P. S.: Post Scriptum

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.

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

I am at the Semantic Web Applications and Perspectives. Is the first Italian Semantic Web Workshop. It took some time, but finally Italy is moving along too. The talks are mostly in English, and more and more people here speak English really good, which use to be rare in Italy.

My first impression is that there is a big gap between the applications that try to enforce a unified onthology from above and the one (very rare) that have an open mind and gap different onthologies, or even work with open onthologies. I am still half way, but so far I feel I found really interesting:
Peer-to-Peer Semantic Coordination and Platypus Wiki: a Semantic Wiki Wiki Web.
On the second:
Google Search, c2 page and the sourceforge project page.

More to come

You know, maybe because my father has been a journalist for so many years I have always been raised to appreciate the complexity of life. And yet I still can’t understand why do we need all this complex machinery.

I totally agree on the importance of the semantic web. And, boy, am I thrilled on the possibility that we might be generating the the internet operating system. I am also aware of the cutting edge problem of who owns your data.

But what I just can’t get is why do we need to make things that can actually be quite simple, into this amazing complexity. I might not be getting the whole picture, and I admit ignorance, above stupidity. But still, why do we need to build this whole house all at once? Example del.icio.us has been amazing, and trivial at the same time. And amazing also because it was so trivial.

Now let’s expand the concept:
Instead of storing one single link let’s store two links, and a set of tags in the middle. Two links with their two titles and maybe their two descriptions. And one set of tags between them.

And people will naturally start using interesting tags.

Like:
‘explains’, ‘terrorises’, ‘defines’, ‘is’, ‘IsTerrorisedBy’, ‘embedds’, ‘uses’, …

It will also be fun.

And then get a page for all the links that uses a certain URI as it’s first link(…/subj/…), and another for those that uses another as their second URI (…/obj/…).

Then you can use delicious to store those pages.

The bookmarks manager was del.icio.us? I can assure you that this will be at least org.asm.ic! And it will not cost the programmer more than 200 lines of code. LAMP, PHP, MySQL, keep it simple. And we will all use it.