Author Archives: paolo

Forecast: Ajax Office available in less than one year

My little forecast: I think that in less than one year there will be a Suite Office usable “inside” your browser, entirely written in Javascript and , using the DOM model of XHTML.

UPDATE: AjaxOffice is now on sourceforge.

UPDATE My office mate told me that there are already many Free Software HTML text editors such as FckEditor, TinyMCE (longer list at HTMLArea). So I guess we just need Google (or Yahoo!) to provide the service and the possibility to store files on their disks. END OF UPDATE

Many usable pieces are already there (usually as Free Software javascript libraries): toolbar, menubar, drag-and-drop, edit-in-place, window, resize images.
What is peculiar is that
– writing this suite is not too complicated
– there are so many people (thousands or more) with enough skills for easily doing it
Using “release early, release often” phylosophy and a Free Software licence (such as GPL), we could have a big number of hackers working all together at the “Ajax Office”, adding functionalities, correcting bugs, …
You can easily imagine that having a reliable Office Suite that works inside your browser is a great opportunity for normal users (who will need Microsoft Office? but also OpenOffice…).
But you can also imagine having Google (or Yahoo! or another big player) offering the Ajax Office interface AND the ability to keep your files on their disks and access/modify/print them from every computer in the world just via a browser. And not having to bother with backups. Similar to what happens now with Gmail (almost infinite storage for your emails and the ability to access it via any computer just with a browser). Jeremy already thinks that Gmail is faster and better than Thunderbird (desktop email program). I think one of its next posts will be “Ajax Office (or Goffice) is better than Microsoft Office (and OpenOffice)”. [Oh yes, there are huge privacy issues.]
Anyway that would be killer! A totally new way to use computers and the web. And I want to see Microsoft shares that day! I’m just dreaming or is it a reasonable forecast? My bet is for the second. So, I see you here in less than one year.

Attention Trust and my cloud of related concepts

I was reading an explanation of AttentionTrust.org goals and got a bunch of related concepts on my mind. For now I throw them to you embedded in bold in this chaotic post, in future I guess there will be a microformat for giving semantics to the relationships between these concepts. [I also guess that for most of the concept words, you can lead to the related wikipedia page and find a compelling ongoing description (and probably a greasemonkey script that converts all the words that are no links to links to wikipedia page is already available somewhere)]

From AttentionTrust.org: a Declaration of Gestural Independence:
if the attention I pay to others is valued in proportion to the amount of attention earned by me, then an accounting system is set in motion which quotes something like the social share prices of individual attention.
PageRank of attention, actually better named AttentionRank.
Cyberspace is where the new kind of economy comes into its own. Like any economy the new one is based on what is both most desirable and ultimately most scarce, and now this is the attention that comes from other people.
Attention is scarce because each of us has only so much of it to give, and it can come only from us — not machines, computers or anywhere else.
Unlike the old matter-based wealth, the new wealth is nothing you can hope to put under lock and key. You get it by reaching out into the world.

Attention Economy, Whuffie
Wealth therefore comes to you by expressing yourself fully. The best guarantee you have for attention going to you for what you do is living your life as openly as possible, expressing yourself as publicly as possible as early as possible (hence it makes sense to put out drafts, early versions, so there are witnesses for everything you do.)
free software phylosophy, release early, release often
So the new privacy and the old are direct opposite. The new privacy means having no secrets, which you don’t normally need to have, because little that was previously shameful or had to be concealed is so now…
sousveillance
What people do demand as privacy now is freedom from having to pay attention, not from being seen but seeing what they don’t want to.
daily me / tiranny of the majority
The first move in establishing an open market for Attention was to declare a set of basic rights: Property: I own my attention and I can store it securely in private.
Mobility: I can move my attention wherever I want whenever I want to.
Economy: I can pay attention to whomever I wish and be paid for it.
Transparency: I can see how my attention is being used
These represent our rights as attention owners.
(…) In any case, by virtue of recognizing the above-listed rights, members of the AttentionTrust (both individual and corporate) express their participation in a free, open market for exchanging their attention.

alternative economy, emerging democracy
Like so many Web applications, but on a much grander scale, Google takes what I am looking for (literally my attention) and turns it into a commodity called a keyword, which in turn gets pooled and traded by advertisers and publishers who don’t give me anything in return but do subsidize my use of Google search, my storage in Gmail, etc.
Interesting discussion of what Google company really is (related to the scary list of what Google knows about you).

And yes, I’m paying attention to the post I commented here and, recursively, if you paid attention to this post, I’m asking/suggesting to pay attention to the post I commented here. Are you paying something to me? Am I paying something to you? Is there anyone out there reading this? If not, who is paying who? Well, I guess some answers will come from AttentionTrust.org and for now I just paid attention…

Ruby on Rails Rules

After seeing at AAAI05 what Jesse is able to do with Ruby on Rails, I decided I have to learn it.
Rails is a full-stack, open-source web framework in Ruby for writing real-world applications with joy and less code than most frameworks spend doing XML sit-ups.
So far so good, it has been a great-great pleasure meeting this joy-toy. My suggestion for get going:
1. See the incredible “how to build a blog engine in 15 minutes with Ruby on Rails” video. [Even if you don’t want to start learning a new language/framework, trust me, check the video, you won’t regret it.]
2. Read the “Four Days on Rails” step-by-step tutorial (and create the code along).
3. Read the Really Getting Started in Rails, if you still have some doubts, especially if you haven’t used Ruby before (I didn’t) and don’t want to learn completely the language (I don’t). [info: Ruby is a language, Rails is a framework for building web applications that uses Ruby]

Wikipedia Statistics

Wikipedia Charts are very cool. They show the evolution in time of the number of Wikipedians – Articles – Database – Links – Daily Usage. See the All languages or for the Italian version. There are so many data you could design a lot of interesting tests. This also reminds me of this event:
Wikimania 2005 – The First International Wikimedia Conference, August 4-8, 2005, Frankfurt am Main.

ArteSella (nature art) slideshow

Today I visited ArteSella, an International Exhibition of Nature Art that is very close to Trento. I’m not very good in explaining how magic this exhibition is so I guess I’ll let the images speak. Or, if you prefer, the Artesella Flickr slideshow. If you want to come in Trentino for a rejuvenating period, you know who to ask for …
From ArteSella site:
Arte Sella is an international biennial exhibition of contemporary art which began life in 1986. It takes places in the open, in the fields and woods of the Val di Sella valley (near Borgo Valsugana in the Province of Trento). Since 1996 the Arte Sella project has been laid out along a path in the woods on the southern slope of the Armentera mountain. The route, named ARTENATURA (“Art in Nature”) is designed to enable visitors to view the artworks and at the same time enjoy the natural site itself (with its different types of woods, rocks and trees …)
The idea of the exhibition is not just to display works of art but also to show the creative process involved: the works are followed day by day as they are created and the artists are called upon to express their relationship with nature from which they draw inspiration – a relationship based on respect.

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Faletti: “Open Source leads to Barbarity”

[again news about Italy in Italian]
In article on La Stampa, Faletti speaks about his free appearance in a Television Spot campaign of the Italian Government to fight piracy of multimedia content. There is no need to say that the spot costs public money to be broadcasted in televisions and that this becomes private money of Berlusconi who owns Italian private televisions.
Anyway the point I want to make here is another: the spokeman of the campaign against piracy, Faletti, is so informed that says:
«Io invece penso che l’open source sia il sistema migliore per precipitare nella barbarie.».
(I think instead that Open Source is the best way to fall into Barbarity.)
Let me state it again: this is the man chosen by Italian Government to explain to Italians (via television) what is piracy and how to fight it.

Incredible article about Windows Longhorn on Repubblica.it

[I usually don’t post link to discussions in Italian, but this is too funny/sad. If you don’t undestand Italian, you can skip this]
L’articolo su Repubblica.it Longhorn, il nuovo Windows su misura per l’era Internet e’ totalmente non plausibile, inverosimile e inconsistente.
Leggete il post di Paolo Attivissimo Repubblica parla di Longhorn, parte il festival della castroneria per farvi una idea delle imprecisioni (e anche per farvi due risate).
Nel seguito l’email che ho scritto di getto (e magari con errori grammaticali) all’autore dell’articolo, Giuseppe Turani [ g.turani AT repubblica.it ] prima di leggere il chiaro post di Paolo Attivissimo. Se vi va di invitare Turani a scrivere un articolo chiarificatore (o almeno a capire che ha scritto inesattezze) potreste inviargli anche voi una email.
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Tripods: online, multiplayer Google Maps game.

Some days ago I was wondering about Creating playable Games on Google Maps. I received an email today from Thomas Scott: he created Tripods: online, multiplayer Google Maps game.
How To Play? – Your job is to battle invading Google Maps tripod markers that are invading Manhattan!
I added it to the Games on Google Maps wiki page. Are you aware of more games? If so, would you mind add them on the wiki page?

Identity Burro: GreaseMonkey extension for social sites.

flickr_after_identity_burro.png

UPDATE: there is now an IdentityBurro project page
You are looking at the page of xyz on flickr and you would like to see xyz‘s bookmarks on del.icio.us?
Or, you are on the technorati profile page of abc and you would like to see abc‘s photos on flickr?
Well, if one of these desideratas has been in your mind before, you now have it!
Enter Identity Burro (or IdentityBurro), a GreaseMonkey extension that inserts, in the profile page of user xyz on flickr or del.icio.us or technorati, the link to the profile pages of user xyz on flickr and del.icio.us and technorati. Your social sites are now more social!
See the screenshots.

Still with me? Then I guess you might want to install:
   Current Version: Identity Burro v0.1

At the moment there is nothing better I can do that assuming an user has the same nick on every site: I assume xyz@flickr is xyz@del.icio.us and xyz@technorati. I know this is by no means guaranteed to be true (or desirable). I hope (and ask) that one of this social sites will soon let its users to enter which are their nicks on other sites. In this way I would be able to get this information and put the correct links when xyz@flickr is called abc@del.icio.us.

And of course, as you can see by the name of the extension, inspiration for this extension came from the mighty BookBurro extension, whose creator Jesse I just met few days ago at the AAAI 2005 conference in Pittsburgh.
The code is released under a Creative Commons “Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5” licence (since Book Burro was released in this way and the shareAlike option didn’t really give me a chance to change licence for a GPL).

If you like, you might want to let me know if it works in the buggy browser, I mean, Internet Explorer.
Todo:
# when expanded, part of the unexpanded interface (buttons and icons) remains in background, more transparent. understand why and fix it
# when expanded the “expand” icon should become a “shrink” icon (the arrow in the other direction).
# some CSS properties are inherited from the current site, so that for example, the extension looks a bit different in flickr and in del.icio.us. Understand which are the properties of which elements and overwrite them (surely the background of some elements is inherited).
# adding more social sites, for example, webjay, citeulike, last.fm, audioscrobbler, furl, wist, blogmarks, 43things, tagsurf, upcoming, jots, podcast, consumating, rojo, bloglines, smugsmug, bookswelike, kinja.

Leave comments to this post for communicating with me about the extension.
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Trento province chooses Free Software

provincia_software_libero_ladige.pngThe article on newspaper L’Adige reports that “Also Microsoft, that is opening a research centre in Trento, will have to use it”. Anyway I think it is probably just a boutade of the article writer to get attention (and he succeeded, at least with me). Anyway the press conference of the Province is more precise and useful. All the links point to information in Italian, some extracts follow.
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