Author Archives: paolo

Google losing trust, Wikipedia still gaining trust

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Try a search for “wordpress blog” on Google and you get an advertisement of Google that says “Tip: Want to share your life online with a blog? Try Blogger”. As you probably know, Blogger is a product of Google. Advertisements to other products of Google are displayed when searching for “photo sharing”, for “calendar”, etc. So where is the problem you might ask? According to Blake Ross, of Firefox fame, “this is a bad sign for Google … Google lost me today”. The title of the post is interesting as well: “Tip: Trust is hard to gain, easy to lose“.
And very timely there is the announcement of Jimmy Wales, the man behind Wikipedia, that plans to launch a new search engine in the first three months of 2007 (read the article on BusinessWeek).
“Like Wikipedia, the new search engine will rely on the support of a volunteer community of users. The idea is that Web surfers and programmers will be able to bring their collective intelligence to bear, to fine-tune search results and make the experience more effective for everyone.”
Users will be allowed to rerank search results by clicking on an “edit” link and programmers will be allowed to read and improve the code since it will be free software, based on Apache’s open-source Web search software Lucene and Nutch.
Wikiasari is the name of the project and I think we will speak a lot about it in the next future (few years ago I would have said we will hear a lot about it in the next future, the change of perspective is amazing). And everything goes back to trust as usual: who would you like to help with your knowledge? A trust-me-on-openess project like Wikiasari and Wikipedia or a trust-me-on-faith project like Google or Britannica? I personally have no doubt at all.

Craigslist CEO isn’t nuts … but it would have been just few years ago

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Reading the long thread discussion on CouchSurfing titled “how’s the money flow?”, I found Irv Thomas’s contribution that summarizes an article of Forbes about Craiglist. The article is delicious: it is so good that Internet has been able to make reasonable and possible something that would have sounded totally unreasonable just few years ago.
Excerpts from the article below (by the way, I would love to be able to write in English half as well as this article …):

Craigslist President and Chief Executive Jim Buckmaster isn’t nuts. He just sounds that way, particularly to anyone who thinks that the point of running a business is, you know, to make money.
And that was enough to make his appearance last week at the UBS Global Media & Communications Conference feel like a dizzying trip through Lewis Carroll’s looking glass.
Speaking in an unflappable, near-monotone, Buckmaster calmly discussed with UBS analyst Ben Schachter a business model which, by any rational standard, is completely insane.
(…)
OK, so Craigslist boasts a huge potential to make money, but isn’t really interested in generating big profits. Given that combination, why not raise funds through equity investments or advertising and then give the money away to charity, Schachter asked.
“I think it’s a valid argument and one that we don’t necessarily have a persuasive answer for,” Buckmaster said. “That is a proven model for doing good in the world. It just doesn’t happen to be our model. Ours is to try to be as philanthropic in our core business as we can be and leave all the money out there in the hands of users.”
We now return you to your regularly scheduled reality, already in progress.

A blog post is a permanent email with cc:world

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During my long no-blog period, I kinda lost the unconditioned reflex “This is interesting, let me blog it” in favour of the less advanced “This is interesting, let me think about who might be interested and send her an email containing just this link”.
At least this is something that was happening with my previous blog post, I was starting to think who might be interested in knowing that “Italian public television (RAI) will be entirely under Creative Commons” in order to send them an email. Luckily a strike in the blue sky of my mind came to rescue me with a providential “why don’t I blog it so that I don’t clutter their mailbox and … if they want to read, they simply come here, when they want? Moreover the possible readers might include people I don’t know that find the post after months via a search engine.”
I strongly rationally believe that Email is where knowledge goes to die, I just think I lost the unconditioned reflex.
By the way, the metaphor of blogging as writing an email cc:World is due to Doc Searls.

Italian public television (RAI) entirely under Creative Commons!

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The Italian Government has prepared the new guidelines for the Italian public television (RAI).
It is delightful to read that one of them is:

  • (in Italian) offrire all’utenza, nell’ambito della licenza nome come Creative Commons, la possibilita’ di scaricare via Internet tutti i contenuti radio-televisivi prodotti dalla RAI mediante proventi dei canoni di abbonamento;
  • (in English) offer, under a Creative Commons licence, the possibility to download through Internet all the radio and television content produced by RAI using the mandatory subscription fees;

I must admit that I’m profoundly surprised but, hey, this is probably one of the effect of having a passionate blogger as Minister of Communications.
Thanks to Stefano Quintarelli for the good news, you can read more of the guideline on his blog (in Italian): another very interesting point is the mention to incentive the upload of user-generated content on rai.it
Since this post is too optimist, let me quote the last sentences of Stefano:
this are 3 steps in the right direction, the very right direction, the VERY RIGHT direction.
Ale’!
(well, Italy is Italy and after 3 steps forward it is always possible to make 6 steps backward)
[via punto-informatico]

Help in making Ryzom a Free MMORPG!

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One of the big advantages of using GNU/Linux is that most of the computer games don’t run on it and, as a consequence, I don’t have the risk of trying one, become addicted and hence even less productive (whatever productive means). However I somehow feel isolated from conversations and frontier experiences for not being able to try World of Warcraft or SecondLife. I once tried to find some Free Software alternatives and downloaded PlaneShift, a very cool Free Software MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game) that runs also under GNU/Linux, but what happened is that I played until 6 in the morning and the following day I was sooo sleepy!
Another game that might soon become Free is Ryzom.
“Ryzom is an innovative MMORPG, which has been developed since the year 2000 by the independent studio, Nevrax. For the past two years Ryzom has been marketed and sold to gamers, developing a fiercly loyal fanbase. Unfortunately, due to market conditions and other unforseen cirucumstances, a request to begin bankruptcy proceedings has been filed at the commerce tribunal.”

The Free Ryzom Campaign is soliciting donations in order to “help us purchase the source code, artwork and other game data associated with Ryzom, so we can breathe new life into it as an open, democratically run player project”.
It is great to read that the Free Software Foundation announced that it will officially support the Free Ryzom Campaign with a pledge of $60,000. Lack of games is often mentioned as one of the main reasons for people not to switching to GNU/Linux.
And Ryzom seems incredibly cool too (see the YouTube video), so who will need the non-free software World of Warcraft or SecondLife anymore?!?

You might want to support this initiative and donate to The Free Ryzom Campaign or donate to the Free Software Foundation.

[via gnuvox] (this post was also an excuse to try how embedding YouTube videos works)

The Rules of BarCamp, now in Italian

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Last Saturday I participated in the BarCampTurin. Bru and I spoke about CouchSurfing as an example of “Sharing as a modality of economic production”. Well, I wanted to speak about this concept while Bru wanted to speak about hidden profits, we probably didn’t coordinate very well. ;-)
Anyway the slides are on slideshare in case you are interested.

It was my first BarCamp and, reading on the wiki there were more than 200 registered people, I was very afraid to burn my first experience of BarCamp. Overall, I think it went well (thanks Vittorio!) given the fact more than 250 people shown up.
Anyway, I would be very curios to run a poll asking to participants of BarCampTurin:

Did you read the RulesOfBarCamp on the wiki?
YES | NO

(Of course there is no critical mass of readers in this blog so I solicit some more popular blogger to post the poll, if she finds the question interesting).

My impression is that 70% of the participants would say “NO, I didn’t read the RulesOfBarCamp”.
The fact we didn’t even bother to translate the rules on the BarCampTurin wiki page might be an indicator. Of course the critique is first for myself and so in a pure free-wiki-doacracy-philosophy today I took some time to translate TheRulesOfBarCamp (English) in LeRegoleDelBarCamp (Italian). The translations is attached below but you better read them on the BarCamp wiki itself. And of course the translation is not perfect at all, but hey, it is a wiki, isn’t it? Go ahead and improve it.

BarCampTurin was the second BarCamp in Italy (the first was BzaarCamp in Milan) and there are already more BarCamps in preparation, I know of RomeCamp and MarCamp (in Marche region).
It is self-evident that in order to run successful BarCamps we should at least be aware of the rules (and discuss them).
The important rule I think we should try to stick with is

NO SPECTATORS, ONLY PARTICIPANTS

or according to my translation in Italian

NIENTE SPETTATORI, SOLO PARTECIPANTI

even if I probably liked more “NIENTE SPETTATORI, SOLO ATTORI”.

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Welcome back to myself!

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Hello everybody!
I’m back, back in the blogosphere I mean. My last post was dated November 23, 2005 so precisely 377 days ago. Wow, this means more than one year without blogging!
Reasons for this long silence? Well, I stopped blogging because I had to write my PhD thesis. I then got my PhD in March 2006 but for different reasons it took me until now to restart blogging.
In the meantime, I took the chance to move to a personal domain, gnuband.org (I’m sure everyone is wondering “why gnuband?“), and to move to WordPress.

So, in case you are interested, please bookmark this new blog URL (http://gnuband.org) and subscribe to the new RSS feed (http://gnuband.org/feed/).

I ‎guess I should now write some clever intuitions about the experience of “living and researching without a blog for more than year” but I’m afraid the reality is that I don’t have any of these. I will try nonetheless to write something about this in one of the following posts.
For now, “Welcome back to myself!”. Stay tuned.

Agent Reputation and Trust (ART) Testbed

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Wow, I received an email with another trust-related project.
The Agent Reputation and Trust (ART) Testbed initiative has been launched with the goal of establishing a testbed for agent reputation- and trust-related technologies. The ART Testbed is designed to serve in two roles:
* as a competition forum in which researchers can compare their technologies against objective metrics, and
* as an experimental tool, with flexible parameters, allowing researchers to perform customizable, easily-repeatable experiments.
You can play with the code released on Sourceforge and you can also enjoy the explanation movie!

More from del.icio.us/tag/trust

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– 22nd Chaos Communication Congress – Private Investigations – Breaking Down the Web of Trust
Even with tutorials on the WoT and good trust policies the concept of “trust” can still be hard to grasp. Here we’ll look at trust metrics, ways of using current trust systems better, and some non-crypto applications of trust.
– Microformats Proposal for Reputation and Trust Metrics By Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc. Very interesting!!!
[From http://del.icio.us/tag/trust, subscribe to the rss feed (http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/trust)]