just found this in my referers list.

Last Saturday I found out that Russel Beattie is reading my Italian weblog.

Somehow it came unexpected, it's true that I write differently on my English and my Italian weblogs and maybe I didn't expect any of my "not Italian" readers to read my Italian weblog. So I started thinking why and how I do it. Of course, the most logical answer is that I find easier writing in Italian than in English, but it goes further than that.

I almost never cross-post, before writing each post I decide if it's going to be in English or in Italian. When the post is part of an ongoing thread happening on other weblogs it's easy, I simply write using the language of the other participants to the discussion. When it's something new or unrelated I simply decide who I want to "talk to".

Also if probably some Italian readers read both my weblogs, I perceive my readers to be pretty much divided in two different and separated groups.

So while there are issues I prefer to keep off my English weblog, such as Italian politics (desperately hoping that the word about what's going on here does not get out from the country, it would be too embarrassing), I tend to write technical-oriented posts on my English weblog because it's more likely that I will get a reply or an opinion from the broader international audience.

The most interesting thing I noticed comparing the two weblogs is not so much related to what I write but to what I do not write on these pages. For example, while I would never dream to start explaining what RSS is on my English weblog I did it on my Italian one and when I write about Italian issues on my English weblog I often have to describe a context which I don't need to define on my Italian one.

Also if it is a one-to-many way of communicating, the very fact that I decide who I'm going to write to and expect some kind of feedback from this activity make all these true conversations.

I was deep in some testing when I realized what I had on the screen. I took a step back, cleaned up a little and took a screen shot. X11, Windows XP, Windows 2000, MacOS X plus a couple of other Linux and MacOS X machine logged in terminal windows. No wonder I get lost from time to time.

To describe better what I just wrote below, this is just a brief example of a very short (and useless) conversation I've just had with Marc Canter about this post in his weblog.

I could have just left a comment, but than I would have had to keep checking for a reply. Doing it via IM was quick and painless. Of course, this exchange should be attached to his post as well.

It just makes sense

Be careful what you promise. [Scripting News]

Heh! This goes into the same chapter of my earlier post !

Dave started this very interesting thread on weblogs and IM.

I use both technologies a lot. I use IM to interact with most of the people I work with, to the point that even when I talk to them on the phone we usually keep an IM window open to exchange links or images while we talk. I also use weblogs both for public and internal publishing.

Currently i use two IM clients, Proteus for ICQ, Yahoo and MSN protocols and iChat for AIM. Both applications provide an History features, while Proteus keeps an history based on users I talk with (meaning that for each person I interact with there's a file containing all our exchanges since the beginning of times), iChat keeps a history based on sessions. Both are barely usable, the first one because the file is huge and hard to search, the second one because there are hundreds of session and they are hard to search as well.

What I would like to have is a tool to attach IM conversations to weblog posts, just like there are comments linked to each post today.

Just like you can click on the Yahoo icon here on the right and start a conversation with me right away, you could do the same clicking on a link next to each post. The conversation could then remain attached to the post. I would also like to be able to link a conversation to an existing post.

This would probably not be applicable to public weblogs, also if it happens all the times that people ping me because they find a link to my IM address on this page and it's usually quite interesting, but it would definitely be very useful to manage internal communications on our k-logs.

It's what we have been promised, uh? Advertising tailored to our profiles. Right. But what about context? Some ads just don't fit in some pages. This is what I just got on Wired.

Find one hour (even four quarters are okay) and check out this Channel 4 show. Between gags there are a lot of historical facts worth considering.

Now that categories are supported (all my weblogs are actually categories blogs) I can give a try to Brent's NetNewsWire.

Let's simply say that if this post is going to appear on my weblog, this little application is totally cool!

PS: yes, it is totally cool.

This Is Your Business, Virtually. Video conferencing has long been hyped as the corporate killer app, but the technology has been glitch-prone and expensive. A revamped 'telesuite' at New York's venerable Waldorf-Astoria is a baby step into a virtual future. By Elisa Batista. [Wired News]

I remember the old times, when we were all playing with the first phone and video conferencing applications, the quality was awful but, hey, we were connected at 14.4Kbs, or maybe 28,8Kbs, we could not expect more, right?

Well, now I have at least 10 times more bandwidth, but apparently the problem has not been solved. What's up?

Now, I want to use video vonferencing, and I don't want to may phone bills to place long distance calls, but I cannot find an application that works for me. Here's what I need:

• Must work on MacOS X 10.2
• Must extist a verion for Windows or be compatible with some other app working on Windows.
• Does not have to be free, but I want to test it before buying
• If it works trough firewalls it would be much better, but I can live with "full-peer only"

Anything out there?

$400 a month.

Prescription drugs cost a lot. Yesterday I refilled just one of my must-have prescriptions, the kind of stuff I have to take for the rest of my life or else I die. I have health insurance, for now, but the co-pay is pretty high. I asked what it would cost if I didn't have insurance. $400 per month. And that's just one drug. How do people pay for this? How does the government justify going to war in Iraq. Where are the priorities. If Bush had to pay $400 per month for one drug, out of his own pocket, I can't imagine he'd have too much bandwidth left for Saddam Hussein.

[Scripting News]

In Italy nobody pays prescription drugs, especially if they are life-saving. In the same way nobody pays for any kind of treatment (including gender change!) in public hospitals. The average quality of national healthcare is pretty good, I work with a lot of doctors and even if they continuosly struggle between budgets and patients, they still manage to do a great work.

We might not have high quality hotel-like bedrooms in most hospitals, but the fact that anybody, no matter how rich or poor, can access free healthcare is in this country is something that from time to time I give for granted and then I realize that I shouldn't.

Also if there are probably many people and companies out there working on digital identity projects, simple and real applications could really spark the adoption of such systems, and bloggers are probably a pretty good group of users to start with since they already feel the need for such systems to solve specific problems.

One of the interesting parts of the "You Know Me" Button idea is that comments servers I will post to will not have to store my email address. They won't even have to ever receive my email address since the identity server will guarantee for my identity and, if needed, will be able to forward email messages to me. Of course, this will be applicable to any kind of web application that currently require registrations.

It would also mean that I could block access to my email address to all the services that would not use it properly.

Kung-Log is an application that allows you to post and manage entries of a MovableType weblog. But the interesting thing is its license: it's donation based and the minimal amount of donation is $6.00, but as long as you are a student or someone in between jobs, this app is free for you.

Scripting News:...Third reason, it's time to solve the global identity problem. We can't trust Microsoft to do this. By now they must know that.

Amen. My first request is: I want to control my identity and decide who is going to have access to it and who isn't. I'm very happy not to delegate this to Microsoft simply because I don't trust them.

Btw: after discussion group threads, I also want to be able to track weblog conversations, like the one going on here between this blog, Dave's and several others that will write in a few hours about this issue. I know that there already are several technologies trying to do this, but none is final.

Trial balloon: "A simple addition to discussion group software makes it easy for a user to go to one place to monitor all conversations he or she is part of." [Scripting News]

Very interesting approach. Decentralized simple and efficient. I wonder who could provide such service. Once enough discussion group providers will be compatible (I bet it won't take much time), someone will have to run a central server. It could be the weblogging application providers or a third party.

These third parties (the system is designed to be decentralized, hopefully we will be able to choose our identity provider) will need revenue streams to keep the server running. I paid $10 for Technorati, I would probably pay for this service as well. But how many others would? Considering that the "free stuff times" are over, each new idea should have its own means to stay afloat. What is the new business model for these services? How is Technorati doing?

And to whoever will start working on this project, while you solve this problem, why don't you consider managing my identity as a vCard as well? I could collect contacts as well as comments in that app, provided that the owner of the data il willing to share it with me, of course. (read below)

Ever since I read about the SMBmeta proposal I started thinking about a similar approach to identify bloggers. Since I started this weblog I have virtually met dozens of people and honestly I'm starting to loose track. What I mean is that it is hard to interact with somebody you have never met, who is often located on some other side of the world (sometimes I don't even know where), a few time zones away.

It would be good to be able to somehow manage these contacts in a logic and possibly automated way.

From my little research it looks like the vCard format is the most widely used to manage contacts. It is already compatible with the software I use to manage contacts (MacOS X Address Book), my Palm, my iPod, even my Nokia phone.

While I was thinking about all this yesterday I got an email from somebody saying:

Hello,

You are in my address book, however I am missing key information about you.

Please click the "Add Details" link and provide your missing details. A web form is used to assist you however the information provided is never stored on the web - GoodContacts software on my PC receives your input via email and directly updates my address book.

So it really looks like somebody is working with this stuff. The message also had a vCard of the sender attached, which I dragged to my Address Book and got me the full info about the person who sent the message updated on my computer (and my Palm, my phone, my iPod, etc.).

At this point I would be tempted to link here my vCard, maybe even start to think about some new meta tag to add to these pages code but... it would also mean starting getting tons of spam almost immediately since all spiders out there would pick my email address up in seconds. While I agree on the fact that I am already getting a lot of spam and that getting my address out there is important, I'm trying to figure out a way to solve this riddle.

Meanwhile, here's my vCard compressed as a .zip file, hoping that those spam spiders won't figure it out

Every time I post a comment on a weblog I have to remember to go back and see if anyone followed up. We have to figure a way to automate this. Agree or disagree? [Scripting News]

Yes Yes Yes! What I've been doing so far is creating an RSS feed for the comments pages I write to using RssDistiller (I already have the template ready for that, so it's just a matter of pasting a URL). Of course, if comments pages would have their own feeds, I could simply subscribe to the page and wait to see replies in the news aggregator.

It could also be connected to the "view comments" feature in Radio's aggregator.

The only thing to figure out is how to unsubscribe from the feed after a reasonable amount of time in order not to waste bandwidth. Anyway, RSS is the way to go in my opinion.

Scripting News: What if a university like Harvard, not just a few students, got busy mapping the world of knowledge on the Internet. Each student would take responsibility for some period of time for some aspect of world knowledge. When they graduate they pass it on, or even better, take the responsibility with them, into life. Does any of this make sense?

Mapping knowledge is definitely going to be the next big thing. While we are investigating new ways to create contents that are already mapped or that could easily be mapped using smart software and flexible standards, mapping the knowledge already available is going to be a huge challenge.

Universities could help, in theory they have a huge concentration of intelligent people who doesn't necessarily have to be paid to do knowledge work. Specialized universities could take the responsibility to manage knowledge mapping of vertical sectors of current knowledge.

This will require some new tools/standards to be developed and it's definitely going to be an interesting challenge.

What is cool with Instant messaging is that you don't need a lot of words to build meaningful communications. [JY's weblog]

Ok, ok, I admit it... from time to time we do waste bandwidth!

I almost forgot I was in blogland. I had a question. Now I got the answer.

While reading the proposal I started thinking about what took us to develop our own content management system, IdeaTools. The main reason we started working on the project, back in 2000, was to empower small businesses with an easy to use and affordable CMS.

In Italy this is especially important since a very large part of the economy is based on SMB. At the time the idea was to create a system that would not only allow to build and manage web sites (both editorial and e-commerce ones) but also to "freely couple" them together, letting them exchange contents, links, profiles, etc.

While the content management part took off, we now have a few hundreds sites managed with IdeaTools, the whole concept of making all these sites a system, to link them together to create an added value, never started.

I think that this new idea is excellent, I'm looking forward to implement it and start using it with our customers but, most of all, to see how many applications will be developed around this format.

There is one missing link: the proposal is using naics codes to categorize businesses. I'm sure that there is a European equivalent (I'm afraid that there are more than one actually), does anybody know which is the leading/more usable one? And once we have found it: has anybody ever mapped it to US or Asian ones?

Everybody talks about Tabbed Browsing (the Mozilla way), so here is my proposal for a Safari tabbed browsing experience. Looks more cocoa than tabs. [JY's weblog]

If I could place a bet, apple won't adopt the tab metaphor, since it's, well, a bad metaphor. Instead, I'd expect a shelf to slide out from the side of the page that manages all of your page views. For one, it doesn't take up vertical space, it doesn't move the browser view when you go from 0 tabs to 1 tab, and you'd actually be able to read the view names when you have more than a few tabs up there.

Remember, Apple ships wide monitors, so they move things to the sides, not the top and bottom.

Beware: you can very easily become addicted to this feature. Don't start using it if you are not ready to leave your favourite browser.

So far Safari looks fast, very fast, compatible with all sites I visited and overall a nice experience. Considering that this is a beta version it's not bad at all (even if as far as I can remember I've been using beta browsers since 1995, no matter how the versions were called).

The most missed feature, coming from Mozilla, is tabbed browsing. This is something Apple should really consider incorporating. I know that tabbed browsing is used be a very small Mozilla/Netscape users minority, but once you are a tabbed browsing addict it's hard to stop. So wherever you are, whatever you are doing, post on your weblog a request for tabbed browsing, they must hear us.

Spell checking while I write in this text area is working, using Apple's system wide spell checker. Unfortunately the spell checker is considering html tags errors, something that should be addressed.

The other thing that Apple should do imho is implementing an easy to use (both for users and developers) wizzy editor. The ideal solution from my POV would be adding a parameter to text areas: since most browser based systems are already managing the IE5 exception (with Microsoft's wizzy editor), I'm sure that supporting Safari would be easy and widely supported quite quickly, and it would be a reason for more users to switch.

Overall, I think that introducing a new browser after 5 years is a pretty bold move from Apple. They already tried once and failed, but browser wars are over, and they might succeed this time.

Microsoft is leading here: a browser tightly integrated to the OS is strategic, so I don't see why Apple should not have its own. And since no matter what, this is not going to be a leading browser on the Internet, they must stick to standards to maintain compatibility, making support for Safari a no brainer for developers (they/we are not going to support a browser used by less than 5% of users).

A new browser is definetly something I was not expecting, but I must say that I'm quite interested in the outcome.

Litter Pearls. If you own a cat and do one new thing this year, let it be this: switch to crystal litter pearl cat litter (the link is to one brand, there are several). It's so amazingly good. First, there is no smell. Honest to God, no smell. Ever. Smell is gone. Second, the crystals absord the pee, so when you scoop, you only scoop the poop, which is faster and easier. And there's none of that clay clump breakage you get with the clumping litters. This is what the future is about. This is progress. Only twenty years ago you had to empty an entire pan of litter and fuss with trash bags, now the miracle of science has brought us silicon dessicant and litter pearls. I [heart] the 21st century. [megnut]

We once calculated how many kilos of cat litter we were taking up 4 floors (clean) and down 4 floors (dirty). Cannot remember the figure but with two cats at home it was an impressive number. Must find the Italian equivalent of crystal little pearl .

Google has updated its index (I'm back to the top ;-), but recently I saw a few hits coming from Altavista, so after a long time I visited the search engine for some ego-surfing and just to check how it works.

Surprise surprise: I'm the first Paolo also there. This makes me think that they have started using something similar to Google's ranking system, based on links from other sites. This would be the only explanation for my blog to show up there (yes, I know I'm not famous). Anyone noticed something similar?

A couple of days ago I downloaded and installed the latest version of Connectix Virtual PC. This is not the first time I use Virtual PC, but I had not been using it for a while: the last time I used it it was still under MacOS 9 and on a machine quite slower than my current dual 1Gz PoweMac.

Anyway, after struggling a little with the Windows 2000 installer and the network set-up, I now have Windows running in a window on my Mac.

There are a few new features that make this application more enjoiable and usable than before, for example the Dock/Start menu, which allows me to run Windows applications from my MacOS X Dock.

Performance is not incredibly exciting, but let's say that it is fully usable. I'm running IE and Radio in the virtual machine, and a kind of interesting thing is that I can access the copy of Radio running under MacOS from the Windows browser and Radio on Windows from my Mac. This is the main reason I purchased the upgrade: it's the ultimate testing environment, especially with the ability to run several Windows versions at the same time on the same hardware, each one running from a different IP.

I think that the most interesting aspect of Virtual PC on MacOS X is that anyway, Apple got us used to run a virtual machine to access all MacOS 9 applications trough the Classic environment (also if I almost never run it anymore), so in some way running another virtual machine to be able to use a bunch of other applications does not seem as weird as it did before. Besides, running Windows on a Mac offers a great feature not available on "real" Windows machines: you can quit Virtual PC and get back to a Mac .