P. S.: Post Scriptum

It seems to me that Twitter, Google, and Wolfram|Alpha, are really not competing at all, but are instead providing complementary services. I would go farther by adding wikipedia (and blogs?), and suggest that the 4 services really represent the digestive process of our information society. From the first Churning to the Backbone

Wolfram|Alpha represents the deeper part. It includes only what is really known inside out from our society. What has been fully digested. FOr something to be in W|A it needs to be known, semantically known, beyond doubt. And notice that I am here speaking about a deeper Wolfram|Alpha than what you have seen here. The Wolfram|Alpha as it should be, once we learned hot to interrogate it proprtly, and once it has epanded with the rest of the knowledge we have.

At a higher level we have wikipedia. Wikipedia permits much more stuff to be present. You have actors, and theories, and stories, and a lot of other stuff.  You also have discussions and point of views. In short you have a lot of stuff that is not being digested anymore, but is also not the bones of our society. It is more like the muscles. The limit of Wikipedia is that since it does not allow for new research, by definition it is limited to what has already been discovered. Although not in a definite way as in Wolfram|Alpha.

And then we have Google. Google is really part of the digestive process. It has new stuff coming in every few days. But is is also less clear. You need to work to get to the results using google. But you can also find new threads. Things that are still not known. There is real food here, waiting to be digested.

And Twitter is the more superficial tool. Twitter has second to second update. It has multiple links in different forms that point to the same resource. Information is not organised in any way, shape or form. But it is information nevertheless. It represents the edge of the knowledge wave of our civilization. It is deeply alive, unpredictable, full of possibilities. You never know how it will react. It is the most alive part of the constant discussion that is going on in our civilisation. It is the civilisation equivalent to the constant chit chat that is going on in our head. Although it has memory, it is not really good with it. Anything that is in Twitter can be true, can be false, can be anything in the middle, neither or both at the same time.

If you are an alive and creative mind that wants to participate in the constant flow of creation of this society you will probably end up interacting in twitter in some ways. But if you want your creation to be grounded in reality you need to use the other levels as well. They are really not competing.

And Blogs? Blogs are ways with which we store personal longer stories. The untwittable (as Chris Anderson from TED called his). They work between the google level and the Twitter level. Letting information move between those levels, and letting complex information be churned before is ready to go deeper. Similarly you have journal articles (and books) working to bring the information to the wikipedia level.

As many of you know, I eat in Primal Diet from a long time. It is at least 3 or 4 years. I was very ill when I started, and feel much better now. I often look around to see when new articles appear on this diet, and I was very happy to read that a mainstream newspaper was writing an article about it. Too bad that the title was not very flattering: “The Primal diet: the silliest diet ever?“. The article was even worse. The worse set of factual errors, that newspaper has ever written. According to this article being in primal diet means to eat for 95% meat, and for most of it “high meat”. High meat is well off meat. Meat that has been kept in the fridge for days, weeks or months. I personally have never eaten high meat. But also people in primal diet who do eat high meat, do that very sparingly. Maybe a little bit, every 2 to 6 months to promote the response from the body. (FYI, this part of the diet is inspired by how some tribal people do eat some eat in their original diet. Confront on this Vilhjalmur Stefansson report on Eskimo diets).

After reading the article, I wrote a comment saying that the article contained factual errors, that I was on primal diet from a few years, and that it is simply false that people in primal diet eat so much high meat.

Guess what? The comment never passed the revision process. My comment was just before the comment of “Chris, Neath”. Yet it never appeared.

I find this behaviour from an online very dishonest, and feel the need to point it out.
We should all watch out from newspapers that censor informations that challenge them.

Pietro

[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.

I know I haven’t written anything in ages. And maybe it is a good thing. Part of it is due to the fact that this blog has become so serious, so high level, that I felt I did not have anything worth enough to write on it. On the side my other small blog, the one on which I presented pictures of my life has come to a stall too. This happened long time ago, when I left Italy, as connecting to the internet through the mobile in Germany was just too costly. For some time I kept on posting pictures on Flickr by hand. That stopped partially as I got annoyed to Yahoo behaviour who required me to pay for the service (while they also put ads on the side), and when I went for a visit in Buchenwald. The wight of those last pictures prevented me from adding anything.

So little by little I stopped recoding my use of life and my internet life. I did not stop having a life, I just stopped speaking about it.

Those days I am mostly on facebook. In my life I left Jena, submitted my thesis, and went to Dublin City University, to work with Barry McMullin’s group, in the Artificial Life Lab. It is a one year contract that is now 4 months through. And I am actively looking for what to do next.

Funny enough my father is blogging way more than me, those days. He blogs in Italian with a short summary in English. If you can read Italian it is quite interesting.

Some of you might remember my rant, once del.icio.us was bought. And some others, who where with me from before might remember the entries I wrote on tag clouds. Some time later I was contacted from an Italian developer, Fabio Vescarelli, who asked me some help in developing some algorithms to find the distance between users in a del.icio.us like program. We had an exchange of email first , and we met in chat some other time. He was building a del.icio.us clone, Smarking. But with some interesting differences. Continue reading Review: Smarking

Hello everybody, I’m back.
The vacations were very good, and soon I’ll pull all the pictures on the moblog, with the descritpions and the embarassing details. Now I’m back to work in Jena.
One of the things that is happening to me at the time is that my computer is physically falling to pieces. It is an old laptop of a brand I don’t wish to nominate not to increase their visibility since it gave me all sort of problem freezing about one time a week at least. Having to look for a new model I started thinking about the products around, and I reached the conclusion that we are ready for another big jump. And generally a new product which will make a new base in the economy of Pda. (Yes I am looking for a laptop for me and I end up writing about PDA. So what? Sue me).

It seem to me that there are 4 different products on the market which really need to be integrated and when they will be integrated there will be a big jump in terms of potentiality. I am speaking of:

• Smart Phones (with Camera)
• PDA
• GPS
• IPod

Right now no product that I know of that is on the market have is really all four at the same time. There are some shy tentative to do the integration but no one has really managed.

Let’s look why those 4 instruments should all be present in one tool and what extra do we get. The smart phone will give the possibility to phone and more important to be in touch on the internet all the time. The more we go on the lower the tarif will be. In Italy is already possible to have a flat rate of 20 Euro a month that let you connect to internet anytime between 6pm and 8 am and during weekends and holidays (It is through TIM, if you are looking for it). It is very good. I wish here in Germany there was a similar possibility. With time the prices will inevitably drop. What all this mean is that the tool, that from now on I will call eBase, will have the possibility to be in contact with the internet pretty much all the time.

When I was in Prague at the European Go Congress I bought a small PDA, used, for 20 euro. It works fine and it permitted me to simply record all the official game I did. If the tool was already online I could have sent them to internet immediatly. But wait, if the tool is on internet I can also play go online directly from the PDA. Imagine, you are on your bus and you play online with someone, far far away, in a distant galaxy. And because more and more of the work is moving on internet, with del.icio.us, calendars on line, office on line, and so on, this would mean that you get all your data all the time. And this on a PDA. So on something that is big enough to actually do some work, read some web pages, and generally be useful.

And now the first critic will be, but what about making phone calls. Will not that be unconfortable? Oc course an eBasa have to be bigger than one of those miniaturized phones that are available right now. On the other hand I see more and more people using those bluetooth microphone to speak. You can still keep your eBase in your pocket while you speak.

Now PDA and phone integrated are already around. And they work quite well. In fact many smart phones are in a sense a PDA plus a phone. I use to be quite skeptic about those tools. Especially about how easy it is to write on the screen itself, but after my last PDA I had to change my mind. It works very well.

But now the last two elements, the IPod and the GPS. Already many smart phones have an mp3 reader inside. But the real novelty in the IPod is not the mp3 reader, but the memory. The fact of having 40 gb of memory means that everybody can carry ALL the music he likes with her. No smart phone that I know of offers this service. This is fundamental. If eBase have also to be a working tool it has to have a huge memory. 40 GB is the minimum. But what else would mean to have an IPod fully integrated with a PDA plus a smart phone. Well, for once it means that you can get your podcast directly on your phone. And since (see above) your phone is supposed to be on internet pretty much all the time you are getting your podcasting all the time from internet directly on your phone. Yes, we had reinvented the radio. And since this is going to have a bigger screen than a mobile (apart that flexible screens are coming out in an case), we can even consider having video podcasting with us. Essentially to have it we just would need some of the smart phone that we already have around and pack them with enough memory, and a flat rate connection to internet. Nothing too incredile.

And the last one is the GPS. We already have that too. Some smart phone have GPS included, and many can have it outside. It seem that until things are not integrated in the base object people don’t use them. It it was for me I would have never bought an external camera to use with my phone. But the model I needed had also a camera included, so I had to take it. And it ended up being what I use most, and I have the most fun with. I think the same goes with GPS. Wait until all phone have GPS. Wait until any phone can tell you the road to anywhere you want. Both in terms of streets, and in terms of physical distance (3 miles in direction 121 degrees). Wait until every picture that you make comes with the exact coordinates of when and where it was taken. And then you will have the possibility to put a picture on internet and everybody can find that exact spot (and of course you can obscure that possibility, to protect your privacy). Wait until you can make a search on internet on all pictures around a certain place. And then the integration of the internet and human beings that wish to be part of the internet can be really strong. And then you can search a post in your blog by where it was written, more than when it was written. And any document we write will not only have the date but also the location. And we start refering to places with their coordinates. Like we do now with time.

Think about it. Before the invention of the calendar people would refer to time by relating with big events. Two years before the flood. 3 years after the king got into power…
Now we have some universal ways to refer to time. 5th of October 2003. We still refer to things respect to an event (’3 months after the twin tower’,…) but mostly we use the western coordinates. And the fact of giving to each user the possibility to know what time it was (the invention of the watch) made it possible and practical for people to refer to time in a precise way. As soon as we have some simple object that is with us all the time and that tells us our spatial position we will start to use this coordinates in the same way.

So I think those 4 objects should come together. And they will. And whoever will do it will get a big share of the market (and maybe this is why it had not happened yet, as each company keeps hold of its own patents to avoid the other being able to make the integration themselves).

I only gave here a sketch of the possibilities of such a tool. In a sense something like an eBase could be enough for a person to interact with the social coomunity. Would be enough to let someone discuss with others and participate in the emerging democracy that we seem to have finally started creating.

I am sure this object will come out. The question is not ‘if?’, the question is ‘when?’, and ‘what should I buy in the meantime?’.

I 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?)

I keep on being hunted by a nightmare:

Think about a post. You write a post, and this is in answer to some other posts, some other web pages, done by someone else. And your post will often be answered by other people. In a sense no post is an island. Given a post you can see all the post that answered it, or reviewed it. This through the trackback list. And they themselves has other post that answered them. And so on. But this does not work only one way. You can also go backward in time (which in fact is what we usually do when we follow the links.) You read a post, then you read the post that post is refering to, and so on. And in my dream this is a sort of tapistry, where each post is a node that links together different threads. So each post is not just contained in a thread, but connects to many threads that work through it.

Now think about a discussion group. In a discussion group each post is part of a tree. Each post can be answered by many posts, but it has only one father. One post it is itself answering to. And because of this structure it is possible, and actually easy to generate the classical hierarchical structure, that you can see pretty much everywhere in discussion group. (i.e. the Healing Dao discussion group)

But if you look closely you will notice that discussion groups are actually not having really a tree structure. Posts do yes have one father, but they refer to many other posts. They might not explicitly link to all the posts they refer to, but they surely refer to many posts. This is because in discussion groups there isn’t usually the need to link to all the relevant posts. After all the readers are generally a filtered group of people. Also often a person will use one post to answer a whole bunch of other posts, especially inside a closed community, where everybody reads everything.

Yet the hierarchical way in which posts are written in a discussion group is really useful. You can in an instant perceive how many people answered, what where the thread departing from that post, etc.

Now look at a post in the blogging world. It refers to many other posts. It explicitly links to them. And if it is succesful it will have many posts linking to it themselves. Now forget a moment about the upward link. Each post posts that link to it. In a sense they are replies to it. The link to those posts is saved in the trackback list. And each of those posts itself will have certain posts that refer to it.

Are you starting to see it?
Each post is in a sense the root of a tree, whose branches are the posts that refer to it, and whose sub-branches are all the posts that refer to the branch posts. In a sense nothing new. But now, if you see your posts in this way, you can also wish not to display just the immediate trackbacks, the posts that refer to your posts. But also their trackback too.

And here is the first part of my dea. Since each post is available in feed format, it should be possible to fetch, for each post, not just the trackbacks, but the trackbacks trackback. The post that refer to the post that refer to your post. Which means seeing the tree starting from your post up to depth 2. And in theory it should be possible to reiterate the process, and go deeper and deeper.

Why is this important? Well, when you read a discussion group, it is often useful to see the hierarchical view.

Example
Title of the post 0:
BLAH
Content of the post 0:
blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah,

blah
Blah.
-Trackback 1
–Trackback to the trackback 1
–Second trackback to the trackback 1
-Trackback 2
-Trackback 3
–Trackback to the trackback 3
—Trackback to the trackback to the trackback 3
-Trackback 4
… and so on.

It might seem an expensive research, but when we read a post, and it has a certain number of trackbacks, it is quite important to see which of those lead to other posts and which didn’t.

And now we go to the second part of the idea.
In a sense there is no reason why the whole tree view structure should only work one way. I mean, each post links to many other posts. Each of those posts link themselves to other posts. And here we have another tree. This time a tree that goes backward in time.

So I think that for each post it should be possible to see both those views.

• All the entries that are linked from it, and the entries that are linked to those entries, up to a specific depth.
• All the entries that link to it, and the entries that link to those entries, up to a specific depth.
• And maybe combine the two view having the first entries, in the format of one entry per line, above it. The later, again in the format of one entry per line, below.

I think this view would greatly increase the ability to see the local structure of the blogsphere. Of course the brothers of a particular entry (the entries that share the same parents) should also be available on the side. As well as the entries that are generally linked from the same offspring. But this is making it unnecessarily complicated. So let’s forget it for the time being.

So, we have reached the conclusion that each post uniquely defines two tree of other posts. The tree generated by it, and the tree that generates it. And I claim that we should work to be able to visualize those trees.

Doing it on Tagsurf
So, where did the idea came to me? Essentially working on tagsurf. Because, you see, tagsurf is maybe the first place where it would be really easy to visualize all this. You have many posts. There is the possibility (although I am not sure if it works right now) to send trackbacks from post to post. So each post does not need to have only one parent, but many. Many. It is true that, as it is now, trackbacks are not used inside the system. The reply is a different thing than the trackback. And each post only belongs to one thread which started with the first post that was not written as a reply to something. So there are quite some changes to be done, to let this vision ground in that system. But is is possible, and comparably easier to do than more generally in the blogsphere.

Those are the changes that I see have to be made to make it possible:

• Make sure that it is possible to send trackbacks between different posts.
• Organize all the reply so that they also send a trackback
• Make sure that each time a post A sends a trackback to another post B, this is also stored inside A
• Add a view down in time page, that from each post gives you that post, and all the posts that reply (that is trackback) to that post, and so on
• Hack this page so that the post appear in a hierarchical way, where it is very clear who is answering to what. Generally the way in which livejournal handles comments is a good way
• Since you stored all the trackback in both directions, organize a page view up in time, that from that post shows you all the posts that entry was answering to. And since they were themselves sending trackback to other posts, add those other posts as subbranches.
• Make it very easy, given a certain post to use those two views, and try taking away the usual thread view. All the information should still be there.

Once the idea is in place you can then cross the idea with the idea of the tag, you could, for example, investigate one tagsurf entry (blog entry), and one tag. Then only the entries that contain that tag will appear in the two tress. And if an entry does not have that tag, then all its subbranches would be excluded, even if they have the tag. (Thanks Andy for this idea)

Doing it on Technorati
Another one that has all the information to generate those views would be Technorati. Of course I would rather see it in a decentralised way. But it would be so easy for them to do it, while to do it in a decentralised way might be such a nightmare, that I am absolutely hopeful that they might make it before. Think about it. A Technorati page: investigate blogsphere local structure. You pass an url to this page, and the said structure appears. Up to depth… say 3.

Update: BN (in the comments) points out to BlogPulse’s Conversation Tracker, as a limited solution to what I was suggesting. It still has many limits, but it is surely a step in the right direction. Beside is good to be reminded that Technorati isn’t the only service to observe the blogsphere.

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

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.