In a comment, Jim Moore (author of The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head) invites to link to The Passion of the Present in order to “help mobilize people to help stop the genocide in Sudan”.
If you want to use Movable Type for your blog but don’t have an always connected computer or simply don’t want to install it, you can use Weblogs.us, free MT blog hosting.
I’m using MT for this blog but, if I had to choose the blog server today, I would probably choose WordPress (read a short review). Note that WordPress is free software while MT is not.
Beppe Caravita, an Italian blogger and open source supporter is running with the Italian Green Party for a place in the European Parliament. He posted his program on his blog. Since he is in my blogroll, in a sense I already voted for him, so I guess I’ll follow and support his campaign. For now I added his blog on the Emergent Democracy in Europe Wiki page.
But I really think he needs a wiki where to let us collaboratively write his program.
Ethan’s attempt of using Blogs to Hack the Media is about increasing attention to news from the developing world:
“Blogs let us tell offline media what we want. When blog readers made it clear we wanted to know more about Trent Lott’s racist comments, mainstream media picked up the ball and dug deeper into the story. What would happen if we started sending an unambiguous message that we wanted to hear lots more about Africa, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Central America? What sort of effort would it take to choose an important issue – say the Sudanese government’s involvement in Darfur – and get enough momentum in the blogosphere that CNN was forced to bring a camera crew to the region?”
In Sudan, just as you are reading this, a genocide could be happening.
In the 10-year anniversary of the Rwandan genocide,
the op-ed columnist Kristof asks on NY Times Will We Say ‘Never Again’ Yet Again?
“Yet right now, the government of Sudan is engaging in genocide against three large African tribes in its Darfur region here. Yet right now, the government of Sudan is engaging in genocide against three large African tribes in its Darfur region here. Some 1,000 people are being killed a week, tribeswomen are being systematically raped, 700,000 people have been driven from their homes, and Sudan’s Army is even bombing the survivors.
And the world yawns.
(…) The convention against genocide not only authorizes but also obligates the nations ratifying it to stand up to genocide.”
So in this case the goal is clear: Use your blog to tell mainstream media that you want news coverage of this possible genocide.
I realised today I didn’t write yet an entry about my PhD Research Proposal “Trust-aware Decentralized Recommender Systems” (TaDRS).
So here it is the PDF file. If you have any comment or criticism, I’ll be happy to hear from you.
The PhD research proposal is a little bit outdated (29th May 2003) but I didn’t have a blog at that time. Enjoy and let me know what you think.
UPDATE:
Abstract
This PhD thesis addresses the following problem: exploiting of trust information in order to enhance the accuracy and the user acceptance of current Recommender Systems (RS). RSs suggest to users items they will probably like. Up to now, current RSs mainly generate recommendations based on users’ opinions on items. Nowadays, with the growth of online communities, e-marketplaces, weblogs and peer-to-peer networks, a new kind of information is available: rating expressed by an user on another user (trust). We analyze current RS weaknesses and show how use of trust can overcome them. We proposed a solution about exploiting of trust into RSs and underline what experiments we will run in order to test our solution.
Even if I’m more interested in the World Social Forum 2004 (see also on Rediff), it is worth noting that the World Economic Forum 2004 included a session on blogs!
It is good or bad that this group of people started to speak in public about blogs? We’ll see but I’m very unconfident.
Read more on Whiskey Bar or read some quotes I extracted from the article (since its content is released under a Creative Commons licence, it is perfectly legal to reproduce it here and to share it):
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Call For Papers
Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics (WWW 2004)
http://www.blogpulse.com/www2004-workshop.html
Important Dates
Deadline of electronic submission: March 12 , 2004
Workshop: May 17 or 18, 2004
This post also appears on the open channel calls for papers and weblog research
(Seb is used to ping topicexchange channels and I think it is a good idea)
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My blog was down during past 20 days or so. It seems now I’m back again.
I’ve just used blam! in this review of Revolution OS.
Basically blam! add some semantic information to your blog entry when this is a review. The semantic information can be understood by a computer program so that it will be possible to, for example, aggregating all the reviews about a certain book or movie.
Read about OpenReviews and their possible uses from Accordion Guy.
I’m planning to do something similar for my project CoCoA.
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I signed Comment Spam Manifesto :: Kalsey Consulting Group.
I personally was about to try MT-Blacklist.
Up to now, this plugin for Movable Type use a text file such as blacklist.txt. I think we could share our blacklist files with something like Razor.
I also like a lot the idea of a Honeypot for spam harvesters but I don’t have a throw-away domain.
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