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Fell in love with #Git. Loved back. Merge. No conflicts. Many projects will come. #geekFebruary 3, 2012 9:47
@La7tv ha ragione. Chi fa un lavoro monotono, lo odia, e poi lavora male. Però ci vogliono mutui per i precari, facilità a trovare e sussidiFebruary 2, 2012 12:03
The Meaning of Recovery Has Changed, You Just Don't Know It | Psychology Today: #AA #addictions #alcohol #drugs: http://t.co/4FhcF5iwFebruary 2, 2012 11:41
Stanton Peele: This is How People Quit Addictions: Stop believing you need it: #AA #addictions #alcohol #belief ... http://t.co/idFHDkRnFebruary 2, 2012 11:08
@fabriwoods :-) sai, noi a Roma, abbiamo una visione un po' mitizzata del clima nella Pianura Padana.February 1, 2012 10:57
@fabriwoods santo cielo, ma quanti metri sono? Anche questo a Parma?February 1, 2012 10:51
Who suggests going back to Nature aim for an idillic state that never existed. Animals cheat and specialize, too. That IS N.! #permacultureFebruary 1, 2012 9:05
In Italy people are protesting (movimento dei #forconi) for the rising price of gasoline and NO ONE is making the connection with @peakoilJanuary 26, 2012 1:53
PietroMap: I added the #mindmap #Terzo incontro transition town roma to my website http://t.co/d6vj5KGPJanuary 25, 2012 11:37
The empire strikes back: LEAKED MEMO: Wall Street Lobbyist's Secret Plan To Squash The 99% Movement. http://t.co/V5wRYXLGJanuary 25, 2012 11:14

Follow @pietrosperoni (556 followers)

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 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

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

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.

How to use social networks in emergencies.

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.

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My new homepage

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

How to use social networks in emergencies.

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