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

You must watch this Flash Video. It is the story of Media until year 2014. It contains facts such as “Google Grid”, “Googlezon” (google+amazon) and “nytimes gone offline”.
What happens to the news? And what is Epic?
Watch it, it is only 8 minutes but it is a jump in (one of the possible) futures.

Today is Linux day. If you are in Trento, pass by, it’ll be fun.

Tomorrow, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 26 2004 IS BUY NOTHING DAY.
“For 24 hours, millions of people around the world do not participate — in the doomsday economy, the marketing mind-games, and the frantic consumer-binge that’s become our culture. We pause. We make a small choice not to shop. We shrink our footprint and gain some calm. Together we say to Exxon, Nike, Coke and the rest: enough is enough. And we help build this movement to rethink our unsustainable course.”

And since it is almost time, I support the Buy nothing Christmas and the xmas resistance movement. If you know me, please buy nothing for me for Christmas but stop, relax and think. Thanks!

Google creates a new functionality almost every week. This time we have http://scholar.google.com/ on which you can search for “scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research”. [Found via an email sent by Valdis Krebs on SocNet mailinglist].

Have you ever sent an email writing “in attachment you can find…” and then forgot to attach the file? Have you ever received such an email? I guess so. At least I had, many times. So, I’m invoking the LazyWeb and asking for an extension to the free software mail reader Thunderbird (link not working at the moment, use the cached version). A name for the extension can be NeverForgetAttachment but of course the creator will decide the name. How could the extension work? Version 0.1 will simply look for the words “attach” or “attachment” and, in case they are present and there is no attachment when the user clicks the send button, a small window such as the one you see in this post will popup and asks the user if she wants to attach a file. Following versions can even use some machine learning in order to learn which words (or combination of words) refer to an email with a desired attachment and which don’t and react consequently. This can especially be the case if the author don’t want to enter the relative “attach” word for every language in the world. Ok, I’m waiting for someone to create the extension, could this be you?

The WIRED CD: Rip. Sample. Mash. Share.. First example of creative commons cd, I hope many will follow this bright example. You can listen to the songs streaming the related WebJay compilation (once there, just click on “play page”).
Songs are released under 2 creative commons licences:
Sampling Plus: Songs under this license allow noncommercial sharing and commercial sampling, but advertising uses are restricted.
Noncommercial Sampling Plus: Songs under this license allow noncommerical sharing and noncommercial sampling.
Buy Wired if you want the cd. The front cover says: “Fight for your right to copy”.
UPDATE: I started reading Wired and found this great article: We pledge allegiance to the penguin, and the intellectual property regime for which he stands. One nation, under Linux, with free music and open source software for all. Welcome to Brazil!. Every day I found one more reason to move to Brazil, when I’ll finish my PhD.

While the evil company launches its search engine (no link - no pagerank), i finally decided to make the switch to Yahoo! search engine. If you use firefox (you should!), it is as easy as changing the icon in the top-right box (mycroft).
[This blog is 1st results if you search for Paolo, in Yahoo! but of course this is not the only reason I switched ;-) I like to promote some diversity in the search engine arena as well]

[I’ll write something about my trip in Israel later on, as time permits]
I just found on HubLog an online service I was really waiting for: CiteULike (a prototype service to manage your personal library of academic papers). When you are logged in and visiting a page related to a paper, you can post that paper to your online library using a bookmarklet. In doing so, you can also specify tags, a list of keywords you’d like to associate with this article (a la del.icio.us and flickr) and optional notes. The service is very similar to del.icio.us (simple, tag-powered and social), but precisely tailored for academic papers. You can also see all the papers tagged under a certain tag (for example networks). Cool!
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