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

I could not have explained it better! ;)

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

(via Bzaarian Gianandrea)

Facebook, Myspace and … real life.
(found on CurrentTv but I didn’t understand how to embed a video on CurrentTv, so embedded from YouTube).

CommonCraft creates these little magid videos for explaining online current trends. This one explains Social Media, by using (?!?) icecreams. Enjoy!

Thanks to David Orban I discovered Omnisio and so I took a chance to merge my slides with the video Gianandrea recorded during my sci(bzaar)net presentation.
Using Omnisio is very easy, you just provide the URL of a video online and the URL of slides on slideshare.net and then you can optionally synchronize slides with video by drag and drop.
You can see my video/slides on omnisio or embedded here below. Slides are in English but I spoke in Italian.

I’m going to speak about Ubuntu this afternoon, so I thought I might show the 1 minute, 37 seconds video in which Nelson Mandela describes the concept of Ubuntu. In order to make it easier to understand it I added English subtitles using dotsub.com, a great Web site in which anyone can help translating a video in his own language. Please help in translating the video in your language and spread the concept of Ubuntu! It is easy and fun!

UPDATE: I added the subtitles in Italian as well.
I hope I didn’t violate the license. I was not able to find the license in the Ubuntu site. According to wikipedia, the video is copyright of Canonical, Ltd. released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 and I uploaded the video on dotsub under this license. Let me know if the license is different. Note that the video file is in the Ubuntu CD which you are allowed to make copies of and share it, but I’m not that good with licenses to understand what this means.
Anyway, help in translating the video in your language and spread the concept of Ubuntu!

An ambiguous animation painted on public walls.
Made in Buenos Aires and in Baden (fantoche)
By blublu.org

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Clay Shirky is a genius at the top of my list of people I would love to meet, others close are Cory Doctorow and Yochai Benkler.
The video embedded in this page (link to video on blip.tv) is from a speech he gave at the Web 2.0 conference 2008.
He released a lightly edited transcription of the speech on the blog of his new book, under Creative Commons By-Attribution ShareAlike licence. Since my blog is under the same license, I’m going to legally copy and paste some parts of it here but I suggest you to read it entirely and to watch the video.

The critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin (…) the transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. (…)
And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

(…) a project started by a professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. It’s a Wiki Map for crime in Brazil. If there’s an assault, if there’s a burglary, if there’s a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring.(…)
Maybe this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don’t pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that this one succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn’t, it’s illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn’t have imagined existing even five years ago.

So that’s the answer to the question, “Where do they find the time?” Or, rather, that’s the numerical answer. But beneath that question was another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: “Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves.”
(…)At least they’re doing something.

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it’s not, and that’s the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?

Read the rest on Clay’s blog so you get to know the story about the mouse. I think it is worth your time.

Thanks to Jesse, I started exploring Git, a version control system alternative to CVS and SVN. Git is based on a very different metaphor. While in CVS/SVN there is one repository which is maintained in a single location, in Git there are as many repositories as users and all of them are maintained in a decentralized fashion, on all the machines of all the users. From centralization to decentralization, it is an interesting twist and change in perspective.
And so what about the risk of balkanization of code? And the fact that there are 10.000 (different) versions of the Linux kernel? Well, according to Linus, the answer is trust. Linus explains the metaphores behind git and the trust issues in an extremely interesting Google Talk.

From the talk of Linux (via Victor):

The way merging is done is the way real security is done, by a network of trust. if you have ever done any security work and it didn’t involve the concept of network of trust it was not a security work; it was a masturbation.
…we don’t know hundred people. We have five, seven, ten close personal friends…

This way of managing a software ecology is wonderfully adhocratic. There are now thousands different versions of the Linux kernel. Currently most of the people rely on Linus’ version but it is possible, in a perfect adhocratic way, that different people will rely on versions of different people. Go decentralized, go trust-based. Cool.

The new Fiat 500 is available! It was presented yesterday in Torino. I love this advertisement.

UPDATE Aug 19,2007. In order to make justice to the comments of Martina, I embed a mashup of the fiat ad. This is for the v-day: on September 8, 2007, Italians will say to Italian politicians “Enough is enough”. It will be an interesting day.

I think I’ll embed also a video from the recent history of Italy just as a reminder: April 30, 1993, Friday, 18.00. A mob gathered in largo Febo in front of the hotel Raphael waiting for Craxi. When he exits, people start throwing at him coins and other objects. Craxi was one of the biggest politicians in Italy and one of the biggest thieves in Italy.