P. S.: Post Scriptum » blogging

How Twitter, Google, Wolfram|Alpha and WIkipedia are not competing at all

Pietro — Tue, 26 May 2009 14:49:43 +0000

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 [...] Related posts:

No more Ivory Towers I am right now at the FET 11 conference. There I was attending a session from my old friend Josh Bongard on Crowdsourcing Science . There I commented that it would be already a good thing if scientists started to make themselves available to the wider public. This by giving a timetable when they are [...]...

Timesonline censors unconfortable comments

Pietro — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 19:08:30 +0000

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 [...] No related posts.

Facebook as a spiritual tool

Pietro — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 20:57:02 +0000

[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 [...] Related posts:

No more Ivory Towers I am right now at the FET 11 conference. There I was attending a session from my old friend Josh Bongard on Crowdsourcing Science . There I commented that it would be already a good thing if scientists started to make themselves available to the wider public. This by giving a timetable when they are [...]...

How to use social networks in emergencies.

Pietro — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 10:26:40 +0000

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 [...] Related posts:

No more Ivory Towers I am right now at the FET 11 conference. There I was attending a session from my old friend Josh Bongard on Crowdsourcing Science . There I commented that it would be already a good thing if scientists started to make themselves available to the wider public. This by giving a timetable when they are [...]...

Moving to Dublin

Pietro — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 23:33:21 +0000

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 [...] No related posts.

Review: Smarking

Pietro — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 08:56:36 +0000

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.

Being the first bookmarking service from Italy, Fabio understood the importance and the frustration that comes from getting pages in a language different than your own, and that potentially you don’t understand. So he integrated in the bookmarking services the meta information “language�?. The value of it being generally guessed by the program (don’t ask me how) but such that you can overwrite. And of course this meant giving to users the possibility to search only for pages in a certain language. But not only this, Smarking can itself work in different languages, meaning that all the messages can appear in different languages. For now just in Italian (and obviously English). But I know some others are arriving (my guess being Spanish, German and French). If you consider that right now if someone wants a bookmarking service he has to wrestle with English, and if you think that many Italians are really not that happy with that, you might understand the business potentiality of this decision.

Also, (and who can appreciate better than me that), when you look at who have bookmarked a page, you get the whole tag cloud. Yess! He also promised me that eventually he will release and API that for each page returns the full tag cloud. Which, I think, is also very important. From a visual prospective, I would say that it managed to bring home delicious’ lesson in simplicity. One of the things I did not like in many other bookmarking services was the size of the everpresent logo. And how much useful space is being used for the everpresent banner header. Spurl is the perfect example for this. Well, Smarking, like delicious, but also like Simpy does not make this error. The service is geared toward a more young audience than many other bookmarking services. Maybe for Fabio’s young age, too (he just ended graduated), the service contains many social tools. From the ability to friend a user, see who friended you and send messages to a user. I don’t, personally see the importance of those tools, as I prefer to have all my messages just reach me by email. And cut the middleman. But teenagers everywhere love them. Smarking also let you vote on (on the standard 1 to 5 stars scale), how good each link is. Another quite useless feature, but again I know I am in the minority on this. What instead is really interesting, and the reason why I might actually consider to pass to smarking myself (yes, I know, I am still using del.icio.us, shame on me), is for the possibility, when you bookmark a page, to ask the service to check it for you, and tell you when the content changes. Think about it, this is so important. Any page that you need to keep an eye on; every blog that has no rss feed (yes, there are some); you just add it here and receive a message when it has changed. Quite useful I would say.

For the rest, the service is still in its infancy. I know that Fabio waited to go live until he could clear all the important bug. Other differences include the possibility to write as much text as you like when describing a website. Making it more useful for those that see social bookmarking as a form of blogging. It is also possible to download your bookmarks from del.icio.us or from an xml file (this I insisted that it was included). And there is a tracker-wiki for further development, and a blog for announcements.

All together a good work I would say. It has some extra possibilities (like the language meta information and the possibility to keep an eye on a page) that I think eventually will become mainstream in social bookmarking services. It is probably a bit overloaded of tools, and social possibilities. But then again, I too asked Fabio if he could implement a system to let me discover users is Smarking who were female, over 18, from Europe, and interested in Taoism, Go and Bioinformatics. And he still have to get back to me on that. So maybe all those social tools might not be that unwelcome.

No related posts.

A new Base

Pietro — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 01:52:55 +0000

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 [...] No related posts.

Blogging over the line

Pietro — Sat, 16 Apr 2005 08:17:17 +0000

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 [...] No related posts.

Visualizing the double hierarchical nature of entries.

Pietro — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 17:04:03 +0000

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 [...] Related posts:

No more Ivory Towers I am right now at the FET 11 conference. There I was attending a session from my old friend Josh Bongard on Crowdsourcing Science . There I commented that it would be already a good thing if scientists started to make themselves available to the wider public. This by giving a timetable when they are [...]...

technorati tag & rss

Pietro — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 19:03:07 +0000

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 [...] Related posts:

No more Ivory Towers I am right now at the FET 11 conference. There I was attending a session from my old friend Josh Bongard on Crowdsourcing Science . There I commented that it would be already a good thing if scientists started to make themselves available to the wider public. This by giving a timetable when they are [...]...