with the feed reader of the mobile phone. I especially like it because the feed contains the complete article and not just an excerpt. Which, when you are reading a feed while being inside a bus, is handy. I really liked the series on the UN World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and how it was getting reformed also thanks to blogging.
But today I found an article that I think is seriously going over the line (originally from: Tian’s blog). Where the owner of a vandalised car (Tian) offers ‘$500′ for the identification of the person(s) and castration of their testicles OR cut off their right hand(s).
I know he is joking. And I know that we must not take ourself too seriously. But I also know that blogging is powerful. That when you post something you don’t know who is going to read it. And that generally inviting people to cut each other testicles (and what if it was a woman? Are you so sure it was a man) is not what I would call a useful and positive way of using your internet power.
When I was in the military service they teached us how to use a gun. The first phrase we were told was: ‘Guns are used to kill’. The second phrase was: “You don’t aim a gun at a person as a joke. Never, ever, under no circumstances.” .
Well, believe me, blogs are more powerful than guns. You don’t aim a blog at a person. Not even as a joke. Never, ever, under no circumastances (see also the blogsphere).
“Freedom of speech is more dangerous than guns, we don’t let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have freedom of speach?”
Mao Tse Tung.
We still have freedom of speach, let’s use it properly.
Pietro
Update: Tian crossed out the request for the person castration. I think this is good. Still I will not cross this whole post, because it took me to much to write it. And will be my reminder of conscious blogging. (Beside Boing Boing hasn’t crossed out their copy of the post. Hmm, interesting situation mainly generated by the creative common copyright: who is now legally responsible for that request?)
As I posted the previous entry, I went to technorati to check if it was being pulled. And what I discovered was that technorati was only pulling the first tag in the list.
I make quite an effort to add all the tags that I think might be relevant. This both to improve visibility, and to better categorise the content. I like to make a copy of the same tags in my p.s.blog delicious account. And then see the whole thing as a mindmap. But for the mindmap to really work it is necessary to that if two entries share some content they should also shar at least a tag. So I use many tags. And the mindmap comes out really nice.
Not only this, but I feel that each post belongs to multiple tags, and should be present in multiple pages. For example this entry belongs to both the tag ‘technorati’, and the tag ‘mindmap’, ‘delicious’ etc.
Investigating a bit further I discovered this post, where a similar problem was presented. In that case technorati was pulling the information from the list of categories in the rss feed. Now the problem is that, in wordpress (other tag!), the list of categories is defined before, while the tags are defined after. And although this might seem like a minor problem, it actually means that often we don’t add all the categories that we need. In a sense it should be possible to just ask that wordpress uses tags as categories.
And then post the tags as:
<category>firsttagname</category>
<category>secondtagname</category>
So the end result of this is:
my posts are not appearing in the technorati page where they should: tag, technorati…;
my posts are appeariung in the technorati page where the shouldn’t :General, English…;
And I haven’t got a clue how to fix it.
Pietro
UPDATE:
I did send a mail to teachnorati, and I got this answer:
Hi Pietro,
Your tags must occur within the boundaries of a post, a div of class of storycontent in your case. Technorati should treat your Dublin Core subjects in your Atom feed as tags.
SECOND UPDATE:
After various tests, I realized that technorati does not parse the html, and I usderstood what the mail meant with Technorati should treat your Dublin Core subjects in your Atom feed as tags.. Since the author of the plugin explained that for a couple of more month he is not going to be able to fix it, in the meantime I downloaded another plugin: Technotag. That gives me the possibility to add <tag>tagname</teg> And that’s makes a tag automagically. Let’s hope that this works!
THIRD UPDATE: it works. And as I keep on making small hacks to the plugins that I use, I slowly learn how they work
FOURTH UPDATE:correction, it only worked for the first tag. But I hacked a bit the code and now it works fine on all. I shall send an email to the author, to pass him the change.
Before it would make a tag on every <tag>tagname</teg>, but all the tags would all point to the same address: The one generated by the first tag. Corrected. The new code is available here.
Rss is somehow one of the best ideas. You can have your content, stripped of form BS being redirected all around. This gives a one to many structure. Now we need the opposite. We need to be able to pull the content from many sites in the same place, and check it. A many to one structure.
Most of you will say, “But we already have that, it’s called an aggregator. Just look at bloglines.
Yes, and no, that’s part of it, but it’s not the whole story. We need to have a page that posts all the content from everywhere in a single page.
And again I can hear: “but we have that too: it’s called a technorati tag“.
Again I will repeat: Yes, and no, that’s part of it, but it’s not the whole story. We need to pull the information from the technorati pages to our aggregator.
This is the idea: we need an rss feed of a technorati tag. As we can get the rss feed of a del.icio.us tag, we need to have it for all the blogs. The time have passed to add to your friend list ALL the blogs that might have information of interest. We need to be able to add that rss to our bloglines.
So, either technorati will start releasing the rss, or I predict that:
- a) other services will start competing with technorati offering that info
- b) anonymous hackers will start scrapping the info from technorati to offer the very valuable information.
See also:semanticweb, tags
This is going to be big. It’s called tagsurf. When we were setting up the taoist discussion board, at Tao Bums, I was looking for a board that permitted me to tag individual messages with different tags. The reason is that over there we are now a group of friendly people and every thread start with a topic, but often touches many separate ones. The board had to be in PhP for reasons only knew to the web master, but that we all were happy to follow. So we started looking around, but no board with tagging facility went up. Nothing. I had to admit that the idea was quite new, and I have not seen any such board around in any case. And then we decided for phpBB which being open source would have had new versions with any new cool geeky thing appearing every so often. Well. Now I finally found the first tag based discussion board. It’s called tagsurf. And is very cool. You get to write messages and tag them. As tag you can use any word up to any size. Now, the result of this is that you can tag thing with the url of something. So immediatly a series of utilities started appearing:
People (first one I saw doing it was Russell Beattie) added a tagsurf button. In short if you click on that button you get all the comments on tagsurf that uses your permalink as a tag. In a sense it is outsourcing the discussion board.
Yes, I added it too, is down near the little technoraty bubble, and I just needed to add:
<a href="http://tagsurf.com/post?tag=<?php the_permalink() ?>">Tagsurf this</a>
in the template.
I also went back to see how was tagsurf behaving in del.icio.us. It seem that, as it often appear in other cases, the meme is 6 days old. At the beginning few people noticed it, and now is starting to explode. I too found out because of the delicious discussion board, which I would suggest anybody who is interested to anybody who is interested in delicious OR folksonomy
I think this tagsurf will and can have great impact. They already have some API defined.
I also got an eye to their privacy policy. It seemed simple and clear. Yet now I cannot find it anymore. I suspect that they might be working on it right now.
I also made a small bookmarklet to post an entry on tagsurf about a specific page. Just drag the word bookmarklet on the bar and it should work. Of course for it to work you have to be logged in in tagsurf.
Great points:
- trackback: every post gets is an entry point for trackback. In other words anything you say can receive trackback from anything else. You say something here, and it get people in the blogsphere chatting. And you can follow their conversation. This is something very important that was missing in all the bullettin board I have been using. In a sense many discussion board are only looking in. This is also looking out.
- trackback 2: Every post that you make can send trackback to anything you want. The software to do this automagically respect to the other posts inside tagsurf is still missing, but I can’t imagine it not appearing very soon.
- possibility to mix different threads: since each post gets as many tags as the poster want it is quite easy for people to join different threads of discussion.
Problems I might see coming.
- Spam, spam, spam: I recieve about 30 spam trackbacks a day. And they get filtered by cool programs and finally deleted by me. Yet those programs need me to make the final judgement. Who will make the judgement for all the trackbacks in all those posts? Will the user have to? Can someone close the trackback from his own posts? I see many problem and much discussion over here.
- copyright: This is another big one. Let’s say that I post a cool entry in tagsurf, who gets the copyright of it? It might be important. Imagine that someone takes it, and wants to add some extra tags. But adding tags is not allowed at the moment. So he copies the post and just reposts it with the extra tags. Do I have a say on it?
All together I think this is a wonderful piece of new technology. When tachnoraty started his tag page I wasn’t very impressed, but this, I think, will make some huge effects. And still I can’t see all the implications.
ADDENDUM: just as I ended this post I read fully the great and very interesting post from Russell Beattie. And I found that he had made exactly the same bookmarklet. Oops. Well, I hope he will not sue me, I haven’t copied his code. I just reinvented the wheel.
ADDENDUM to the ADDENDUM: As I was looking at all the people who were commenting on the thread on Russell post I noticed another post with the same bookmarklet. And I thought I would have been the first  . At least I get to see if the trackback to posts over there actually works.
ADDENDUM to the ADDENDUMto the ADDENDUM: trackback does not seem to work, or the comment is being held back for security reasons
Since my Windows crashed, and I am now running on an old linux Suse 8.0, on a small partition, I was looking forward to reinstall linux as the only OS, with a newer version: Suse 9.2.
After a day of work, the system administrator of the company I work for was not able to install linux on my weird computer (ACER 340). The first problem we had to face was that having an external CDROM (and Floppy) it would never boot from there. Ever. Period. So we had to move all the files to the HD. Even then it was not trivial to convince him (male and bastard) to load from the HD. And when we managed we got an “EBDA too big” error. He tried changing the ‘magic’, but then concluded that my ‘magic’ was of the wrong kind .
Then we tried to start it under windows and we got a:
“WARNING not enough free memory (load buffer size)”
Which was a similar error: something is too big and the memory is too small. In any case he was able to fix my windows system so for the next months I will keep on using windows and asap I will switch to linux.
Linux don’t run away, our union is just postponed.
Did some more debugging. Now any unicode the user used in the tags should be ok. Still there is a big brick wall in terms of memory usage. And some users are not having any luck just out of the fact that their map is taking so much resources that it goes beyond the ISP limit. I could work hard and distribute the whole calculation so that all variables are stored on disk, so the memory would never be hit, but honestly, it is not my top priority at the moment. I am here to help those users run the program on their own machine. And eventually we might solve that problem too. So, what are my top priorities:
- Add an rss feed.I would like to add an rss feed that every time a new map is done, the feed gets updated. It wouldn’t just tell the name but all sorts of data, like the list of the Main Tags. So the users could see if they might be interested in checking the new buddy’s map
- Insert a way for user to delete their own maps. If I am going to go into hosting business, I am not going to be one of those hosts where you can add info, but you cannot delete it. I am aware that users info ultimately is adding value to my site, as such I want users to be happy in having their map here. Not forced.
- Insert a general log of all the maps that are being started, and ended. Right now such a log is absent, and there are about 200 maps completed, and more than twice maps that have been started. So about 300 have been dropped. I bet many of those users would have success, if they tried right now, after those 3 deubugging session. Still I want something that tells me: Warning warning warning, map dropped. Bug? OutOfMemoryError?
- Add the number of posts inside a tag. Just obvious
- Probably add some of the MainTags as keywords to each single map. The problem is: which? All is too much. All the ones that contain more than x posts, y subtags is not flexible enough. The solution should be: if a MainTag is part of a ParetoFront of Delicious than the keyword should be there. The fact that this means writing a whole program that stores in a database the latest ParetoFront is just a small detail . And before you ask: no, I will not need anybody’s password to do that, and the data will all be public.
- Add a bookmarklet to save a map in your own delicious, with the keywords as tags
- Change the map, so that it can run on a single tag. Useful for big complex maps like mine, and others.
- Make it change the Title of the Map Page, to show the owner of the map. Useful if people want to add the maps to their delicious pages.
And then there are some tests I would like to make, like:
- Check if it would make sense to show all the tags that appear with a single tag, and not the subtags.
There is more? If you can think of other modifications , please drop a line in the comment section. Also if you tried to run the map maker and it is not giving you satisfaction let me know. I’ll whip it appropriatly. HarHarHar. (I’ve always wanted to say that!)
Some people (few) were in the unfortunate situation that the tool would calculate their map, and would correctly add it to the make map page, but then the map could not be open. If you were one of those people, I have good news. I tracked down the bug (this time only derived by my stupidity) and nailed it. So, please try again. Insert again your data, calculate it again, and then open it. With this I ended debugging the obvious big errors. If you try now and the tool does not work, please drop me a line with your username, maybe send me by email (available via my homepage) your complete list of all the posts. And I will see what I can do for you. If you don’t contact me I have no way to know that the tool failed, and I will not be able to help you.
Things are progressing, more and more people are using the tool. Unfortunately not for all was a succesful experience. I could spot two separate bugs. In the first case the map would not be created at all, and the program would stop just after making the poststotag dictionary. In the second the map would be created but it was unreadable from the user. Yesterday evening (in my camper van!) I debugged the first issue. Essentially the program was downloading from delicious two different files, the (don’t click on it) list of all posts, and the list of all tags. Well, the two files were not coherent one with the other, and the list of all tags would in some rare cases list tags that had no post associated with them. Of course as soon as the dictionary would start being created the program would protest, and quite correctly so. I think the problem has something to do with how del.icio.us is at the moment handling the change tag name function. Maybe the problem has been solved by now, and what I got into were some users that had used the function while it was still not completely bug free.
In any case I circumvented the problem by not downloading the tag list file at all, but recovering the list of tags directly from the posts/all page. It is obviously slower (by big map moved from 377 sec to 460 sec.) but more secure.
So, if you tried to use the map before, and you did not had luch luck. If it did not create the map at all, then try again, and now it should work. And if it doesn’t please contact me, and maybe send me an email with your all.xml file.
If instead the map was created, your name was added but the map wan unopenable, then keep having patience, and this evening I hopefully will kill that bug too.
And thanks to all who are using the tool, is such an interesting project for me!
Pietro
The good news is that finally the Mind Map Maker is being used and tested. The bad news is that it does not always work. Somehow it would have been easier if it never worked. I think there are two problems: one problem is that it requires some heavy download from del.icio.us. No matter if the download are for different account, they are all coming from the same IP, so I would not be surprised to discover that del.icio.us have bashed the program on the head more than once. I can somehow half the request by making the program calculate the whole list of tags, instead of downloading it as a separate file. I had it already on my todo list, and I think I will do it tomorrow. So, if you have requested for a password and it did not appear, than fear not, just try again in some half an hour. (Alenahra, I’m speaking to you for example!)
But this is not the only reason why the map maker is failing. There have also been cases where the map maker made some ‘perfectly acceptable’ maps from my point of view, but that for some reason are unreadable from the mind map. What am I refering to: but to niels77 for example, for whom the program made what seem as a perfectly acceptable .mm file but that for some reason neither the java program, nor the free mindmap in my computer seem able to read. This is the kind of mistery that are more easily unraveled in the morning.
But for few maps who don’t make it many did. Just go to the Make Map page and choose one, any one. And each will tell you a story, a point of view, a set of interests, and a suggestion on how that person sees the world. The more I use them the more I like them.
BTW the Make Map has also made it to the popular page. I feel so unprofessional in noting it
Update I checked how many directories have been created respect to how many maps have been completed. The ratio is about 110:70 That’s not that good. It means that if you ask for a map you have about 1/3 of probability that it will not make it. For now just wait some time than try again.
We must be stupid. I am being serious, we must be REALLY stupid.
It is possible that after many years of people blowing the whistle against people collecting personal information we still fall for it. Who am I refering to? But to Furl, of course. Because, you see, we are often in good faith, and when someone says:
Privacy
Privacy is probably a top priority for you. It certainly is for us at Furl. When you mark an item “private,” we respect your expectation that no one else will be able to see its contents. Other members cannot see your private items when they view your archive, and Furl Search (search all archives) is restricted to public items only. We have designed the Furl system to ensure that your private items and topics are secure. We will not sell your email address or privately-stored information, nor share it except in very specific cases described in our Privacy Policy.
Access to the servers that house your archive is restricted to a very small number of employees. Procedures strictly prohibit accessing a member’s information, except when necessary to diagnose a problem or as specified in our Privacy Policy (such as when ordered by a court of law).
We’re members of Furl, too, and demand the utmost respect for privacy.
We kind of believe we are safe, right? Wrong! Let’s re read it:
We will not sell your email address or privately-stored information, nor share it except in very specific cases described in our Privacy Policy.
Again:
except in very specific cases described in our Privacy Policy.
We can put it in music:
except, except, except…
except, except, except in very specific cases described in our Privacy Policy.
And you should thank that this is no podcast.
But more, at the end of the same page:
Important Note
The contents of this page do not replace, modify or supercede Furl’s Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Please read them carefully before using Furl.
Let’s go and look at the privacy policy. After all those people at furl have our privacy as a top priority. Guess why?
And we don’t need to look very far to understand the true nature of the service:
Who is collecting my information?
Furl usually collects the requested information. However, Furl has chosen select partners in order to provide certain services. In order to use certain services on the Site, it may be necessary to enter information that then goes to our partner and is not kept by Furl.
We contract with Coremetrics, a service partner, to provide us with a data collection and reporting service for our Site. If you access the Site, Coremetrics may collect information about you on our behalf. For further information, including how to opt out of such data gathering, please see: http://www.coremetrics.com/info_eluminate2.html.
In other words: We don’t gather data, we let Coremetrics do it for us. And guess who is Coremetrics:
The company’s flagship product, Coremetrics Online Analytics 2004, is the industry’s only online marketing analytics platform that captures and stores all customer and visitor clickstream activity to build LIVE (Lifetime Individual Visitor Experience) profiles that serve as the foundation for all successful e-business initiatives. Through a patent-pending browser-based data collection technology, the Coremetrics Online Analytics 2004 Data Warehouse gathers and stores behavioral information directly from the visitor’s browser and records interactions in real-time to build LIVE Profiles.
It can hardly get worse than that.
But let’s keep on reading Furl Privacy Policy. After all our privacy is their first thought in the morning. Or so.
How does Furl use my information?
Furl’s primary goal in collecting personal information is to provide you, the user, with a customized experience on our service. This includes, or may include in the future, personalization services, interactive communications, online shopping, and many other types of services. In order to provide services free of charge, we will serve ads using content-targeting technologies, based on the content of your archived items.
But this is not all:
The following describes some of the ways that your information may be disclosed. Please note that this is not a complete list. The ways your information may be disclosed will change from time to time.
So even the privacy policy is not complete.
Or read this:
Coremetrics: Coremetrics may store certain data that we received from visitors to Furl (which may include email addresses), so that we may access this information via their reporting service. Furl will only use information shared with Coremetrics for proprietary Furl purposes. Coremetrics does not have the right to transfer your information to any party other than LookSmart.
Business Partners: LookSmart may disclose your personal information to our business partners in order to provide you with the services on the Site. If you have questions regarding the privacy policy or data-collection practices of one of our business partners, please contact that partner directly.
We are told the information is disclosed to business partners, but we are not told to whom. Yet we are asked to look at their privacy policy to understand what use do they do of this information.
They also spy when are you reading their e-mails:
We may also collect information through the use of “pixel tags” included in email messages we may send to you. Pixel tags are tiny graphic files, not visible to the human eye, that are included in HTML-encoded email messages. When such a message is opened in an HTML-capable email program, the recipient’s computer will access our server to retrieve the pixel tag file, allowing us to record and store, along with the recipient’s email address, the date and time the recipient viewed the email message, that the recipient’s email program is capable of receiving HTML-encoded email, and other standard logging information. The pixel tag also may see or read cookies.
The policy goes on, and forgive me for not analysing it all. I just didn’t have the guts. I understoo what I wanted, and here are my conclusions:
Conclusions
Furl collects personal information, gives this personal information to online partners for commercial purpose, including your e-mail address. Thus I don’t want to use furl and probably neither do you.
In short: Furl Sucks.
Amen.
The first person to use the tool (presented here) was Mike Harris, for his delicious entries. Note immediatly how the time needed to compute the map has little to do with the number of posts, and much to do with the number of tags.
- WCityMike: 2029 Posts, 87 Tags and 81 Main Tags, calculated in 86.85 seconds.
- p.s.blog: 21 Posts, 43 Tags and 17 Main Tags, calculated in 0.23 seconds.
- pietrosperoni: 372 Posts, 400 Tags and 152 Main Tags, calculated in 377.40 seconds.
The Main Tags, are the tags that will appear as main branches. And we can also see a difference between Mike maps, and mine. In mine I tend to have about 0.4 of the tags as Main Tags, while Mike tends to have something more near 0.9. This is probably due to the fact that I tend to apply many tags to each post (four or five are common, but sometimes more), while Mike tends to use an average of one or two.
If we look at the map we can also see that there are less clusters than in my map. Note for example how in the small blog map nearly everything is clustered… and those are only 20 posts and 17 Main Tags.
If we look at the source code we can see that, on the 9th line some constants are set:
distances_constant= [0.333333,0.4,0.5,1]
Those constants define the minimum distance for entries to be in the same cluster.
The 1/3 means that if one third of the posts between two tags are in common then the tags should be in the same cluster. And so on. Tags that are farther apart, but have a path of tags between them such that you can go from one to the next without never going above that distance are in the same cluster, too. A process that in the log is referred to as making the distances tables transitive.
Those number have been specifically tweaked for my delicious posts (and generally my style of bookmarking). It seem obvious that for Mark the numbers should be different. Since it is more uncommon for him for posts to share a tag, probably the numbers should be lower. Something like:
distances_constant= [0.1,0.333333,0.25,0.4,1]
The last 1 is just to make sure that tags that are synonimes are shown together.
I think eventually I will modify the program so that it is possible to insert your own constants from outside. But for now I am just grateful to Mike for giving me the material to understand better how to enhance the program.
I finally made it. Those holidays in Rome have been productive. I made a tool to automagically make a clustered delicious mind map. You need to have java installed, I’ll do the rest. It’s still pre-alpha, but it seem to be working fine up to now.
I used the previous algorithm, only debugged. You see before starting programming those maps I never programmed in python. So those are my first attempts. The more I learn, the more I discover shortcuts. The source code is here.
To test the program, I needed a lighter account (my delicious account have right now 400 tags), so I started a new account just to bookmark all the entries in this blog, and … wow. The map looks really nice!
I also added the tool to the general page with all the various index of the versions of the mind map of delicious.
All the maps that are completed are added to the end of the page. I think this is fair. I am really looking forward to see others people map, too. If you run the map more than one time, your name will appear on the page more than one time. Hopefully this should stop people from running the tool more than once a day… please.
I sincerely hope it will be succesful without giving me massive space problems.
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