In the following some comments about the Program of the fifth day.
[some people asked me where they can find the slides, actually all of them should appear on the school page but at the moment only a few are there. I think/hope they will appear in the following days]
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In the following some comments about the Program of the forth day.
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In the following some comments about the Program of the third day.
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Some weeks ago, Tantek was introducing a new microformat hReview.
We are pleased to announce the first public draft (v0.1) of hReview, jointly co-authored by representatives from America Online, CommerceNet Labs, Microsoft, Six Apart, Technorati, and Yahoo!. hReview is an open microformat standard for publishing and indexing distributed reviews on the Web. This standard enables users to contribute, identify, and aggregate review content on their own web sites and blogs as well as on community sites.
I didn’t have time yet to dig into it but it is good that they analyzed previous attempts (I was trying to use RVW by Alf Eaton and to keep my list on Allconsuming but I didn’t put too much effort into this) and that they ask for Feedback; almost all the links are to Wikipages so you can edit them directly there.
In general I really appreciate the work of Technorati (I also wrote a paper backing their proposal of VoteLinks, submitted to Web Intelligence 2005: “Page-reRank: using trusted links to re-rank authority” (pdf)).
Some other link I’ll try to digest later on: jluster on hreview, hreview on technorati, hreview on del.icio.us, organizedshopping on hreview, adriancuthbert suggested to use this_is_an_hreview as common tag (tagspace?).
It would be great to have this format widely adopted so that the amount of decentralized published reviews will become soon huge and I will have a large amount a data for what I’m working on in my PhD: Trust-aware decentralized Recommender Systems. If interested, check my (a bit outdated) PhD proposal at my papers page.
Today during the lectures I was falling asleep some times. And you know what was waking me up everytime? The lecturer saying my name! Yes, like in primary schools!
But actually they were not saying “paolo” but “powerlaw”. I don’t know the phonetic alphabet so I cannot write it but if you try to pronounce it very fast you will see how much they sound the same.
In this Study by Xiti (Firefox en Europe : on ne l’arrête plus!), you can see that Firefox is very popular all over Europe: in Finland its market share is 30.9%! And you can also see that Italy is almost the last one as Firefox penetration! So let’s horde over MozillaItalia.org and prouve that we Italians are not living in the ICT-less-advanced country in Europe! (via BlakeRoss)
In the following some comments about the Program of the second day.
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I’ll try to blog the entire School and Workshop on Structure and Function of Complex Networks. 12 days of great speakers. The school in ICTP, an UNESCO research center in Trieste. Since its mission is to foster advanced studies and research, especially in developing countries, there are many researchers from developing countries, as the list of participants shows. And tomorrow there will also be a special talk by UNESCO Director-General.
Following a short summary of the first day:
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As I was saying few days ago, I’ll be in Trieste at the ICTP for the School and Workshop on Structure and Function of Complex Networks for the following 2 weeks. The school is free (UNESCO funded) but I’m on my budget for the accomodation and meal so I tried HospitalityClub and CouchSurfing. On Monday 9 May (evening), I searched for people offering hospitality in Trieste and sent a message to all of them (almost 20). The morning after I got several replies (all on HospitalityClub), all of them very kind offering help and one of them offering me hospitality for the entire period (16-28 May). Incredible!!! Actually as truesmile told me in one of the following emails: “no, non e’ incredebile che ci sia brava gente al mondo, e’ incredebile che non ci crediamo piu!!!” (“no, it is not incredible that there are decent people in the world, it is incredible that we don’t believe this anymore”). So I’ll stay in robby‘s house for the following 12 days! truesmile will lend me her bike and I will meet a lot of new “friends”: rocana, alessia1305, igmaru! Sweet!
User Interface note: There are much more users on HospitalityClub than CouchSurfing and this is incredible because CS is a great site, very usable, good looking and perfect, while HC is unusable, with a poor graphics. I didn’t investigate the reasons but I might guess that HC’s code is written by users themselves that feel HC as a creature of them, while CS is perceived as a great (commercial) tool created by someone else: it is not so, CS’s creator is a great guy and one of the CS users but maybe this is how it is perceived.
Can it be the case that, on social software sites (for non web programmers), crappy graphics and lack of usability is a feature?
Anyway, if you are a Web designer, would you like to give some advise on how to improve HC’s graphics and usability?
Wikimania 2005: The First International Wikimedia Conference will be held in Frankfurt am Main, Germany from 4 August 2005 to 8 August 2005.
Original research is welcome, but not required. Be bold in your submissions! Wikimania is meant to be both a scientific conference and a social event. (from WikiMania Call4Papers).
I’m thinking about going. By chance, can you host me during these days in Frankfurt?