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

From Lessig Blog:
Google has been sued by the Authors Guild, and a number of individual authors. (…)The authors and the publishers consider Google’s latest fantastic idea, Google Print “a project to Google-ize 20,000,000 books � to be �massive copyright infringement.� They have asked a federal court to shut Google Print down.
(…)Google wants to do nothing more to 20,000,000 books than it does to the Internet: it wants to index them, and it offers anyone in the index the right to opt out. If it is illegal to do that with 20,000,000 books, then why is it legal to do it with the Internet? The �authors�� claims, if true, mean Google itself is illegal. Common sense, or better, commons sense, revolts at the idea. And so too should you.
This is a point I always make: the fact that Google caches sites is illegal (at least accepting the restricting copyright rules that are currently valid). Google by caching is doing a copy of my site and it has no right to do the copy (no copyright). Then, is Google cache a valuable service? Absolutely, I used it very often. Is it fair use? I think so, other may think differently. Google does not get sued about copying sites because is so big now. Google Print is not yet so big and Author Guild is trying this preemptive attack.
Well, Lessig says it better, so read Lessig post or even better read Lessig’s book “Free culture” or even better listen Lessig’s book “Free culture”.

I just saw the presentation by Dick Hardt at OSCON2005 about Identity2.0. The style of the presentation is great, it is almost a cartoon, check it. And it is a great for getting to know in a quick way many of the current efforts in providing an identity system that can really work on the Internet (decentralized, open, …). I’m currently lurking the OpenID mailinglist and I discovered Passel that seems interesting. The presentation is available in WMV, QuickTime and as Flash, so you should have no problems. The last slide says that the presentation style was borrowed by Lawrence Lessig.
As the online world moves towards Web 2.0, the concept of digital identity is evolving, and existing identity systems are falling behind. New systems are emerging that place identity in the hands of users instead of directories. Simple, secure and open, these systems will provide the scalable, user-centric mechanism for authenticating and managing real-world identities online, enabling truly distinct and portable Internet identities.

I wrote this comment to the great post A cognitive analysis of tagging (or how the lower cognitive cost of tagging makes it popular) but it does not appear in the comments so I post it here.

Wow, I overenjoyed your short-enough essay. Extremely clear!
Might I suggest you 3 additional topics you might want to consider and include in your struggle for understanding? I would do it myself but I’ll never be able to write as clearly as you ;-)

3) Of course it would be better to have people tagging stuff in a way that makes sense to them but, as soon as tags are public (everyone can see them), there is concern about tag spam (I tag something with a certain tag so that other people will be exposed to it). This is not a problem when tags are private, for example for the tag you use in your gmail account: no big deal in spamming yourself, no?
I wrote about it at
http://moloko.itc.it/paoloblog/archives/2005/01/29/what_is_tag_spam_or_better_tag_spam_exists.html (from where you can find interesting links). Or check the image at http://www.micropersuasion.com/2005/07/yahoo_myweb_bec.html
In order to make better tag systems (I think this is one of your goals), we must take into account this issue as well. Of course one simple solution would be to give you the possibility to see only resources tagged by friends (flickr and Y!MyWeb2.0 let you do this) or friends of friends, i.e. users deemed trustworthy by a simple and customizable trust metric. What do you think?

Numbers are really fascinating, so here there are 2 cool number hacks I found time ago.
1) Numberspiral.com Number spirals are very simple. To make one, we just write the non-negative integers on a ribbon and roll it up with zero at the center. The trick is to arrange the spiral so all the perfect squares (1, 4, 9, 16, etc.) line up in a row on the right side: and then interesting patterns start to emerge.
2) The secret lives of numbers (applet): determine the relative popularity of every integer between 0 and one million. The resulting information exhibits an extraordinary variety of patterns which reflect and refract our culture, our minds, and our bodies.
For example, certain numbers, such as 212, 486, 911, 1040, 1492, 1776, 68040, or 90210, occur more frequently than their neighbors because they are used to denominate the phone numbers, tax forms, computer chips, famous dates, or television programs that figure prominently in our culture. Regular periodicities in the data, located at multiples and powers of ten, mirror our cognitive preference for round numbers in our biologically-driven base-10 numbering system. Certain numbers, such as 12345 or 8888, appear to be more popular simply because they are easier to remember.

I don’t know if I’m more scared by what it is written in this article “A World of Warcraft Worlds” or by the fact I do believe that what is written there will really happen, soon. If you are intrigued by online games and their (future?) impact on society, read it.

From news.com: Massachusetts has decided to use only products that conform to the Open Document Format for Office Applications which is developed by the standards body OASIS. (…)The move to adopt OpenDocument shuts Microsoft out of the state’s procurement process because the software giant, which dominates the office application market, has said it does not intend to support the OpenDocument format.
Microsoft of course is trying to stop a precedent that would be possible followed by many other states all over the world (and terminate its global monopoly). So Microsoft manager Alan Yates wrote a letter (15 pages PDF available on mass.gov site).
I hightlight just one paragraph of the Microsoft letter: In short, the proposed policy is costly and unnecessary and would limit the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to a desktop software policy that is less functional, less open, and less flexible than the Commonwealth�s current policy.
Tim Bray comments on this precise claim: That barn-floor stench threatens to overcome me. In particular, the claim that office technology based on an open, standardized, file format that has already been implemented multiple times is necessarily �less functional, less open, and less flexible� is outrageous.

Summaryzing, “Openness is Closeness”. I think Big Brother Microsoft is suggesting to add this new slogan to the 3 Orwellian ones, �War is Peace�, “Freedom is Slavery� and �Ignorance is Strength” [by the way, if you have not read 1984, I strongly recommend it. And of course, after reading it, you may want to join SOS: Students for an Orwellian Society.]
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Some time ago I had fun playing with Google Maps but then I didn’t follow evolutions. Today I tried a quick search and I found already 2 gems (but I guess many more exist). Animated Route, Integrate layers on map from NASA WMS server. Check this page and the additional Javascript library by which you can create similar gems.

I just finished giving a presentation at the Web Intelligence Conference in Compiegne (France). I tried to push the concept of VoteLinks. The presentation is in S5 (so pure standard XHTML+CSS+JS) and CreativeCommons licenced: Page-reRank: using trusted links to re-rank authority (presentation) with the accompanying paper (pdf). Nothing earth-shaking at all, really. The main (simple) concept was that “Attention != Appreciation”, the most linked to page is not necessarily the most appreciated: I might link to gwbush.com in order to criticize it but my link increases its PageRank (something I don’t want). At the moment, HTML does not allow to express the reason behind a link, but VoteLinks microformats will allow to add some semantics to linking language. For example, you could say something like
<a href=”http://forza-italia.it/” rev=”vote-against”>berlusconi</a>
<a href=”http://romanoprodi.it” rev=”vote-abstain”>prodi</a>
<a href=”http://ivanscalfarotto.info”rev=”vote-for”>scalfarotto</a>
In the paper I also give evidence of the (intuitive) fact that “Attention!=Appreciation” with a simple experiment on a real, huge community with positive and negative links.
I thought it would be good to have the Web Intelligence community knows about VoteLinks and other microformats. And actually only 1 person (out of a number of people raging from 10 to 30) had heard of VoteLinks before, so the goal of spreading knowledge was accomplished.
And feel free to link to the presentation of course … hopefully not with a rev="vote-against" link!! ;-)
Tomorrow I go to Paris for giving a demo at SonyLabs and then meeting with Alf.
My trip was once more time sponsored by HospitalityClub/CouchSurfing: in Compiegne I was hosted by Jeremy and in Paris by Antonello. Too cool! Try it yourself, you always met great people!

Reading How to Make Your Speaking Easier and More Effective:
An old UCLA study of effective presentations analyzed 3 elements (verbal, vocal, visual). Here’s what it found was important in establishing credibility/believability:
* Verbal (words you say): 7%.
* Vocal (how you sound when you say them): 38%.
* Visual (how you look when you say them): 55%.

Some days ago I had to give a presentation for the 2K* symposium, a joint initiative of research groups from different IT institutions, based in Trento and in Genova. The 40 mins presentation was titled “Trust in Recommender Systems: an historical overview and recent developments” (check the source code!). It is heavily based on an old presentation, I just added some slides about microformats, a concept I wanted to convey to the audience.
Anyway, I took the occasion to try to create the presentation in HTML using S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System developed by Eric Meyer. I think I will create all my future presentation in S5 from now on. The advantages: it “forces” you to keep the slides simple (no unnatural flow of information) and short (however you can have animations, check this slide); it is easy to publish the presentation on the Web, anyone can link to a specific slide, search engines find the information and index them, it is highly standard, evolutionary and small-pieces-loosely-connected-philosophy-like (for exaple it would be possible to create a small piece of javascript code that collect slides from different presentations in some meaningful automatic way to create a new presentation, but the possibilities are endless of course, especially if using the S5 format based on XOXO microformat), I can create the presentation with whatever text editor (perfect if you are in text mode), it does not require the viewer to have some fancy program (openoffice for the freedom lovers, powerpoint for the others) but a browser suffices.
You can find many presentations in S5 format in the microformats wiki; I also liked this presentation of Firefox, with style vulpes-flagrans or with style greenery. Yes, I know the stile I used for my presentation is not that great, if someone with graphical skills would like to create a style for me, it will be very appreciated of course.
For starting playing with S5, I suggest you S5 primer (you need to download HTML code and edit it) or S5present, an open-source web-based slideshow application (you just create an identity there and then use the site for creating the presentation). Guess what? S5 Presents was written in under 10 hours and 500 lines of code using the fantastic Ruby on Rails framework.
[question about English: “take the occasion to”? “take the chance to”? I wanted to say that I used this fact as an opportunity to try the technique. How do you say it in English?]
Tag: s5