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

I’m at Coopis 2004 right now (in Agia Napa, Cyprus) and next week I’ll move to Jerusalem in order to meet Zvi and other people of the Multiagent Systems Research Group of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I’ll be back in my office on November 9.
I was hoping to do a lot of work during the coopis conference but the wireless network is not working very well and so expect few or no blogging at all.
I almost forgot to say that I’m presenting “Trust-aware Collaborative Filtering for Recommender Systems” (find it under papers section). Check it out if you are interested in Recommender Systems and Trust.

Some colleagues of mine are working on “how people can reach a shared common dictionary/language to denote concepts” (or at least understand each other still using their keywords). See Advertising games. We want to test ideas using real data from the blogosphere. The idea is to detect when 2 bloggers are posting about the same concept/topic but use different names to tag it (the post’s category). For example, I use “trust and reputation”, someone else uses “reputation” but we may speak about the same concept.
The questions:
- There is an aggregated repository of posts with categories?
- If not, Have you any idea about how can I collect this information?
Requirement:
- posts must have a category associated (livejournal and blogger don’t let do this, while MovableType and Wordpress yes).
Some ongoing web search about the topic we’re doing can be found at this wiki page, and this too. Thanks for help!

The long tail: economy is changing!
“Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.
By Chris Anderson”

100 electrodes implanted directly into the motor cortex of a 24-year-old quadriplegic man allows him to control computer directly and hence play videogames and check email. Read the article in Nature . I would be interested in reading the explanation of the man on how he learnt to control the computer and how he feels in controlling it. The similar questions are: “how have you learnt to move your finger?” and “how do you feel when you move a finger?”. It is something it is difficult (or impossible?) to explain, it just seems natural. I may guess it is the same for the man and his brain control on the computer. Unluckly the article does not analyze this. (found via BoingBoing)

When millions of users will have Desktop.google.com installed, Google will simply release a new version in which the user can check a box and say “Share the files in my disk” (maybe only files in a certain directory). This will create in a second an enormous P2P (peer-to-peer) network, in which you can search for files directly on other users’ disks. What do you think? Make sense?
UPDATE: If I were Google, I let users choose also “share your files only with your friends on Orkut”. In this way Orkut would becoma a uber-useful network (now is a bit pointless), and Google Corporation will have all the worlds users for all the services. And increase what it knows.

Just few days ago I was commenting on new google features and now we have another one: Desktop.google.com. It allows to index and search every file stored in your filesystem, every site in your Internet Explorer cache, every email in your Outlook, every chat/instant message in your AOL. (It is only for Window$ so I have no way to try it.)
This reminded me of a post of Alf Eaton:Things Google knows about you. The list (now increased) is pretty scary.
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It seems Joi Ito is having some problems with Italian (giggling) translators. Ah, those Italians, always joking and laughing and giggling … ;-)
[yes, I had to check the meaning of to giggle, that is “To laugh quietly in short bursts or in a nervous or silly way.”]

Citeseer is less useful today than how it was 2 years ago. It seems they stop the crawling looking for papers. [I have a project about adding “web of trust” to citeseer so that every user can express a degree of interest in another users’ kept bibliography) but it seems I never have the time to seriously start it.] Anyway this post is to cite 2 interesting related projects: LionShare and Eprints … (read below for links and details)
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Google print, Google SMS, Google helps China censorships.
The Google Italian version is now offering: maps (just search for an Italian city, such as Bologna), trains timetables (just search for two Italian cities, such as bologna roma), UPS packets monitoring (just enter an UPS code, such as 1Z1234567891234567). [found via Pandemia]
For the train timetable, Google.it doesn’t use the Italian Trenitalia but the German reiseauskunft. Well, I guess they are more reliable (both as train service and Internet site).
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I’ve spent the past week (21-24/10/2004) in Fribourg (Switzerland) working and discussing with Hassan Masum. I was guest of the Theoretical Physics Department of the University of Fribourg, precisely of the Interdisciplinary group leaded by Prof. Zhang. They apply methods and tools of Theoretical Physics (Statistical Mechanics, Probability Calculus ecc.) to other fields of research, namely economics, game theory, sociology or biology.
Hassan and Prof. Zhang are writing a book on Reputation Society. To get an idea of the topics you might want to have a look at their Manifesto for the Reputation Society.
We had 4 days of very interesting discussions. Perhaps they were not very focused (this is typical of me, I must admit) but we were free to jump from future economics systems to copyright and intellectual property issues, from emergent democracy to computation trust systems, from collaborative filtering to religion, from recommender systems to privacy, from … We were annotating issues in this wiki page and from it you can have an idea of the scope of our discussions.
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