P. S.: Post Scriptum » powerlaw

My first 2 talks available online: Tags & 21st Century Democracy

Pietro — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:12:49 +0000

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 [...] No related posts.

Would you rather have sex or know about it?

Pietro — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:38:46 +0000

This is quite interesting. According to this very unscientific statistics, with way too few data, but enough to start showing some trends, we discover that people who just completed elementary school has way more sex than everybody else.

Elementary school 24 Junior high / middle school 11 High school 10 College 11 College – post [...] 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 [...]...

The new project: TagBay. Tagging e-Bay

Pietro — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 16:18:37 +0000

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 [...] 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 [...]...
My new homepage 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 [...]...

Small China

Pietro — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 12:28:47 +0000

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 [...] 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 [...]...
My new homepage 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 [...]...

On Tag Clouds, Metric, Tag Sets and Power Laws

Pietro — Wed, 25 May 2005 18:52:59 +0000

Note: This entry is connected also to a mindmap. Some people were having problems in opening the page because of that. As such the mindmap has been stored in a separate page, and can be viewed from here.

Introduction

As correctly pointed out by Jeffrey Zeldman tag clouds are becoming more and more popular. Yet [...] 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 [...]...

Tagsurf first review

Pietro — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 15:28:57 +0000

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 [...] No related posts.

Bloggers without Borders

Pietro — Thu, 30 Dec 2004 09:44:53 +0000

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.

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