Too bad that This recipient does NOT accept payments from International Accounts.

They still don't get it, uh? Oh, well... I'm sure that that mp3 file can be obtained in other ways. I could then burn it on a CD-R purchased in Italy on the black market (see below).

Beautiful, uh?

I hope that this will push the legendary Italian creativity to find better ways to use music. We have to pay for blank CD-Rs? Cool, we will use the Internet. Thanks.

I might very well have a distorted vision (dream?) about the future of digital identity systems, but if we agree that they are going to be distributed and not centralized, this could be a non issue. Of course making identities distributed will not mean that a user will be able to choose his or her identity services from more than one provider, but that the very identity will not be some file saved on a specific server somewhere but will be a cloud of data across many different servers.

Some of these servers will provide services for persona use, some others for government or corporate applications, but they will still be facets of the same identity.

In the very good article there is a reference to a sentence of World of Ends:

. . . A new identity infrastructure?one provided by open APIs, protocols and other standards that serve no agenda other than to enable useful dealings between buyers and sellers of products and services. Like the Web and e-mail infrastructure that are already part of the Net, this new infrastructure would be a full-fledged service on the Net. And it won't become that unless it's something nobody owns, everybody can use and anybody can improve. Again, like the Web, e-mail and the Net itself.

The keywords in my opinion are like the Web and e-mail infrastructure. Even today many users are using more than one e-mail account: one for personal messages, one for professional communications and maybe even one to maintain anonimity on the web, but still, all these e-mail accounts are part of the system and can connect to each other.

With all this I mean that I believe that the real challange is going to be trying to develop a system where the same application will be applied to different environments.

There are a few updates on the project and the technology that are worth mentioning.

First, with Matt Mower we are working on improving his liveTopics Radio tool in order to make it work as part of a "cloud". Even if it will most probably change soon, currently we are investigating the use of OPML files to distribute clouds' metadata. As far as the Italian Blog aggregator is concerned, users will be able to subscribe to an opml cloud file which will provide the sets of types and topics (in this case participants are not able to add new topics) straight to their liveTopic tool without the need of any special configuration.

All topics and types will then be included in RSS 2.0 feeds, to be used centrally to categorize each single post.

On the aggregator side, which is developed by Giuseppe Granieri, there are several ideas about how metadata could be exploited to improve the service and add more value.

Yesterday we had a pretty long discussion with Giuseppe and Cesare Lamanna about user rating, or "identity, trust and reputation" as Doug put it. In the specific case of the Italian BlogAggregator, which is a closed "club" of bloggers who have been invited, trust and reputation are somewhat less relevant since there's a very strong filter at the very beginning of the process and, in the case somebody would misbehave, he or she would probably thrown out by Giuseppe :-)

Anyway, we are absolutely still at a very experimental level, also if the first results are in sight and look quite promising. Let's keep digging.

Each time I try to look up their name on google they don't seem to be anywhere in sight. Doh!

Most of posts that I write have a bunch of links. Usually I write the post first, then I add the links. Adding links usually implies:

1. Running a search on google
2. Copying the url of the page I want to link
3. Creating the link in the post

Something like 95% of the times, the link I'm looking for is the first match in the google's results page. Type any person name and his/her weblog are going to be the first hit. Type any product or company name, and the product or company sites are going to be the first hit.

Now... guess what I want?

Yes, I want to write in my post something like "link:Dave Winer" and have it replaced in my post with Dave Winer in my post.

Isn't it what Google's API are for? Let me know as soon as the feature is available. Thanks.

PS: less than 20 minutes later I have the macro running, thans to Matt Mower (this link has been generated with the new "googlami" macro).

PPS: 25 minutes later I have TWO macros, thanks to Mikel Maron.

What did I tell you about the blogosphere? This is just great!

Yesterday I went trough the last 12 months of posts. I didn't read them all, but... well, I saw my life passing before my eyes.

There are some posts that I wrote about one year ago that look like they could have been written yesterday while others belong to a very distant past, when my company and my life were different, we had other projects, other dreams.

A lot of stuff has happened since them, good and bad.

Among the good thing, I must say that weblogging in the last year has been a great experience, more than 61,000 "unique visitors" came on these pages, more than 1,5 millions hits. I have met a lot of incredibly smart people in the blogosphere and some have become friends.

A warm thank you to everybody for this wonderful year.

On propoganda, big-pub news and editorial integrity in wartime.

[...] When it comes to Dear Raed, it's not as if the information on his site isn't already accessible world-wide. It's not information that's going to threaten our troops on the ground. It's not going to supply any strategic or tactical advantage to Iraqi troops since after all they're in Baghdad already. But what it does do is bring a human face into public view -- the face of an average person who happens to be on the other side of the walls of the Pentagon propoganda machine. It takes us out of our videogame mentality with our animated 3-D maps, rendered helicopters and tanks, and night-vision-enhanced smart-bomb footage. Hopefully it gives us a glimpse into the real human reprecussions of what's going on.[Jake's Radio 'Blog]

P.S.: I don't know if this is the same article that has been pulled from the CNN site, but it has exactly the same beginning that can be seen on CNN search results.

Until somebody will show up on TV claiming that he's Saddam and the people in Iraq and in the rest of the world will think it's real, I don't really see the point....

Dave: Here's an idea. Should Google take who's doing the search into account when doing its page rank work?

An interesting idea. Of course, it would mean letting google know what kind of searches I'm doing; also if google already tracks users with cookies, it does this more or less anonymously while such a service would require registration. However, provided that they would give a better service, this is not my concern.

Ideally Google could develop an additional layer of ranking based on users. It could track my searches and learn from the results that I tend to pick. It could always provide on top, maybe in a separate box, not only the content written on my own weblog, but also the contents written by people in my neighborhood, which most probably I trust better than others (I'm looking at my related sites pages right now, and I not only trust but I know most of these people).

Given their huge parallel processing power, I'm sure that this kind of tracking could provide all kind of added value to their data and improve their service.

It would also mean acknowledging that the web is used not only by readers but also by an increasing number of writers and given their recent acquisitions, they should know that.

PS: small pictures of people's faces are great, we should find additional ways to use them.

Marc's Voice: "I fully expect Paolo to not only have 3D fly throughs of his designed garden, waterfalls and footpath down a quiet country lane, but also touchscreen interactive kiosks dispersed throughout his home, with each network node supporting video, audio, phone, control and 2 ethernet connectors.

Oooops - sorry, that's what my home had.

Building infrastructure into a home enowadays is all about WiFi. We just need to get those digital<-->to analog convertors pumping - connecting the world of the PC - to our analog-consumer electronic world."

I do remember Marc's home (this is me at his table the last time I went to SF) and I admit that I'm copying quite a few tricks. There's going to be a small server room where all the patch panels will be, there are going to be conduits connecting every single room and extenting to the garden. We are planning to do most of the network wireless, but there will also be everything necessary to get a cable anywhere I like in case of need.

As far as the software is concerned... well, I have a couple of ideas... for example, there will be a homeBlog.

(this is how the place really looked like)

Overexposing with a digital camera is cool, because you don't have to wait the film development to see your results. Anyway, I have large pockets, and I tend to take the camera always with me too.

For the past decade or so, sociologists have been pushing one more concept, "social capital" - trust or community, in one of its guises - that is now also being taken up by economists. Crudely speaking, the more people trust each other, the better off their society. They might work more efficiently together, for example. In business, trust might obviate the need for complicated contracts, and thus save on lawyers' fees.

Besides using "social capital" to measure countries' economic power, I belive that the same concept can be applied to any community. Applied to the weblogs community, this concept help explaining the huge power that has been unleashed by blogging.

Reading other people's weblogs creates trust and efficiency, and it's an excellent base to build businesses and relationships.

This is interesting also for k-logging (or Business Journalling): if a country with a better community is richer, then also a company with a better developed trust and efficiency amoung its workers is going to be better off than others.

So, no, we are not wasting time writing on our weblogs, we're investing.

Unfortunately I'm now convinced that it's somehow much simpler than that. It's about power. And about lack of power. The U.S. feel that they can establish a new kind of imperialism to the world and that all existing international organizations, leftovers from the last century, are not needed anymore (if not to clean things up once they're done). Only Europe, as a friend od the US, could have opposed this imperialism. But we failed.

Right after September 11 the US were leading the largest coalition of countries ever seen. Now, whatever the US administration is saying, they are going to a war alone. Even in the countries officially supporting this war (Italy is one of them), very large majorities of the population are strongly against it.

There's something terribly wrong about all this.

PS: Dave corrects me. It's true, not only the British are fighting with the US, but also other countries will provide support, including France. Once a war starts sides must be taken, and nobody, at least in the Western world, will take Saddam's.

I love when the do this....

The blue spot you will see in the movie shows where he is looking, the larger the spot becomes, the longer he has been looking at a specific item. It's really amazing.

While today these services are available mainly to large companies (with large budgets), I'm trying to convince Luca that such a service made available at affordable prices would not only make sense, but be profitable. How much would you pay to have this kind of feed-back on a site you are designing or that you already have?

Totally personal note: when in a not so distant future I'll be wondering "When did this crazy house building adventure begin?" I'll be able to google it out. It was March 11th.

A few examples. Say that you need an icon for a discussion group, how about this:

^

It's "^" using the Webdings font.

Staying with webdings, do you like peppers? Use a simple comma:

,

You can also compose cool panoramas:

EREM

Marc Barrot could use these, instead of gif files, for activeRenderer:

4 6

So, keep an eye on these fonts

N

While Dave is taking pictures of the house he's leaving and Doc is taking pictures of the house he's reconstructing, today I took a few pictures of where my house, hopefully soon, will be.

A Seattle Times review of NoteTaker confirms that the president of the company is the same Scott Love who worked at Living Videotext. Scott understood outliners in ways that no one else did at the time, and I bet he still does. Very smart guy, doesn't cut corners. I'm sure it's a great product, worth buying a Mac to run. And it's nice to see that it supports OPML and can exchange outlines with Radio. Excellent. [Scripting News]

And guess what happens if you save your Web Notebook in your Radio www folder?