Tag Archives: Blogging

Teens share innermost feelings with parents or ….?

When teens are asked to choose whether they prefer to share their innermost feelings with their parents or a blog, they are split with roughly half (51%) selecting their parents and 49% choosing a blog. (from BusinessWire, via an email on SocNet).
Yes, I didn’t follow Clay’s advice with this entry, posting a news that just is too postable not to be posted.
Most of us will not be able to afford the calling and re-calling of sources to double-check a quote, but all of us can ask ourselves, just before we hit Submit, ‘Is this true?’. And the time we should be most careful to do that is if we feel really satisfied with what we’ve written.
This result seems so perfectly fabricated for having bloggers post it … with self-satisfaction and I’m brainlessy posting it not pondering enough ‘Is this true?’, but that’s how the world goes these days …

Review of “Quality Control in Scholarly Publishing”

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Some weeks ago, I received an email from Stefano Mizzaro asking my opinion about his paper Quality Control in Scholarly Publishing: A New Proposal (pdf). In the meantime he came to Trento and we discussed face to face but I want to share here some quick comments I wrote on my wiki about the paper. I liked it, it is very clearly presented, it addresses a real problem and a more and more important one. The math is very clear, sound and makes sense. [Yes he found me because of the blog and not because of my papers and this keeps telling me something]. Read the comments to the paper.
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HTML tag <A> gets a new attribute: nofollow

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I read on News.com that Google is promoting a new attribute for the html tag <A> for preventing comment spam.
Example: Visit my <a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel="nofollow">discount pharmaceuticals</a> site.
Google will not follow such a link (because of the nofollow attribute) and hence the linked site will not get Pagerank. This should give less incentives to blogspammers in automatically commenting your blog with spam messagges. I think it will not work but this is just a try for tacking spam and hence worthwhile.
What is more interesting is the “decentralized” evolution of (HTML) language. The new attribute is just a proposal from Google to extend a standard language but Google has a so high reputation that many people will follow this suggestion and this means Google has the power to change HTML language. Technorati did something similar proposing rel="tag" just few days ago. Technorati proposed also VoteLink with rel="vote-for" and rel="vote-against" and XFN with rel="friend met" and others relationships-related tags.
Actually everyone can propose a change in HTML language (or whatever language/protocol) but it is of course difficult to have it accepted by a significant number of players/content creators.
It will also be interesting to see if this language evolution will produce different linking behaviours.

<a rel=”tag”> and technorati aggregates your post based on category

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If you want to have your category-tagged posts aggregated by Technorati, “tag” your post by including a special link:
<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/[tagname]" rel="tag">[tagname]</a>
(from Technorati Tags Help).
Since I was there, I’ve modified how post categories are visualized on my blog, they should float on the right with a little cloud image linking to the relative tag page on Technorati. If you notice any problem (especially with IExplorer), please let me know.

2 more “things” technorati could aggregate: papers and todo lists.

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Some entries ago I was asking if there was somewhere a repository of category-tagged blog posts (for a project I was thinking about with some colleagues on evolution of a shared language). Few days ago, Technorati made a big step in providing it.
It aggregates URLs bookmarked under a certain tag in del.icio.us, photos tagged under the same tag in flickr and ALSO blog posts categorized under the same “tag”. Cool! For example, see the page about the tag “peace”.
Are there other services that use tags to tag things? Yes, there are. citeUlike lets you tag scientific papers. 43things lets you tag “todo lists” (I didn’t play with 43things so I’m not really sure what you tag). For example, see citeUlike page for design “tag” and 43things page for design “tag”. Gmail as well allows you to tag received emails but of course (at least for the moment) emails are private and it is not possible to aggregate them. We will investigate “would it be useful?” next time.
Are there more services that allow you to tag things? If you know any, please report them in the comments. I especially think we could really enjoy a songs-tagging site but more about this later.

Almost one month without blogging

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Phew! I just saw last entry was written Dec 17, 2004. Almost one month ago! Why have i not written during all these days? I don’t know. Maybe lack of motivation. Maybe just too many holidays. Maybe I was tired. I need to think more about it. Anyway I have many “drafts” (unpublished blog entries, often with just a sketched idea or just a have-to-blog-it link) so I’ll buffer out them today and tomorrow.

Hassan Masum is WorldChanging

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Via Seb, I come to know that my friend Hassan Masum started blogging over at WorldChanging. I met Hassan some months ago in Fribourg and I was delighted to discuss with him of many different topics. He is really a many-interests clever guy. WorldChanging was already in my blogroll and I think it will beneficiate from Hassan’s contributions in changing the world for the better. Welcome Hassan!

Repository of category-tagged blog posts: anyone?

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Some colleagues of mine are working on “how people can reach a shared common dictionary/language to denote concepts” (or at least understand each other still using their keywords). See Advertising games. We want to test ideas using real data from the blogosphere. The idea is to detect when 2 bloggers are posting about the same concept/topic but use different names to tag it (the post’s category). For example, I use “trust and reputation”, someone else uses “reputation” but we may speak about the same concept.
The questions:
– There is an aggregated repository of posts with categories?
– If not, Have you any idea about how can I collect this information?
Requirement:
– posts must have a category associated (livejournal and blogger don’t let do this, while MovableType and WordPress yes).
Some ongoing web search about the topic we’re doing can be found at this wiki page, and this too. Thanks for help!

OpenMedia and Galway

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[still looking for a friend(-of-a-friend)* offering me hospitality in Larnaca, Cyprus, from 25 to 29 Oct 2004.]
Marc is working on OpenMedia. The project is very interesting but what catched my eye is that in the picture explaining OpenMedia there is my picture (the one representing me on WebJay).
I’ll meet Marc at the FOAF conference in Galway, Ireland (we will have a dinner in the castle you can see in the image). I’m looking forward to meet Marc and the other people in the committee. It will be fun!

GoogleBomb to stop genocide in Sudan

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Jim is trying to organize a google-bombing of Sudan by getting folks to blog the word “Sudan” and link it to Passion of the Present, a site he’s helping organize to call attention to the plight of the residents of Darfur. Unlike John Kerry and waffles, or George W Bush and “miserable failure”, this google-bombing has a point – the Khartoum government has proven very sensitive to public pressure. If Google tells them the world is paying attention to Darfur, perhaps they’ll ease more of the restrictions making it difficult for food and aid to reach refugees in Darfur.(via Ethan)
I also want to add this attempt in the definition of googlebomb in Wikipedia that has probably more pagerank than my site, but wikipedia is temporariy locked for maintenance. TODO: remember to edit Wikipedia.
For Italian people, there is an Italian site about the situation in Sudan (no, I´m not affiliated with it).
You can also check who is participating with Technorati.