P. S.: Post Scriptum

Some time ago I remember reading a comment.

La Repubblica, one of the first italian newspaper, holds a big internet website. As part of their initiative they have La Repubblica TV, which is a sort of television, just recorded for the net. You can download it when you want, and see it at your leisure. It includes everything: advertisments, opening music, interviews, etc.
Well the comment was discussing how that internet TV is quite dumb. Not really using up the powers of the net.

It took me as a really smart comment, and later I thought that also the lessons from the universities who are being recorded and released are still part of the old way of doing things.

And today I saw something which I thought might be part of the new way: The lessons on history from Lars Brownworth,
12 Byzantine Rulers.

Lars is a professor at a private high school, and if I got it right not even a professor in history, but history is his passion, and so in his free time he started investigating the middle ages. His lessons in pocast format really had success, and now his podcast is among the most followed on the net.

Why do I think his podcast is part of the new wave of education, and not part of the old wave:

• The lessons are not produced by a University. He did was not advertised as being an expert, and yet his succes came because of how interesting they were. How often have we followed a lesson at the university (or at high school), thinking the professor was not that good, and probably some students were actually better. Universities need to cover every class. But with podcasts there was no class to cover. He was an expert in something, he spoke about that.
• There is a great desire for real high quality content. We all recognise the power of the internet, but experts that blog about their area of expertise are still few. It is easy to find blogs and discussion forums where many amateurs discuss a topic. We are moving toward a time where the real experts start to use the internet to share about their topic. This will take away space to the amatour (it was nice to be the expert in a Taoistic forum, but am I really an expert), but real knowledge will start to flow more easily.
• It uses podcasts, and website. Cheap but high quality technology. Available to everybody
• His expertise was so great that he manage to induce an interest even in people who had no natural interest for the subject

And the conclusion of all this is that more and more material will start to flow. Up to now we have mostly seen amatours discussing subjects. While the experts would write books in the old fashion way, copyright them, and make themselves unavailable. Essentially putting a higher and higher distance between them and their public. Now an expert can teach, and if he is really good he can share not only his knowledge, but his burning passion too. The tools are available, and soon the best lessons on a subject will not be from the universities, but directly from the expert website. At that point universities will start pointing to them, and this will induce a great change in society. Maybe we might even reach the point that some website will offer lessons worth a certain number of credits. A fully decentralized university.

Some of you might remember that I wrote a post about the long tail of the ruling class. The post was in Italian and got translated in English by blogger Phil Edward. I took the translation copied it in my blog (with a link), but said that I did not fully agree with Phil understanding of my post. I didn’t enter more into details. And then there was silence, and in the silence I decided it was easier to just ignore the whole discussion. But a few days ago Nicholas Carr from Rough Type wrote a post on how the long tail permits to the service the puts in touch people to make massive amount of money, but to the people who produce the actual content not much money. Absolutely true, and this is why you don’t see google advertisments in my blog. But this is a very different problem from what I was discussing when I was speaking about the long tail of the Ruling Class. Mainly because I was not speaking about the ruling class but about the ‘classe dirigente’. Which is not exactly the ruling class, although I still can’t find a better translation. Ruling class smells a bit too much of kings and queens and prime ministers. And I was actually speaking about ‘classe dirigente’ as people who have authority over a certain field.

So when Phil commented on Nick post:

I blogged on this last year, in response to Pietro Speroni:

I felt I had to answer. Because my post was all about a multidimensional space (all our interests), which gets mistreated as a unidimensional space (money). Poor chap! For a multidimensional space to be treated as a unidimensional one is fairly common, but never fair. And the general excuse is ‘to understand better’, or ‘to simplify a bit’. But I suspect that multidimensional spaces might take it personally, bacause if you treat them bad, they can become quite convoluted, if you know what I mean. Maybe I should write a long post on the importance of not making models (even mental ones) with too few dimensions. But I think I shall leave it for some time next year. And then I can say that it was long due.

In any case I decided to copy my comment to Nick post here. Continue reading Where life is and money isn’t

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 year or so. I am speaking about how tags, and tag clouds, and distance between tags, and so on.
So, in brief we made a web site to tag material that is being sold on e-Bay. Anybody can tag any object that is being sold. Not only can any object be tagged but you can tag sellers, too (oh, we are not responsible for offensive tags, eh!).
Tags on objects can be made private or public, and you can also search among your tags, among everybody else tags, and eventually (when we code it) it will be possible to search among the tags of another user, like in del.icio.us.

Now that the summary for the people who have no time has been done, let’s try to explain the idea in the details for those who have a bit more time.

Pages:
On TagBay, right now, there are 3 type of pages: e-Bay Search Pages, TagBay Tag Search Page, TagBayUser Tag Search Page, Item Page, and Seller Page.

• Search Page: It is possible from inside Tag Bay to make searches on e-Bay on specific keywords. The user can then add tags to each object that came out, store the tags added all at once, or store the tags of a single object. The same thing can be done in the Tag Search Page
• TagBay Tag Search Page: In this page the user gets all the results for a single tag that someone have used. Nothing fancy (for now). Items where the tag only appears as a private tag will not appear here.
• TagBayUser Tag Search Page: In this page the user gets all the results for a single tag that he have used. If the user is logged in and is looking at his own tags, also the items tagged in a private way will appear.
• Item Page: Each object has its specific page. From such page any user can see what are the public tags that other users have used for that page. Also they can define their personal tags for that object, if their tags are going to be private, and the tags of the seller.
• Seller Page: And then there is the seller page, and in the seller page any user can tag any seller. The use of tag for sellers is still limited, but will be increased in the future.

The natural use of the site

• For a seller or for a shop A seller might want to use the site to tag all the objects that he is selling, giving for each object all the tags related. Thus increasing the possibility for it to be found. We suggest to list the tag in the order of importance, as soon we are going to use the order consider the importance in the search page.
  Also, if a person wants to make a cool list of objects, they can tag exactly those objects, with a tag they never used, and then link to the page in their directory of this tag. Thus creating on the spot, their lists. Also sellers will want to tag their objects, and people making searches will tag objects to make lists of objects they want to follow, before jumping on a transaction. We think there is more than enough material to generate interesting behaviour. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same emergent behaviour that we are used to see. After all we are just exploring the possibilities of social folksonomy.
• A shop To the possibilities before, a shop who is selling on ebay might be interested to make sure that the shop itself (remember that you can tag sellers, and not only shops) have all the tags related to the merchandise that they are selling
• Someone buying Our suggestion for someone who wishes to buy, on e-Bay, would be to first look under the tag search, to see if there is anybody who has already tagged any object that they are interested in. This does not necessarily be someone else who is buying, but also someone who is selling. Then tag the objects they are interested themselves, to have it in their own list of objects. Then they could go to the search e-Bay page with the necessary keywords, and add the chosen tag to all the objects interesting. At that point a first selection have been made, and all the possible objects have been tagged. At this point, he could choose one or those objects, change the tags to private, and start betting on it.
• Someone suggesting And finally if someone is just trying to suggest some possible objects, he could search e-Bay for those objects, tag them with a unique tag and present the url of the list to whoever is interested.

There are many other ways to use TagBay. In a sense TagBay is a toy, and not a game. And as every good toy it can be used for many different games. We suggest here only some of them. Also TagBay itself is rapidly evolving. We have tons of stuff we are interested in including, and if you have been reading my blog, you know how my problem is always to find people to code my ideas, more than to find them. And this is why I am so happy for Derek work!

Difficulties that we found:
There were a number of issues that came out when we started developing this program.

1. Public vs private tags:
   Why would someone tag an object if they are interested to buy it? After all aren’t they making it easier to others to find it, by adding those tags?
   This was a serious doubt that we had, and finally we decided to give the possibility to users to tag objects privately. Yet there have to be a balance between private tags and public tags, as public tags are necessary to generate the emerging folksonomy that we wish to use. So we decided for a compromise: public tags can be done from the search page, but private tags requite you to go to the specific object page. In our view (but we are ready to be proven wrong) someone would go to the search page, tag all the entries where he might be interested. Then chose one, and tag that one in a private way.
2. Limitations due to the temporary nature of the objects
   Considering that most object exist on ebay only for few weeks before being sold, wouldn’t this be not enough time to make a tag cloud and let all cool emergent properties that folksonomy induces, appear?
   Maybe, but sellers also can tag the objects they are selling, thus giving a fresh start to all the objects. Also side by side to tagging object we are giving the possibility to tag sellers. Which eventually should survive each transaction and build up an interesting tag cloud.
3. I spoke about sellers tagging their own objects, but wouldn’t this invite people to spam your site? After all, wouldn’t it be much better for a seller to add many tags to be present in many searches?
   Ah ha! You think tag clouds can be spammed. This is false. Tag clouds cannot be spammed, and no one understand this. And we shall use this site to prove it. We have nothing against spammers, they are absolutely welcome in our site and spam it as much as they feel. Add all the tags they want to each object they sell. It will make ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE in the search page. Tag clouds are unspammable. And our engine will use tag clouds as its base. Everybody else uses tag sets. And this makes them easily spammable. So, no we don’t fear spammers. In fact we hope that spammers will come to our TagBay site. They are just people trying to sell their stuff, we are trying to make sellers meet with buyers. Wouldn’t be bad to single out spammers just because they are spammers.

TagBay is obviously still in beta, and there are many things that need to be coded. If you have any idea on how to make it better please do not hesitate to contact me. If you want to make a difference on what the final product will be now is the time to do it. Also all new suggestion implemented should be listed in a special page with links to the original suggester home page.

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

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 effect from the government. The only reason they give is that there are simply too many blogs.

Well, I have a different idea, I think that censorship is not useless as a strategy for China’s government. It is counterproductive. It is making the the chinese blogsphere stronger. Let me explain why do I think it is so. Continue reading Small China

I wanted to start this entry congratulating with Joshua for the deal. But I won’t.
Tha facts: the web site delicious have been sold to Yahoo!.

I personally don’t dislike Yahoo. I positively hate them. For having eaten and raped startup websites, one after the other. For being totally obscure in terms of contact with the public. For refusing to answer e-mails. For being so big that they can just claim: “we are too big to answer your e-mails”. We can ignore you, and trample on you; we will not even notice. I have something personal with them from the moment they deleted my web page back in 2003; and with it all the material inside; which included some preprints of academic papers I wrote; some of them I had in single copy. I hate yahoo because they don’t get what is the web2.0 and they try hard to copy it. And when they fail in copying it, they try to buy it. As if you could buy a community. As if you could own a community. As if you could buy a language and the agreement to keep the data open.

So maybe I should congratulate with Joshua for having sold something which had no price for some real and tangible money. But I still will not. Because delicious was not only a community. It was also an experiment. A place for us geeks to meet and discuss. A place where we were changing the web. Yes WE were changing the web through our ideas. And Joshua was good in picking the best ideas. Inviting us to give more. Now do you really think this will continue under Yahoo!’s reign? Forget it! At least for my part.

But this is not the reason why I shall not congratulate with Joshua. No I shall not congratulate with him because he could have made it. Because delicious was clearly, and recognised, the best bookmarking service on the web. And with the whole community behind giving suggestion it was prosperous and growing. Because people have pleaded him to start charging, or put advertisments, or do something, but let us pay for it. Because we knew. We knew he could not possibly pay off it all by himself. And we were happy to join in. We were happy to pay. How many services are you aware of where the costumers ask to pay for them? Few indeed!

Of all the people who have commented the action I feel the person who better captures my feelings is Ronald Johnson, who comments:

Some lessons to learn here:

1. Never trust a startup service to store your important data no matter how the owner seems honest to you. Sooner or later he/she will run away with the money and YOUR data.
2. Never trust a corporate entity to continue storing your important data. Now that they stole your data, you are subjected to the user-specific ads and they abuse you no matter how strong you cry.
3. Never act like a fanboy on services you don’t trust. Instead, invest your time and knowledge on open source projects to ensure your efforts are never sold to third party evils.

I have to add, one of the thing I found most disturbing was the form whith which Joshua announced it. In evidence the words that I found most disturbing:

We’re proud to announce that del.icio.us has joined the Yahoo! family. Together we’ll continue to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet, with a big emphasis on the power of community. We’re excited to be working with the Yahoo! Search team – they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web. (We’re also excited to be joining our fraternal twin Flickr!)

We want to thank everyone who has helped us along the way – our employees, our great investors and advisors, and especially our users. We still want to get your feedback, and we look forward to bringing you new features and more servers in the future.

I look forward to continuing my vision of social and community memory, and taking it to the next level with the del.icio.us community and Yahoo!

The post stinks of corporate declaration, and has already signed the destiny of delicious as just another piece in the yahoo puzzle. A more honest post would have spoken of the money that was passed. How they made an offer that could not be refused. Of the risks of the passage. It would still make people upset, but we might have felt that it was coming from Joshua and not through Joshua, from the Yahoo P.R. office.

All this calls for some actions, for I really don’t want to support Yahoo; and if all I can do is passive resistance, then that’s what I shall do!

1. I shall look for a good alternative to Yahoo, ehm, I mean del.icio.us. The folks at slashdot suggest Simpy.
2. I want to look better at microformats, and in particular at rel-tag. It might be possible to install a small bookmarking service on site, and then have it send standard info to the community at large. In this way I would not be vulnerable anymore to the next Yahoo! acquisition.
3. While I am there I should also look for ways to get out of Flickr (who has been acquire by Y! too). Don’t miss the wonderful description of the mess Yahoo is doing with the Flickr signup page. There I also heard that 23hq might be a good alternative. Still I would prefer something on site that speaks a common language.
4. I have to decide what to do with the Delicious Mind Map Maker. You see, I really don’t want to support Yahoo. Not even indirectly. So I am tempted to take it offline. But if I find a better service, and it is bound to be there now that other geeks will start migrating to come out of the belly of the beast, I might just modify it to sustain this other service. Nothing have been decided yet.
5. And then I might instead develop my own service or help someone else develop their service, using the tagclouds ideas I spoke about early.
6. And last but not least, there is the possibility that I might develop the famous search utility I have been speaking about. Up to now, apart the constraints in time, what really stopped me where ethical reasons. Joshua asked people not to screenscrape delicious, so I felt I would abide by his request. I surely did not want to tax the servers of a poor hacker. But now the ‘poor’ hacker have sold the golden eggs’ hen, and walked away with tons of cash. And I am sure Yahoo will not even notice if I start screenscraping them. At least until they start putting all sorts of advertisments which might make it too hard to do. Hmm, active resistance might have some attraction!

So I probably should congratulate with Joshua. He sold a bunch of quite simple and useless code to Yahoo. He prospected them the possibility to have a great and creative community. Now all he has to do is walk away with the cash, start a delicious clone and we will all be more than happy to join him in the new adventure. Hell! We will not even ask for our part of the booty. Although we might ask for a dinner in a good restaurant.
And I think that’s just fair.

ADDENDUM:
After reading all the comments on slashdot I found a link to a page with most bookmarking services compared. It is a bit old, so not totally updated. But yet it gives some good overviews and can be used for some good pre-screening. Also the maintainer of Simpy, Otis, wrote a long comment explaining how he might even adapt the code to make the mindmap work for that too!

I suddenly relised I don’t have the time to do all the things I was interested in (and keep what remains of my mental sanity). So out of need I decided to make the following offer.

The technorati tag plug in gives the possibility to have technorati tags, and for each tag a different page. What instead it does not offer is the possibility to have also an rss feed for each tag. So I offer 20 € for whoever makes the necessary changes to the plugin so that side by side to the tag page (here available at http://blog.pietrosperoni.it/tag/… ) I can have an rss feed of the entries in my blog with each tag (possibly at http://blog.pietrosperoni.it/rsstag/…).

The changes will have to be open source, so that they can then join the mainstream wp program. And be on that plugin. I know 20€ is not a lot, but I reason that for the right person this is a simple hack that might take half an hour. For me it would take ages (mainly because I need to understand how wp is working, and it’s not that trivial).
Oh, yes, I can pay via paypal. Or buy you something via Amazon, LJ, Flickr. Whatever.

And now to comment the above:
It’s interesting how the spreading of open source software also means the opening of a whole new market of people helping each other. I could never have made the above offer if I was using blogger, or lj.

Addendum: Since the new release of wordpress 2.0 includes the possibility to use categories as tags, the above offer is no longer valid. Sorry.

Speaking about things that should happen, and that have not happen, one thing that I still have not seen is a browser with a feed reader such that when you go to the web page that is linked to a certain feed, it updates the feed and assumes that you have now read that feed. So for example I add Jim feeds, but on a certain period I am just passing through his web page very often. Obviously if he is updating his blog I would see it. The feed reader does not need to give me that information.

I have added the feeds of some major newspaper, but I also often go to the web page, and the result is that bloglines keep on telling me that those feeds have 200 entries that I should look at.

This evening I played with calendars. In particular with the calendar published by Mozilla. SunBird. It is pretty amazing. Also here they managed to install an open standard with which anybody can write his own calendar. The program let you then save it into a file or publish it on the web. You can also upload claendars from other people, and they will appear superimpressed on your events, so that you can see your event as well as the other calendar event.

Think about it, it is extreemly easy, and extreemly powerful. I can just write down the dates that for me are important, and people can use the info to define meeting, set up ambush, or find out when the campervan is unattended. Infinite power.

More, it is possible to set up calendars for particular type of events. For example we could, at work, set up a calendar for all the conferences on artificial life, artificial chemistry, complex system. etc. Or even a separate calendar for each of type, and each person could just subscribe to the calendars that he is interested in.

The calendar is still very limited in many ways. For example events can be assigned only to one category. The whole idea of tags and folksonomy has here yet to come. For example eventually people should be able to set each event in multiple categories, or even suggest categories for events of others.

In any case, my calendar is at http://www.pietrosperoni.it/calendar/agenda.ics. If you have firefox with the calendar plugin inserted you can just see it. If not you probably need to wait until I integrate it with my blog, which will take quite some centuries.

Update: Another thing that is definitly missing is an integration between this software and the smart phone technologies. What’s the point of having a cool phone that can connect to the net, so you can be everywhere anywhere you are, and have such phone have all your appointments, if you cannot let this phone speak, on the net, with your calendar. It does not seem such a hard thing to obtain, although I would not know where to start, so I would predict that within 6 months, no, no 4 months, a program should me around that let me integrate the 2 things. If it isn’t already there.

I finally did it. I bought myself a new phone (nokia 6670). Or shoudl I say a smatphone. Infact you should not think of this as a phone at all, but rather as a computer. A small wearable, easy to connect to the internet in any time, computer. Who happens to be of the same size of a phone. Happens to be usable as a phone. But not let it trick you. It is a computer. And nothing else. It runs an operating system: (symbian). When it freezes (and it happen) you need to reboot it (it seem that microsoft did not patent that feature).

It took me quite some time to learn to use it. And I don’t see how anybody who is not good with computers could do it, unless properly helped. In the first week I just learned to use it as a normal phone. phoning, answering, sms, … Then I started to study the more fancy stuff. I knew what I was after. Possibility to:

• send and receive e-mail
• update my blog
• check my feeds
• chat

And all this possibly at a low cost. I was not after pictures and those fancy and idiotic application.

The beginning was quite problematic. Starting from understanding that surfing via wap or via web is NOT the same thing. And if you have paid for wap you should not surf via web or find all your credit gone pretty soon. And do not believe those people at the help line that might be telling you that if you are surfing from your phone than it must be wap, thus you are covered. They don’t know what they are speaking about. Or to be totally honest, they know, unfortunately they speak for the average person. Not for your new, kickass smartphone (a.k.a. computer disguised as a phone).

Soon I learned how to get my mail from the phone (forwarding it from the gmail account to the tim account), and even get an sms every time I received an e-mail. The next step was to totally divide my mails into personal mails (gmail) and automatic mail deliveries (yahoo account). So that I only got sms for interesting stuff. I still get a couple of sms a night for spam, but all in all the system works quite well.

I then looked for a good rss reader. Rss orbit, although I have to say with quite some problems. From incorrect spacing (makes reading poetry freaky), no links in the text (useless for so many feed, del.icio.us to start with), and some feeds that would simply not work. Also it required me to ask for the feed manually each time. All the comodity of having the site come to you when it had updated, disappeared. I started using it only on few important sites, who update quite often. I also mailed the programmer, asking if some of theose bugs/feature could be fixed. and he very kindly responded. Eventually most of them will. The automatic update instead will not happen until internet flat rate for mobile will be widespread enough.

For a chat program I use IM+. I tried many, but none seemed to work well. And IM+ seemed to be professional enough. I was also very lucky. Being their first costumer with a Nokia 6670 I asked them for a free licence in excange for me testing some of their software on my phone. It worked fine for both. It was a fun extra hour of work, and I was happy to be paid with that licence.

But before moving to the blog feature let me say that soon I had started usng the camera installed, let’s say, a bit too much. In short I started taking a picture of everything. It was so fun to just be able to take picture and scrape them, all while not having to carry any extra piece of technology (i.e. camera) at all.

I tried various type of software to post to my blog, … and eventually I learned how to send pictures to flickr (via email). I also learned how to do it so that flickr would then post both the picture and my comment to a blog. SO that is what I did, I started a new blog, that I updated only from my mobile . The picture also appear at my page in flickr. And can be feed scraped from both sites.

So the result is:
I have a new cameraphone.
I have a new moblog.

And I am having lot’s of fun.