- 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.
Links for 2008 09 08
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Author Archives: paolo
Links for 2008 09 05
- 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. (…) - 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.
Still looking for a PhD student for LiveMemories project
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 `alive’ 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 don’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
By Mike Welsh, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University
Watch it, it’s worth your time!
Links for 2008 08 01
- Mike On Ads » Blog Archive » Using your browser URL history to estimate gender
Trick for estimating if you are a female or a male from your browser history. It uses an information leak introduced by CSS. The browser colors visited links differently than non-visited links. All you have to do is load up a whole bunch of URLs for the most popular social bookmarking sites in an iframe and see which of those links are purple and which are blue. - apophenia: Rebooting America
Book with essaysa bunch of super awesome folks, including Yochai Benkler, Susan Crawford, Esther Dyson, Newt Gingrich, Craig Newmark, Howard Rheingold, Doug Rushkoff, Clay Shirky, David Weinberger …. and danah boyd. You can download the whole book (it is under Creative Commons license). danah boyd essay is titled "Can Social Network Sites Enable Political Action?" - Who do people trust? (It ain’t bloggers)
Interesting report! - YouTube – TUBE-ADVENTURES (aventura interactiva)
A game INSIDE youtube!!! You follow links inside videos!!! Amazing!!!
You are invited at the DolomitiCamp, a BarCamp in Trentino mountains, 24 august 2008!
Together with my friends, napo, ket and franz, we decided to organize the first DolomitiCamp, just as a BarCamp but in a mountain hut in the wonderful Dolomites in Trentino, Italy! Because geeks need some physical exercise too. And some fresh air sometimes. ;)
So please, register in the DolomitiCamp wiki page!
When? Sunday 24th August 2008. A bit close in time and space there is the BlogFest which is going to be an amazing event in Riva del Garda, 12, 13, 14 September 2008. But we thought we would organize the DolomitiCamp anyway, the DolomitiCamp would be perfect if you are already close to Trentino in holidays. But also for coming just for this weekend. As written on the the DolomitiCamp wiki page, the day before, Saturday 23th August there is a free concert by Tetes des Bois in Val Rendena in the Suoni Delle Dolomiti festival, great musicians playing outdoor in the Dolomites.
Where? Rifugio Segantini (see the map at the end of this post). In Alta Val d’Ãmola, Presanella, (mt. 2371), Trentino, Italia. One hour and 19 minutes from Trento.
Is there Internet connection? Yes, it was recently installed. But, since we need to make the final tests, it would be great if you can register in the DolomitiCamp wiki page.
There is also a dolomiticamp user on facebook who you can friend and the dolomiticamp event on facebook which you can subscribe to and the DolomitiCamp group on Facebook which you can join.
I see you on 24th August 2008 on Trentino mountains, ok?
Visualizzazione ingrandita della mappa
The Rules of DolomitiCamp (derived from The Rules of BarCamp)
* 1st Rule: You do talk about DolomitiCamp.
* 2nd Rule: You do blog about DolomitiCamp.
* 3rd Rule: If you want to present, you must write your topic and name in a presentation slot.
* 4th Rule: Only three word intros.
* 5th Rule: As many presentations at a time as facilities allow for.
* 6th Rule: No pre-scheduled presentations, no tourists.
* 7th Rule: Presentations will go on as long as they have to or until they run into another presentation slot.
* 8th Rule: If this is your first time at BarCamp, you HAVE to present. (Ok, you don’t really HAVE to, but try to find someone to present with, or at least ask questions and be an interactive participant.)
Links for 2008 07 31
- Shindig – opensocial and google gadgets container, open source
Shindig is a new project in the Apache Software Foundation incubator and is an open source implementation of the OpenSocial specification and gadgets specification.
Religions symbols in Unicode characters
I was testing a chat system we’re creating with Extjs (amazin Javascript framework!) and I wanted to test issues with “strange” characters. So I quickly found the page of special characters on Italian wikipedia and I was very surprised to see that there are religious (and political) symbols in Unicode standard characters. What you see in the following are normal chars you can copy and paste, just as a normal “a”. I think the classification under “religious As bru was saying in chat: “wow, lots of crosses” … ;)
☥ ☥ ☦ ☦ ☧ ☧ ☨ ☨ ☩ ☩ ☪ ☪ ☫ ☫ ☬ ☬ ☭ ☠☮ ☮ ☯ ☯ ♰ â™° ♱ â™± ✝ ✠✞ ✞ ✟ ✟
A search on Google for “☔ did not return any result. A search for the swastica symbol instead returns results and actually it was once one of the hot terms in Google Trends. I wonder what Unicode characters does Google include and exclude.
By the way, what is the strangest Unicode character you are able to find (for some definition of “strange”)?
Links for 2008 07 30
- Network Weaving: Human Rights Network Mapping
Amazing report by Skye Bender-deMoll on the applications of network mapping, analysis and weaving to assist and facilitate human rights work. It is basically an introductory textbook for all types of applied network analysis, filled with examples and case - Statistics on Google’s OpenSocial platform end users and Facebook users
- Reputation Pattern – Yahoo! Design Pattern Library
A person participating in a social structure expects to develop a reputation and hopes for insight into the reputations of others, but each designed model of participation and reputation embodies its own set of biases and incentive structures. Balanci
The consequences of opensourcing Facebook code
Some weeks ago Facebook released its source code as Free and Open Source Software.
I’m very curious about the consequences of this action. Initially I was to suppose this choice would have been a tsunami in the social networking sites world, but I haven’t found many mentions of this around. So I tried to look around and to answer the question “Which were the consequences of Facebook making its code opensource?”.
I don’t have a clear idea, but it seems very small consequences.
How many clones of facebook popped up? Are they used? I haven’t found any facebook clone worth mentioning.
How many people downloaded the code? How many code patches were provided to Facebook? I guess one of the biggest intended consequences was this one: Facebook getting bug fixes, and chunks of code or suggestions on how to improve performances. Also, it is now easier, I think, for Facebook hiring new developers because they can know them in advance from the commits and suggestions they write about Facebook code. But for example there have been any exploit from people reading the code and finding weaknesses? Probably not, it is much more meaningful, if you discover a glitch to send an email just to Facebook to explain it, there is a chance Facebook might want to hire you as security expert.
Overall, Facebook is better off or worst off after the decision to release the code as Free Software? I was not able to get too much information about this and I’m a bit surprised. Actually I haven’t yet downloaded the code in order to test it. I was about to do it but then for Webvalley we decided to use BuddyPress so “check Facebook code” is still in the todo list.
Some interesting links which might be worth checking in more detail: open source projects on facebook wiki, the portal for developers on Facebook code (interesting!), Project Cassandra: Facebook’s Open Source Alternative to Google BigTable, the fact Google recently released its Protocol Buffers as open source, Facebook did it much earlier with Thrift.
So, did I miss something? What do you think were the consequences of Facebook opensourcing its code?