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Recently I have made some serious changes to my homepage. SOme of those changes I have been planning from a long long time. Others were more sudden.
The central page is of course at pietrosperoni.it that leads to home.pietrosperoni.it. But then there was something that I wanted to do for a long time. Integrate my mind and thinking process directly on internet. When I think I often do that through mindmaps. I have used several type of software in the past. Starting from mindmanager (back at the time when I was on windows), then freemind. I also tried the mindmap from Buzan (which I found slow, costly and with a terrible costumer service). Recently I am using iThoughtsHD which I found do be the best mindmap tool for iPad. Also I find very good that every time I wrote them I received an answer directly from Craig Scott (the programmer of the application). I was in this way able to suggest and see implemented several ideas. In particular the only thing I really missed was the possibility to make html pages from mindmap, with nodes hosting URL links. This was possible in mindmanager, but not on any other system. So iThoughts made a release that permitted to export mindmaps in html format directly on dropbox.
At this point I organised a whole part of my public dropbox folder into a homepage for my mindmaps (in the form of a mindmap itself). Which then at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2754299/maps/Mind.html. But I did not like the long link. So instead I organised another subdomain: mind.pietrosperoni.it for those mindmaps. Added some rules in the .htaccess file to make sure people going there would be forwarded to my dropbox, and I was ready to rock.
Those lines were:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ $1 [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.php$ $1.php [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2754299/maps/$1.html [R,NC,L]
RewriteRule ^$ http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2754299/maps/Mind.html [R,NC,L]
Those rules make sure that any requesto for mind.pietrosperoni.it/x go to http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2754299/maps/x.html
which is where the x map will be stored. Of course if you use it, you would have to change http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2754299/maps/ to the address where your dropbox stores your maps.
After I did all this there were still some problems with how to publish those mindmaps. One this is to make a mindmap, another is to put it on the internet, but yet another is to let people know of this mindmap, and connect it with the others. The connect part was easily done by making sure every time I made a new mindmap I would also update the general mindmap. Still there was the problem on how to make people aware of them. The best would have been an rss field. But I did not know how to make an automatic one, nor did dropbox offer an rss field of its public directories. So instead I had to set up another directory on my dropbox. Then I had to enable sharing mode (here is an explanation, here you activate it) . When you share a dropbox folder you also can get an rss field for it (here). But just going from the rss field to twitter would look lousy. So instead I took the rss field for it and used it inside yahoo pipes, and the resulting rss was then pushed in twitter using ifttt. The only thing that was missing at this point was to connect the dropbox folder where iThoughts store the mindmap with the dropbox shared folder wheich releases the rss feed. This was done using SynchTwoFolders,
The idea is:
iThoughts–>dropbox public folder–>SynchTwo Folders–>dropbox shared folder–>dropbox releases an rss–>Yahoo Pipes–>IFTTT–>Twitter.
And as a result every time I save a mindmap on my dropbox public folder (/public/maps) it gets advertised on twitter with a link to it. If you are interested in the yahoo pipe I set up in all this you can find that here.
So now I have a homepage, a series of mindmaps, a twitter account where new mindmaps are echoed; two active blogs (one in Italian and one in English), and a list of publication. What was missing? Making a page for each of my publication, and this is what I started to do. Starting to store one after the other the talks I gave at conferences on a youtube channel. What follows is the mindmap of the whole structure.
While the mindmap of the tweet the mindmap-hack is
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!
The two talks I gave at the: International Workshop on Challenges and Visions in the Social Sciences, this summer, are now available at videolectures.net.
Not the best talks of my career, and hopefully not the last either. But the guys at VL did a great job in recording them.
One of the talk was about Tags, and the second about Democracy of the 21st Century.
In the one about Continue reading My first 2 talks available online: Tags & 21st Century Democracy
I just came back from the vacations to discover that my website is now a mess.
All the delicious mindmap data have been deleted, and so did the MySQL data of the wiki.
I am not really sure how it could happen, but I am just not going to investigate.
I am, more pragmatically, moving my website to another host. It will take some days, and a lot of the data will in any case be lost.
Please if you came to my page looking for any of the previous services: the delicious mindmap, the wiki aggregator, have patience.
As soon as the transfer have been made, I shall post a new message.
So if this current message is the last one, you know that we are still using the old host.
Pietro
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Finally the time has come. Although I wanted to do this from a long time, only now did I found the time and the technical knowledge to do it:
I divided the blog.
I divided all the Italian posts from the English ones. I created a new blog at http://it.pietrosperoni.it, and my italian posts will, from now on, be posted over there. And only over there. Most of the people (3) who read me (5) either read Italian or English posts. And I am sure it must have been very confusing to scroll through a page and find some posts in English and some in Italian. Plus I always had the sensation that I could not write too much in one language, or possible readers of the other language will just assume the blog contains no information at all for them, and dismiss it. This in time made me slow down posting, as I could not always follow particular threads, that would have involved to post many times, in one language.
But now all this has come to an end.
Of course if you want to read entries from both blogs you should add the rss from the italian blog too. Some topic will remain confined to this blog (like tags, for example), others will remain there (like italian politics), while other will span through both medium (like diet, which already is present in both). The wiki in this case should act like a glue, creating a space where entries from both are aggregated. Plus, being a wiki, I (and whoever wants to come and play) will use it to keep notes, aggregate extra content, and generally make some pages stand out while others will only show the blogs entries, the bookmarks, and the context (i.e. the links from delicious popular page, and from technorati).
Generally it is not a smart idea to to come here every time to see if I have written something. I tend to write when I have something to say, so many days might pass before I say something, then for some days I might make one or more post a day. The solution is to add my rss feeds to your feed reader. Bloglines is a good one. I am sure there are better ones. Feel free to suggest them (as I am always looking for ways to improve).
Now let’s get a bit more technical: making this change also meant getting my hands dirty with MySql Continue reading The Italian blog is born: reasons and technicalities
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