December 05, 2006
This blog permanently moved to http://gnuband.org.
In case you are interested, you can subscribe to the new RSS feed that is conviniently located at http://gnuband.org/feed.
Summaryzing:
Follow the new blog at http://gnuband.org
Subscribe to the new RSS feed at http://gnuband.org/feed
November 18, 2005
I read from Ethan Zuckermann who is currently in Tunis for the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) some shocking news.
I’m here to help run a workshop titled “Expression Under Repression”, hosted by Hivos and organzied by the Global Voices team. When we arrived at the exhibition hall this morning, we were warned that our workshop could be cancelled. (...) Specifically, it was suggested by Tunisian authorities that “expression under repression has nothing to do with ICT for development.
and
Yesterday, we were warned that our session could be cancelled by the Tunisian authorities. We also discovered that the session wasn’t listed in the official program guide. Today, we came to the room where the session was to be held and there was a sign on the door stating that the workshop was cancelled. Friends who passed by the UNDP booth on the WSIS floor earlier today heard gossip that the security forces would appear at our session and anyone who attended would be arrested. And I got a few SMSs from people who’d asked about our session at the information booths and had been told there was no information on our session.
It is incredibly stupid for Tunisia to just show its repressive and censorship face when all the world is looking in their direction for the WSIS. And we all should really think about it more often, many countries control Internet and negate freedom of expression to their citizens.
Something you can do (but only a tiny contribution of what we should do) is to join the Electronic Frontier Foundation which, among millions of other worthy campaigns, published How to Blog Safely (see also GlobalVoices technical extension and the Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
Just one more shocking news, RSF head Robert Menard was not allowed by Tunisian security officials to leave the plane after his arrival from Paris in Tunis.
Too often, leaving in a country where Internet is not (too much) filtered and there is (enough) freedom of expression I forgot about these important matters. If you care about these matters, do join EFF and follow Ethan's blog.
September 14, 2005
| Blogging |
blogging
|
| Emergent Democracy |
emergent_democracy
|
| Italia |
italia
|
| Trust and Reputation |
trust_and_reputation
|
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
August 23, 2005
I'm (slowly) moving to wordpress. However I didn't find any plugin for keeping a list of papers in a structured way, possibly outputting also a bibtex file for every paper. Is there one? Or is there a simple-enough solution to the problem, for example considering every paper as a specific kind of page? In the meantime, I try to ping the LazyWeb.
May 18, 2005
| Blogging |
blogging
|
| Metadata |
metadata
|
| PhD |
phd
|
| Recommender Systems |
recommender_systems
|
| Reviews |
reviews
|
| Semantic web |
semantic_web
|
| Social Software |
social_software
|
Some weeks ago, Tantek was introducing a new microformat hReview.
We are pleased to announce the first public draft (v0.1) of hReview, jointly co-authored by representatives from America Online, CommerceNet Labs, Microsoft, Six Apart, Technorati, and Yahoo!. hReview is an open microformat standard for publishing and indexing distributed reviews on the Web. This standard enables users to contribute, identify, and aggregate review content on their own web sites and blogs as well as on community sites.
I didn't have time yet to dig into it but it is good that they analyzed previous attempts (I was trying to use RVW by Alf Eaton and to keep my list on Allconsuming but I didn't put too much effort into this) and that they ask for Feedback; almost all the links are to Wikipages so you can edit them directly there.
In general I really appreciate the work of Technorati (I also wrote a paper backing their proposal of VoteLinks, submitted to Web Intelligence 2005: "Page-reRank: using trusted links to re-rank authority" (pdf)).
Some other link I'll try to digest later on: jluster on hreview, hreview on technorati, hreview on del.icio.us, organizedshopping on hreview, adriancuthbert suggested to use this_is_an_hreview as common tag (tagspace?).
It would be great to have this format widely adopted so that the amount of decentralized published reviews will become soon huge and I will have a large amount a data for what I'm working on in my PhD: Trust-aware decentralized Recommender Systems. If interested, check my (a bit outdated) PhD proposal at my papers page.
May 06, 2005
| Blogging |
blogging
|
| Folksonomy |
folksonomy
|
| PhD |
phd
|
| Semantic web |
semantic_web
|
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.
May 04, 2005
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 ...
February 18, 2005
| Blogging |
blogging
|
| PhD |
phd
|
| Reviews |
reviews
|
| Trust and Reputation |
trust_and_reputation
|
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.
Paper:
Quality Control in Scholarly Publishing: A New Proposal by Stefano Mizzaro
Abstract:
The Internet has fostered a faster, more interactive and effective model of scholarly publishing. However, as the quantity of information available is constantly increasing, its quality is threatened, since the traditional quality control mechanism of peer review is often not used (e.g., in online repositories of preprints, and by people publishing on their Web pages whatever they want).
This paper describes a new kind of electronic scholarly journal, in which the standard submission-review-publication process is replaced by a more sophisticated approach, based on judgments expressed by the readers: in this way, each reader is, potentially, a peer reviewer. New ingredients, not found in similar approaches, are that each reader's judgment is weighted on the basis of the reader's skills as a reviewer, and that readers are encouraged to express correct judgments by a feedback mechanism that estimates their own quality. The new electronic scholarly journal is described in both intuitive and formal ways. Its effectiveness is tested by several laboratory experiments that simulate what might happen if the system were deployed and used.
January 19, 2005
| Blogging |
blogging
|
| Metadata |
metadata
|
| Trust and Reputation |
trust_and_reputation
|
A gets a new attribute: nofollow
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.
January 17, 2005
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.
January 16, 2005
| Blogging |
blogging
|
| Metadata |
metadata
|
| PhD |
phd
|
| Social Software |
social_software
|
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.
January 15, 2005
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.
December 17, 2004
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!
October 18, 2004
| Blogging |
blogging
|
| PhD |
phd
|
| Semantic web |
semantic_web
|
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!
August 16, 2004
| Blogging |
blogging
|
| FOAF |
foaf
|
| Semantic web |
semantic_web
|
[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!
May 29, 2004
| Blogging |
blogging
|
| Emergent Democracy |
emergent_democracy
|
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.
April 29, 2004
| Blogging |
blogging
|
| Emergent Democracy |
emergent_democracy
|
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".
April 27, 2004
| Blogging |
blogging
|
| Movable Type |
movable_type
|
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.
April 21, 2004
| Blogging |
blogging
|
| Emergent Democracy |
emergent_democracy
|
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.
April 20, 2004
| Blogging |
blogging
|
| Emergent Democracy |
emergent_democracy
|
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.
February 27, 2004
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.
January 27, 2004
| Alternative Economy |
alternative_economy
|
| Blogging |
blogging
|
| Copyright |
copyright
|
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):
[Joy] Rosen [the chair of the department of journalism at NYU]'s point, I think, is that communications technology may be moving in a great historical cycle. The invention of the printing press—followed by radio and then television—created a progressively more capital-intensive media industry, with an increasing division of labor among reporters, editors, printers, advertising whores, um, I mean, salesmen, etc. The invention of the Internet, however, has shifted the balance back towards the individual writer/publisher, doing his/her own thing, reporting or commenting on events they find through their own research, either on the web or off.
The difference, of course, is that what was once limited to a small literate elite in the 18th century is available to millions of people the world over in the 21st. This is a revolution by anybody's definition, and could even, in time, spell the end of the mainstream media as we know it. Or, as Rosen put it: "The age of the mass media is just that—an age. It doesn't have to last forever."
The net is capable of deciding—in a completely democratic way what topics it wants to explore. In effect, the news agenda is put to a continuous vote, with Google counting the ballots. Everyone and anyone is free to contest the results, but if the blogosphere wants to talk about, say, Dean's scream, then that will become the metaphorical equivalent of the lead story on page one—until something comes along that attracts more votes. This is what terrifies the mass media: the threat of losing control of the news agenda.
One guy from Business Week was particularly outraged about the whole thing. He waxed eloquent about the importance of the news "filter" (in my day we called it the gatekeeper function) as mankind's last best defense against the barbarian hordes. I felt like I was listening to a buggy whip manufacturer, circa 1910, talking about the growing threat of the automobile.
Actually, there was a time when I probably would have agreed with the guy—back when I was on his side of the fence and thought journalists played a valuable watchdog role. But after watching the steady deterioration of the profession over the past ten years or so, I have no patience for such self-serving crap. Yeah, there's a lot of misinformation and just plain nonsense on the web, but a mass media that gives us Bill O'Reilly and Michael Savage on a regular basis, and that devotes more coverage to Michael Jackson's legal problems than the Iraq War, isn't in a position to lecture anyone about standards. The truth is that the blogs are getting better and better, and the mass media is getting worse and worse. If the credibility lines haven't crossed yet they soon will.
The more serious problem, I think, was raised by Le Meur, the French blogger, who argued that blogs have the potential to become for the news media was Napster was for the music industry.
One of the worst moments at the Davos session was when some twinkie from a New York advertising firm stood up and described how her firm has started turning first to blogs to place ads for certain products. "What I don't understand," she said, "is why the big media companies don't swoop in and buy up some of these blogs while they're still cheap."
But if the thought has occurred to her, it's probably already occurred to others. Just the fact that blogging showed up on the agenda at Davos this year is probably a bad sign. I can't shake the suspicion that the golden age of blogging is almost over—that the corporate machine is about to swallow it, digest it, and regurgitate it as bland, non-threatening pablum. Our brief Summer of Love may be nearing an end.
January 23, 2004
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)
Theme of the Workshop
Weblogging has emerged in the past few years as a new grassroots publishing medium. Like electronic mail and the web itself, weblogging has taken off and by some estimates the number of weblogs is doubling every year. Recent estimates place the number of active weblogs at about 1.4 million.
The weblogging microcosm has evolved into a distinct form, into a community of publishers. The strong sense of community amongst bloggers distinguishes weblogs from the various forms of online publications such as online journals, 'zines and newsletters that flourished in the early days of the web and from traditional media such as newspapers, magazines and television. The use of weblogs primarily for publishing, as opposed to discussion, differentiates blogs from other online community forums, such as Usenet newsgroups and message boards. Often referred to as the blogsphere, the network of bloggers is a thriving ecosystem, with its own internally driven dynamics.
The cross-linking that takes place between blogs, through blogrolls, explicit linking, trackbacks, and referrals has helped create a strong sense of community in the weblogging world. There is work underway to understand the dynamics of the weblogging network, much of which springs from bloggers themselves. The self-publishing aspect of weblogs, the time-stamped entries, the highly interlinked nature of the blogging community and the significant impact of weblog content on politics, ideas, and culture make them a fascinating subject of study.
Workshop Topics and Objectives
The "Weblogging Ecosystem" workshop will provide a forum for presentation and discussion of research into the dynamics, sociology, and mining of the blogsphere.
Topics of interest to the workshop include:
* Mapping and visualization of the blogsphere
* Weblog taxonomies: automatic and/or manual construction
* Automatic classification of weblog entries
* Weblog search engines
* Aggregate measures over the blogsphere
* Weblog mining and applications
* Dynamics of information flow across the blogsphere
* Methods for weblog census
* Weblog lifecycle
* Influence of blogsphere on the information landscape
* Alternative blog forms (radioblogs, photoblogs, etc.)
* Sociological studies of blogging
* Knowledge sharing applications of weblogs
A secondary goal of the workshop is to discuss the sharing of weblog datasets for use in research studies.
January 15, 2004
My blog was down during past 20 days or so. It seems now I'm back again.
November 17, 2003
| Blogging |
blogging
|
| CoCoA |
cocoa
|
| Movable Type |
movable_type
|
| Recommender Systems |
recommender_systems
|
| Semantic web |
semantic_web
|
| Trust and Reputation |
trust_and_reputation
|
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.
The semantic format for reviews is RVW (Review Module for RSS 2.0), created by Alf Eaton. Read an explanation of RVW from Corante.
The RVW specification is a module extension to the RSS 2.0 syndication format. RVW is intended to allow machine-readable reviews to be integrated into an RSS feed, thus allowing reviews to be automatically compiled from distributed sources. In other words, you can write book, restaurant, movie, product, etc. reviews inside your own website, while allowing them to be used by Amazon or other review aggregators.
There should be more than enough RVW metadata out there floating around at this point. The next step is for someone to build a decent aggregator that collates reviews of a particular topic or two. Because of RVS, creating aggregate rating scores and summarizing opinions should be very straightforward. It's really not in the best interests of Amazon, epinions and the like to lose control of their review content, but RVW makes controlling review content impossible in the long term. Anyone got some pull at the Google skunkworks?
Blogware supports the new format and there is also a RVW plugin for Movable Type but I don't understand how it works.
Seb likes RVW and also point out how this semantic information could be used to generate personalized recommendations.
In the case of item types that describe reviews, overall average ratings on any particular product are easy to look up. However, if you choose to provide a description of your personal web of trust to those interfaces (think of blogrolls as a proto-example), you can efficiently get a sense of what your tribe of like-minded individuals thinks of that product. It's the microblogosphere idea again - look up Recommender systems and the microblogosphere for more.
This is essentially what my PhD Research Proposal: Trust-aware Decentralized Recommender Systems is about.
November 10, 2003
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.
from Comment Spam Manifesto :: Kalsey Consulting Group.
In order to increase search engine rankings you are posting advertisements to our Web pages. What you failed to understand is that bloggers are smarter, better connected, and more technologically savvy than the average email user. We control the medium that you are now attempting to exploit. You’ve picked a fight with us and it’s a fight you cannot win.
The War on Span has now began!
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| FOAF |
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| Social Software |
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| Trust and Reputation |
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There is a very interesting article on Business, Business 2.0. The Technology of the Year: Social Network Applications
Social networking applies the power of the network to one of the most fundamental problems in all of business: finding the person who has the critical information you need, right when you need it.
There are all the cool companies playing the game: SixDegrees, Spoke, VisiblePath, Friendster, RyzeIn, ZeroDegrees. There is a mention about CIA interested in using these ideas and the article finishes with an important concern about privacy.
