Next Saturday (May 17th, 2008) I’ll be in Milan at the Politechnic School of Design for sci.bzaar.net.
With some friends of bzaar.net and few people I still don’t know, we will brainstorm and discuss about how Web2.0 dynamics can be adapted and imported into science. A sort of hybrid between a BarCamp, a traditional event and a Pecha Kucha, about science and research. Sweet!
The title of my talk will be “How much is a researcher happy discovering the existence of Yet Another Social Network for Science?”.

I spent the beginning of the past week in Innsbruck for the 11th International Conference on Business Information Systems.
My presentation went well but I’ll post about it later. Overall the conference was interesting and worth the trip.
Many talks were mentioning Semantic Web. What extremely positively surprised me was that the approach to Semantic Web was very very pragmatic in all the presentations, a sort of Pragmatic Web or, as I prefer, a lowercase semantic web.
The peaks of the conference were a great keynote speech by Fabio Ciravegna titled “Challenges and Methodologies for Acquiring and Sharing Knowledge in Large Distributed Environments”. He presented the approach of his group at the University of Sheffield on knowledge capture, which is very very pragmatic and just makes sense. Among others, he reported how noting that what workers in a big company (Rolls-Royce) were doing was creating word and excel forms and passing them around via email, they decided to provide a simple web interface for creating forms. This simple change allowed a lot of interesting services on top of it, services which use semantics when it adds value and not for the sake of it. I cannot resume his very interesting many points here but you might want to check his slides (from a different presentation) at around page 71 or just his Web page with a list of the many projects in which semantics is used in a pragmatic and reasonable and adding value way.
Another peak was a great tutorial by Emanuele Dalla Valle titled “RSWA 2008 - Realizing a Semantic Web Application”. He explained how to develop step-by-step a Semantic Web application that expects a music style as an input; retrieves data from online music archives and event databases; merges them and let the users explore events related to artists that practice the required style. He challenged the Semantic Web technologies on the Web 2.0 ground of realizing a mash-up that reuses, transforms and combines existing data taken from the open Web (namely MusicBrainz, MusicMoz and EVDB). Again a clever use of semantics when semantics can add some value and a clear explanation.
I suggested him to record this tutorial next time and put the video somewhere on the Web because it is really a great example (the first I’ve seen) in which Semantic Web really add value over more simple way of developing applications (Web2.0). For now you can just check his slides (released under a Creative Commons license). And also check the Semantic Web Activities group at Cefriel which has many interesting projects and ideas.
And there were few other peaks: Couchsurfing is always a great experience which never ceases to amaze me. We were 6 people (Khrista and Sarah, 2 canadian girls, Bruno, a dutch guy which is spending one year traveling around Europe , see useuropeans.com, myself, and Manuel and Yvonne, our 2 lovely hosts) sleeping in a small house with mattresses everywhere.
And I started twittering thanks to the push by Andre’ Passant at the conference, who also helped me to make my foaf file to remain always up to date by automatically including the results of export of facebook, flickr and other web2.0 services. However for now the foafing didn’t really work out though.
And I also started geocaching thanks to jailway: after the conference dinner we found my first cache near the Golden Roof.
Summaryzing: lowercasesemanticwebbing, couchsurfing, geocaching, twittering, foafing, and some more *ing …

I’m going to be in Innsbruck, Austria for the 11th International Conference on Business Information Systems (BIS 2008) from this evening until the 7 of May evening. If you are attending as well, I’ll be happy to chat with you, please contact me.
Hospitality as usual found via Couchsurfing (a network of people hosting each other and a totally different way of visiting a city, try it and you’ll thank me!), this time I’m going to be hosted by DRPRUTZ who actually even organized a CS meeting in a bar, so I’m going to meet local people just few seconds after my arrival, isn’t that fabolous? We are going to be at Elferhaus bar, in the centre of Innsbruck, very close to the Golden Roof. And of course you are welcome to join if you are around.
Well, about the conference and the paper I’m presenting, I’ll write a post later, I need to run to prepare the bags and catch the train now, just wanted to quickly share how Couchsurfing never stops to amaze me!

Clay Shirky is a genius at the top of my list of people I would love to meet, others close are Cory Doctorow and Yochai Benkler.
The video embedded in this page (link to video on blip.tv) is from a speech he gave at the Web 2.0 conference 2008.
He released a lightly edited transcription of the speech on the blog of his new book, under Creative Commons By-Attribution ShareAlike licence. Since my blog is under the same license, I’m going to legally copy and paste some parts of it here but I suggest you to read it entirely and to watch the video.

The critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin (…) the transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. (…)
And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

(…) a project started by a professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. It’s a Wiki Map for crime in Brazil. If there’s an assault, if there’s a burglary, if there’s a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring.(…)
Maybe this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don’t pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that this one succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn’t, it’s illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn’t have imagined existing even five years ago.

So that’s the answer to the question, “Where do they find the time?” Or, rather, that’s the numerical answer. But beneath that question was another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: “Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves.”
(…)At least they’re doing something.

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it’s not, and that’s the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?

Read the rest on Clay’s blog so you get to know the story about the mouse. I think it is worth your time.

Great article on Financial Times No place to hide. It tells two alarming stories for getting the idea and then analyzes the changes and threats social networking insert into our lifes.

1st story: Graham Mallaghan was recently feeling very awkward because he started to increasingly found himself being intimidated and threatened with no apparent explanation. Both his wife and him had the brakes on their bikes cut. People were take very close photos of him on their phone. Or people waiting for him and shouting abuse such as ‘Wait till he comes out, we’ll kick his f****** head in’.
Then Mallaghan discovered on Facebook a group called “For Those Who Hate The Little Fat Library Man”, dedicated to insulting him. Mallaghan is a library assistant at the University of Kent in Canterbury and one of his responsibilities is to enforce the library’s noise regulations, and he believes the group was set up by students unhappy with his efforts.
At its peak the group had 363 members.

2nd story: In August, Laura Evans received a private message from someone she had cut out of her life a few years previously. She had changed her phone number and e-mail, and even moved house in a bid to lose contact with certain people, and now they were back in her life. The ease with which they had found her came as a shock.
The message said: ‘I bet you didn’t think you’d find me on here, well here I am. You changed your number, like a coward’ Let’s just hope we never have to bump into one another ever again.’
‘I was just sat there staring at the computer in shock for hours; I just kept re-reading the message over and over. I don’t think I ever once thought about it being unsafe - you just log off if anyone annoys you. But here, at the click of a mouse, was one of the people I had worked hard to distance myself from, and he had thrown a knife at my online social bubble.’
Evans shut down her account last month, but admits that she still feels like she is missing out on something by not having one.

Changes and threats social networking insert into our lifes.
The networking currency is ‘friends’ ‘ online camaraderie expressed in the links that users create between their homepages and the pages of others members of the network.
Social networking has rapidly transformed the way we interact with each other, and has started to redefine the idea of friendship, making it something much more nebulous than in pre-web days. But where casual friendship thrives, so does casual enmity. The free association that social networking sites put within everyone’s reach cuts both ways, creating an equally fast, free and easy tool for those who do not want to be our friends. And the social pressure users feel to create more and more connections scatters personal information about themselves more and more indiscriminately.

The rest in the brilliant article on Financial Times No place to hide, also mentioning “The other side of social networking” sites such as Enemybook (allows you to add people as Facebook enemies below your friends, specify why they are enemies and notify them that they are enemies. You can also see who lists you as an enemy, and even become friends with the enemies of your enemies), Snubster (similar to Enemybook) and Hatebook (a sort of open forum for abuse and aggression)

(photo by MegElizabeth_ licensed under Creative Commons)