Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Presentation in standard format, S5

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.
[question about English: "take the occasion to"? "take the chance to"? I wanted to say that I used this fact as an opportunity to try the technique. How do you say it in English?]
Tag: s5

Categories (tags):

Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software

A Microformat for grouping all your identities?

Jesse comments on my Identity Burro post in which I spoke about OpenId as a possible method for tieing together various ids you have on social sites (flickr, del.icio.us, ...). I want to be able to say that on flickr I'm phauly and on del.cio.us I'm paolomassa and on 43thing I'm mariah, etc. He ponders 2 solutions, a centralized and a decentralized one. I'm totally for the decentralized solution. I was suggesting OpenID but, to be sincere, I still need to interiorize well OpenID, I can feel it is a great idea but still need to understand all its power (and how to use it).
Actually I think a microformat would be killer for this. Jesse says # Distributed solution - people can embed their information on their homepage, which can be mined by a greasemonkey script. If I want to know Paolo's del.icio.us, flickr, 43thigns, ... I need to visit his homepage and grab his list.
I would add: they can embed this information ... using a microformat and hence adding some simple semantics and a possibility to thousands of services to bloom!
So according to the microformats process I'm going to send an email in the mailing list to see if there is interest, then we will Document current human behavior on the microformats wiki: are people already writing on their blogs which are their identities on social sites? Do they already do it using some formats? There are already formats for expressing your identities? And then I guess we'll see what happen.
I can hear someone asking "Attacks? Spamming?". Yes, on my blog I can claim my identities are boingboing (blog), danah (photos), ethanzuckermann (URLs on del.icio.us), etc. But it is just as now I can open a blog on blogger and claim I'm bill gates or the pope. Or I can leave comments on anyone's blog as Scoble writing "Microsoft is watching you", no? Read "What about spam?" on OpenID.net homepage to get an idea.
Technorati tag: microformat

Categories (tags):

Social Software

social_software

BBC Phonetags and future of radio

Great project from Tom Coates: Reinventing Radio: On Phonetags... This post concerns an experimental internal-BBC-only project designed to allow users to bookmark, tag and rate songs they hear on the radio using their mobile phone.
BBC seems a wonderful place to work in (play in?) these days: BBC opencontent backstage, BBC creative archive, BBC opensource code.
UPDATE: Tom correctly comments that this project is Not just me - also Matt Webb, Gavin Bell and others. I'm just the person able to write it up most effectively.

Categories (tags):

Mozilla	mozilla
Programming	programming
Social Software	social_software

Identity Burro: making social sites more social.

Identity Burro Project Page.
[Impatients can check the Flash video or the Screeshots or directly install the script (current version 0.4).]

Identity Burro is a Greasemonkey script for Firefox that gives quick access to all the public aspects of a person: photos, blog, preferred sites, preferred songs, etc.
Precisely, when you navigate on the Web page of a certain user on (for example) Flickr, it inserts into the Web page links to the page of the same user on , Del.icio.us, Technorati, CiteULike, WebJay, Last.tm/Audioscrobbler, Rojo, 43things, 43places, AllConsuming, LiveJournal, Simpy (see Screenshots). And of course it works also on the other sites, i.e. when you are on del.icio.us page of user "alice", links to the userpage of "alice" on the other sites are shown (see Screeshots).

An example? Have it. danah seems to use consistently the nick "zephoria" on social sites so you can try the extension with her Web presence (if you prefer to first watch and then try, you can see the Flash video of what will happen).
1. Just install Identity Burro script (or see install howto ).
2. Then visit (for example) zephoria page on Flickr or zephoria page on last.fm.
3. Now on the left of the flickr or last.fm danah's page, you see a box with some icons that links to the pages of danah on the other social sites (see screenshot).
4. You can also expand the box to see more descriptive text for links (see screenshot).
5. If you click, for example, on the del.ciou.us icon, you land to zephoria page on del.icio.us.
6. Can you think of another? Well, feel free to add it in the comments.

So basically when you find an interesting user on, say, del.icio.us, you can try to see (one-click-away) her photos of Flickr, and her blog, and her preferred songs on Last.fm and Webjay, and the things she wants to do on 43things, and ... Of course, sometime the user will have a different nick on different sites and in this case the script is not that useful (however see possible inprouvements) but, hey, it is only one-click-away so you can give it a try anyway, right?

Possible improvements
1. Assuming that a person has the same nickname on all the social sites is of course working on very limited cases. So what do we need? We need a parent place where an user can reasonably keep a link to all her identities (and possibly expressing them with a microformat, hIdentity?), and what better than your own blog? Possibly we could use OpenID, a decentralized identity system but I haven't thought too much about it. Do you have any suggestion?
An OpenID identity is just a URL. You can have multiple identities in the same way you can have multiple URLs. All OpenID does is provide a way to prove that you own a URL (identity). And it does this without passing around your password, your email address, or anything you don't want it to. There's no profile exchange component at all: your profiile is your identity URL, but recipients of your identity can then learn more about you from any public, semantically interesting documents linked thereunder (FOAF, RSS, Atom, vCARD, etc.).
2. From a visual point of view, the HTML element inserted in the HTML page (divs, links, etc) inherits the CSS style of the current site. For example if flickr would have a black background and links in shocking pink, the IdentityBurro box would have them as well. Since I would like to have the same box, with the same colors and spaces between lines and fonts in all the possible sites, the question is: there is a way to clear all the previous set styles for an element? a sort of resetStyle? or somewhere a list of how all the CSS properties are set by default? If you have suggestions, the comments may be a good place where to place them. [In the code there is the variable resetStyle that tries to reset all the styles and it is prepended in every your_element.setAttribute("style",resetStyle+ "your specific inline css here")].
3.Still some sites to be added such: furl, wist, blogmarks, tagsurf, upcoming, jots, podcast, bloglines, smugsmug, bookswelike, kinja.com. Any more?
4. creating an ajax method that query google or yahoo! for "<username> blog" and creates a link with the first returned result (possibly the highest in the two combined queries) with anchor text such as "guessed blog of <username>". For the ajax-power, I guess I need to steal, ... ehm, take inspiration again from the fantastic bookburro code!
5. peritus was thinking about doing something with FOAF information as well. I can't remember now precisely what.

Thanks to:
- Jesse for providing the fabolous BookBurro Greasemonkey script and releasing it under Creative Commons "Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5"
- Peritus for improuving the script in various ways.
- The mozilla community at large for providing Firefox, a web browser it is fun to play with (and hopefully, in the process, improuve it a bit).
- Otis Gospodnetic, creator of simpy.com, for sending me by email the code for adding simpy to the list of supported sites that was introduced in version 0.4.

Licence:
The script code is released under a Creative Commons "Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5" (since BookBurro code was). So feel free to play with it, improuve it, redistribute it, ...

How to install Identity Burro
1. Install the Mozilla Firefox browser;
2. Install the Greasemonkey extension;
3. Install the Identity Burro script (current version 0.3).
[If you have problems, check the Flash video]

Flash Video of Identity Burro

Screenshots

Identity Burro collapsed on danah's page on del.icio.us





Identity Burro expanded on danah's page on del.icio.us





Identity Burro collapsed on danah's page on flickr





Identity Burro expanded on danah's page on flickr





Identity Burro collapsed on danah's page on technorati





Identity Burro expanded on danah's page on technorati





Identity Burro collapsed on danah's page on citeulike





Identity Burro expanded on danah's page on citeulike





Identity Burro collapsed on danah's page on last.fm





Identity Burro expanded on danah's page on last.fm





Identity Burro collapsed on danah's page on 43things





Identity Burro collapsed on danah's page on 43places





Identity Burro expanded on danah's page on 43places





Identity Burro collapsed on danah's page on allconsuming





Identity Burro expanded on danah's page on allconsuming





Code
The code is at http://moloko.itc.it/paoloblog/archives/identityburro.user.js.

Changelog
0.1 - initial release (working on flickr, del.icio.us and technorati) - July 17, 2005
0.2 - tweaked to add: citeulike, last.fm (+audioscrobbler), 43things/places/ideas/allconsuming, rojo and lj
       plus modified idburro() to create a collapse button/function 0.--- Daniel Dockery, peritus@gmail.com, Aug 15, 2005
0.3 - refactored the code a bit and cleaned it up (resetStyle, images are more separated from code).
       added webjay.org and audioscrobbler.com (however audioscrobbler has been incorporated into last.fm so the code is commented but maybe in future it will be useful again.
       added 2 todos. added some comments in the code. --Paolo Massa, massa@itc.it, Aug 25, 2005
0.4 - added simpy.com by Paolo Massa, the code was sent to Paolo via email by Otis Gospodnetic —Sep 1, 2005




Technorati tags: identityburro, flickr, identity, technorati, delicious, social software, greasemonkey, firefox, webjay, last.fm, Rojo, 43things, 43places, LiveJournal, AllConsuming, danah, zephoria, CSS, OpenID, Identity

Categories (tags):

Free software	free_software
Mozilla	mozilla
Programming	programming
Social Software	social_software

Identity Burro: GreaseMonkey extension for social sites.

UPDATE: there is now an IdentityBurro project page
You are looking at the page of xyz on flickr and you would like to see xyz's bookmarks on del.icio.us?
Or, you are on the technorati profile page of abc and you would like to see abc's photos on flickr?
Well, if one of these desideratas has been in your mind before, you now have it!
Enter Identity Burro (or IdentityBurro), a GreaseMonkey extension that inserts, in the profile page of user xyz on flickr or del.icio.us or technorati, the link to the profile pages of user xyz on flickr and del.icio.us and technorati. Your social sites are now more social!
See the screenshots.

Still with me? Then I guess you might want to install:
   Current Version: Identity Burro v0.1

At the moment there is nothing better I can do that assuming an user has the same nick on every site: I assume xyz@flickr is xyz@del.icio.us and xyz@technorati. I know this is by no means guaranteed to be true (or desirable). I hope (and ask) that one of this social sites will soon let its users to enter which are their nicks on other sites. In this way I would be able to get this information and put the correct links when xyz@flickr is called abc@del.icio.us.

And of course, as you can see by the name of the extension, inspiration for this extension came from the mighty BookBurro extension, whose creator Jesse I just met few days ago at the AAAI 2005 conference in Pittsburgh.
The code is released under a Creative Commons "Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5" licence (since Book Burro was released in this way and the shareAlike option didn't really give me a chance to change licence for a GPL).

If you like, you might want to let me know if it works in the buggy browser, I mean, Internet Explorer.
Todo:
# when expanded, part of the unexpanded interface (buttons and icons) remains in background, more transparent. understand why and fix it
# when expanded the "expand" icon should become a "shrink" icon (the arrow in the other direction).
# some CSS properties are inherited from the current site, so that for example, the extension looks a bit different in flickr and in del.icio.us. Understand which are the properties of which elements and overwrite them (surely the background of some elements is inherited).
# adding more social sites, for example, webjay, citeulike, last.fm, audioscrobbler, furl, wist, blogmarks, 43things, tagsurf, upcoming, jots, podcast, consumating, rojo, bloglines, smugsmug, bookswelike, kinja.

Leave comments to this post for communicating with me about the extension.

Screenshots

Del.icio.us with Identity Burro not expanded (all icons are clickable anyway):

Del.icio.us with Identity Burro expanded:

Technorati with Identity Burro not expanded (all icons are clickable anyway):

Technorati with Identity Burro expanded:

Flickr with Identity Burro not expanded (all icons are clickable anyway):

Flickr with Identity Burro expanded:

Categories (tags):

Folksonomy	folksonomy
Free software	free_software
PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

AAAI05: terrific talk by Marty Tenenbaum

AI Meets Web 2.0: Building The Web of Tomorrow Today by Dr. Jay M. Tenenbaum.
Terrific terrific talk, fascinating. I should have podcasted it because you really missed something (except I have nothing to record audio on, would you consider sending me your old mp3 recorder pen?). I was so excited during the talk that I happened to take a photo of almost any slide. Actually the slides were 94 and I photoed 59 of them! Incredible to me as well.
Anyway, you might want to read the slides (pdf) or maybe you want to have a look at my pictures (possibly as a slideshow).
He introduced all the stuff I enjoy, such as Blogs, RSS, wiki (wikipedia), folksonomies, tags, flickr, Del.icio.us, microformats (aka Lower case semantic web), technorati, pubsub, greasemonkey (bookburro, greasemap) and much more; all tied together in a fascinating, convincing, making-sense manner!
After his presentation, we spoke about my research and he seemed interested. He invited me to visit commerce.net for one month or so and I have to say that I really like the idea. I spoke also with Rohit Khare that is actually working with Tenenbaum and he has a whole bunch of very clever, fascinating, realizable ideas that would really make an impact. They also underline more than once that this kind of architecture/language-of-web2.0 projects should be open source and I totally agree with them and like it.
Actually after the presentation, while I was speaking with Marty and Rohit, there was also Jesse Andrews, the creator of the mind-blowing book burro (actually he got most of the attention, totally deserved by the way). I guess it should be too cool having someone presenting your hack on a conference and then go to meet that person and say "You know the Book Burro extension you presented? Well, I'm the creator of it!". Cool! If you want to see how Jesse looks like, here is a picture of him and wait some more great hacks from him in few days.

Categories (tags):

Future	future
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

SocialSearch: risk of moving from "tyranny of the majority" to "the daily me"

On Yahoo!Blog, while presenting its new MyWeb2.0:
The answer a web search engine delivers is what it believes is the correct answer for the majority of users – often referred to as "the tyranny of the majority". For example, when you search for 'apple', the first result on most search engines is Apple Computer. But you may have been searching for information about the fruit or Apple Records.
This is a point I'm making since some years and so I totally agree that this is a problem of current search engines and I totally agree that considering personal trust networks of users is the solution to go (actually this is my my PhD research topic).
But I want also to point out, as I already did some time ago, that on the other extreme (total personalization) there is another, maybe bigger, risk: "the daily me".
If you only see web sites, opinions, movies, etc of people you already agree with, you will never ever meet new, unexpected points of view, you will never ever need to argue your points with someone that thinks different (and possibly change your mind, at least a little bit), you will simply exacerbates your opinions, you will end up not even being able to understand the language used by people that are not in your "community" of like-minded friends!
If you are an anarchist speaking/reading only other anarchists, you will strengthen your opinions, they will become more extreme. Or if you are a catholic orthodox, or ... The same is true for every group: liberals watching and reading mostly or only liberals; moderates, moderates; conservatives, conservatives; neo-Nazis, neo-Nazis. The resulting divisions run along many lines--of race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, wealth, age, political conviction, and more. Most whites avoid news and entertainment options designed for African-Americans. Many African-Americans focus largely on options specifically designed for them. So too with Hispanics

This will produce extremism and fragmentation of society and could have terrible, violent consequences.
The great book of Cass Sunstein Republic.com analyses this risk and more importantly tries to suggest a range of potential reforms to correct current misconceptions and to improve deliberative democracy and the health of the American republic.

(...)
First, people should be exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance. Unplanned, unanticipated encounters are central to democracy itself. Such encounters often involve topics and points of view that people have not sought out and perhaps find quite irritating. They are important partly to ensure against fragmentation and extremism, which are predictable outcomes of any situation in which like-minded people speak only with themselves. I do not suggest that government should force people to see things that they wish to avoid. But I do contend that in a democracy deserving the name, people often come across views and topics that they have not specifically selected.

Second, many or most citizens should have a range of common experiences. Without shared experiences, a heterogeneous society will have a much more difficult time in addressing social problems. People may even find it hard to understand one another. Common experiences, emphatically including the common experiences made possible by the media, provide a form of social glue. A system of communications that radically diminishes the number of such experiences will create a number of problems, not least because of the increase in social fragmentation.

I think it is time that everyone of us (especially those involved in creating personalized services, and hence in this case, especially Yahoo!) should start thinking about this problem before we are too ahead in the future. What do you think?

Categories (tags):

Free software	free_software
Metadata	metadata
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

My suggestion to Google: getoutfoxed('s author)

Google, do hire Stan before Yahoo! does it. Stan is the author of "Outfoxed - Personalize your internet." I didn't play with the code yet (seems a Linux version is not yet ready at the moment, but on the way). Yes, the code is open source (Mozilla Public Licence), sweet! Anyway, the detailed description is fantastic! It is a bit like what I want to do for my PhD thesis. The difference? Stan did it! Check the site: it has a lot of interesting pages such as The Outfoxed Idea (A collection of thoughts on the theoretical aspects of Outfoxed, and the whole idea of using social networks for metadata distribution). Or at least the page A Third Phase of Internet Search in which Stan pictiorally shows the 3 phases: Naive trust --> PageRank and inferred quality --> Social networks to determine subjective quality

Every search query is a question: "What pages are most related to X?" Current search engines assume there is a single correct answer to each query. But consider a query like "Britney Spears." (The most popular Google query for 2004.) If you're a fan, you probably want to see her official site and maybe lyric pages. If you're a musician, you probably want to see reviews and music tabs. Of course, current search engines can't do this because they only consider "objective" measures like the number of links to a page. (See The good, the bad, and the subjective) What is needed is subjective, trusted ratings of the pages.

Categories (tags):

Bookmarks	bookmarks
Folksonomy	folksonomy
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software

Visualizing time trends in how a site is tagged on del.icio.us: cloudalicious

The previous entry was about "powerlaws in the use of tags on del.icio.us". Then at http://del.icio.us/tag/powerlaw, i found Pietro Speroni's great post Tagclouds and cultural changes that (also) introduces cloudalicious, a one-night project of Terrell Russell. Cloudalicious shows the evolution in time of the tags used to tag any page on del.icio.us. Very very cool!!!
I tried to find a URL that was showing a non-converging behaviour but I failed. (Pietro was already providing some examples of sites presenting interesting trends in tags use.) Are your able to find at least one controversial URL? A site for which there was a great swift in time in the tags used for it.
For your information, I already tried with sites tagged on del.icio.us under controversial tags (such as abortion, scientology, jew), I tried with microsoft.com (as I was thinking may people would have tagged it as evil but this is not the case [in general people tend to tag what they like and less what they don't like in order not to increase the visibility of it, so I tried with "terri schiavo blog" that was very visible for a short period of time and I was suspecting the "tasteless" or "awful" tags were much more and growing over time but this is not the case]).
The only one with a little bit of variance over time I was able to find is boingboing.net. See cloudalicious for http://boingboing.netDel.icio.users seem to recognize it as a news site as time passes by. And it also seems that Del.icio.users are moving from "blogs" to "blog" as tag (common pattern or just for boingboing?).
There is some variance also with http://del.icio.us itself: see cloudalicious for http://del.icio.us
So I just repeat the small challenge: Can you find a URL that presents non-converging tags use?

Small suggestion for Terrell Russell (I write it here since I was not able to find his email address on his web site). [I'm sure he probably has already figured out by itself this suggestion since he was so good to put together in one night a great tool!]
Cloudalicious interface at the moment asks for These URLs (that) can be found at del.icio.us - they're the red "and X other people" links. (for example, http://del.icio.us/url/ec08a8ddfda4f2f9cad3a142dc49e23b represents http://boingboing.net/).
ec08a8ddfda4f2f9cad3a142dc49e23b is the md5sum of http://boingboing.net/
There are 2 easy way to obtain it automatically: (1) run md5sum on the server, (2) use http://del.icio.us/url?url=http://... (in which http://... can be replaced by the website we want to cloudicious).
In this way, users could enter in the Cloudicious interface, the real URL they are interested in (http://boingboing.net) and not the less easy to find (http://del.icio.us/url/ec08a8ddfda4f2f9cad3a142dc49e23b)
A bookmarklet and a greasemonkey extension (working on the site the user is browsing) are left as easy exercise for the reader as well

Lastly, let me mention that one of the key point of Clay Shirky in Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags that is also present is Pietro's post is that the correct way of categorizing something does not exist (initial Yahoo! approach was trying to force this and failed and librarians still (must) try to adopt this semplifying but wrong assumption). Instead there are as many correct ways of categorizing a thing as there are users. This resonates with my study on controversial users on Epinions (pdf): the idea that there is a global value of trustworthiness/reputation for every user/peer in the system does not make sense but still most of the papers in the reputation/trust literature start with this wrong and misleading assumption.

UPDATE: I just found it now but Pietro in
On Tag Clouds, Metric, Tag Sets and Power Laws was already mentioning that the paper by Clay Shirky "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality" started to be tagged as longtail only after the article from Wired: The Long Tail came out

http://www.terrellrussell.com/projects/cloudalicious/cloudalicious.php?button=Graph+Tag+Cloud&delurl=http%3A%2F%2Fdel.icio.us%2Furl%2Fab415cb7529f139795401054ee2e6899

Categories (tags):

Bookmarks	bookmarks
Folksonomy	folksonomy
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software

Use of Tags on del.icio.us follows a powerlaw

I read the wonderful Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags by Clay Shirky (highly recommended! Read it all!). Near the end, he speaks about "Tag Distributions on del.icio.us" and shows a graph that resembles a powerlaw (even if this is about only 2 hours of activity of 64 del.icio.users). After 2 weeks of powerlaws, I see powerlaws everywhere and I thought "let's try to test the hypothesis on a bigger dataset from del.icio.us". Well, few googling-minutes told me that many people had already had this idea and already performed tests on del.icio.us.
And of course many of them can be found looking at http://del.icio.us/tag/powerlaw (the del.icio.us page that shows all the URLs tagged under "powerlaw") [this is kind of uber-cool-self-referentialism].
Among the many, I just cite http://www.cozy.org/d/
(from which the image shown here is taken), where 84 popular URLs are studied and shown to exhibit a powerlaw structure (in the tags used for them). I suspect the value of del.icio.us can be found in the long tail of tagging as well.
Each dot on the log-log charts represent a tag. The most used tag appears to the left while the least appears to the right. All charts have the same x and y range, .5 to 1350; so the slope of these lines is about -1.

Categories (tags):

Blogging	blogging
Metadata	metadata
PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Reviews	reviews
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software

hReview: a semantic microformat for reviews

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.

Categories (tags):

Folksonomy	folksonomy
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software

Folksonomies criticism

I tend to be enthusiastic about folksonomy and forget considering in what they are good and in what they are not, basically I forget to keep asking myself questions instead of blatantly state "Here we need a folksonomy! Yeahhey!!!". Anyway, as a sort of balance, you might want to read a post by Gene Smith and one by danah that are more critics than I am (unfortunately).

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Social Capital and Social Networks - Bridging Boundaries

Social Capital and Social Networks - Bridging Boundaries conference seems interesting. Moreover there is no registration fee and Junior scholars, graduate students and assistant professors, are invited to apply to attend the conference and receive lodging, meals, and up to $400 in travel expenses. The application deadline was May 5, 2005 (oops). I cannot make it but if you are in US, it is worth checking it.

Categories (tags):

Folksonomy	folksonomy
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software

Tag your friends

The interface of Rojo is totally unusable (at least to me), i don't understand the interface metaphors. What attracted me was the ability to tag your friends. So a curiosity: how would you tag me?
Our vision is that the next generation of feed reading requires new forms of organization so we built in the ability to tag your world, your content, your feeds, and even your friends.

Categories (tags):

Folksonomy	folksonomy
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software

FolkOS: Folksonomy Operating System

We were used to organize our bookmarks in folders, then del.icio.us came and we now appreciate folksonomies (flat taxonomies, just a set of free keywords you can attach to URLs). We are used to operating systems that allow us to categorize files (knowledge) on folders, would it make sense to have an operating system that allows us to categorize files only based on taxonomy (just add keywords to any file, all the files are in a flat pool)? I don't know.
What I know is that the total lack of concurrency in the Operating Systems domain (actually just one global monopoly) is depriving all of us of new ideas, new paradigms, progress. If you compare it with the vibrant Web, where a new idea gets implemented and proposed almost daily, you can maybe see how far we would be if there were a free market for Operating Systems.
Anyway, how could we call it? What about FolkOS? FolkOS, the Folksonomy Operating System, I can already see the advertisements.... And, yes, I patented the idea, I got every possible TradeMark and not only on Earth. I patented FolkOS also on Venus and Alpha Centauri (venusians and alphacentaurians be aware! Don't use my patented ideas! I have the best lawyers of the galaxy!).
[I tend to overload my emails of smilies (for expressing when I'm joking) but I don't like them on blog posts, so I'm not sure my 4 readers understand when I (try to) make a joke. So, just to be sure, this is a joke ... I think patenting computational ideas is a total nonsense (maybe a video can help in understanding why)].

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Contact me if you'll be in Trieste next week for the School on Structure and Function of Complex Networks.

I'll be in Trieste at the Abdus Salam ICTP (Unesco funded school) during next 2 weeks (16 - 28 May 2005) for the School and Workshop on Structure and Function of Complex Networks (i was advertising about it time ago and I got accepted). I'm so excited. The list of speakers is simply great (see below) and there are participants from all over the world, in fact "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.".
If you happen to be there and want to discuss a bit about blogosphere, trust, reputation, social software, social networks, languages, globalization, ... just whatever, please contact me!

Main Topics:
- Characterization and modeling of complex networks;
- Socio-economic networks;
- Technological and communication networks;
- Biological and ecological networks.

This activity is divided into two parts, the first week being a School in which established results in networks will be presented by the Lecturers and the second week, a Workshop to discuss present problems in economical, biological and technological networks. The Organizing Committee promote a call for contributed talks: please send applications, with title and abstract of the proposed talk, only by email to G. Bianconi: gbiancon@ictp.trieste.it no later than 28 February 2005.

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Reviews	reviews
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Paper accepted at AAAI05: "Controversial Users demand Local Trust Metrics: an Experimental Study on Epinions.com Community"

A paper of mine titled "Controversial Users demand Local Trust Metrics: an Experimental Study on Epinions.com Community" (pdf) got accepted for the Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-05)! Cool! The email I received this morning says "Your paper was one of 148 accepted to AAAI-05, out of 803 submissions. AAAI is a highly selective conference, and you are to be congratulated on your paper's acceptance." This means acceptance rate is 18%. Let me know if you like/dislike the paper or want to discuss its topic a bit. I think controversiality is an important theme and I think there are too many papers that assume that every user/agent has a global goodness value that is the same for everyone (there are some users that are bad for everyone and the goal of the technique is to spot them out). This assumption is unrealistic: just think of Bush or Berlusconi ... some people like them (yeah, I know it's kinda incredible) and some other don't. My paper hopefully provide some evidence about this intuitive phenomena. You might also want to check other papers of mine.

Title: Controversial Users demand Local Trust Metrics: an Experimental Study on Epinions.com Community
Abstract: In today's connected world it is possible and very common to interact with unknown people, whose reliability is unknown. Trust Metrics are a recently proposed technique for answering questions such as "Should I trust this user?". However, most of the current research
assumes that every user has a global quality score and that the goal of the technique is just to predict this correct value. We show, on data from a real and large user community, epinions.com, that such an assumption is not realistic because there is a signicant
portion of what we call controversial users, users who are trusted and distrusted by many. A global agreement about the trustworthiness value of these users cannot exist. We argue, using computational experiments, that the existence of controversial users (a normal phenomena in societies) demands Local Trust Metrics, techniques able to predict the trustworthiness of an user in a personalized way, depending on the very personal view of the judging user.

Categories (tags):

Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Attacking HITS (and not PageRank)

While I think PageRank is a very clever (though simple) idea, I'm not very sure about HITS. What this algorithms are for? For predicting the quality of a page on the Web based on all the links between pages. PageRank assumes that a page linked by many pages and linked by pages of high quality (recursive!) has a good quality, i.e. it is an authority. HITS is based on the notions of hub and authority: a good hub is a page that points to several good authorities; a good authority is a page that is pointed at by several good hubs.
So, why do I appreciate PageRank and less HITS? Because the latter can be easily attacked. The PageRank of this page depends only on the pages linking to this page and I cannot easily force everyone on the web to link to this page. It depends on what other pages decide to link and I have no power over it.
Conversely, according to HITS, the hubness of this page depend on the pages this page link to, and I have total power over the pages I link to! Do I want this page to become an hub about cars? It is enough to link to (what I think are) cars authorities: bmw, mercedes, ferrari, ford, renault, ... (fiat is better not). Then do I want to exploit the hubness score this page got? I would simply link also to crappyCarsISell.com. HITS thinks this page is an hub and, since an hub by definition points to authorities, hence HITS thinks crappyCarsISell.com is a car authority.
What matters is Direction of links! I have no control on links that go in my page but I have total control in links that go out of my page. Anyway I think the work by Kleinberg is simply great but HITS does not take into account the fact that users will always try to game systems (especially, but not only, if they have an immediate benefit).
... I was almost forgotting the initial reason of this post: I got remind about HITS reading Lexical authorities in an encyclopedic corpus: a case study with Wikipedia by my friend Francesco, whose blog I just discovered today via a comment he left here. And this means one less friend without a blog! Welcome Francesco!

Categories (tags):

Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

FlickrLand: network analysis

Graphs, Networks, PowerLaws, Relationships and everything you like.
Network analysis of the Flickr population, based on data collected on January 8th, 2005, and some additional analyses. There is also a March 2005 version.

Categories (tags):

Social Software

social_software

Flickr FlashGraph

Found on FlickrBlog, a fancy Flash application that shows your social network on Flickr. For mine, type
  http://www.marumushi.com/apps/flickrgraph/flickrgraph.cfm?q=phauly
for yours, just change the string "phauly" with your username on flickr. What is terribly better than the social network visualiization tools I saw before (based on TouchGraph, check del.icio.us subscription network visualizer
or these) is the fact that nodes are represented by photos. This makes me much more aware of the social network and (possibly) able to manage it and depict it in my mind.
And just to be clear, no, I don't think this graph-based interfaces are usable for now, they are just fancy to play with for some seconds. But, as I said, "for now"....
And let me say "happy birthday Flickr" (the post also points to great pictures, Visualizing the Flickr social network)

Categories (tags):

Free software	free_software
PhD	phd
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Eclipse trust framework

I found on SocialPhysics Wiki a very interesting proposal: Eclipse Trust Framework (ETF).
The goal of the ETF Project is to provide an open source framework to support the creation of applications on the Eclipse platform that manage a person’s online context (profile) and identity from the person’s or their agent’s perspective. (Eclipse is one of the most used tool for writing Java code, it is open source and funded mainly by IBM).

The description of the application that SocialPhysics wants to build is hyper-cool as well!

The base app is a downloadable application that helps you manage your identity and interactions with co-workers, customers, business associates and friends.

The app can be extended with context plug-ins that support new and different "social protocols"--cultural conventions about who can see what about whom, what's measured, what's private, what's shared. Using a community-of-interest plug-in, for example, communities can share insights into "what's hot," and who's working on what, or what's not happening that should be. It might provide community-wide and/or individual metrics of trust, connectedness, centralization and so on.

Categories (tags):

Alternative Economy	alternative_economy
PhD	phd
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

My first couchsurfing host

During past week I hosted in my house a russian girl I didn't know before. Why? She asked hospitality through CouchSurfing. I subscribed few months ago to CouchSurfing when I was looking for free hosting in Cyprus. In the meantime I also arranged to find hospitality in Paris. And of course I was very happy to host her (Anna is her name and here is her couchsurfing profile). Feel free to contact me if you pass near Trento, Italy (here is my CouchSurfing profile and it should be easy to find my email address around).
And as an example of how much information you leave behind yourself surfing the web, here you can see a map of places Anna has logged in from.
One evening she asked me to use Internet and I saw she was typing livejournal.com, and yes, she has a blog, though it is in Russian and I cannot understand it.
[CouchSurfing can be interesting also from a research point of view, see much below in the following text]

The Hospitality Club is a web site similar to Couchsurfing, although someone told me that the network is much bigger. And there is also Servas. However Servas was founded in 1949 and it is not a initiative born because of the new possibilities offered by the web. In fact they don't exchange or publish information electronically but you have to ask for the list of a certain country (you want to go) to the local responsible and she will send it to you (by normal mail) the dead-tree list, then you can contact people offering hospitality, Everything is highly certified (the local responsible gives you a sort of Servas Identity Card that certifies you are a good person). Servas is much slower, personally it does not fit at all my requirements, since I often decide to go somewhere less than 20 days before. I tried to use it in US, Belize and Guatemala, always without success. Anyway if you want something slower but more sure and certified, Servas can be your choice.

Ok, so what is CouchSurfing (and HospitalityClub) interesting for?
From a global point of view, I really envision (or dream) a world where everyone is free to move everywhere (no more borders) and, as a first step, a place where everyone that want to travel the world and visit countries would be able to do it hosted by local people and at almost-zero cost. In this way, more and more people will come to know different people (white, black, green, red, muslims, hindis, old, young, ...[add yours]..., just different people, the one we usually fear simply because we don't know them, yes maybe we will able to just laugh when the media or the politicians try to push in our brain the idea that everyone else is a potential terrorist and we should fear her). And moving aroung the world will be possible for everyone and not just rich people as it is now. Surely it is very hard, for example, for people from African Univeristies to participates in International Conferences. And in general for people from not-rich countries to move around the world. That would produce a better world, I'm sure. A world of open houses, open cars, trains and transportation vehicles and .... of open minds.

And from a research point of view? Before hosting Anna, I asked myself questions such as "why should I host this girl I don't know? Will she steal everything I have? Will my house be safe?" (you can complete with the classic paranoid bla bla questions). Why I'm happy to host someone she asks hospitality on the web and not someone that simply stops me on the road saying she has no place to sleep for this night and asking to take advantage of my roof and warm house? Why it is different?
Well, it is just the same question such as: Why I'm happy to buy from someone on ebay and not from someone that stops me on the road saying "i'll ship you a wonderful guitar, just give me now 50 euros"?
Yes I'm going there
What makes people happy to use ebay for sending money to people they DON'T know is the fact that ebay gives "identity" to people, you can see the homepage of someone and you can see her history as a buyer and as a seller, and based on this information you can build and grow trust on her. Yes, Trust was the word I wanted to arrive to.
Basically Couchsurfing (and ebay) gives you additional informatiion based on which you can make decisions. In the real world, would you be happy to host a friend of your father? I think so, and why? Because you father trusts her and you trust your father. As simple as that. So technologies can be used to automate this process (the term "social software" is about this enabling power of ICTs). CouchSurfing collects and shows a lot of "social" information: who surfed with who, who certified who, who referenced who, ...
This goes in the same direction as enabling hitchhiking or car pooling through some trust-facilitator ICTs mechanisms as was writing some time ago in Using social software for good: car pooling. Here the same arguments apply: I might be scared to open my car to a total stranger but, if my mobile tells me that she was already hitchhiked by 1000 other people and nothing bad happened, maybe I will be a little bit more open(minded). And the same if my mobile can tell me that this total stranger was picked up already 3 times by my friend Mary and she was happy with the lift and the conversation.
Actually, some months ago I asked to Couchsurfing founder Casey Fenton if I could get access to the data collected by CS and shown on the site for my research on Trust-aware decentralized recommender systems (PDF). But after a positive reply, I didn't hear from him any news. The social data are very very interesting. I copy and paste from my email to him:

In general, if possible, i would like to also have this information
about an user:
#login name (or id if you want to anonimize the dataset).
#country (with longitude and latitute)
#State/Province
#City
#Spoken languages (with levels)
#gender
#age
#Occupation:
#Ethnicity:
#Interests:
#Music, Movies, Books: (particularly important since recommender
systems recommend items such as these ones!)
#Places I have visited: (important for developping a system that
recommends countries to be visited)
#Places I have lived:
#Places I want to go to:
#groups an user belongs to (again good for recommending which group
you might find interesting)
#Couch Available (yes/no/maybe)
#Preferred Gender of surfer:
#Max Surfers Per Night:
#how many photos did the user upload.
#some degree of activity of the user such as (total number of logins,
registration date, logins in the last 30 days, in the last 90 days, ...
a more verbose output would be to log all the dates when an user login
in the system). this information can be useful to conduct studies
considering for example only active users.
# is the user verified? at which level?
# is the user vouched for? (of course i can derive this information
from previous logs)
# is the user ambassador?
# is the user certified? (this means "did he contribute financially?")

I was also asking about detected attempts to spam the network, sybil attacks and the like:

one more question, if i may
what is your experience with SP_ A MM ?
there are people that send spiam (remove the "i") messages to other users?
that write spiam profiles or link to spiam sites?
any fake profile (such as bill gates profile of john kerry profile...)?
any other abuse did you happen to see on couchsurfing?
i'm curious because the other side of social software systems is ...
trying to abuse of them and use them for your "malicious" (depending
on your point of view) interests
(such as selling your book on amazon or attracting visitors to your
spiam page or ...)

Actually I think I'm going to copy also the rest of my email to Casey, maybe you find something interesting in it as well:

Some suggestions:
#have you considered exporting personal and "friends" data of every
user in FOAF format (more info at
http://www.foaf-project.org/ or i can tell you something about it if
you like)?
#it would be great being able to "export" your profile to your blog.
the idea is that you provide some html an user can copy and paste in
her blog and this html "writes" some information from couchsurfing
about her profile such as username, place visited or location or
"Couchsurf in my house" or "surf my couch", the couchsurgging logo and
of course all this information link to couchsurfing.com (it can be
good to spread the existence of your fantastic site!)
this is something similar to "flickr" (see for example caterina blog at
http://caterina.net/ and the photos exported from flickr on her blog
on the right), or allconsuming.net (on the right of my blog
http://moloko.itc.it/paoloblog/ you can see "books i'm reading", they
are "written" by allconsuming using the html i copied there and pasted
it in my blog) and tribe.net. all these services allow you to show
your presence on these communities in your blog/site. [was i clear? if
not, sorry. i can try to be more clear, just let me know]
#there was something about geotagging user pages and let geo-aware
browser and application to see the map of users and browse it but the
main site about it geourl.org just went offline so i'm not sure it is
a meaningful project right now...
#you can even think some integration with flickr, every city can
become a "group photo set" on flickr or couchsurfing users can be
allowed to posts their photos on flickr...just an embryonic idea.
#you can show in the homepage the list of currently logged in users
(such as phpnuke/postnuke-powered portals often do). this could
possibly foster the sense of community.

Last words: Couchsurf the world!

Categories (tags):

Folksonomy	folksonomy
Metadata	metadata
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

What is "Tag Spam"? Or better, Tag Spam exists?

Leigh asks So any signs that "tag spam" has started yet? (found because he uses "trust metrics" a keyword to which I'm subscribed in a number of service). Here I ask the same question. It seems very unlikely that web spammers (they called themselves "search engine optimizer") cannot see in seconds the value of getting the wanted URL (of the to-be-busted book, movie, ...) or photo (of to-be-busted movie, product, ...) under my eyes. Afterwards, we are in the attention economy, aren't we? Getting attention of some humans (or aggregators and, as a consequence, of many humans) on your item is the first step towards you getting reputation (and possibly money). [by the way, the same is true for this blog post].
However, if you look it from a biodiversity point of view, spam is good because forces you to evolve, to differentiate, to invent new solutions.

So, any signs of "tag spam"? If you find something, write it on wikipedia pages Spam or Spamdexing (there is nothing at the moment about this) or ask Britannica to insert it in the next version (hope you get the difference...).

But first, how to define "tag spam"? A bot is always a spammer? If you genuinely think that microsoft.com could be tagged as crap, then this is not spam? But if you tag something just in order to capture attention of other people, then this is spam? If I tag on del.icio.us this post as "folksonomy", is this spam? If I tag my papers on CiteULike as "Cool" is this tag spam?
Rebecca pointed out that someone tagged on flickr an antisemite protest sign as "MLK" (Martin Luther King). Is this tag spam? She says "community standards" do not, indeed, can not defend against abuse of the system--only design can do that. Off the top of my head, there are several simple things Technorati could do to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future:
And in fact, Rebecca is already starting to provide anti-spam techniques:
* Technorati could design their system not to publish any photo Flickr users have tagged "Might be offensive".
* Technorati could create their own tagging system, and not publish any photo Technorati users tagged "Might be offensive".
* Technorati could provide an email address so that users could alert staff if a photo was offensive or inappropriate, and then the staff could go in and tag the inappropriate photo so that it would not appear on Technorati's site--or hand-select an appropriate one.

And in fact David Weinberger's (implicitly) also suggesting to use a trust metric when he says
"Tags work because they're so simple and because they are so connected to the human semantic context, but having billions of tags won't work because they're so simple and connected to the human semantic context. Will we be able to triangulate tags with other data - especially social data - so that we can get more out of them than we put in? It doesn't seem impossible to me - simply knowing who created a tag lets you get more out of the tag than the person put in - but it's not up to me to invent the stuff."

Let me make a strong point here: "Tag Spam does not exist. What does exist are different ways of viewing stuff in the world (and I hope there will always be!). What does exist are also incentives to get attention of other people". How can we take the most out of decentralized tagging? I think that using trust metrics we can choose to consider only tags provided by sources we deem trustworthy and exclude all the rest. There is the risk of DailyMe here: that is you will see only world classifications of people you already agree with and you will never ever get exposed to different way of thinking. I was speculating about it some time ago and leave this topic for next time.
Ok, I started with "trust metrics" and, having closed the circle, here I stop.

UPDATE: you can never stop. While I was writing 2 posts on Corante appeared that are very relevant.
In "issues of culture in ethnoclassification/folksonomy" danah argues that tagging is culture dependent. The great example about the book "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things" tells us that if someone (of a the culture described in the book) tags a picture of a woman under "danger", this is not at all tag spam but simply a different point of view on world, a different culture (not a better or worst one).
And in Folksonomy is better for cultural values Clay replies that the same problems applies to ontologies but exacerbated and that "The aggregate good of tags is not that they create consensus or accuracy; they observably don’t, and this is very observability is much of their value." He also reports that "But the relativity can also be interesting when crossed-tabbed with the identity of the tagger; I don’t want ‘toread’ or ‘funny’ generally, but I do want Liz’s ‘toread’ tags, and Matt Webb’s ‘funny’ links." In my Jargon, he is here expressing a trust statement (I trust as 1/1 Liz in the context of "toberead" tag). What I propose is to use this information to automatically discover the identities trusted by Liz in the context of "toberead" context and automatically suggest them to Clay. The balance between "i keep a small and direct and controllable social network of people i really know" or" i use also automated tools that can infer, based on the global social network, how much i could trust unknown users" should be an user option in my opinion. The first is more controllable, the second is more prone to serendipity, exposure to something new and new persons but also less controllable and under risk of social attacks.

Since I'm here, there are other interesting posts I found later on navigating some of the links. They are here below:
Cheap Eats at the Semantic Web Café
Folksonomy Notes: Considering the Downsides, Behavioral Trends, and Adaptation
The Politically Correct Police (PCP) are making lots of noise about how "This isn't right and SOMETHING SHOULD BE DONE".
Technorati Tags Set for Abuse who is tagged as "Nude Celebrities" just to prouve the concept
Shapes of knowledge, word for poodles
Making use of tags and tagsonomies
Controlled Vocabularies and Folksonomies: Why Change is Good.
Social consequences of social tagging
and i guess you will find all of them on del.icio.us's "folksonomy" tag

Categories (tags):

Metadata	metadata
Social Software	social_software

Lucas, please, add tagging to WebJay

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].

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Trust in Games

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?

Categories (tags):

Metadata	metadata
Social Software	social_software

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

"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.

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

School and Workshop on Structure and Function of Complex Networks

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).

Main Topics:
- Characterization and modeling of complex networks;
- Socio-economic networks;
- Technological and communication networks;
- Biological and ecological networks.

Lecturers and Keynote Speakers:
L. Adamic (HP Labs., U.S.A.) R. Albert (Penn. State Univ., U.S.A.) A.-L. Barabasi (Notre Dame, U.S.A.) K. Borner (Indiana Univ., U.S.A.) G. Caldarelli (La Sapienza, Italy) S. Goyal (Essex, U.K.) *M. Granovetter (Stanford Univ., U.S.A.) S. Havlin (Bar-Ilan Univ., Israel) M. O. Jackson (Caltech, U.S.A.) M. Marsili (ICTP, Trieste, Italy) J. Mendes (Porto, Portugal) *M.J.E. Newman (Michigan Uni., U.S.A.) R. Pastor-Satorras (Catalunga, Spain) F. Vega-Redondo (Alicante, Spain) A. Vespignani (Indiana Univ., U.S.A.) * S. Wasserman (Harvard, U.S.A.) R. Zecchina (ICTP, Trieste, Italy)

List of Invited Speakers:
(updated as of January 2005) A. Barrat (Paris-Sud, France) B. Bollobas (Memphis Univ., U.S.A.) S. Bornholdt (Bremen, Germany) R. Burioni (Parma, Italy) A. Calvó (U. Aut. de Barcelona,Spain) R. Cowan (MERIT, Maastricht)) P. De Los Rios (EPFL, Switzerland) A. Diaz-Guilera (Barcelona, Spain) S. Dorogovtsev (Aveiro, Portugal) B. Dutta (Warwick, U.K.) M. Greiner (Siemens, Germany) * B. Huberman (HP Labs., U.S.A.) * S. Jain (University of Delhi, Delhi)) J. Kertesz (Budapest, Hungary) * A. Kirman (CNRS, France) B. Khang (Seoul, Korea) * S. Kirkpatrick (Jerusalem, Israel) * M. Lassig (Cologne, Germany) * S. Leibler (Rockefeller, U.S.A.) * S.S. Manna (Kolkata, India) N. Martinez (Berkeley, U.S.A.) S. Maslov (BNL, U.S.A.) * F. Menczer (Indiana Univ., U.S.A.) * R. Monasson (CNRS, France) * Z. Oltvai (Northwestern Univ., U.S.A.) * K. Sneppen (Niels Bohr Inst., Denmark) T. Snijders (Groningen) Z. Toroczkai (LANL, U.S.A.) * U. Upfal (Brown Univ., U.S.A.) A. Vazquez (Notre Dame, U.S.A.) T. Vicsek (ELTE, Hungary) M. Weigt (Gottingen, Germany) (* to be confirmed )

The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) is organizing a School and Workshop on Structure and Function of Complex Networks, to be held from 16 - 28 May 2005 in Trieste, Italy.
The Organizing Committee will be: A.-L. BARABASI (Notre Dame, U.S.A.), M. MARSILI (ICTP, Trieste, Italy), F. VEGA-REDONDO (Alicante, Spain), A. VESPIGNANI (Indiana University, U.S.A.) and R. ZECCHINA (ICTP, Trieste, Italy).
The Local Organizer will be G. BIANCONI (ICTP, Trieste, Italy).
The finding that many complex systems, from the man-made Internet to the evolutionshaped cell and to the network of social and economical interactions, can be studied and compared on the common ground of network theory, has propelled the field into the attention of the larger scientific community and turned network research into a truly interdisciplinary enterprise.
Measurements performed on a vast number of complex systems have indicated that the networks that underlie them are not random, but have common or specific features that make them suitable for their function. The rapid growth in interest in networks has created the need both for authoritative and pedagogical introductions, lowering the barriers for newcomers and for an exchange of new results and ideas.

Main Topics:
- Characterization and modeling of complex networks;
- Socio-economic networks;
- Technological and communication networks;
- Biological and ecological networks.

This activity is divided into two parts, the first week being a School in which established results in networks will be presented by the Lecturers and the second week, a Workshop to discuss present problems in economical, biological and technological networks. The Organizing Committee promote a call for contributed talks: please send applications, with title and abstract of the proposed talk, only by email to G. Bianconi: gbiancon@ictp.trieste.it no later than 28 February 2005.

Categories (tags):

Blogging	blogging
Metadata	metadata
PhD	phd
Social Software	social_software

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

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.

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Using social software for good: car pooling

Paul Resnick is researching on "ride sharing services that dynamically match riders with rides". Read the very interesting and clear SocioTechnical Support for Ride Sharing scenario document. The idea is to make car pooling easier using ICT. If your interests contain trust, recommender systems and making the earth a better place, you should definitely read the paper. Maybe I'll try to put up a project and submit to the local government, there was a car pooling project in Trento but it seems dead. Contact me if you are interested! [My impression is that often research does not produce useful and real benefit for society, this is a case in which we can put our brain activity for creating something useful and that can make a difference].

Excerpt from SocioTechnical Support for Ride Sharing by Paul Resnick, Associate Professor University of Michigan, School of Information

I. Intro/Overview
In America, there is tremendous unused transportation capacity in the form of unoccupied seats in private vehicles. Not only would filling some of those seats reduce smog, congestion, and fuel consumption, but it also could create opportunities for increasing local social capital. The major barriers to ride sharing include coordination of routes and schedules, safety risks, social discomfort with sharing what are currently private spaces, and an imbalance of costs and benefits among the affected parties. Despite these barriers, ride sharing does occur, both in the form of recurring carpools and van pools. According to one estimate, more than twice as many people in America share a ride to work in a private vehicle as use public transportation to get there [ref.] In a few cities, there is even instant ride sharing among strangers. Emerging changes in the technology infrastructure of our society may soon make it possible to reduce some of the barriers that have limited the appeal of instant ride sharing. The first change is the widespread deployment of cell phones and other mobile communication devices, with the prospect that they soon be integrated with a position-sensing infrastructure. The second is advances in computational power that may allow for dynamic route matching of drivers and riders. The third is the development of reputation systems on the Internet for maintaining trust among strangers. Research is need on how to leverage these developments to create a SocioTechnical infrastructure for instant ride sharing.

II. Scenario
Janine is new to instant ride-sharing. She is twenty-five and single. She s trying to save money and besides, it s such a hassle to park at the hospital where she works as a research assistant administering clinical trials. She sometimes stays late at work, so she never joined a carpool, but she s decided to try the new Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti instant carpool system. She was a little worried about taking rides with strange men, so she set her profile to only accept rides from women, or from men who had a history of giving at least 10 previous rides without any complaints from riders. She logs onto the website and enters her address and her destination address. She finds that if she walks only to the corner of her current block, she ll have to wait an average of 15 minutes to get a ride, and sometimes much longer, but if she walks two blocks further, to a main street, she can usually get a ride within 3 minutes. She decides to walk the two blocks. This first morning, she s kind of curious about what kind of person picks up riders, so she checks off the box that indicates she s willing to converse the driver.
She s still a little nervous, so she doesn t allow any of her personal information (name, address, or interests) to be revealed to the driver. She s talked to other people who found people to play music with or got a ride all the way home by revealing some information, but she s decided to wait and see how the whole system works first. As she walks out the door, she calls the number she had pre-programmed into her cell phone. The system tracks her progress as she walks to the main street and tells her that a blue Toyota Matrix is just three blocks away and that she should hold up her instant ride-share sign. It gives her a code that she s supposed to say to the driver, and a code that the driver is supposed to say to her. Sure enough, the car pulls up. The driver is a forty-something woman, smartly dressed with a white lab coat on the passenger seat. They exchange codes and Janine jumps in the back. The driver asks Janine what she does at the hospital and soon they discover that the driver and Janine s boss are good friends from way back, and tells a humorous story about her boss when he was first getting started in medical research. As they pull into a choice parking space at the hospital parking lot, reserved for multiple occupant vehicles, the driver smiles and says, You saved me 5 minutes driving around and around in this lot. Thanks. Maybe I ll take you again some time, but my schedule s very irregular so I m not sure when. Thank you! says Janine as they walk off in different directions. As she walks away, she calls the ride sharing system again from her cell phone and presses a button to indicate that she arrived safely, that she would be happy to ride with that driver again, and that she recommends her to other passengers.

[/end of Excerpt]

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

CiteULike: A free online service to organize your academic papers

[I'll write something about my trip in Israel later on, as time permits]
I just found on HubLog an online service I was really waiting for: CiteULike (a prototype service to manage your personal library of academic papers). When you are logged in and visiting a page related to a paper, you can post that paper to your online library using a bookmarklet. In doing so, you can also specify tags, a list of keywords you'd like to associate with this article (a la del.icio.us and flickr) and optional notes. The service is very similar to del.icio.us (simple, tag-powered and social), but precisely tailored for academic papers. You can also see all the papers tagged under a certain tag (for example networks). Cool!

You can see your library (see mine), and see which other users are reading the papers you find interesting. The about page tells you what is coming soon. I think that "exporting those data in semantic web formats" and "opening the API" can be interesting additions to the list. This would be great for creating Trust-aware Recommender System tailored for researchers.
The big problem I see is that only papers in (PubMed, HubMed, JSTOR, arxiv, IngentaConnect) can be added for now. Most of the papers I'm interested in are not stored on those online repositories.
I wish it would be possible to add Citeseer (I'm involved in a project whose goal is to relaunch citeseer), eprints archives and Springler (see my last paper page on Springler for a typical paper page).
I'd like also to be able to keep some blog posts (not published) in my online library and papers that researchers keep in their homepages: using the URL as key for the "paper" could do the work but this will make the site just as del.icio.us is now and I think this is not the goal of the online service. Maybe it would make sense to introduce two levels of papers: certified (by some recognized authority such as PubMed) and uncertified (such as my papers I keep on my blog) but I'm not sure this is a good idea.

Categories (tags):

Peer to peer	peer_to_peer
Privacy	privacy
Social Software	social_software

Enormous P2P Network by Google

When millions of users will have Desktop.google.com installed, Google will simply release a new version in which the user can check a box and say "Share the files in my disk" (maybe only files in a certain directory). This will create in a second an enormous P2P (peer-to-peer) network, in which you can search for files directly on other users' disks. What do you think? Make sense?
UPDATE: If I were Google, I let users choose also "share your files only with your friends on Orkut". In this way Orkut would becoma a uber-useful network (now is a bit pointless), and Google Corporation will have all the worlds users for all the services. And increase what it knows.

Categories (tags):

Free software	free_software
Peer to peer	peer_to_peer
PhD	phd
Social Software	social_software

Sharing research papers

Citeseer is less useful today than how it was 2 years ago. It seems they stop the crawling looking for papers. [I have a project about adding "web of trust" to citeseer so that every user can express a degree of interest in another users' kept bibliography) but it seems I never have the time to seriously start it.] Anyway this post is to cite 2 interesting related projects: LionShare and Eprints ... (read below for links and details)

LionShare P2P project (see the search screenshot on the wiki) allows people to stop thinking P2P is illegal by default. It is Java Open Source code.
"LionShare P2P project is an innovative effort to facilitate legitimate file-sharing among individuals and educational institutions around the world. By using Peer to Peer (P2P) technology and incorporating features such as authentication, directory servers, and owner controlled sharing of files, LionShare promises secure file-sharing capabilities for the easy exchange of image collections, video archives, large data collections, and other types of academic information. In addition to authenticated file-sharing capabilities, the developing LionShare technology will also provide users with resources for organizing, storing, and retrieving digital files."
(found via the iper-interesting Italian WikiLab).

The other interesting project is more mature and is called Eprints.org - Self-Archiving and Open Access (OA) Eprint Archives. The software is called GNU eprints and it is of course free software. At present, there are 141 known archives running EPrints software worldwide. It is a sort of p2p network where peers are libraries (also University libraries) that certificates that the papers they host are real papers from their scholars. I think that every single researcher can have her own instance of the peer but I think noone is doing it. [Anyway I didn't investigate too much the project and I could be wrong]. My University Library is one of the 141, good! Among the softwares, there is CiteBase whose goal is, I guess, very similar to citeseer.
You can also admire some powerlaws (are they ubiquitous?) in these graphs (Java applets).
The different eprints peers keep them up to date using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.

Ok, I must admit I didn't check the projects in great details so if you do it (or even install them!), leave some comments (if you feel like). Thanks!

Categories (tags):

Social Software

social_software

Games and Social Networks

6th September 2004, University of Leeds, UK: Games and Social Networks: a workshop on multiplayer games promises to be interesting. Looking at the paper titles, the keywords nowadays are "mobile" and "location-based".

Categories (tags):

FOAF	foaf
PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Paper accepted for Coopis --> looking for cheap place in Cyprus (through 2 degrees of separation)

Good news: my paper "Trust-aware Collaborative Filtering for Recommender Systems" got accepted for Coopis2004.
Bad news: the conference is hyper-expensive.
So I'm looking for hyper-cheap (possibly free) hospitality in Larnaca, Cyprus, from 25 Oct to 29 Oct 2004. I checked on couchsurfing (a site where people offers ospitality in their houses and a super-cool YASN [yes, you can express your friends list]) but I found none in Cyprus.
If we take for true the six degree of separation theorem, I should be connected to everyone in Cyprus by only six degrees of separation. So I guess there should be at least some cypriots in my friends of friends set, now i only need to find one of the connecting friends. So if you know someone in Cyprus, please become my friend and close the circuit (and don't forget to write down the path from me to the cypriot host in the comments below). Thanks.

Categories (tags):

Emergent Democracy	emergent_democracy
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Manifesto for the Reputation Society

I trust enough Hassan Masum that I'm recommending his new article Manifesto for the Reputation Society (written with Yi–Cheng Zhang) even if I didn't have time yet to read it. It is published on FirstMonday, a very interesting online journal. I'm recommending it also because it cites a paper of mine, so I guess I get back some reputation as well
Too bad the content on FirstMonday is not released under a Creative Commons licence.

The paper got cited online on BoingBoing, SmartMobs, Many2Many, CommonCraft, MemeStreams and, I guess, much more sites.

Categories (tags):

FOAF	foaf
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software

FOAF Camp in The Netherlands

There will be a FOAF Camp (19-20 August 2004, Campus UTwente, The Netherlands).
In short, Two days of talking, hacking, socializing and making FOAF better. and more importantly W're doing this for fun, not for profit, on a pure cost recovery basis - so bear with us as we sort out some details.
Together with 1st Workshop on Friend of a Friend, Social Networking and the Semantic Web (FOAF'2004), it will be a ubercool FOAF summer here in Europe!

FOAF Camp - 19-20 August 2004, Campus UTwente, The Netherlands

WARNING

This is the first time we do this - we reserve the right to make changes and/or cancel the event; see below for the full restitution of the fee in that case. W're doing this for fun, not for profit, on a pure cost recovery basis - so bear with us as we sort out some details.

In short

Two days of talking, hacking, socializing and making FOAF better. Held in the parklike surroundings of Twente University, hometown of the Grolsch beer brewery.

This gathering will be loosely based on the ideas pioneered at the BSD and Apache Hackathons and last years FooCamp; i.e. a self organizing group (though do suggest topics) working on cool things together while having fun. And using the Face to Face time to understand people and issues better, work on things which require people from different continents to be in a room together and to build enough trust and understanding to make even greater things when you get home. (If you are also looking for something with a bit more structure, organisations and formalisms; do check out the FOAF workshop in Galway, Ireland.)

Organized by the FOAF community for the FOAF community.

The programme starts on Thursday the 19th of August 2004 at 9.00; and continues until Friday the 20th of August 2004 at 16.00.

The camp will be held at the Logica Facility; a tiny, somewhat secluded, conference center (which is just big enough for us) in the woods.

Friend of Friends help a Friend

We are organizing this on a personal and non-profit/cost recovery basis. So if you can help out; if you want to do something specifically; show something, help out organising something, sponsor a t-shirt, beerbash or a lunch, whatever, do let us know. We need the community to make this work.

Note that the site we are at is a private Campus away from any public roads and normal citizens; so even if you have very wild, noisy or strange ideas - we can propably accomodate them.

Conference Fee

150 Euro which includes lunch on both days and a dinner (or BBQ weather permitting) on thursday. Breakfast is included in the roomrates quoted below.

We prefer payment ahead of time, but see cut-off dates below into:

IBAN: NL64ABNA0481301186
Account: 48.13.01.186 / WebWeaving
Bank: ABN AMRO, Stationstraat 31, Leiden, The Netherlands
Swift/FAST sorting code: ABN ANL 2A

using an internatioanl SWIFT or IBAN transfer, with the transaction set in Euro's and with any cost paid by the sender. Contact us to make alternate arrangements, in case of hardship, or if you need things such as a proforma invoice.

Or alternatively in cash on-site. In any case; you will receive your receipt from the registration desk at FOAF camp.

In the unlikely, but possible event that, we need to cancel the event we will fully restitute de amounth paid; and/or any banking fee's up to a maximum of 15 E upon presentation by email or fax of the receipts.

If you have to cancel - and let us know before the 15th - we'll restitute the full amount paid. Any cancelations after that point will be restituted up to 50%.

A registration form will be provided as soon as possible; meanwhile you can help us tremendously by sending us an expression of interest.

Lodging is not included in the above conference fee; see below for the options and how to make reservations. It is up to -you- to arrange your own accomodation. A fair number of rooms are suitable for sharing; use your friend of a friend network as appropriate.

Important Dates

15 of July premillary registration cut-off. Registrations after this date will be served on a first-come, first served basis provided there is still space.

1st of August registration closed.

2nd of August Deadline for presentation requests.

3st of August If you've not yet wired your conference fee at this point; then be prepared to pay cash at the conference.

Location

FOAF camp will be held at the Campus of Twente University, near Enschede, The Netherlands.

Which is located at the very east of the Netherlands, on walking distance from the current border with Germany.

Amsterdam Schiphol is the nearest main airport; though note that some budget carries also fly to Munster Osnabruck Airport (FMO) just across the boarder in Germany. The connection between FMO en Hengelo is a bit more awkward than the direct train between Schiphol and Hengelo; though generally doable for experienced travelers .

Schiphol is about 200 km (150 miles) west of Enschede, Munster airport about 75 km (60 miles) to the South East. Either airport and the campus are connected directly to the highway and it is well signposted.

Facilities

Dial-in: none; though avialable in most hotel rooms (some rooms however have ISDN)

GSM: Europe standard; i.e. 900 and 1800 Mhz; a US 1900Mhz phone will -not- work. You need a european one (prepaids start at 35 Euro's without contract; best sourced from a supermarket) or a triband.

Network: The entire campus is covered by WiFi - exact arrangements will be announced later. (please confirm if you need wired access too).

Beamer: yes, up to XVGA; VGA style connector only.

Audio: not plannned. Let us know if needed.

Power: 230 volts, 50 Hz. DIN41494 or DIN 57620 which looks like this: .

Food

Carnivore and Western Vegetarians are catered for - if you have any other dietary needs - let us know before the 21st of April.

We expect to provide you with a Lunch on Thursday and Friday, and a dinner of sorts (or BBQ, loaction and weather permitting) on Thursday evening.

Breakfast is included in the room rates below.

There will be coffee, tee or water during the sessions.

Route - from Amsterdam Schiphol Airport

The easiest way to reach Enschede is by Train; as the most highways between Amsterdam/Rotterdam and the Hauge are are clogged during rush hours; and you have little use for a car while on Campus (which is more or less a single pedestrian zone).

In short the train station is below the airport; underground. There are direct trains to Hengelo and Enschede once an hour and more often if you do not mind changing midway. This is generally well anounced and clear. The trip will take a bit over two hours and set you back 22.50 Euro (about 25 USD). The campus is located in between Hengelo and Enschede and has its own train station called Drienerloo. There is a very regular bus/shuttle service from the train station to the campus.

More details provided by the university , a routeplanner university, short table and the schiphol airport web site.

Meanwhile at the airport follow the signs for the trainstation which is below the terminals. Note there there are also Tickes vending machines in the luggage reclaim area which are generally less crowded and with less of an issue to be besieged by pickpockets and other big-city folklore.

Vending machines require coins, make change, take most ATM and a few of credit cards. More details on these vending machines found here.

A one way ticked will be E 22.50 which is awkward to pay with coins.

There are also manned ticked booths during the day at the area above the train station. These people generally pretend -not- take credit cards (but will relent if you get stroppy). If you get your ticked here also ask for a Strippencard (see below) which is valid for all busses in the whole of the Netherlands.

Note that that this area (like Amsterdam Central Station) is rife with pickpockets.

Use the timetable, enter Schiphol and Enschede. Virtually all trains depart from platform 2. You want to go into the direction Amersfoort or Enschede. The direct train departs at 51 past the hour; at 21 past the hour there is a train which requires a change at Amersfoort. This change is easy; the train you have to get into will be waiting for you on the other side of the platform. Once you get to Hengelo you can either change to the Enschede Drienerloo train (a 5 minute train ride) or continue to Enschede and take a taxi or bus from there.

Schiphol to either Hengelo or onto Enschede, twice an hour from 5.51 until 23.21:

from Schiphol to Hengelo
(2 hours, 3min later) Enschede
(2 hours, 11min later)
Departure: 5.51
6.21
6.51
7.21
7.51
....until..
21.51
22.21
22.51 Arrival: 7.54
8.24
8.54
9.24
...
23.54
00.24
00.54
01.24

Arrival 8.02
8.34
9.02
9.34
...
00.02
00.34
01.02
1.34

There is a connecting bus at 09 or 39 minutes past the hour from Enschede (Line 1, direction Hems), a 14 minute ride.

If you get out in Hengelo you can wait 25 minutes (until 18 or 48) for a train onto Drienerlo, which is the station nearest to the Campus from where you can also pick up that same bus 1 to the campus (a 4 minute ride):

fromHengelo to Enschede Drienerlo
18 minutes past the hour 23 minutes past the hour
48 51

The choise of sitting in the train until Enschede; and taking the connecting bus from there; or chaning at Hengelo and take the connecting bus from Drienerlo is one of personal preference.

If you want to take a Cab stay on board until Enschede; there are generally more taxies at the stand in Enschede and generally a bit cheaper.

Bus tickets are called "strippenkaart" and are valid throughout The Netherlands. The ticket contains 15 so called "strips". The city is divided into zones and you need to have stamped the number of strips that is equivalent to the number of zones you travel through, plus one. For the above trip from Hengeloo station to Campus this is three strips. Only the last strip of that number is stamped, usually by the bus driver who knows how many strips you need. Strippenkaarten can be bought at the ticked counter of the station. A more elaborate guide is made available by the transport authority - or use this more colloqial guide.

By international train

From southern europe; take a train direction Amsterdam and change at Schiphol; from Germany or from Scandinavia; know that Hengelo-Osnabruck is on the main East/West train connection. Or change at Arnehm.

Osnabruck/FMO airport to the campus

Generally easiest to take the bus to Osnabruck or Munster and then take any train direction Netherlands; and get out at Hengeloo.

By car

Schiphol airport, Munster Airport and the Campus are all directly on the main highway system. Simply follow the signs to Enschede/Hengelo. Once there follow this description. There are parking pacilities next to the conference area.

Staying at the Campus

We have two levels of accomodation available; at 67 Euro (including VAT and breakfast) in the Drienerburg Hotel and at 46 Euro (including VAT and breakfast) at the Logica facility.

Secondly we'll expect to be able to allow you to pitch a tent and use the nearby sports facilities for toilets/showers on a nearby sportsfield. Pricing to be announced. If you plan on bringing a (very small) campervan or caravan - please secure approval ahead of time.

You can book through this form directly with them. Do add the code 'FOAFCAMP' in the comment block at the bottom.

A link and reservation reference code to our room block will be made available as soon as possible.

All locations are within a 10 minute walk from each other.

For those craving for more luxery; there is a 4 start hotel just off campus site: the Broeiert as well as lot of choise in Enschede or Hengeloo. This hotel is 50 meters from trainstation Drienerlo.

Other things to do

If you are staying on - you can travel the usual sights of the Netherlands; Amsterdam beeing a well known one; visit one of the textile industry museums in Enschede itself (add more..)

Contact

The event is organized by members of the FOAF community on purely for fun and a not for profit basis: Libby Miller, Dan Brickley with a bit of logistical assistance thrown in by @Semantics S.R.L..

Dirk-Willem van Gulik, +31 (0) 71 514 9564, Libby Miller and Dan Brickley. Fax is at +31 71 514 9564

© 2004 FOAF Camp, Asemantics, All Rights Reserved. Contact foafcamp@asemantics.com for more information.

Categories (tags):

FOAF	foaf
PhD	phd
Social Software	social_software

Call For Papers: 1st Workshop on Friend of a Friend, Social Networking and the Semantic Web

1st Workshop on Friend of a Friend, Social Networking and the Semantic Web (FOAF'2004)
*1-2 September 2004, Galway, Ireland*,
sponsored by SWAD-Europe and DERI
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/events/foaf-galway/

Many of the interesting conferences about these topics happen in USA. So, if you are in Europe, you cannot miss this one!
In the committee there are many people that I learn to know by email or by reading their blogs but I have never met. I hope to meet them physically in Galway.
(found via rdfweb mailing list)

This call for papers also appears in the Call for papers topicexchange channel and in Trust-related-conferences wiki page

Introduction
------------

The FOAF (Friend of a Friend )
project explores a unique combination of themes from social
networking, search engines, knowledge representation and software
development. FOAF was designed as a practical experiment that
would highlight the technical, social and business challenges
raised by the next generation of "Semantic" Web technology. Over
the past few years, the FOAF developer community has been working
on standards-based techniques for publishing and harvesting
machine-readable descriptions of people, the links between them,
and the things they create and do. The working assumption of the
project is that such techniques will underpin the deployment of
the next generation of Web technology, W3C's "Semantic Web".
The FOAF project was created in the expectation that
these machine-readable descriptions will grow, as the Semantic Web
platform matures, to cover companies, organisations, documents,
groups, products, file sharing and many other aspects of life,
both online and off. The time has come to evaluate these
assumptions in the context of the opportunities and challenges
presented by the rise of FOAF and the
Semantic Web.

Social networking is a recent topic gaining much interest and
publicity. Social networking sites are community sites where users
can maintain an online network of friends or associates for social
or business purposes: whether looking for a job, reconnecting with
old friends, moving to a new area, or dating. Most of these sites
are based on a centralised architecture: all users' descriptions
are stored in one big database. There is, however, growing user
and business interest in portability between such sites, and for
sophisticated "single sign-on" mechanisms that reduce the need for
data re-entry, while allowing users to manifest different aspects
of themselves in different contexts. FOAF-based import/export
allows such sites to address user demand for control of "their"
data; however, many deployment, privacy, authentication and
engineering issues have not yet been fully explored. To what
extent do mechanisms such as FOAF change the environment they
attempt to describe? How can the visibility of personal data be
restricted to certain audiences? How can businesses make money
when their customers can migrate to new services with increased ease?

This workshop on FOAF, social networking and the Semantic Web
provides a first chance to discuss the unusual combination of
perspectives - academic and scientific, engineering, social, legal
and business - drawn together by these trends. The workshop aims
to bring together for the first time researchers interested in the
effects, analysis and application of social networks on the
(Semantic) Web as well as practitioners building applications and
infrastructure. The workshop will also try to give a snapshot of
current developments, as well as setting a roadmap for the future
of both FOAF and social networking - especially in the context
of the Semantic Web.

Topics of interest for full papers include, but are not limited to
the following:

* Social network metadata standards
* Trust issues in social networks
* Profiles of FOAF, subsets, mapping to other vocabularies and formats
* Federated digital identity, single sign-on (decentralized identity
management)
* Business models for the Semantic Web (life after banner
advertisements)
* Integration with desktop and mobile applications (chat, IM, P2P,
Bluetooth, address books, RSS/Atom)
* Privacy, etiquette and best practice issues for aggregators
* Infrastructure for social networking
* Applications of online social networking
* Knowledge management with social networks
* Mathematical analysis of social networks
* Exchange of social network information
* Applications of online social networks
* Shared annotations
* Use of digital signatures and encryption with RDF/XML
* RDF-based search engines, data harvesting and syndication
* GUIs (browsers, editors) for FOAF and Semantic Web data
* Formalisms that address practical problems of heterogenous
changing data
* Pragmatics of sharing data schemas across subtly different datasets

Submission and Important Dates
------------------------------

The workshop will be organized in part around talks presenting
selected research results in the relevant fields. Another
important part of the workshop will be open discussions, where
participants define the agenda themselves, focusing on the
interests of the participants with respect to social networking,
FOAF, and the Semantic Web. Depending on the nature of the
submissions, some time may be allocated to discussion of
the future development and coverage of the FOAF specification.

We invite the submission of position statements and demonstration
descriptions as well as full papers. Position papers and
demonstration submissions should not exceed 1000 words, full
papers should not contain more than 6000 words. Documents should
be be submitted as tarred/zipped archives containing exactly one
index.html file and all accompanying files to
team-foafws-org at w3.org (or alternate address(danbri+foafws at w3.org>).

Papers to be published and/or presented will be selected by in
peer review process.

* Full paper submissions due: *18th July 2004*
* Position papers and demonstration proposals due: *22nd July 2004*
* Notification for acceptance: *5th August 2004*
* Web-ready versions due: *16th August 2004*
* Workshop date: *1st-2nd September 2004*

Chairs
------

* Dan Brickley , W3C.
* Stefan Decker , DERI.
* Libby Miller , ILRT.
* R.V.Guha , IBM.

Programme Committee
-------------------

* Lada Adamic
* Tom Baker
* Orkut Buyukkokten
* Marc Canter
* Edd Dumbill
* Dieter Fensel
* Morten Frederiksen
* Nick Gibbins
* Jen Golbeck
* R.V.Guha
* Jan Hauser
* Jim Hendler
* Mashide Kanzaki
* Paul Martino
* Brian McBride
* Wolfgang Nejdl
* Chris Schmidt
* Guus Schreiber
* Nova Spivak
* Barney Pell
* Jack Park
* Danny Weitzner

Location
--------

Galway was founded in the
13th century by the Anglo-Norman de Burgos as a medieval
settlement on the eastern bank of the River Corrib. It became a
walled and fortified city state ruled by fourteen powerful
merchant families, later known as the "Tribes of Galway". Today
the city is a vibrant, bustling centre of the arts and commerce,
though it still retains a relaxed and intimate atmosphere. Galway
is also one of the most popular tourist destinations in the
country. The city, with its medieval streets, waterways, extensive
range of shopping facilities, wealth of music sessions and other
cultural events, is a place to be treasured. The seaside town of
Salthill, a Galway suburb, is a renowned summer resort. Its fine
beaches open directly onto spectacular Galway Bay. Galway's
numerous annual festivals and celebrations - among them the
'C?irt' International Festival of Literature, the Galway Arts
Festival, the Galway Races and the Oyster Festival - are famous
throughout Ireland and beyond. Galwegians can justly claim a
quality of life that is surpassed nowhere in the world.

Being a university city, Galway is a lively energetic place
throughout the year. The National University of Ireland, Galway
, situated close to the heart of Galway,
enjoys an intimate relationship with the city and during the
academic year, 15% of the population of the city are students. A
compact, thriving city, Galway caters to youth like few other
places can. The University's graduates have played a pivotal role
in all areas of the development of Galway, including the arts,
industry and commerce.

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute has a
centre located at NUI Galway and is focused on developing
Semantic Web technology.

See the local organisers
page for further details on accommodation and travel.

Sponsoring Possibilities
------------------------

Are you a company or organisation willing to sponsor this event?
Sponsoring companies will be given the opportunity to present
their software in The demo session and display their logo
prominently on the workshop homepage. Please contact John Breslin
(john.breslin at deri.ie) for further information.

Categories (tags):

Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

KnoBot

KnoBot [UPDATE: the link is often broken. the knobot page on Sourceforge is always up (thanks Zbigniew)]- An agent for decentralised knowledge exchange :KnoBot combines semantic web technology with a P2P design to build a trust based decentralised system for information selection and discovery.
I should check it better but looks a lot like what I want to do for my PhD.
On KnoBot news I found a similar and interesting project: the Matrix Public Network project.
Both ot the project have running code, so we can try them out.

Categories (tags):

Social Software

social_software

Google Personalized

Google Personalized.
Google Personalized web search delivers custom search results that are based on a profile you create describing your interests.
The slidebar (with which you can ask for more or less personalitazion) is cool.

But I still prefer the idea behind Eurekster: "Eurekster shows you What's Hot with your friends".
It would be great to be able to tell Eurekster "here is my FOAF file where my friends are already expressed" and then receive search results.
(via Mark Carey)

Categories (tags):

Blogging	blogging
FOAF	foaf
Peer to peer	peer_to_peer
PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

PhD Research Proposal: Trust-aware Decentralized Recommender Systems

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.

Categories (tags):

Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Reviewr

Reviewr "ties into the API exposed by Ludicorp's [...] new social software application, Flickr and hooks it up to the API exposed by Amazon. The point is that using Reviewr allows you to search for reviews of products by people you know and trust." (via Hublog)
Interestingly, as I was proposing in a previous post, Friendr limits the number of contacts an user can have. It was not a totally dumb idea after all...
Check the services already created using the API and the services documentation (1, 2)

Categories (tags):

Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Best social software? Orkut? No, Epinions.

I tend to agree with Danah about Orkut. In particular, I think Orkut does not model the real social network of an user. I speak of Orkut because is the buzz of the moment and its being in affiliation with google makes it the big expectation. But the same arguments could be used against many of the social network applications listed on socialsoftwareweblog.

The question is: "Why should I not accept an invitation from a totally unknown user that pretends to be my friend?" There is no negative consequence in adding someone as friend.

For instance, I pretended to be friend of Joi and Marc and Danah and Dina. And, even if they don't know me, they added me to their friends list. I could be the worst spammer on earth but they didn't care.
I did the same with people asking for an invitation in these comments. Because adding someone as friend does not have nay negative consequence.

Compare this with Epinions.com. In Epinions you can express your web of trust, a network of reviewers whose reviews and ratings you have consistently found to be valuable (from Epinions FAQ).
First of all, trust relationship is not symmetric. If I state that I trust Richard Stallman, this does not mean that he should trust me or needs to approve this. I'm only saying to the system that I'd like to see the items that Richard Stallman likes. [As a side point, it is worth note that trust relationship should have context. For instance, I can trust Richard for philosophy and free software projects but not for fashion or hair cut. This is not true, I'd love to have all his hair ]
Moreover, your experience on Epinions.com is influenced by your web of trust. If you add "terrorist_user" to your web of trust, you will probably receive recommendations about bombs and flight simulator software but this is totally possible and acceptable. In this sense, you have incentives in keeping your friend list under control (this could also mean short) and in adding only really trusted and like-minded friends.

In the end of friendster, Dick reported how two guys in a shower room were competing about who had a larger social network on Friendster ("I'm now connected to 31,000 people", at which point the second guy chuckled and said "Dude, you think that's cool? I'm connected to 420,000 people"). Dick notes how the all point of becoming friends has become having as many "friends" as possible (or simply, more friends than you, that is the same). But being connected to everyone means being connected to noone!

So what are the possible solutions?
1) first define well if in your "community site" the relationship you want to model is symmetric (A states that B is her friend and B has to accept and confirm (or not) the invitation of A) or not symmetric (A can be friend of B while B is not friend of A; in this case the term "friend" is probably not semantically correct).
2) (especially if you want to model a symmetric social relationship) introduce some (possibly) negative consequences for adding someone in your friend list so that an user has the incentive to not add just every perfect unknown user and keeping her friend list under control.
3) limit the maximum number of friends you can have in your friend lists. I know this is kind of strange ("Who are you for telling me how many friends I could have?") but, introducing scarcity, you are giving a value to friend acceptations. Instead, if the number of friends you can add is infinite, then there is no incentive in denying a perfect unknown the rank of friend. This has a lot to do with the economy of links and reputation economies (whuffie).
Maybe this number can be increased very slowly as long as an user keeps using the site but I'm not satisfact with this idea because I can create a bot that "uses the site" for me and lets me gain additional undeserved priviledges.
4) friendship could become a fine-grained relationship, i.e. you can add a value to your relationship, so that I can be friend of my mom as 1 and friend of my uncle as 0.6. In this case you can limit the total amount of friend currency you can spend, a sort of FriendShares (as in BlogShares.com?)
5) I think metaster () is something we really need to think about.
Perhaps we just need a web service for managing relationships on the social networking sites. A meta Friendster; Micrsoft Passport for social networking. We could call it, oh, I don't know, Metaster...or Sterster. Sign in to all the sites with one username and password. Invite metafriends to all the sites with a single click. Manage a single profile across all the sites.
6) [what about you adding the 6th possible solution in the comments, my friend? ]
n+1) [of course there is always space for one more comment ... and one more friend ...]

I know it seems that I propose to monetize friendship but I only want to introduce incentives in having your friend list corresponding to reality.
Basically we need to break the assumption that having a large social network (even if not real) is better that having a small social network (but real). And also that having Joi Ito (or many power-bloggers) in your social network means you are more a blogroll-link deserver, i.e. a more interesting person. Summaryzing, if my relationship with Joi Ito is not real, Joi Ito should have some incentives in not adding me in his friend list.
Then you could ask: "what real means in our digital world?"
I have a perfect answer to this question but it doesn't fit in the margin of this page.

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Other papers analyzing Epinions.com web of trust

Since Seb ha cited my paper as epinions empirical analysis paper, I'd like to mention other 2 papers that analyze epinions web of trust:

the already commented Trust Management for the Semantic Web and the new Propagation of Trust and Distrust.
As a side point, note that we collected datasets of different dimensions. I collected only 49.290 Epinions users because I was following only "this user trusts X" links. Richardons et al. collected 75.000 users (but used only 5.000 of them); I think they followed also "this user is trusted by" links. Guha et al. had access to the real dataset of Epinions which consists of 130.000 users. Note also that Guha et al. had access also to the web of distrust (a sort of black list) while this information is not available on Epinions.com and hence not downloadable.

This post also appears on channel social software

Categories (tags):

Copyright	copyright
FOAF	foaf
Social Software	social_software
Songs	songs
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

SongBuddy and Decentralized Music

Yes, YASN (Yet Another Social Network). Have you noticed that Add as a friend is the most common link in websites created these days?
Anyway, this time we have SongBuddy. Social software + online music: an explosive pair!
SongBuddy is a new way to find music that's already available on the Internet. By finding songs on bands' and labels' sites and sharing the address of those songs with your friends, you can explore music you'll love that you wouldn't hear anywhere else. So sign up, make some friends and list some music. You won't even need to install any software, SongBuddy works with your current media player.
Here my profile.
SongBuddy also produces a FOAF file representing your friends and uses the MusicBrainz RDF namespace.
The term of service is also very good!
Unless otherwise specified, all content on this site is copyright SongBuddy LLC. You may use the data on this site under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0 Creative Commons license.

Another similar site worth mentioning is Webjay by Lucas Gonze but I haven't had time to try it yet.

This post also appears on the open channel playlistlogging

Categories (tags):

Social Software

social_software

Google Social Networking

I have seen on Many-to-Many that there is a new social networking service, Orkut.com.
The site states that the service is in affiliation with Google.
Orkut.com was created by Orkut Buyukkokten, who works for Google. Actually, what is fantastic about Google is that this company invites its engineers to spend one day a week on personal projects! Read more on Cnet.

Since joining Orkut.com is by invitation only, I ask to everyone that is already in to invite me. Thanks.
Membership to orkut is by invitation only.
If you have a friend who's a member of orkut, have them invite you to join.

UPDATE: I got an invitation by Jeremy. I'll post more about how Orkut looks from inside soon. In the meantime, if you want to be my "friend", just ask!

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Paper submitted to iTrust2004

I submitted my paper Using Trust in Recommender Systems: an Experimental Analysis to the Second International Conference on Trust Management 2004.
You can read the PDF file or the HTML version (by latex2html).

Abstract:
Recommender systems (RS) have been used for suggesting items (movies, books, songs, etc.) that users might like. RSs compute a user similarity between users and use this as a weight for the users' ratings. However they have many weaknesses, such as sparseness, cold start and vulnerability to attacks. We assert that these weaknesses can be alleviated using a Trust-aware system that takes into account the ``web of trust'' provided by every user.
Specifically, we analyze data from the popular Internet web site epinions.com. The dataset consists of 49290 users who expressed reviews (with rating) on items and explicitly specified their web of trust, i.e. users whose reviews they have consistently found to be valuable.
We show that users have usually few items rated in commons. For this reason, the classic RS technique is often ineffective and is not able to compute a user similarity weight for many of the users. Instead exploiting the webs of trust, it is possible to propagate trust and infer an additional weight for other users. We show how this quantity can be computed against a larger number of users.

Categories (tags):

Peer to peer	peer_to_peer
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Trust Management for the Semantic Web

I've just finished reading a very interesting paper Trust Management for the Semantic Web by Matthew Richardson, Rakesh Agrawal, and Pedro Domingos.

There are a lot of interesting ideas and theoretical analysis about trust and propagation (it defines or explains some concepts such as path algebra, generalized transitive closure algorithms, well-formed decomposable path problems, global invariance, cycle-indifferent combination function, ...).

Among the many interesting ideas, I liked a lot the following simple idea partially inspired by pagerank (I think).
Let me give you first a short explanation of how pagerank (one of the algorythms behind google.com) works.
PageRank ideally performs a random walk from webpage to webpage following a link at random and remembering how many times it passed in a web page; this number is the pagerank of the web page. Of course a random surfer will pass in Yahoo.com more often than in my homepage and in fact yahoo.com will have a high pagerank while my homepage will have a lower one.
At every step there is a (small) probability to jump to a random web page, so that the random surfer does not get stuck in a clique of highly connected web pages and every webpage has some chance to be taken into account.
It is proven that the random surfer can start in whatever webpage and the final pageranks will be the same; only the time needed to converge will be different.
If the description was not clear, you can read the the explanation given by Google or by Webworkshop.net or by Ian Rogers. Otherwise you can read the original paper or you can even construct a web graph and try pagerank.

So the authors of Trust Management for the Semantic Web, similarly, propose:
Imagine a random knowledge-surfer hopping from user to user in search of beliefs. At each step, the surfer probabilistically selects a neighbor to jump to according to the current user's distribution of trusts. (...) Further, choosing which user to jump to, the random surfer will, with probability delta (in [0,1]) ignore the trusts and instead jump directly back to the original user, i.

So here the very simple idea:
the random surfer starts in i (the user who want to predict how much she should trust other unknown peers), then it jumps to other users depending on the trust distribution (following with higher probability, higher trust links).
But (and here there is the difference!) with probability delta it will not follow a trust link but instead jump directly to i (our starting point user).
In this way you can choose how much you want the opinion of i taken into account and basically how much the random surfer is allowed to go far away from i!!!

As in the paper about pagerank, there is also the probabilistic interpretation and the interpretation as operations on matrixes.
Actually on pagerank, doing the random walk is equivalent to compute the first eigenvector of the link matrix.

Ok, if you trust me, you should read it!

Categories (tags):

Blogging	blogging
FOAF	foaf
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

The Technology of the Year: Social Network Applications

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.

Categories (tags):

FOAF	foaf
Peer to peer	peer_to_peer
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

My Erdos Number

My Erdös Number is 5.

Erdös numbers have been a part of the folklore of mathematicians throughout the world for many years.
Essentially, the Erdos Number Project studies research collaboration among mathematicians.

If you are curious about your Erdos number, you can compute it.

If you have written a paper with Paul Erdös, you have Erdos Number 1. If you are a coauthor of a coauthor, you have Erdös number 2. And so on.

Here is the mail I receive when I asked to compute my Erdos Number.

Erdos number
Your Erdos number is at most 5, via this path of length 4 to Aguzzoli:

S. Aguzzoli, P.Avesani, P.Massa
"Collaborative Case-Based Recommendation Systems"
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence
Volume 2416, 2002.

Categories (tags):

Social Software

social_software

social software

http://www.corante.com/many/