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

During past week I hosted in my house a russian girl I didn’t know before. Why? She asked hospitality through CouchSurfing. I subscribed few months ago to CouchSurfing when I was looking for free hosting in Cyprus. In the meantime I also arranged to find hospitality in Paris. And of course I was very happy to host her (Anna is her name and here is her couchsurfing profile). Feel free to contact me if you pass near Trento, Italy (here is my CouchSurfing profile and it should be easy to find my email address around).
And as an example of how much information you leave behind yourself surfing the web, here you can see a map of places Anna has logged in from.
One evening she asked me to use Internet and I saw she was typing livejournal.com, and yes, she has a blog, though it is in Russian and I cannot understand it.
[CouchSurfing can be interesting also from a research point of view, see much below in the following text]
Continue Reading

This funny flash animation can give you an idea of how Italy is different from Europe. I especially enjoyed the representation of how Italians form queues, and I can swear that it is totally true: queue is probably a too difficult concept for us. This humorous anthropologic study can be useful in case you are pondering about coming to live here (you know who you are).

The Meatrix, good example of flash-aktivism.
Think about it next time you eat meat,
and choose the red pill.

In Tagwebs, Flickr, and the Human Brain, Jakob argues “a neuron in your brain is a lot like a tag in a tagweb“. A tagweb is a network of tags whose edges are the “this tag is tagged with this tag” relationship, for example he tags the tag “Victoria” with the tag “female”. He states that it is not possible to tag tags on flickr but there is a workaround. If you tag a page that “represents” a tag, you are implicitly tagging that tag and you can do it with del.icio.us. I tagged some pages representing tags with the new tag “tag_the_tag” (metatag has already another meaning due to HTML). It can be a sort of wordnet but bottom up. I’m skeptical about the rise of “tagging tags” but, if this happen, then tag spam will be an issue. Jacob ends with “I now understand how my brain works, and I can act in ways that embraces that knowledge.” that really seems an enormous excess of “technology-driven optimism”.
[New word you find in the text: metadadaism (search for metadadaism and write metadadaism in wikipedia).]
[Note for myself: an online article with colorful pictures is more likely to attract attention (at least for me) but .mov videos are bad since I have many problems watching them on my operating system libre]

After BillGates and Stallman, Sun is working with Trento. “Java Open Business Initiative launched by Sun Microsystems Italia … con il patrocinio dell’Università degli Studi di Torino e dell’Università di Trento, Dipartimento di Informatica e Telecomunicazioni”. Did the world discover this little town all of a sudden?

Today I received a package from Ubuntu. It contains 50 cardboard folders containing both an UbuntuLinux Install CD and an UbuntuLinux LiveCD. And Ubuntu sends it for free. This is very timely since there will be Stallman (father of GNU and Free Software Foundation, the one who started it all) in Trento on February 28, 2005 and the intention is to give away hundreds of CDs with free software (ubuntu GNU/Linux, mandrake Linux, but also free software for Windows such as theopencd and gnuwin2) and creative-commons-licenced music. Most people still don’t understand that copying and giving away free software is totally legal, actually it is what people creating that software want you to do! Anyway, I want to thank Ubuntu, to invite you to order some free Ubuntu CDs as well and, if you feel like, to donate to Ubuntu.