Just Bru

• I didn't like the old look anymore
• It had lot of visalization bugs (especially under Microsoft platforms)
• It was not clean and clear enough

1. mainly text (blog and wiki)
2. visual (fotolog and gallery)

1. linear and (mainly) personal (blog and fotolog)
2. persistent and shared (wiki and gallery)

Managed to chat a little bit with Lilia last night about lack of "bandwidth" during communications through text only media like chat/IM, and the fact that the mind goes looking to "fill in the gaps" by taking bits and pieces from archetypes.
Already discussed the basis of this theory some time ago, in reference to continuous partial attention and again about full-time intimate communities.
It's been really interesting to discover that someone else reached similar conclusions from different starting points / ways...
This time realized that this kind of communication pushes the interaction towards having a "best picture"; that is where both parties are "looking" at an interpolation of different archetypes that matches the behaviour pattern played by who's on the other side of the screen.
Lack of para-verbal and non-verbal channels makes verbal interface overloaded: the mind needs an answer, quickly, and goes for this kind of identikit, best guessing from semantic bits extracted from the conversation.
By far the nemesis of the concept of natural interaction :)
Moreover, line after line, recontestualization of the digital language will be more and more complete, letting small changes in language patterns lead to huge recoil in perceived interaction. Much like a puppet.

Although, observed "out of band" signals that, little by little, help in shaping the image of the other party toward a better fitting mask (alter ego)... thus shifting away from the pure archetypical paradigm and toward a more "exception" filled, realistic character.
work still in progress...

I did one small update to CodeWitch today: I removed the authentication from the integrated wiki.
The more the time passes, the more my confidence in Wikis just grows stronger; maybe it's just the fact that I'm starting to understand why wiki works, but also because I've experienced that having to register yourself when you'll be anyway allowed to change anythings is just a) a waste of time b) another step to take (so lowering overall usability) and c) an hindrance to the use of the tool, since people (me at the very least) will feel on one side still under control (because of the registration and authentication procedure), and on the other hand fully responsible for what they are going to do (it's hard to accept the idea of versioning, at least at the beginning).

You know, among those nifty features of BlogLines, there's the chance to clip posts for future use/review.

Today I was skimming through my quite long stack of clips, and found this post (in Italian) by Davide Bennato, about butterfly effect and social networks.

Davide Bennato
Studiando la crescita delle reti rispetto al tempo e le strategie dei co-autori di articoli scientifici, Kleimberg è giunto alla conclusione che internet stimola la diffusione di idee quando diventa lo strumento utilizzato da alcuni opinion leader per mantenersi in contatto con diversi gruppi sociali (più o meno influenti). Newsgroup, siti web, forum e - recentemente - blog, contribuiscono ad amplificare l'audience e la discussione di determinati argomenti.

Niente di nuovo. Già negli anni '60 un pioneristico lavoro del sociologo Stanley Milgram, dimostrò che nel mondo ogni persona è collegata alle altre da una media di circa sei persone diverse.

Now, the so called butterfly effect is one of the basis of the chaos theory and owes its name to an example made by Edward Lorenz in the first days of chaos studies: "the beating of a butterfly's wings in Brazil might set off a tornado in Texas months later".
As Davide quotes in his post, John Kleinber at AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) in february provoked the audience asking "Can a single e-mail from Brazil set off a torrent of action in Texas?".

Kleinber is actually studying also how network grows over time, suggesting that, because of the small world phenomenon, counting the number of hops between people doesn't help. "It's better to look for people who have many different short paths connecting them, " he says. "This is an interesting open question with a lot of room for further research."
So, what I described a while ago in six slopes of separation about the importance of the quality (bandwidth) of a connection rather than just its path length is yet another point of view on this subject!
My curiosity now is: what happens as social networks grow bigger (and probably less deep), and thus worlds get smaller... will this enhance the instability of that torrent of actions?!
Maybe some of these papers on small-world and power-law / scale-free networks could help... :)

Even moreso, googling on the tracks of the small world meme, I discover that this article in New Scientist, describes a parallel between small-world network structure of neuron networks.

Small world networks key to memory
If you recall this sentence a few seconds from now, you can thank a simple network of neurons for the experience. [...] The key, they say, is that the neurons form a "small world" network. Small-world networks are surprisingly common. Human social networks, for example, famously connect any two people on Earth - or any actor to Kevin Bacon - in six steps or less.

Now, my question is: if a mail in Brazil can set off a torrent of actions in Texas, and if social networks and neurons share the same small-world network structure, what can the flip of a neuron do? :)

Is it just my impression or people is starting to use gtalk slightly more now that it supports avatar pictures?

A few weeks back, while I was in Italy on my time-off, I sketched this few lines on my notebook about the sources of inspiration.

Woke up this morning in the bedroom where I grew up, in Alessandria, Italy.
And, mate, was it good!
The smell of good coffee, all my books, comics, gadgets around. It's more than the actual value of things, ya know, it's about what they're tied to into your head: the context they represented, and that's triggered by that specific colour, or maybe that smell of books, or the sound that door makes when it's shut. And it may go totally subconscious too... like glancing at the bookcase and that specific title fires up the right neuron at the right time.

The result is that my mind actually blew up with inspiration, su much so that I don't know where to start with.
Of course being on "time off" really means something, but I'm sure this dear, reassuring, friendly environment also has its weight.

This made me think a lot about style, design and my tastes about it.
You see, I embraced and spread the gospel of minimalism, I dearly love empty spaces, white surfaces, burning-bright and pinpointed lights.
And then guess what? I come back home and find out that in this messy, tiny room full to the unimaginable with stacks of old newspapers, RPG magazines, books, CDs, worthless pieces of electronics,wires, a bicicyle hanging from the wall and another wall totally covered by old ugly pictures and "symbols" from my childhood (racing cars, fantasy characters, and so on)... in this very room, I was saying, it is where it's easier for me to fire out new ideas and small sparkles of enlightenment.
So what? So I still have no ultimate answer. Let me have this terrific coffee and think about it ;)

I'm blogging those now because yesterday, after three weeks spent with these thoughts "bubbling" in the background of my mind theatre, I joined some dots. As I'll explain in the next post.

Straight from Pasta and Vinegar:

How Berlusconi keeps his face: a neuropsychological study in a case of a semantic dementia by Sara Mondini and Carlo Semenza, Cortex, 3, pp. 332-335, 2006.

Abstract: A patient (V.Z.) is described as being affected by progressive bilateral atrophy of the mesial temporal lobes resulting in semantic dementia. Vis-à-vis virtually nil recognition of even the most familiar faces (including those of her closest relatives) as well as of objects and animals, V.Z. could nevertheless consistently recognize and name the face of Silvio Berlusconi, the mass media tycoon and current Italian Prime Minister. The experimental investigation led to the conclusion that Mr Berlusconi’s face was seen as an icon rather than as a face. This telling effect of Mr Berlusconi’s pervasive propaganda constitutes an unprecedented case in the neuropsychological literature.

This blog dates back more than 4 years. It's among the longes experiments I've ever had and feel quite fond of it.
However, I realized today I'm not going back to it as often as I used to.
Most of the time (even now), my interface to this blog is that of ecto, and once I submit the post it's almost forgotten, as I seldom go and browse the blog itself.
I remember a time not so long ago when it was my main tool in organizing my experiences. What changed? Well, the answer is not so difficult, and is at least :
. there used to be a wiki, that is no more.
. there used to be more "tools" here, such as the calendar, that now are spread on different platforms (google calendar and friends)
. I was writing more personal stuff or, to say the truth, the same stuff from a more personal cut, and with much less squelch

Now, if the first two are syntomatic of less and less time spent on this platform, as more and more time was required to explore the new kids on the block, the third point is crucial.
Especially considering how useful I always found the habit of keeping diary.
And there's no reason why this shouldn't be the place to keep on storing those shards of memory (yes the Italian one was supposed to serve that purpose, but that's another problem: I found i cannot split my personality between the two).

Sorry for periodically going back to this kind of posts, but for me is actually useful to record this kind of iterations.