Author Archives: paolo

The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia

The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir (part1) (part2) posted on SlashDot is a terrific read. I really really really recommend it!
“Larry Sanger was one of the moving forces behind the pioneering Nupedia project. That makes him one of the people to thank for Wikipedia, which has been enjoying more and more visibility of late. Sanger has prepared a lengthy, informative account of the early history of Nupedia and Wikipedia, including some cogent observations on project management, online legitimacy, dealing with trolls, and other hazards of running a large, collaborative project over the Internet.”
I also recommend the Power Structure page on meta.wikipedia.org
“Wikipedia’s present power structure is a mix of anarchic, despotic, democratic, republican, meritocratic, technocratic, and even plutocratic elements”

Client power: you modified the page your browser receives (greasemonkey)

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GreaseMonkey is an extension for Firefox browser that easily allows you to change the rendering of a web page received by your browser. The example image shows how Greasemonkey can insert prices from competitive booksellers right into Amazon..
Well, you can easily imagine how Greasemonkey will blow up business models (as well as your mind). The total control over the content you see with your web browser had slipped away from content providers’ hands (the web site who is sending you the data i.e. Amazon, Google, …) to content consumers’ hands (this means you … well, if you use a clever browser).

Folksonomies criticism

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I tend to be enthusiastic about folksonomy and forget considering in what they are good and in what they are not, basically I forget to keep asking myself questions instead of blatantly state “Here we need a folksonomy! Yeahhey!!!”. Anyway, as a sort of balance, you might want to read a post by Gene Smith and one by danah that are more critics than I am (unfortunately).

Social Capital and Social Networks – Bridging Boundaries

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Social Capital and Social Networks – Bridging Boundaries conference seems interesting. Moreover there is no registration fee and Junior scholars, graduate students and assistant professors, are invited to apply to attend the conference and receive lodging, meals, and up to $400 in travel expenses. The application deadline was May 5, 2005 (oops). I cannot make it but if you are in US, it is worth checking it.

Propagating Trust until I found gold: Ultra Gleeper

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An email from Zbigniew pointed me to a Tribe.net discussion which pointed me to Personal Web Neighborhood: The Small Web project (very interesting read indeed) which pointed me to The Ultra Gleeper: A Recommendation Engine for Web Pages (pure gold!)
The UltraGleeper paper is the paper I could dream of writing but I will never be able to. Since the paper is released under a creative commons licence attribution/share-alike (and my blog too) I’m going to copy portions of it but of course giving credit to Leonard Richardson . Ooops, i was almost forgetting: Ultra Gleeper is Free software, so you have freedom of study and improving it. I will try to play with it really soon!
Continue reading →

Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy

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I began reading “Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy” by Bertrand Russell (First page)
Mathematics is a study which, when we start from its most familiar portions, may be pursued in either of two opposite directions. The more familiar direction is constructive, towards gradually increasing complexity: from integers to fractions, real numbers, complex numbers, from addition and multiplication to differentiation and integration, and on to higher mathematics. The other direction, which is less familiar, proceeds, by analysing, to greater and greater abstractness and logical simplicity; instead of asking what can be defined and deduced from what is assumed to begin with, we ask instead what more general ideas and principles can be
found, in terms of which what was our starting-point can be defined or deduced. It is the fact of pursuing this opposite direction that characterises mathematical philosophy as opposed to ordinary mathematics. But it should be understood that the distinction is one, not in the subject matter, but in the state of mind of the investigator. … The distinction between mathematics and
mathematical philosophy is one which depends upon the interest inspiring the research, and upon the stage which the research has reached; not upon the propositions with which the research is concerned.
I began reading this book already at least 5 times, I’m beginning again. Russell seems a genious (at least to me, but I guess I don’t really have ways to judge him so I’m more trusting the generalish opinion about him here).

Trust Metrics Book

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I’m thinking about writing a book on Trust Metrics, or maybe about Trust Metrics and Recommender Systems. (I need to write my PhD thesis anyway so if I can get it published, this is a plus). Well, a search inside-books on Amazon for “trust metric” reveals this is not a too covered topic. Good. Do you have any suggestion? Publisher, topics, whatever. Anyway being able to search inside (almost) every book in one second is astonishing, sometimes I forget about how astonishing the Web is…

New paper: Learning Contextualised Weblog Topics

I forgot about another paper I wrote: Learning Contextualised Weblog Topics (pdf) will be presented at WWW 2005 2nd Annual Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics in Chiba, Japan, May 10th 2005. My boss was going to WWW2005 for presenting another paper and so we decided to submit our ongoing work to this workshop to get some feedback. We are still working with the system but we should be ready for prime time soon enough … stay tuned!
[I would have loved to meet Ethan Zuckerman that is the invited speaker at this workshop and whose work on media attention is just delicious. (I even proposed to help him in coding something for monitoring the Italian media world but it’s too bad I’m so lazy)]

If you like, check the paper Learning Contextualised Weblog Topics (pdf)
Abstract: In this paper, we examine how a topic-centric view of the Blogosphere can be created. We characterise the problems in aligning similar concepts created by a set of distributed, autonomous users and describe current iniatives to solve the problem. We introduce the Tagsocratic project, a novel initiave to solve the concept alignment problem using techniques derived from research in language acquisition among distributed, autonomous agents.

Tag your friends

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The interface of Rojo is totally unusable (at least to me), i don’t understand the interface metaphors. What attracted me was the ability to tag your friends. So a curiosity: how would you tag me?
Our vision is that the next generation of feed reading requires new forms of organization so we built in the ability to tag your world, your content, your feeds, and even your friends.

FolkOS: Folksonomy Operating System

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We were used to organize our bookmarks in folders, then del.icio.us came and we now appreciate folksonomies (flat taxonomies, just a set of free keywords you can attach to URLs). We are used to operating systems that allow us to categorize files (knowledge) on folders, would it make sense to have an operating system that allows us to categorize files only based on taxonomy (just add keywords to any file, all the files are in a flat pool)? I don’t know.
What I know is that the total lack of concurrency in the Operating Systems domain (actually just one global monopoly) is depriving all of us of new ideas, new paradigms, progress. If you compare it with the vibrant Web, where a new idea gets implemented and proposed almost daily, you can maybe see how far we would be if there were a free market for Operating Systems.
Anyway, how could we call it? What about FolkOS? FolkOS, the Folksonomy Operating System, I can already see the advertisements…. And, yes, I patented the idea, I got every possible TradeMark and not only on Earth. I patented FolkOS also on Venus and Alpha Centauri (venusians and alphacentaurians be aware! Don’t use my patented ideas! I have the best lawyers of the galaxy!).
[I tend to overload my emails of smilies (for expressing when I’m joking) but I don’t like them on blog posts, so I’m not sure my 4 readers understand when I (try to) make a joke. So, just to be sure, this is a joke … I think patenting computational ideas is a total nonsense (maybe a video can help in understanding why)].