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Updated: 19-12-2005; 9:47:48
Paolo's Weblog.
 Venerdì, 27 febbraio 2004
I found out this morning that I've been offered a fellowship at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard. I start officially in July.
What a great opportunity! I'm thrilled. [Joho the Blog]
Sounds like Berkman Center is becoming every day a more interesting place to visit. Martedì, 24 febbraio 2004
When we introduced the "when" part in the w4
concept, almost one year ago, what we had in mind was a space where
events would be topics which could be aggregated in calendars and
allowed users to navigate information using a timeline.
We have not finished implementing the when side yet for a few reasons:
- there was no widely accepted way of transporting events in RSS feeds (we are using ENT for topics, but it doesn't work well with events)
- we didn't know exactly where to get these events from and how to display them within the site structure
so the current version is using for the when classification the only time-related information available in RSS feeds: publishing date.
Now we have decided to start working again on this issue and come out with a first solution.
Our first step is going to be implementing a tool which will allow to
add event-related information to a weblog post. We are planning to use ESF even if reading several comments
to yesterday's post (thanks guys :-) we have learned that there are
several others standards which can be used. If there are going to be
tools supporting these standards we will support them server side, but
to begin with we think that ESF will do the trick and it will work well
with ENT. Server side we will also want to collect events from other
sources (calendars, intranets, databases, etc.).
Using the same approach we are using with topics, new events will be
automatically distributed among members of a cloud allowing users to
pick an event if it already exist instead of creating it.
There will also be relations between events and other topics on the
server, which we believe will create a sigificant added value to the
process (allowing, for example, to quickly move to all information
related to an event to all information related to one of the
participants).
Now, I think that this is the kind of application which needs to be
seen even to start understanding its advantages. If you have any good
idea on sources of events which could be thrown into the process,
comment below. Lunedì, 23 febbraio 2004
Event Share Framework: very, very interesting. Here's my do list:
- Build support for ESF in K-collector (excellent for our when classification)
- We need clients to add ESF data to blogs feeds (Radio, Manila, MT, our own... is anyone already working on some client?)
- Convert iCal's ics files to RSS+ESF feed
- Can we exctract RSS+ESF from Outlook?
PS: looks like something is moving.
Mercoledì, 18 febbraio 2004
How many times have you read about weblogs breaking google's
PageRank? I don't think it's true, however I guess that a
symptom of this should be that I'm the first
Paolo
on google, while I'm definetly not the most known, famous nor powerful
Paolo of the world (or the web).
Well... I have just figured out that the same is happening on Altavista
and Yahoo.
Given these results, it looks like Altavista and Yahoo are
chasing
Google in terms of ranking technology. Which also mean that switching
search engine might not be as bad as it could seem.
(yeah, this is a totally egosurfing oriented post ;-) Venerdì, 13 febbraio 2004
Perils of publishing.
Charles Herrera sent an email yesterday saying that he has a whole new impression of blogging after watching the talk I gave at Microsoft on Monday. It was a gratifying email for another reason.
He says: "To someone who has read Scripting News since the start,
but who is not involved in scripting or blogging, it has seemed to me
that on occasion you have been forced into a grumpy mode. Sometimes
words on a screen don't always convey the sense of the person
underneath. Of course, the 'grumpy' that I saw, or thought I saw, comes
probably from the flames all around you."
[Scripting News]
Yesterday I watched part of Dave's talk at Microsoft too and I had more
or less the same feeling Charles Herrera had. Actually I did meet Dave
a couple of times a while ago and he's always been very kind to me. But
over time the Dave I read on Scripting.com, on mail lists or even in
personal email did "overwrite" the Dave I had met in person.
Now, this probably applies to all of us: no matter how many smileys we
can add to our posts, email messages and IM conversations, our image
projected by what we write is very different from what we are in person.
While we should all keep this in mind while reading what other people
write and know that we are only seeing a tiny bit of their
personalities, we could also try to figure out how to improve this. A
little (quite good quality btw) video of Dave helped. Do you have a camera at hand?
Microsoft source code leaked out. The software giant says part-blueprints of its Windows operating system have been leaked on the internet. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]
I've always been told that Linux is secure because all source code is
available on the web. Now they're telling me that Windows is not secure
because some source code has been leaked on thw web. Who knows... maybe
some hacker will fix some bugs ;-) Mercoledì, 11 febbraio 2004
Dave:
[Google] by taking control of the syndication format, and trying to
eliminate RSS, they will control the whole blogging-syndication-search
space. The whole thing. We're about to be assimilated, according to
Google's plans. Remember the Browser Wars of the 90s? Just like that.
Using incompatibility to force the users to go your way. It's
disgusting, of course. But see it for what it is, not revenge, but a
grab of power. Don't be evil? That's marketing hype. ...The users
now have enough data, and the tools to speak for themselves. That was
the point of doing blogging software, so that we would never be held
hostage to people who sit at the top of a pyramid and look down at us,
their minions, and sigh when they have to kill our dreams. It doesn't
have to happen.[Scripting News]
It's true, thanks to weblogs we are not forced to be silent anymore. But does this help?
I'm tempted to say that if Google decides so, this battle is already over and we have lost.
RSS aggregators makers will run and implement Atom support. They will
probably struggle to keep up with the standard (Atom is at 0.3 level)
but they simply cannot afford not to support it since they are all
small guys and especially if Google is going to introduce a competing
product.
Publishers of RSS content, small and big, will start supporting Atom,
especially if there is going to be some kind of Google aggregator or
service (which, at this point, will only support Atom).
Google is already controlling how we get to our html contents, it's
controlling a significant part of on-line advertising, it's even
collecting our profiles on Orkut... why shouldn't they control the
whole syndication space?
This might be the ultimate Big Brother scenario, unless we collectively
figure out what to do to prevent this (and maybe try to get some other
big gorilla on the RSS wagon). Venerdì, 6 febbraio 2004
ER drops scene over Janet furore. US network bosses cut a scene from ER in the wake of the row surrounding Janet Jackson's Super Bowl stunt. [BBC News | World | UK Edition]
Uh... are you serious about this? I mean, Italian television generally
speaking sucks, but such a stunt would not have made any news. And as
many visiting Americans always remember: the Pope lives here. ;-)
The good news is that apparently not all Americans think alike:
Dave: Women's breasts are great. I think there should be a requirement that
all women bare their breasts if they want to when they're on
television. It should be a choice thing. I'm pro-choice. It might be
more comfortable. It's unbelievable that Michael Powell is having a
hissy fit over this. More breasts, not less. That's my opinion.
Giovedì, 5 febbraio 2004
Knowster.The problem with Orkut is simple: it lets you label as friends anybody you know. So the choice is too damn binary. Is Anita Hooker your friend or not? Yes or no? So I have a simple suggestion: add a new variable: "know." As in, Do you know Anita Hooker? Yes or No? If yes, is she a friend? That's it. Hate to bump 120 people down from friend to acquiantence, but it would make a lot more sense. Doncha think? [The Doc Searls Weblog] Mercoledì, 4 febbraio 2004
This morning I received an email message from somebody I know and have linked on Orkut saying something like:
I found out you that you are "friends" with...
mentioning somebody else I have in my "friends" list there.
I have already read on many other weblogs several discussion about the usage of the word "friend". Checking on Dictionary.com, here's the result:
- A person whom one knows, likes, and trusts.
- A person whom one knows; an acquaintance.
- A person with whom one is allied in a struggle or cause; a comrade.
- One who supports, sympathizes with, or patronizes a group, cause, or movement: friends of the clean air movement.
So I guess that calling most of the people I'm linking to on Orkut and
other services "friends" is okay, the most common definitions are not
very strict. But I guess I'll keep using the term in quotes ;-)
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