Author Archives: paolo

Microsoft means e-exclusion (also in music)

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(via TeledyN) An alliance announced today between MSN Music and Smithsonian Folkways Recordings will make tens of thousand of historic songs from legendary performers of folk, blues, jazz and world music available online for the first time, allowing music fans to discover a diverse world of music and sound. But from the archive I can get nothing, since the System Requirements are screamful and I don’t use the crappiest operating system ever. This is an example of e-exclusion: since I choose not to use that operating system, I am cut out of this experience. File formats (and songs formats obviously) MUST be open so that everyone can be free to write a program able to read them! Just try to imagine if Microsoft was more smart and understood earlier what the web could have been. We would have now: closed protocols (no TCP/IP, no HTTP, but M$TP!), no open formats for web pages (no HTML but M$ML). Of course you would not be able to use whatever program to communicate over the internet or to create a page but you would have been forced to pay for highly-unuseful and dangerous and closed-source M$ software! I’m so depressed that most people just don’t see it: the future Microsoft wants for us is a future of darkness. Following you can find the System Requirements for listening to “historic songs from legendary performers of folk, blues, jazz and world music”:
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Lucas, please, add tagging to WebJay

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A lot of discussion about why tags are so useful (folksonomies is the current buzzword) on Many2Many. As I noted in a previous post, at the moment there are services that allows you to tag: URLs (del.icio.us), photos (flickr), your emails (gmail), posts on metafilter (metafilter), posts on your blog (technorati, using <a ref="tag">), scientific papers (citeulike), todo items (43things) and books (bookswelike, which I just discovered).
But what we would really really really enjoy is MUSIC TAGGING!
So, is there a site where it is possible to apply free tags to songs? And to collections of songs? I’m not aware of such a site. I mean totally free tags (such as PsyChill or MaleNeuvoFolk) to express your personal categorization of a set of songs and not ID3 tags.
I think WebJay should be our friend here. Let me first say that I’m in total love with webjay, a site that helps you listen to and publish web playlists, i.e. collections of mp3s (and other formats) available on the web. Here are my webjay playlists.
So, coming back to the subject of the post, I definitely think we would enjoy a free-tagging music site and I think WebJay is the best candidate and Lucas Gonze (the developer of webjay) totally rocks. Anyway, Seb (@WJ) was arguing on webjay forum some time ago that “Webjay Needs Tags” and the entire discussion (7 posts) is really interesting. Lucas is not that convinced since he argues that playlists and tags are very different metaphors and very different organizing principles and also that “WJ is radically constrained by the lack of money”.
I think tags could be applied both to playlists (I tag this playlist as “mellow”) and single songs (I tag this song as “PsyChill”). Both ways seems appealing to me about what they can produce, for example: “let me see all the playlists tagged as ‘mellowblues’ or “i’ve 30 free minutes, play me a collection of ‘coldrelax’ songs”). The good of tags is that they are not imposed from the top (i agree with riddle (@wj) when he says “I’m glad that you didn’t impose a preconceived notion of genre on Webjay”) but they emerge from the bottom. Lastly, hideout (@WJ) proposes to use del.icio.us system to tag playlists since every playlist has a permanent URL. This can be a low-impact-on-webjay solution and very small-pieces-loosely-connected one and i definitely think it can make sense. Maybe it would be better if Lucas integrates the remote tagging made on del.icio.us on WebJay interface in order to make it in some way visible and promote its usage.
What do you think? Want to share your point of view? You can either do it on WebJay Forum or with a comment here. Music free tagging is the next step! [ehm, I think I’m not good in inventing new words … so i leave to you the option to invent the new cool buzzword for music-free-tagging].

Trust in Games

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Over at Terranova, nathan is thinking about trust in games. One of the reasoning lines goes along “more powerful characters can be less trusting of the world around them than the weaker”. Interesting, it seems that the weak is obliged to risk by trusting other unknown users while the strong can rely on herself, at least in part.
Anyway, I think virtual worlds are definetely a good playground for studying how social relationships evolve over time. Do you know of any MMORPG that is making available (possibly anonimized) data about characters’ interactions? Or do you know of a powerful and open-source framework for quickly creating an appealing online environment in which it would be possible to study those dynamics?

Controversial books: patenting the obvious?

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Interesting NYTimes’s article (if you don’t want to register, use BugMeNot where you can find shared login and password pairs). Mikhail Gronas discovers that “reviewers gave more five-star reviews than two-star reviews, creating an upward sloping curve”. (…) “But the most telling variable is the one star rating. Professor Gronas found that books high on what he called the “controversiality index” are given almost as many one-star as five-star ratings, creating a horseshoe-shaped curve. As it turns out, these books also tend to have high sales.”
I’ve found these patterns analyzing Epinions.com ratings and trust statements (chech the graphs’ on the paper (pdf)) but actually I don’t think they are that surprising: they seem pretty obvious and I just reported them passing by.
What is really depressing is that Dartmouth is now in the process of patenting software that will be used to determine the “controversiality index”.
I’m happy that in Europe we are still fighting against a so-stupid-policy of being able to patent everything, no matter how trivial it is. In this case the controversiality level of a book is something like “if a book received as much 5 ratings as 1 and if the 5 and 1 ratings together are the vast majority of ratings and if the number of received ratings is over a threshold (probably depending on release time), then the book is controversial” (putting it in formula that produces a controversiality value would require 10 minutes at most).
By the way, I’m currently working on the concept of controversiality of users and hopefully a paper is on the way. Controversial users are users who are trusted by many and distrusted by many. (Bush is a good example, but this can happen to highly visible persons in general). The idea is that Local Trust Metrics make sense expecially for highly controversial users (for example, users who are trusted by more than 200 users and DIStrusted by more than 200 users in the community). For those users, it does not make sense to predict a trust value of 0.5 saying that you should trust this user as 0.5 but, instead, to predict you should trust this controversial user as 1 if, for example, all your friends trust her and 0 if all your friends distrust her.

Folksonomies spreading is a river, we can just steer the kayak

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“To put this metaphorically, we are not driving a car, with gas, brakes, reverse and a lot of choice as to route. We are steering a kayak, pushed rapidily and monotonically down a route determined by the enviroment. We have a (very small) degree of control over our course in this particular stretch of river, and that control does not extend to being able to reverse, stop, or even significantly alter the direction w’re moving in.”
I love how Clay Shirky writes! Read the entire post on Many2Many about the fact “mass amateurization of cataloging” is going to happen anyway.

School and Workshop on Structure and Function of Complex Networks

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School and Workshop on Structure and Function of Complex Networks. 16 – 28 May 2005 at Abdus Salam ICTP – Trieste – Italy.
Even if the dealine for the application is already passed, it seems there are still some places. Check the poster (pdf): the invited speakers are just great! Note that “Although the main purpose of the Centre is to help research workers from developing countries, a limited number of students and post-doctoral scientists from developed countries are also welcome to attend.” and “There is no registration fee to be paid” (via an email on SOCNET mailinglist of INSNA).
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Mycroft Firefox Taggregator

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Matt has created a bookmarklet for adding Technorati tags (via boingboing). And there is also a bookmarklet for searching Technorati tags. So I thought I might create a mycroft search engine plugin for Firefox and Mozilla that could search Technorati tags. However it seems that now, Mozilla only supports plugins that work with the GET method (those URLs with "?somename=somevalue&othername=othervalue" in them) and Technorati Tags page does not use this approach (see as an example the page for the tag “simple”). So I felt back to the really first aggregator of tags, Taggregator, whose pages do use the GET method: see for instance Taggregator page about tag “simple”.
In the process, I discovered that creating a Mycroft plugin is incredibly simple thanks to the generator.

So if you like, you may add Taggregator search engine plugin to your Mozilla, Firefox or Netscape7 browser.

Download them (scarichiamoli)

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Creative Commons Italy is proposing a simple law: “everything that is funded with state funds must be public domain” (ciò che è finanziato con soldi pubblici deve essere di dominio pubblico). A Creative Commons licence would be better than public domain but I guess this is just a first step for igniting a nation-wide discussion … and anyway laws in Italy cannot be that simple, they must contains tons of words that you can’t understand (without a lawyer). ;-)
(via punto-informatico)

The web is more a social creation than a technical one.

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The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect — to help people work together — and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies. We develop trust across the miles and distrust around the corner.
    —Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving The Web
(found at XFN: Introduction and Examples)