Presentation at the Web Intelligence conference

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I just finished giving a presentation at the Web Intelligence Conference in Compiegne (France). I tried to push the concept of VoteLinks. The presentation is in S5 (so pure standard XHTML+CSS+JS) and CreativeCommons licenced: Page-reRank: using trusted links to re-rank authority (presentation) with the accompanying paper (pdf). Nothing earth-shaking at all, really. The main (simple) concept was that “Attention != Appreciation”, the most linked to page is not necessarily the most appreciated: I might link to gwbush.com in order to criticize it but my link increases its PageRank (something I don’t want). At the moment, HTML does not allow to express the reason behind a link, but VoteLinks microformats will allow to add some semantics to linking language. For example, you could say something like
<a href=”http://forza-italia.it/” rev=”vote-against”>berlusconi</a>
<a href=”http://romanoprodi.it” rev=”vote-abstain”>prodi</a>
<a href=”http://ivanscalfarotto.info”rev=”vote-for”>scalfarotto</a>
In the paper I also give evidence of the (intuitive) fact that “Attention!=Appreciation” with a simple experiment on a real, huge community with positive and negative links.
I thought it would be good to have the Web Intelligence community knows about VoteLinks and other microformats. And actually only 1 person (out of a number of people raging from 10 to 30) had heard of VoteLinks before, so the goal of spreading knowledge was accomplished.
And feel free to link to the presentation of course … hopefully not with a rev="vote-against" link!! ;-)
Tomorrow I go to Paris for giving a demo at SonyLabs and then meeting with Alf.
My trip was once more time sponsored by HospitalityClub/CouchSurfing: in Compiegne I was hosted by Jeremy and in Paris by Antonello. Too cool! Try it yourself, you always met great people!

Presentation in standard format, S5

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Some days ago I had to give a presentation for the 2K* symposium, a joint initiative of research groups from different IT institutions, based in Trento and in Genova. The 40 mins presentation was titled “Trust in Recommender Systems: an historical overview and recent developments” (check the source code!). It is heavily based on an old presentation, I just added some slides about microformats, a concept I wanted to convey to the audience.
Anyway, I took the occasion to try to create the presentation in HTML using S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System developed by Eric Meyer. I think I will create all my future presentation in S5 from now on. The advantages: it “forces” you to keep the slides simple (no unnatural flow of information) and short (however you can have animations, check this slide); it is easy to publish the presentation on the Web, anyone can link to a specific slide, search engines find the information and index them, it is highly standard, evolutionary and small-pieces-loosely-connected-philosophy-like (for exaple it would be possible to create a small piece of javascript code that collect slides from different presentations in some meaningful automatic way to create a new presentation, but the possibilities are endless of course, especially if using the S5 format based on XOXO microformat), I can create the presentation with whatever text editor (perfect if you are in text mode), it does not require the viewer to have some fancy program (openoffice for the freedom lovers, powerpoint for the others) but a browser suffices.
You can find many presentations in S5 format in the microformats wiki; I also liked this presentation of Firefox, with style vulpes-flagrans or with style greenery. Yes, I know the stile I used for my presentation is not that great, if someone with graphical skills would like to create a style for me, it will be very appreciated of course.
For starting playing with S5, I suggest you S5 primer (you need to download HTML code and edit it) or S5present, an open-source web-based slideshow application (you just create an identity there and then use the site for creating the presentation). Guess what? S5 Presents was written in under 10 hours and 500 lines of code using the fantastic Ruby on Rails framework.

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Am I a human? Well, I take the Turing Test

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Very funny post: How I failed the Turing test. Actually, it raises a lot of metaphysical questions.
Some time around March, I started receiving a number of random instant messages from people I’ve never met before. Apparantly, my AIM alias had been added to at least two online lists and people all over the world were busy importing me as a buddy.
I say “at least two” because the people who contacted me fell into one of two camps: people who thought they were contacting a celebrity and people who thought they were contacting a robot. As I talked to more and more of these folks, I began to discover something really disturbing about myself:
I consistently fail to be perceived as human.
Since you are defined but what other people think of you, if the other people think you are not an human, what are you?
Read the entire post.

Discovering Roman ancient villa through GoogleMaps

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From Nature: Using satellite images from Google Maps and Google Earth, an Italian computer programmer has stumbled upon the remains of an ancient villa. (…)
Luca Mori reports his findings on this blog post. On Gmap you can see the discovered villa.
Luca then created CyberArchaeologist.net: In the world many places exist that deserve of being investigate to you. For this it is necessary collaboration with the persons of the place, with who it knows to recognize the places and with who it knows the history well.
An Italian television (La7) made a report about it. And you could possibily see the video at mms://videoteca.cdn…. I could NOT see it since I use GNU/Linux and MMS (the mms:// part in the previous URL) or ‘ Microsoft Media Server ‘ protocol is Microsoft’s proprietary network streaming protocol. Microsoft has never released a specification to describe how MMS actually works, yet it is extensively used by their Microsoft media player software. (info about MMS protocol taken from http://sdp.ppona.com/ and I didn’t check if they are still true). I could probably try to download the last codecs for my Free Software player that someone has retroengineered but this is not the point. Just as much as http:// is an open protocol that allows anyone to contribute (for example, Luca was able to contribute using the Web and providing info on the Web), mms:// is a closed protocol which does not allow evolution, contribution, freedom. Seeing videos on GNU/Linux is always a bit problematic, since there are no open protocols for streaming videos, or I’m missing something? Vorbis? How can we make an open protocol hugely adapted?
By the way, good spot Luca!

Petition for Open Access to State-Collected Geospatial Data

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You might want to sign up the petition for Open Access to State-Collected Geospatial Data (in Italian).
We believe that state-collected geodata should be openly available to citizens. Please sign up below to support this manifesto.
All government-collected geodata should be open, that is, available for free distribution and re-use under a ShareAlike license.
Geodata is a public good. Open access to it, under a ‘Commons’ (ShareAlike) license, is the best way to see its full benefits realized by industry and citizens. At the same time such an arrangement, by requiring users to redistribute updates and improvements to the data, promises to deliver more and better data for less.

Power to the browser with Flock

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If 50% of what this Wired article says is true, your Web experience will never be the same again.
Flock advertises itself as a “social browser,” meaning that the application plays nicely with popular web services like Flickr, Technorati and del.icio.us. Flock also features widely compliant WYSIWYG, drag-and-drop blogging tools. The browser even promises to detect and authenticate all those user accounts automatically. It’s a clear attempt to be the browser of choice for the Web 2.0 user.
Yes it is Free Software.

Trusted computing video

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Marco Fabbri comments on my previous post about open standards and recommends me to check the Trusted Computing Video, since I’m interesting in Trust. The video overcame my attention threshold at least twice during this week but when I tried to watch it the site was always down. This time I was luckier and I must say the video is incredibly well done, and released under a Creative Commons licence!
Marco Fabbri (some initial pagerank for a new comer in the blogosphere) comments that I will find especially interesting the definition given: “Trust is the personal believe in correctness of s.th. . It is the deep conviction of truth and rightness, and can not be enforced. If you gain s.o. trust, you have estabilished an interpersonal relationship, based on communication, shared values and experiences. TRUST always depends on mutuality”.
Idea: since the video is under Creative Commons, shall we be a bit Creative and enrich the Commons? Shall we translate and dub it in Italian so that non-English-speakers can get an idea of what this is about? I could easily translate the text but I don’t have any device (trusted or not) for recording the audio.
And just in case you don’t have handy plugins for playing videos (as me), here we have some direct links to the high quality video: http://www.lafkon.net/tc/trusted-computing.torrent, http://yafc.net/TrustedComputing_LAFKON_HIGH.mov

Problems with Beppe Grillo Blog

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Beppe Grillo Blog is currently 66th on the Technorati list of top blogs. Pretty impressive if you think he only writes in Italian. However I see some problems with this blog I’ll try to describe here.
Every daily post has around 1000 comments. This is not a problem per se, of course, if people want to write a lot of comments to every your post, this is good, you probably write something that is very interesting.
So today I wanted to alert Beppe (or who read all the comments) about this article on groklaw, so I went to beppegrillo.it and try to leave a comment and, surprise, you cannot leave as signature a link to your blog but only an email address! This is really against empowering communication in a decentralized manner! In this way, if I want to be heard on the Web I cannot write on my blog but I must come back to beppegrillo blog and leave a comment there. I cannot have a Web identity independently of beppegrillo.it domain!
I think Beppe speaks often of “Direct democracy” that is achieved through his blog. Well, this is not at all something new. Instead Beppe Grillo is becoming a leader of a face-less, identity-less crowd that exist only by commenting on his blog. It is not very different from a Prodi or Berlusconi leader whose followers are anonymous identities (you might even have doubts they exist at all).
So, enough criticisms and let start with the (hopefully) constructive part: Beppe, please, invite people who flock to your blog to have their Web presence. Let commenters leave a link to their Web identity (a blog). Place a very visible invitation (in the menubar and on top fo the right column) for visitors to open their own personal blog, with instructions on how to do it. The message could be something like this: (in Italian) “Sono molto contento di vedere cosi’ tanti commenti ai miei post. Ma credo che la forza del Web sia nel fatto che ognuno puo’ dire la sua. Ti invito quindi ad aprire un TUO blog e a postare in esso le TUE idee. Potrai ovviamente linkare i miei post quando lo ritieni opportuno o lasciare commenti con link alle TUE riflessioni sul TUO blog. Io ho tante cose da dire ma sono sicuro che anche tu hai tante cose da dire, e non e’ affatto detto che quelle che dico io siano piu’ interessanti di quelle che dici tu. Quindi ti consiglio di aprire un tuo blog. E’ semplicissimo. Le istruzioni per farlo sono qui di seguito. (e nel seguito alcune semplici istruzioni su come creare un blog in splinder.com, blogger.com, …)”
Another comment I wanted to leave on his blog was about GNU/Linux. He speakes a lot about the power of the new technologies and Internet but a search for linux on his blog returns zero results. I wanted to suggest to Beppe to speak about this alternative in the domain of software. Anyway I hope that in some decentralized way, he finds this post and comments here, here you can leave a link to your web presence.
And Beppe, since you are so intripped (yes, this is not English) with the power of the Web, I’m confident you’ll be able to understand why I (try to) write in English even if I’m Italian.

UPDATE: a comment by Matteo lets me know that Massimo already wrote about it: crea il tuo blog.
“Tutto quello che pensi e scrivi lo ha gia’ pensato e scritto qualcun altro” – Anonimo