Paolo blog: Ramblings on Web2.0, Trust, Reputation, Recommender Systems, Social Software, Free Software, ICT4D and much more

(Via BoingBoing) Microsoft’s crapware browser, Explorer, has more security vulnerabilities than my block has dope-dealers, but this is ridiculous. MSFT now advises its users to not click links, but rather to type them in by hand:
Micro$oft says:The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER.

It’s like if a door constructor would say: “Since we are not able to make good doors, don’t touch the handle because you could get hurted”. In a competitive market, this productor would be out of the market in few seconds.

The alternative? Easy! Download Mozilla or Firebird.
Mozilla is a wonderful browser, is Free Software (Free as in Freedom) and works perfectly also on M$Windows.
Note also that Mozilla has now a global usage share of 1.8% and is increasing.

Since Seb ha cited my paper as epinions empirical analysis paper, I’d like to mention other 2 papers that analyze epinions web of trust:
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Yes, YASN (Yet Another Social Network). Have you noticed that Add as a friend is the most common link in websites created these days?
Anyway, this time we have SongBuddy. Social software + online music: an explosive pair!
SongBuddy is a new way to find music that’s already available on the Internet. By finding songs on bands’ and labels’ sites and sharing the address of those songs with your friends, you can explore music you’ll love that you wouldn’t hear anywhere else. So sign up, make some friends and list some music. You won’t even need to install any software, SongBuddy works with your current media player.
Here my profile.
SongBuddy also produces a FOAF file representing your friends and uses the MusicBrainz RDF namespace.
The term of service is also very good!
Unless otherwise specified, all content on this site is copyright SongBuddy LLC. You may use the data on this site under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0 Creative Commons license.

Another similar site worth mentioning is Webjay by Lucas Gonze but I haven’t had time to try it yet.

This post also appears on the open channel playlistlogging

On hublog I have discovered I like it, collaborative filtering for web pages with a 1-click rate bookmarklet.

Since I spoke of WikiTravel, I like to mention World66. That seems a lot more advanced.
I’m wondering if my next holidays will be based on a work licenced under a Creative Commons licence. That would be great!

Even if I’m more interested in the World Social Forum 2004 (see also on Rediff), it is worth noting that the World Economic Forum 2004 included a session on blogs!

It is good or bad that this group of people started to speak in public about blogs? We’ll see but I’m very unconfident.

Read more on Whiskey Bar or read some quotes I extracted from the article (since its content is released under a Creative Commons licence, it is perfectly legal to reproduce it here and to share it):
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I have seen on Many-to-Many that there is a new social networking service, Orkut.com.
The site states that the service is in affiliation with Google.
Orkut.com was created by Orkut Buyukkokten, who works for Google. Actually, what is fantastic about Google is that this company invites its engineers to spend one day a week on personal projects! Read more on Cnet.

Since joining Orkut.com is by invitation only, I ask to everyone that is already in to invite me. Thanks.
Membership to orkut is by invitation only.
If you have a friend who’s a member of orkut, have them invite you to join.

UPDATE: I got an invitation by Jeremy. I’ll post more about how Orkut looks from inside soon. In the meantime, if you want to be my “friend”, just ask! ;-)

I collected some conferences related to Trust and Reputation, Social Networks and Recommender systems.
The wiki page is at http://moloko.itc.it/trustmetricswiki/moin.cgi/TrustRelatedConferences and of course you are invited to edit it adding new conferences or moving old conferences.

With Mixmaster it is possible to combine the content of a site with the layout of a different site.
I produced some funny mix by mapping the content of my site on Boingboing.net layout and on Smartmobs.com layout and on Cnn.com layout and on New York Times layout and on News.google.it layout and on Slashdot.org layout and on
Simplebits.com layout and on Deanforamerica.com layout and on Cesca layout.
The content of governo.it (empty propaganda) on my layout is instead pretty disturbing!

Call For Papers
Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics (WWW 2004)
http://www.blogpulse.com/www2004-workshop.html

Important Dates
Deadline of electronic submission: March 12 , 2004
Workshop: May 17 or 18, 2004

This post also appears on the open channel calls for papers and weblog research
(Seb is used to ping topicexchange channels and I think it is a good idea)
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