P. S.: Post Scriptum

[crossposted on the moblog, and the facebook notes.]

One of the leit motif in spirituality is to reach an integration among the various parts of oneself. There are many important reasons for this, which I am not going to enter right now. Becoming One is not seen in Taoism as a spiritual goal, but as a spiritual prerequisite. It is not school, it is preschool. Until you are one you cannot really get involved with spirituality. It is like if in your family you decide to build a house, but not everybody agrees on that. Then one part of you builds it in the morning, and someone else of the family will destroy it in the evening. Maybe using the bricks for something else.

The idea that we are many, that each of us is many, is quite common. In psychology is common, Junghian Psychology, if I recall well. Again, in Taoism it even reaches the point of believing that this is true in a litteral point of view. Each of us, is seen as a patchwork of different spirits (shen). And when you die each spirit will then go its way. As such in Taoism until you have reached a real integration between your parts of yourselves (your spirits), you cannot even have reincarnation unless you have developed a unit which is integrated enough to go through the trauma of death without shattering in a 1000 little pieces.

And another idea that is very common (you have it in Taoism, but also in Christianity, for example), is the idea that one day, one time, at some point we will all get together. Christian say “sit by the father”. In Taoism the idea is that any person who have showed a spark of interest for spiritual work will eventually join together in some place beyong space and time, a sort of heaven. And the joke then is if people are following the 1 lifetime program, the 10 lifetime program, the 100 or 1000 lifetime program, to reach it. And the faster it is, the rougher it is.

I have to say I am amazed by how well is Facebook helping in this integration work, for me. I have many friends, on facebook. But more importantòy I have friends from different groups. Each friend knew a different Pietro. Some were from my spiritual life (taoism, tai chi, meditation, …), some from my academic world (artificial life, mathematics), some are Go-brothers, others people I knew from childhood, or from high school, or middle school. And with each of them I was a different person. And now they are all together. All in the same place. And the internet does indeed feel a little bit like this place beyond space and time. And I read of many of them. But what is more important, is that, as I write about my life, I am forced to write in a way that is acceptable for both my academic side and my spiritual side. I can only write in an integrated way, because I know that friends from both worlds will read me. In this sense facebook is catalysing an integration in me. Is helping me to become one.

I know many people are having problems with facebook. I think a lot of the problem is that they are not ready or willing to have this integration. For me Fb is pretty easy: to become my friend you need to know me. With very few exceptions I do not add anyone who is not someone I personally know. But if I have met you, and you want to befriend me, then you are in. I don’t keep people that I know out of the door. Because that would be equivalent to keeping some part of myself out of the door, the part of me that interacted with them. You are all invited to the party. I sometime even go back in time, and look for people I once knew. People that were important in my life. Or people I wished I had the time to know better. Maybe now we have another occasion. But then on my status, in my notes, in the caption of my photo, I try not to speak thinking about one in particular (I might have done it, but mostly I try to avoid it). I speak to all my friends at the same time. And if anyone comments, I answer that person, personally. The answer is personal, but anybody can see it, and thus the integration goes deeper. I write in English and in Italian, because those are the languages with which I live, work, chat, play and love. My inner dialogue is sometimes in Italian and sometimes in English, depending where I am, what I am thinking of doing. And my facebook reflects that.

Most of you know that I use facebook pretty frequently. I update the status often, sometimes more than once a day. But what some of you have not realised is that I do not do much less on facebook. I avoid facebook applications. I only use the ones that are truly useful, that add functionalities that were not there, and are truly helpful. If I want to wish to my friend Happy Chinese New Year, I will do it in person, or through the status. Not through an application. In this way the integration proceeds. I very rarely invite people to use applications. I only do so when I think an application is very very good. (The “skip this” button is my friend). I invited my friends for the geo tagging application. I would do it for the “cause” application. Maybe the iRead could be another one, and the application to play Go online. Here you go, this makes it 4. And when I invite people I only invite people I think will appreciate it (or should, they know it or not ). I consider the other applications to be equivalent to spam. I try not to spam my friends. When a new application arrives (elves, and pirates, etc…) , I usually just block it. If an application is requiring me to send invitation to let you proceed, I report it (because it is breaking the TOS, and ruining the party for everybody), delete it and block it. With absolutely no pity, whatsoever.

I see often people who get tired of facebook. But very often those are people who are not using facebook as a tool to interact with friends that are far away (in space or time), but as a game. Those are the friends that use more of those facebook useless applications. They get tired, but what they are really getting tired are those useless applications. They are right in getting tired. They just need to use facebook, instead of be used by it. And then fb will stop being a toy, and become an instrument. You will forget about facebook, and think about your friend.

Keeping the application to the minimum necessary.
Speaking to everybody. Inviting all your (real life) friends.
It is fairly easy to let facebook help you in the integration process.

In the article:
Tweeting the terror: How social media reacted to Mumbai
it is explained how twitter, blogs and social networks gave mixed results in during the Mumbai massacre.
I particular it is said:

As Twitter user “naomieve” wrote: “Mumbai is not a city under attack as much as it is a social media experiment in action.”

But then,

as is the case with such widespread dissemination of information, a vast number of the posts on Twitter amounted to unsubstantiated rumors and wild inaccuracies.

and finally:

As blogger Tim Mallon put it, “I started to see and (sic) ugly side to Twitter, far from being a crowd-sourced version of the news it was actually an incoherent, rumour-fueled mob operating in a mad echo chamber of tweets, re-tweets and re-re-tweets.

Well, this could easily be avoided if we agree to just write the source of the information.
Just write (yourname) if you have seen something yourself.
(cnn) if you are repeating news from cnn, and so on.

Something that permits to track the spread of info to recover the original source could possibly be done directly at the twitter server level.

Another revolution is about to happen.

A revolution that is many times in size and importance bigger than the music revolution. I call it the e-book revolution.

In this moment a number of technologies are coming together:

On the one side OCR technologies are reaching a level of sophistication, where it is nearly as easy to photocopy a book as to make an ebook out of it. Do you remember when you would go to a photocopy shop, and ask them to make a copy of the book. Now it is that easy to have the ebook version of it, if you know how to do it. This means that more and more books are available in ebook format.

But the difference between the ebooks now, and the mp3, back then, is that when the mp3s came out, a song (5 minutes of fun) was about 5 MB. And since the internet was slower back then, it would take quite some time to download those 5 minutes of fun. Now a book, is often between 1 and 10 Mega Byte. And it can permit you to read it, study it, but also just to consult it.
More about this later.

I thought there were few ebooks around. That mostly you could find some old classics, but nothing really interesting. I was SO wrong.

Here is a collection available for download from pirate bay with more than 1000 ebooks, all on computer science. Here another with practically all of the ebooks from the “* for dummies” collection.

Those are not just some old classics. Those are good new books.

But why are users going through the whole work of digitalizing a single book to post it online? I guess this text will explain us: Continue reading Ebooks, the next revolution. But this time is BIG!

I am just back from the airoport.
I bought some time ago a return ticket with Rayanair to Rome, going on the 4th August, and return on the 19th of August. Well, long story short I needed to change my going there ticket. I am no longer going with Ryanair to Rome, but to Athens, passing some time in Greece and coming back still with Ryanair on the 19th.

So I tried to move my first flight to another date. I know for sure I will go to Rome for Christmas, so moving it to the 21st of December seemed the best thing. You can’t actually do it online because the system would not accept a going ticket (21st of December) later than the return part of the ticket. I thought, fine, it sounds like something that really needs an operator.

And the operator just confirmed me the same thing. We can’t move a going part of a flight later. We can’t twist a flight around making what was the coming back the going, and adding a flight after while deleting the first.

Those things make me boil, it sounds like machines are in charge.

The crazy thing is that if I had bought the ticket as two separated flights I would have paid the same and had the possibility to change them. Crazy, eh! And ths limit is a total nonsense imposed by some wanker programmer, who imposes on other useless limitations.

So the first take away message is: when you buy a ticket alway buy each separate flight as a stand alone flight, and never buy two tickets as a return ticket. You never know when you might need to change the ticket.

As I was discussing the issue with my collegues, I was further told that when you buy a return ticket you still pay double taxes on each credit card transaction, so you are really paying the same. And then I was told other stories of how Ryanair handled everybody much worse. From mother who are required to submit the babies trolley as a “outsized” package. While in all other companies they can go with the trolley up to the plane and are then uploaded in a place where they can easily taken back. How then they have to walk with baby, handluggage and baby carseat to the plane (which in Dublin is about 1 km, sweet). And so on.

So generally the agreed wisdom from the office is:
never fly with Ryanair when you have a choise, and if you don’t have a choise wonder if your flight is really necessary.

Some time ago I remember reading a comment.

La Repubblica, one of the first italian newspaper, holds a big internet website. As part of their initiative they have La Repubblica TV, which is a sort of television, just recorded for the net. You can download it when you want, and see it at your leisure. It includes everything: advertisments, opening music, interviews, etc.
Well the comment was discussing how that internet TV is quite dumb. Not really using up the powers of the net.

It took me as a really smart comment, and later I thought that also the lessons from the universities who are being recorded and released are still part of the old way of doing things.

And today I saw something which I thought might be part of the new way: The lessons on history from Lars Brownworth,
12 Byzantine Rulers.

Lars is a professor at a private high school, and if I got it right not even a professor in history, but history is his passion, and so in his free time he started investigating the middle ages. His lessons in pocast format really had success, and now his podcast is among the most followed on the net.

Why do I think his podcast is part of the new wave of education, and not part of the old wave:

• The lessons are not produced by a University. He did was not advertised as being an expert, and yet his succes came because of how interesting they were. How often have we followed a lesson at the university (or at high school), thinking the professor was not that good, and probably some students were actually better. Universities need to cover every class. But with podcasts there was no class to cover. He was an expert in something, he spoke about that.
• There is a great desire for real high quality content. We all recognise the power of the internet, but experts that blog about their area of expertise are still few. It is easy to find blogs and discussion forums where many amateurs discuss a topic. We are moving toward a time where the real experts start to use the internet to share about their topic. This will take away space to the amatour (it was nice to be the expert in a Taoistic forum, but am I really an expert), but real knowledge will start to flow more easily.
• It uses podcasts, and website. Cheap but high quality technology. Available to everybody
• His expertise was so great that he manage to induce an interest even in people who had no natural interest for the subject

And the conclusion of all this is that more and more material will start to flow. Up to now we have mostly seen amatours discussing subjects. While the experts would write books in the old fashion way, copyright them, and make themselves unavailable. Essentially putting a higher and higher distance between them and their public. Now an expert can teach, and if he is really good he can share not only his knowledge, but his burning passion too. The tools are available, and soon the best lessons on a subject will not be from the universities, but directly from the expert website. At that point universities will start pointing to them, and this will induce a great change in society. Maybe we might even reach the point that some website will offer lessons worth a certain number of credits. A fully decentralized university.

Paolo Rossi, an italian comedian, made a wonderful job, in taking an old discourse from Pericles, and presenting it to the modern public as part of his personal show: Il Signor Rossi e la costituzione (mr. Rossi and the constitution- but, as Rossi is the most common italian name, could be translated as mr. Smith and the constitution). The speech is so precise, so moderne, that it was censored by Berlusconi controlled state television. After confronting the italian version from Paolo Rossi, with the original which we have in the project Gutenberg, I translated Paolo Rossi’s speech in English, trying, as much as possible to use the expression of the original translator in English. What follows here is first the translation, then the whole original speech is copied, with the parts that have been taken by Paolo bolded, to clarify the context in which they originally were. In the translation there is also a phrase in italic, it is a phrase that was absent in the original text, but that fitted perfectly both in the original text, and in the italian situation. It was inspired to Paolo Rossi by the ex-prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Here in Athens we do like this, our government favours the many instead of the few; this is why it is called democracy.
Here in Athens we do like this, the laws, here, afford equal justice to all in their private differences; but we never ignore reputation for capacity.
When a citizen has shown himself worthy, he will be, upon others, favored to serve the state, not as a privilege, but as a reward for worth, and poverty doesn’t bar the way.
Here in Athens we do like this. The freedom which we enjoy, extends also to our ordinary life.There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes. We are free, free to live exactly as we please, and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate danger. An Athenian citizen does not ignore public affairs, when he is following his private life, but, upon all, never uses public affairs to solve his private problems.
Here in Athens we do like this: we have been taught, to respect magistrates, and we have been taught to obey the laws, and never to forget those who have been injured. And we have been taught to respect that code which, although unwritten, is based upon the universal feeling of what is right, and cannot be broken without acknowledged disgrace.
Here in Athens we do like this: we see him who takes no interest in public matters not as unambitious but as useless, and although few are able to originate a politics, we all athenians are able to judge it. We don’t look on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way to democracy.
We believe that happiness originates from freedom, but freedom only originates from courage.
In short, I say Athens school of Hellas, and that every Athenians shows in himself a happy flexibility, self trust, and readiness to face any situation. And this is why we throw open our city and never by alien acts exclude foreigners.

What follows is the original discourse from Pericles, from The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. Continue reading Here in Athens we do like this

Some of you might remember that I wrote a post about the long tail of the ruling class. The post was in Italian and got translated in English by blogger Phil Edward. I took the translation copied it in my blog (with a link), but said that I did not fully agree with Phil understanding of my post. I didn’t enter more into details. And then there was silence, and in the silence I decided it was easier to just ignore the whole discussion. But a few days ago Nicholas Carr from Rough Type wrote a post on how the long tail permits to the service the puts in touch people to make massive amount of money, but to the people who produce the actual content not much money. Absolutely true, and this is why you don’t see google advertisments in my blog. But this is a very different problem from what I was discussing when I was speaking about the long tail of the Ruling Class. Mainly because I was not speaking about the ruling class but about the ‘classe dirigente’. Which is not exactly the ruling class, although I still can’t find a better translation. Ruling class smells a bit too much of kings and queens and prime ministers. And I was actually speaking about ‘classe dirigente’ as people who have authority over a certain field.

So when Phil commented on Nick post:

I blogged on this last year, in response to Pietro Speroni:

I felt I had to answer. Because my post was all about a multidimensional space (all our interests), which gets mistreated as a unidimensional space (money). Poor chap! For a multidimensional space to be treated as a unidimensional one is fairly common, but never fair. And the general excuse is ‘to understand better’, or ‘to simplify a bit’. But I suspect that multidimensional spaces might take it personally, bacause if you treat them bad, they can become quite convoluted, if you know what I mean. Maybe I should write a long post on the importance of not making models (even mental ones) with too few dimensions. But I think I shall leave it for some time next year. And then I can say that it was long due.

In any case I decided to copy my comment to Nick post here. Continue reading Where life is and money isn’t

It is 2.30 am and I just woke up. I went to bed at 2.05 am.

I am not crazy. Not yet, not anymore, at least not more than usual. I am just trying a new sleeping technique. It is called polyphasic sleep. I actually wanted to become polyamorouse, but I got confused during the googling process, and now it is too late.

What follows is a brief intro to polyphasic sleep for the general bear audience. Continue reading Polyphasic Easter

It is now the time to present the next project we have been working to: TagBay. And I say ‘we’, because is this project I am not alone. I did it with a friend of mine, Derek, who accepted, very patiently to code, some of the idea I have been tinkering around in the last year or so. I am speaking about how tags, and tag clouds, and distance between tags, and so on.
So, in brief we made a web site to tag material that is being sold on e-Bay. Anybody can tag any object that is being sold. Not only can any object be tagged but you can tag sellers, too (oh, we are not responsible for offensive tags, eh!).
Tags on objects can be made private or public, and you can also search among your tags, among everybody else tags, and eventually (when we code it) it will be possible to search among the tags of another user, like in del.icio.us.

Now that the summary for the people who have no time has been done, let’s try to explain the idea in the details for those who have a bit more time.

Pages:
On TagBay, right now, there are 3 type of pages: e-Bay Search Pages, TagBay Tag Search Page, TagBayUser Tag Search Page, Item Page, and Seller Page.

• Search Page: It is possible from inside Tag Bay to make searches on e-Bay on specific keywords. The user can then add tags to each object that came out, store the tags added all at once, or store the tags of a single object. The same thing can be done in the Tag Search Page
• TagBay Tag Search Page: In this page the user gets all the results for a single tag that someone have used. Nothing fancy (for now). Items where the tag only appears as a private tag will not appear here.
• TagBayUser Tag Search Page: In this page the user gets all the results for a single tag that he have used. If the user is logged in and is looking at his own tags, also the items tagged in a private way will appear.
• Item Page: Each object has its specific page. From such page any user can see what are the public tags that other users have used for that page. Also they can define their personal tags for that object, if their tags are going to be private, and the tags of the seller.
• Seller Page: And then there is the seller page, and in the seller page any user can tag any seller. The use of tag for sellers is still limited, but will be increased in the future.

The natural use of the site

• For a seller or for a shop A seller might want to use the site to tag all the objects that he is selling, giving for each object all the tags related. Thus increasing the possibility for it to be found. We suggest to list the tag in the order of importance, as soon we are going to use the order consider the importance in the search page.
  Also, if a person wants to make a cool list of objects, they can tag exactly those objects, with a tag they never used, and then link to the page in their directory of this tag. Thus creating on the spot, their lists. Also sellers will want to tag their objects, and people making searches will tag objects to make lists of objects they want to follow, before jumping on a transaction. We think there is more than enough material to generate interesting behaviour. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same emergent behaviour that we are used to see. After all we are just exploring the possibilities of social folksonomy.
• A shop To the possibilities before, a shop who is selling on ebay might be interested to make sure that the shop itself (remember that you can tag sellers, and not only shops) have all the tags related to the merchandise that they are selling
• Someone buying Our suggestion for someone who wishes to buy, on e-Bay, would be to first look under the tag search, to see if there is anybody who has already tagged any object that they are interested in. This does not necessarily be someone else who is buying, but also someone who is selling. Then tag the objects they are interested themselves, to have it in their own list of objects. Then they could go to the search e-Bay page with the necessary keywords, and add the chosen tag to all the objects interesting. At that point a first selection have been made, and all the possible objects have been tagged. At this point, he could choose one or those objects, change the tags to private, and start betting on it.
• Someone suggesting And finally if someone is just trying to suggest some possible objects, he could search e-Bay for those objects, tag them with a unique tag and present the url of the list to whoever is interested.

There are many other ways to use TagBay. In a sense TagBay is a toy, and not a game. And as every good toy it can be used for many different games. We suggest here only some of them. Also TagBay itself is rapidly evolving. We have tons of stuff we are interested in including, and if you have been reading my blog, you know how my problem is always to find people to code my ideas, more than to find them. And this is why I am so happy for Derek work!

Difficulties that we found:
There were a number of issues that came out when we started developing this program.

1. Public vs private tags:
   Why would someone tag an object if they are interested to buy it? After all aren’t they making it easier to others to find it, by adding those tags?
   This was a serious doubt that we had, and finally we decided to give the possibility to users to tag objects privately. Yet there have to be a balance between private tags and public tags, as public tags are necessary to generate the emerging folksonomy that we wish to use. So we decided for a compromise: public tags can be done from the search page, but private tags requite you to go to the specific object page. In our view (but we are ready to be proven wrong) someone would go to the search page, tag all the entries where he might be interested. Then chose one, and tag that one in a private way.
2. Limitations due to the temporary nature of the objects
   Considering that most object exist on ebay only for few weeks before being sold, wouldn’t this be not enough time to make a tag cloud and let all cool emergent properties that folksonomy induces, appear?
   Maybe, but sellers also can tag the objects they are selling, thus giving a fresh start to all the objects. Also side by side to tagging object we are giving the possibility to tag sellers. Which eventually should survive each transaction and build up an interesting tag cloud.
3. I spoke about sellers tagging their own objects, but wouldn’t this invite people to spam your site? After all, wouldn’t it be much better for a seller to add many tags to be present in many searches?
   Ah ha! You think tag clouds can be spammed. This is false. Tag clouds cannot be spammed, and no one understand this. And we shall use this site to prove it. We have nothing against spammers, they are absolutely welcome in our site and spam it as much as they feel. Add all the tags they want to each object they sell. It will make ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE in the search page. Tag clouds are unspammable. And our engine will use tag clouds as its base. Everybody else uses tag sets. And this makes them easily spammable. So, no we don’t fear spammers. In fact we hope that spammers will come to our TagBay site. They are just people trying to sell their stuff, we are trying to make sellers meet with buyers. Wouldn’t be bad to single out spammers just because they are spammers.

TagBay is obviously still in beta, and there are many things that need to be coded. If you have any idea on how to make it better please do not hesitate to contact me. If you want to make a difference on what the final product will be now is the time to do it. Also all new suggestion implemented should be listed in a special page with links to the original suggester home page.

We have all heard the news that do-no-evil Google has accepted to comply with Chinese laws and ban some words from the search results (Google testimony here). More than that China is censoring media, editors, journalist, blogs, and practically any form of free expression. According to this article this censorship is not having the desired effect from the government. The only reason they give is that there are simply too many blogs.

Well, I have a different idea, I think that censorship is not useless as a strategy for China’s government. It is counterproductive. It is making the the chinese blogsphere stronger. Let me explain why do I think it is so. Continue reading Small China

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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!

1. I shall look for a good alternative to Yahoo, ehm, I mean del.icio.us. The folks at slashdot suggest Simpy.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. And then I might instead develop my own service or help someone else develop their service, using the tagclouds ideas I spoke about early.
6. 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!

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.

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.

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.

Reading Joi Ito I just discovered a new blogging site: Bloggers without Border. It seemed a serious site, but somehow I had a hard time in understanding what where they after.

In other words:

• What does a blogger without border do?
• How will the world be a different place if there are bloggers without border?
• Are they here to be part of the problem or part of the solution?
• And who are them (understand me, not the names…)?
• Can anybody be a blogger without border? Is it like a badge (I too support BwB… in my heart)?
• Is it a network?
• Is it a way to send funds?

Following this line of thought I noticed that on the right there was the omnipresent PayPal button. Yet no info was given on what was the money going to.

• Will the money reach people in help?
• All the money?
• Will it be used on the site?
• All the money?

I started investigating the mission. And was left more hungry than before. There was a bit of history, but still no meat.

This is, where BwoB is today. We continue to add features, and will introduce a few great ones in short order, but for the time being, it’s a weblog, a forum, and a means to communicate and coordinate.

In other words, for now is just another place to chat, which had the luck to be Ito-dotted.

And then the answer to the (obviously) only frequently asked question:

Q: Are donations to BwoB tax deductible?

Why I just can’t give a damn?

I am fully supporting true grassroot activism and participation, but I just can’t found either here. It reminds me of my experience with Our Answer. The site that should have been a center for creating through a wiki the answer to press releases and declaration of influential people, and was instead a big flop. No one actually used it. Until I took it down.

And slowly the sensation creeps in, that in the power law world of bloggers, the fact that something is succesful might still be a bit too much tied on who launches it, then on the intrinsec value.

So Bloggers without Border, are you part of the problem or part of the solution? How so?

Update: This morning I checked Bloggers without Borders. The pages were sensibly changed: Where the charity money was going was clarified. Also the mission was clarifed:

Our Mission Statement in a small block:

Bloggers without Borders was founded to raise
awareness for charities and charitable events
around the world. We use the tools and
exposure of modern citizen journalism as a
means to lend a hand in the solicitation of
donations and outbound information management.

.

Which is good. Still not revolutionary, but good.

What instead sounds truly great was the topic: Building a disaster alert system on existing informal networks. Yes!

The tsunami of December 2004 is a perfect example of a situation in which technologically-empowered social networks could have saved lives…

Even without building giant sirens in every town on the Indian Ocean we could have a tsunami warning system. An increasing number of people have mobile phones and/or internet access. Let’s build a trusted network of communication paths. Let’s be a place for scientists to provide information and warnings. Let those pass through to the appropriate regions through websites, email, news feeds, SMS, and good old fashioned “pick up the phone and call somebody�. Let the people on the ground spread the word locally and report conditions back to the world.

Which recall something I wrote when I heard of the disaster:

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.

Can you recognise when an idea is ready to be applied? Generally that is when it appears from different sources at the same time.

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.