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

Links for 2008 11 18

paolo — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 22:40:05 +0000

The YouTube Presidency | 44 | washingtonpost.com
"This (youtube) is just one of many ways that he will communicate directly with the American people and make the White House and the political process more transparent," spokeswoman Jen Psaki told us last night. In addition to regularly videotaping the radio address, officials at the transition office say the Obama White House will also conduct online Q&As and video interviews. The goal, officials say, is to put a face on government. In the following weeks, for example, senior members of the transition team, various policy experts and choices for the Cabinet, among others, will record videos for Change.gov.
(tags: youtube, obama, transparency, politics, twit)

Dellai2.0: Italian politics in time of Web

paolo — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:08:03 +0000

Sunday it was election day here in Trentino. Since Trentino is an autonomous region in Italy, local elections have a much larger impact on the region than national politics. Luckily enough, Lorenzo Dellai won with a large percentage and he will be once more the president of the province. Before the election day, there was the fear of having even here in Trentino a success of Lega Nord, a racist and obscurantist right-wing party.
I’m very happy Lega Nord didn’t win and I believe Dellai and its coalition (left-centre) will keep making Trentino an happy island in the context of Italy, but what interests me the most is the use Dellai made of Internet and Web2.0 phenomena for his campaign.

The tools used by Dellai:

Wordpress Blog on Wordpress.com http://lorenzodellai.wordpress.com/
Twitter Heavy twittering http://twitter.com/lorenzodellai (it was extremely interesting to read a twitter around every 30 minutes during the campaign: these short messages can give you an idea of what Dellai was doing such as “appena arrivato in ufficio 10:35 PM Nov 6th“, “ritorno in città per l’incontro con il circolo anziani 5:35 AM Nov 5th“, “vado all’incontro sul tema della scuola nella sede di Teatrincorso Spazio 14 in via Vannetti 8:10 AM Nov 3rd”, “Lunga e amichevole telefonata con il collega Luis Durnwalder.”, … Once I read that he was going to meet some people in Piazza Duomo and I had the temptation to go in Piazza Duomo to check if this was true, a strange feeling I must admit
Facebook Facebook www.facebook.com/people/Lorenzo_Dellai/: at the moment Dellai facebook profile has 997 friends. Many of them requested the friendship after the success (in Italy we say “saltare sul carro dei vincitori” (jump on the winners’ bandwagon)) which is interesting as well. While most of the Web2.0 tools were used more as a direct but online communication channel, with Facebook, Dellai tried also to move the online networking to offline discussions. In fact, he organized an real-world aperitif in a bar of Trento. See the Dellai Facebook Aperitif page. This event had 95 confirmed guests and around 80 people (very young on average) shown up in the bar.
Youtube Youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/lorenzodellai
Flickr Flickr profile http://www.flickr.com/photos/28475218@N02/ and he even asked to Flickers the permission to report their photos of course respecting their copyright. In the message he even wrote the word “watermarking” which sparked some discussions about the fact Dellai would really know what watermarking is, which is in my opinion very unlikely.
Netvibes and more Even a netvibes page http://www.netvibes.com/lorenzodellai!!! Very Mashuppy!!! A Mashup of all the other tools basically. With for example a public todolist (with done things checked as he was doing them ) and even dopplr (http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/lorenzodellai)!!! And Skype, and google talk, and gmail, and liveblogging events with scribblelive, …

Well, besides this impressive list of Web2.0 tools in use, there are at least 2 interesting points I would like to briefly examine.
First, is this an example of politics becoming more transparent? I guess the real question should be: “will Dellai keep twittering/facebooking/blogging/… that heavily now that he is elected and, in this way, give to (tech-savvy) citizens a way to follow what he does daily and maybe even contribute with comments and suggestions? If yes, to which level will he dare to push this? Only messages about what he did or posts about strategic decisions even before they are already made?
Of course maintaining such a structure requires lots of resources, both in term of time (his time and his collaborators time) and money (people working on this aspect mainly since most of the tools used are free to use for now).
That’s something I’m terribly curious to see how it develops. In the message in his blog after his election, there is a Youtube video in which he states he will keep experimenting with the network (”Adesso la campagna elettorale si e’ chiusa pero’ (…) per me non si chiude l’esperienza della mia presenza nella rete.” and even “abbiamo bisogno della vostra amicizia (little esitation) su facebook”). But I think a twitter every 30 minutes is something he is not going to keep and this is a pity.

And the second key point is: is it possible to scientifically measure the impact of this approach, of this use of Web2.0 tools on the outcomes of the electoral competition? The more general question would be: can we identify numeric indicators of success? Are there around experiences in this sense? Research labs on Politics2.0 and its quantification? I guess that the are a lot of people working on the campaign of Obama so there might be some work already published (in papers or blogs). Are you aware of any of these?
The effects should be both on the number of votes collected by online tools, their general impact on the aura of the candidate, the changing relationship of the candidate with traditional media (newspapers, tv), …
Anybody trying to foreseen how big will be the impact of such strategies in the next elections (let’s say in 5 years)?

(logo created with http://creatr.cc/creatr/)

Tools for finding conferences and journals

paolo — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 09:18:56 +0000

There are some aggregators for Call for Papers. The ones I use for finding conferences and journals are:

Check them. The amount of conferences organized every month is really amazing!
Do you use other services? Maybe with a recommender system in it so that they are able to directly suggest you the conferences relevant for you?

Links for 2008 11 03

paolo — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 22:40:07 +0000

Build Service/Concepts/Trust - openSUSE
Trust network on top of the GNU/Linux distribution OpenSuse
(tags: sonet, trust, metrics, reputation, suse, opensuse, linux, gnu, trustmetric)
Marko’s Blog » Blog Archive » Trust metrics for the openSUSE Build Service
(tags: sonet, trust, metrics, reputation)

Learning Processing

paolo — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:53:52 +0000

I’m learning Processing, a programming language for artists. Extremely cool!
The goal is to build things cooler than the following ones:

Metamorphosis from Glenn Marshall on Vimeo.

Solar, with lyrics. from flight404 on Vimeo.

Mæve table demo from Maeve installation on Vimeo.

Processing has a great infrastructure with hardware too (http://hardware.processing.org/) but I haven’t started digging into it yet.

Learning a language in a hacking group is a lot more fun so if you are around Trento and you want to join us, please let me know! This is going to be awesome!

Try to not YAWN!

paolo — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:45:11 +0000

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Yawning is a fascinating human social phenomenon! Try to not yawn! And, if you like, write as a comment if you yawned or not.

Who can make real change in USA? Who is that?

paolo — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:33:53 +0000

From AARP.org, viral marketing for society … and a lot of fun as well! ;)

(via Bzaarian Gianandrea)

Links for 2008 10 22

paolo — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 21:40:08 +0000

Borrow and Lend Money From Friends and Family With Virgin Money
Virgin enters the business of peer-to-peer lending
(tags: p2p, money, lending, virgin)
With friends like these … Tom Hodgkinson on the politics of the people behind Facebook | Technology | The Guardian
"So by his own admission, Thiel is trying to destroy the real world, which he also calls "nature", and install a virtual world in its place, and it is in this context that we must view the rise of Facebook. Facebook is a deliberate experiment in global manipulation, and Thiel is a bright young thing in the neoconservative pantheon, with a penchant for far-out techno-utopian fantasies. Not someone I want to help get any richer."
(tags: facebook, guardian, rightwing, conservative, sonet)

Links for 2008 10 14

paolo — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 21:40:04 +0000

Omeka
Omeka is a web platform for publishing collections and exhibitions online. Designed for cultural institutions, enthusiasts, and educators, Omeka is easy to install and modify and facilitates community-building around collections and exhibits. Omeka is free and open source.
(tags: sonet, livememories, opensource, memories, freesoftware)
I Remember: Capture and share memories its fun, easy and free - Linkory.com
(tags: sonet, livememories, memory)

Kickoff meeting and public presentation for LiveMemories project with Ricardo Baeza-Yates from Yahoo! Research

paolo — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 06:52:42 +0000

Wednesday October 22th 2008, in Trento there will be the kickoff meeting for the LiveMemories project, Active Digital Memories of Collective Life (in which I’m involved). The public workshop is open to everybody (it will be at least translated in Italian).
UPDATE: Now with blog in Italian http://lamemoriaaltempodiinternet.wordpress.com.
Check the program of the workshop or read it here below copy and pasted. There will be Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Director of the Yahoo! Research labs at Barcelona speaking about the Impact of Social Networks, Alessandro Cavalli - Professore di Sociologia, Università di Pavia, speaking about “La Costruzione Sociale della Memoria Collettiva”, Simon Delafond - Web producer - BBC, UK speaking about “BBC Memoryshare initiative” and presentations from the project partners and a collective discussion about “Quale modello per la libera circolazione della Memoria?”

I’m really looking forward for the event! If you are interested or you are coming, please let me know! See you!

The program of the workshop

9.30

Ricardo Baeza-Yates - Direttore Yahoo! Research, Barcellona

The Impact of Social Networks

10.30

Alessandro Cavalli - Professore di Sociologia, Università di Pavia

La Costruzione Sociale della Memoria Collettiva

11.30

Simon Delafond - Web producer - BBC, UK

BBC Memoryshare initiative

12.30

Pausa pranzo

14.30

Bernardo Magnini - Coordinatore progetto LiveMemories - FBK-irst

LiveMemories: Memorie Digitali Attive di Vita Collettiva

15.00

Tecnologie e Ricerca per LiveMemories

Partner progetto LiveMemories - Università di Trento

Fausto Giunchiglia

Massimo Poesio

15.30

Esperienze Internazionali

Partner progetto LiveMemories - Università di Southampton

Wendy Hall - Web Science Research Initiative

Niegel Shadbolt - Memories for Life

16.00

LiveMemories e il territorio

Giuseppe Ferrandi - Direttore generale della Fondazione Museo storico del Trentino

Il Progetto “Memoria per il Trentino”

16.30

Pausa caffè

17.00

Dibattito: Quale modello per la libera circolazione della Memoria?

Moderatore: Alessandro Papayannidis - Corriere del Trentino

Partecipano: Pierangelo Giovannetti - direttore de L’Adige, don Ivan Maffeis - direttore di Vita Trentina, don Livio Sparapani - direttore dell’Archivio Diocesano Tridentino, Rino Zandonai - direttore dell’Associazione Trentini nel Mondo, Giuseppe Ferrandi - direttore del Museo Storico in Trento, Monica Ronchini - direttore del Museo di Riva del Garda, Camillo Zadra - direttore del Museo Storico Italiano della Guerra di Rovereto, Filippo Nardelli - direttore di Cogito, Alessandro Tescari - amministratore delegato di Pervoice, Amedeo Cappelli - direttore di Celct

Two new joint projects with MIT

paolo — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:24:16 +0000

Fondazione Bruno Kessler, the research institute where I work, started two joint projects with MIT Mobile Experience Laboratory, not bad!

1) Sustainable Connected House (http://mobile.mit.edu/en/sustainablehome), FBK-MIT Mobile Experience Lab alliance.
The MIT Mobile Experience Lab, within the Design Laboratory, signed a 3 years strategic alliance with the Fondazione Bruno Kessler on July of 2008. The alliance has been promoted by the Province of Trento, Italy. Our goal is to advanced research in sustainable connected homes, including subtopics of renewable energy systems, sustainable architecture, and also social sustainability and connected information system to optimize home behavior and peoples’ life. At the end of the project, we want to build a full-scale prototype of a sustainable home with new technologies, materials, and applications.

2) Green villages (http://mobile.mit.edu/en/zambana), Re-defining the sustainable green village of the future.
In partnership with Trentino Sviluppo division of the Provincia di Trento, Italy, we wanted to investigate how to transform the village of Zambana into a Sustainable Green Village. The main goal of the design workshop was to creatively redesign the village of Zambana, from an urban planning perspective, as well as from architectural and new media design perspectives. This exercise, more than giving specific directions for the implementation of the project, has opened a variety of ideas, scenarios and concepts that need to be further explored. In July 2008, the Design Lab and Mobile Experience Lab renewed our partnership with the Provincia di Trento and the Fondazione Bruno Kessler to continue the study for at least three more years.

Links for 2008 09 08

paolo — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 21:40:08 +0000

Six Degrees of Separation Is Now Three
Six degrees of separation has fallen to three due to the impact of social networking and developments in technology, according to a study carried out by O2.
(tags: research, web2.0, social, networks, sixdegrees, socialnetworks)

Links for 2008 09 05

paolo — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 21:40:05 +0000

Influence and Correlation in Social Networks | Yahoo! Research
By Anagnostopoulos, A.; Kumar, R.; Mahdian, M.
14th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) (2008)
In many social systems, social ties between users play an important role in dictating users’ behavior. One of the ways this can happen is through social influence, the phenomenon that the actions of a user can induce his/her friends to behave in a similar way. Identifying and understanding social influence is of tremendous interest from both an analysis (e.g., predicting the future of the system) and a design (e.g., designing viral marketing strategies) point of view. This is a difficult task in general, since there are many other factors that can induce statistical correlation between the actions of friends in a social network. In this paper, we propose two simple tests that can identify influence as a source of social correlation in cases where data on the time step of actions are available. (…)
(tags: research, social_networks, correlation, yahoo, paper, influence)
TrustBets: Operating a Prediction Market on an IOU Network, 2008.
Paper by Sharad Goel, Mohammad Mahdian, David M. Pennock, and Daniel M. Reeves,
We consider the problem of operating a prediction market where players pay with IOUs instead of cash, and where in general not everyone trusts everyone else. Players declare their degree of trust in other players. The system determines what bets are acceptable according to the trust network. We show that if there are n markets, even if the markets are independent, the problem of determining whether a bet is acceptable is NP-hard. In the special case when the trust network is a tree, the problem can be solved in polynomial time using a maximum flow algorithm.
(tags: research, yahoo, paper, trust)

Still looking for a PhD student for LiveMemories project

paolo — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:37:52 +0000

There is the opportunity for a 3-years PhD scholarship at the University of Trento working with my group (SoNet) on Web2.0 and social networking at Bruno Kessler Foundation in Trento. Please, consider contacting me about it!
The project you will work on is LiveMemories (http://livememories.org), Active Digital Memories of Collective Life. From the project web site:

From a scientific / technical perspective, LiveMemories aims at scaling up content extraction techniques towards very large scale extraction from multimedia sources, setting the scene for a Content Management Platform for Trentino; using this information to support new ways of linking, summarizing and classifying data in a new generation of digital memories which are `aliveâ€™ and user-centered; and to turn the creation of such memories into a communal web activity. Achieving these objectives will make Trento a key player in the new Web Science Initiative, digital memories, and Web 2.0, thanks also to the involvement of Southampton. But LiveMemories is also intended to have a social and cultural impact besides the scientific one: through the collection, analysis and preservation of digital memories of Trentino; by facilitating and encouraging the preservation of such community memories; and the fostering of new forms of community, and enrichment of our cultural and social heritage.

Our involvement is about how Web2.0 tools can support a community in this collective building of memory. The idea is to offer a contract at FBK for around 8 months with the research institute I work on and, if we like each other, to start the PhD. If you are interested please send me an email: massa AT fbk DOT eu (if I donâ€™t reply, it is because your email ended up in spam, please try to find other ways to contact me).

An anthropological introduction to YouTube

paolo — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 09:43:08 +0000

By Mike Welsh, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University
Watch it, it’s worth your time!

presented at the Library of Congress, June 23rd 2008. This was tons of fun to present. I decided to forgo the PowerPoint and instead worked with students to prepare over 40 minutes of video for the 55 minute presentation. This is the result.
more info: http://mediatedcultures.net

0:00 Introduction, YouTube’s Big Numbers
2:00 Numa Numa and the Celebration of Webcams
5:53 The Machine is Us/ing Us and the New Mediascape
12:16 Introducing our Research Team
12:56 Who is on YouTube?
13:25 What’s on Youtube? Charlie Bit My Finger, Soulja Boy, etc.
17:04 5% of vids are personal vlogs addressed to the YouTube community, Why?
17:30 YouTube in context. The loss of community and “networked individualism” (Wellman)
18:41 Cultural Inversion: individualism and community
19:15 Understanding new forms of community through Participant Observation
21:18 YouTube as a medium for community
23:00 Our first vlogs
25:00 The webcam: Everybody is watching where nobody is (”context collapse”)
26:05 Re-cognition and new forms of self-awareness (McLuhan)
27:58 The Anonymity of Watching YouTube: Haters and Lovers
29:53 Aesthetic Arrest
30:25 Connection without Constraint
32:35 Free Hugs: A hero for our mediated culture
34:02 YouTube Drama: Striving for popularity
34:55 An early star: emokid21ohio
36:55 YouTube’s Anthenticity Crisis: the story of LonelyGirl15
39:50 Reflections on Authenticity
41:54 Gaming the system / Exposing the System
43:37 Seriously Playful Participatory Media Culture (featuring Us by blimvisible: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yxHKg…
47:32 Networked Production: The Collab. MadV’s “The Message” and the message of YouTube
49:29 Poem: The Little Glass Dot, The Eyes of the World
51:15 Conclusion by bnessel1973
52:50 Dedication and Credits (Our Numa Numa dance)