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)

Lilia Efimova

People are selfish: I care more about my own archives than about my company's :) Stong quotes on our dependence on external objects to think and to remember.

• The existence of three interesting tools:
  • K-collector (that, shame on me, I didn't know of before, even if it's a creature of Paolo Valdemarin, an Italian blogger I often read)
  • LiveTopics (which seems pretty interesting, but the link is broken!? :( )
  • Waypath - to find related posts from weblogs around the Web
  These add to my list of "have-to-study-more-deeply-this-stuff" which by now includes Blogdex, Technorati and del.icio.us.
• The use Lilia does of trackback pings to address her own posts (or at least I guess she does that by trackbacking herself :P ). Ubercool!!! This way you can read an old post and get all the newer followups on similar topics just by looking at the pings... useful for personal KM too ;)
  On the other hand, I'm afraid to be a bit too lazy to do this post by post... there should be an auto or semi-auto tool that does it... that would be great!

First question: Why a pKM management model? Do I really need it?
Well, in short, yes. For a longer argumentation... I could just take a look at my desktop (either the physical one or the one drawn on the TFT in front of my nose) to
understand how deeply I need it.
As I was recently reading on this article on KnowledgeManagementMagazine:

“Over the years we have equipped everyone with PCs and taken these support positions away, but we have neglected to tell the knowledge workers that they have been given new tasks. Worse still, we have since made 95 per cent of work invisible.” McGee notes that it is easy to see a messy, disorganised office, but a messy, disorganised hard drive or e-mail inbox is invisible.

• a way to quickly organize (categorize?) so that people will find what they suppose to find where they suppose to find it.
  
• a way to quickly find what I am looking for (and when I say quickly I mean very fast)
  
• a way to describe (or map) my knowledge network. How do all the things I'm interested in connect? And, even more interesting, which are the point of contact and which the unexplored (enexploited) borders?
  
• a way to make contamination possible by others. even if I'm not there. I mean, everytime I come back to the office after being away, I find post-its, some of them just with messages or "to-do" items, others with ideas. Sometimes I even leave unresolved tasks or "problems" (say, a routine if I'm programming, or a layout, or whatever) written in the form of a question on my huge planner, and some goodhearted fellow often leaves me insights on the solution of the problem, or maybe the solution itself!!!
  
• A way to summarize results of my work, and a way to go back if I make huge mistakes.
  
• A way to describe (both to me and to my co-workers) what's influencing me at the moment, or where I'm finding the best sources of inspiration.
  
• A way to quickly find what's related to this topic around the web, both in knowledge repositories and in evolving repositories (blogs, mailing lists, etc.)
  
• A way to (with less possible hassle) track where in the world I am at the moment, so that nearby friends can show up and have a beer with :)

Second question : How? Wiki? Blog? (was: why not just my pencil and a paper notepad?)
I used to have a diary. I used it to keep track of my moves and actions, at first just to keep record of it and to "not let things go", then I started to feel the need for a more organized structure (i.e. keeping separate entries for memories and ideas).
I switched to blogging a couple of years ago, for three reasons: 1) because I was able to write entries without having a book and a pen always with me 2) because it let me better categorize entries and 3) because I found that sharing my ideas with others was a good motivational thrust (since I got little or no comments, peer review was not to take into account) in order to keep the diary (blog) always up to date.
Now, when it comes to choosing a tool for doing "serious" knowledge management (as I feel the need now), the probem is that each and every tool has its own interesting features, and looks like it's focused on a main, specific, task:
- blogs let you follow the knowledge making process, step by step, from muddy ideas to "distilled" solutions.
- wikis' got the great "refactoring" thing, so that in each moment you (in theory at least) should get the organized snapshot of the whole thing. Moreover, wikis harness the collaboration between users, which is (usually) good (see below).

So, is it Ergonomy versus Completeness?
I definitely don't wanna loose the visibility on the solution-setting process, since I learnt to know that far too often understanding the procedure is the real "precious", while the deliverable is just a consequence.
Yet, since I'm being payed on deliverables (and on meeting deadlines), I wanna be able to constantly and thoroughly monitor the "big picture", and being able to submit the work for peer review, collaborate on it and eventually refactor it.
But I do not want wikis everywhere! For example, blog-like entries shouldn't be subject to wikification (wikification? cool), since, as I wrote earlier, they represent kindof "milestones" in my personal knowledge process, so refactoring it would ruin the emerging definition of the procedure,

So, the better solution seems to be the integration of a blog and a wiki.
The blog will hold the procedure (consisting of entries, comments, trackbacks), while wiki will hold the knowledge state-of-the-art. [...]

There's one more thing that's not being taken into account: the knowledge ecology system: what surrounds me and inspire me at the specific time that made me take that specific choice?
The easier way to handle this (quite naturally) is through a bookmark archive tool like del.icio.us!!!
This can be easily done, and chances are that most blogging engines already supports it.
The same approach could solve the question on how to find related material on the web (through content from google, waypath, and so on).

More to come on the subject, stay tuned!

Edit:

• ups! I see on my aggregator that I'm not the only one to write about personal knowledge management models this night (even if I was thinking of a model as a set of tools and procedures, rather than a formal scientific model as Lilia's :) ...maybe I should give a break to this "duct-tape" behaviour and adopt a more formal approach... :P )
  ...and it also looks like we got similar ideas on wiki + blog architecture... gosh! :)

• These considerations are actually a follow-up to the new codewitch.org, which I posted a couple of weeks ago.
  

This has been a classic subject of long discussions with friends of mine like EasyO and Panda... you get an idea, you talk a little bit about that, maybe jot down some of it...

...then the day after, you browse to SourceForge or FreshMeat (if it's a software project) or just to your news aggregator, and there it is... somebody else on the other side of the planet just had the same idea (and usually got a step ahead and did some code or some more documentation than you :P )

So today's but-I-had-that-idea-only-yesterday is... RSS support for email systems... and here's the timely news that appeared on my aggregator today:

Dave Taylor

“As I was thinking about Gmail today, wondering whether to log in and check to see if I had any email to my address there… I realized that RSS could be a very cool solution to that problem, one that plagues all the Web-based email systems. Here’s how I’d do it…”

and, just following a few comments from that:

• MailFeed
  
• Awasu email plugin
  

...you never know how ideas can travel!!!! :)

Note: this could be also a way to find people on the same wave. Never used to do that... till now. Any idea?

Yet another meeting to add to my agenda...

Social Software Weblog

In London, on 12 July 2004, there will be an “event aimed to be a practical get go for CxO’s in Enterprises as to how social tools & methods can help them with problems like insufficient collaboration, low innovation and unmanaged risk” according to some early thoughts from Matt Mower’s weblog…

While experimenting today PubSub on the topic of Knowledge Management I found this article on Boyink named Will people use K-logs? .

Boyink

K-Logs are the internal intranet style use of blog tools. Author John Robb mentions three keys in using blogs for knowledge management: 1) The tool must be EASY to use.

2) The tool must deliver visible benefits immediately.

3) The tool must gain value as more people use it (network effects).
What's missing, or assumed here, is that all it takes is the right tool to get employees to share knowledge.

I don't buy it.

Even if the tool could run off speech recognition, or a Genie-like blink of the eyes and nod of the head, many people still just won't know what to say. What to share. What they learned that someone else could benefit from.
thought that actually it's true that a good (even perfect) tool is not all you need to create a working knowledge management solution. [...]

So, the article says that in ordrer to have a working knowledge management environment, you need more than just the tool: you have to build the competence and skills into people.
I agree with that, but I think that's still not enough.
Take a man with good, even exceptional writing skills, and give him a super-typewriter with voice recognition, autocorrection and turbo-boost, and you still won't have a writer. Not if the man doesn't want to write.
You will still need motivation
Or, you need to make the tools invisible, natural... (Panda? U there? :) )

I realized recently that I'm definitely not the only one thinking and designing about the idea of a "personal *** management".

Today, I came across this entry by Matt Webb:

Matt Webb

I want to read the Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, but there are 1,565 pages and I have too much else to read. At a page a day it would take a little over four years, but be manageable.

So I knocked this up: Day-by-day Da Vinci. There's an RSS feed to subscribe to which carries a new page every day (and some recent ones too). You can read along with me or start from page 1 whenever you like. It's only the text, but Good Enough I think. I'm hoping to find some hidden gems.

This immediately lit a candle in my head, for that was just another of the stem cells of the p*m thing that's buzzing in my head (and slowly becoming reality):
more specifically, this time the perfect acronym could be a progressive learning manager.

So i coded up pageaday.pl as a proof of concept.
By now it still very basic: no embedded html, no backlog. It just takes the current day, finds out what is the "page of the day", and creates an rss with just that page in it.
Take a look at the generated RSS for an idea of both these limitations.
More to come, so stay tuned! :)

Worked a little bit on blog and wiki during spare time yesterday.
The result are some subtle but, imho, important changes:
First of all, following the wikiFREEcation wave, I added UserCookiePlugin to my TWiki installation. This will permit users to register just once (with no password needed, actually: it's just a matter of "declaring" who you are, if you wish to do so), and then come back at will to freely add to the wiki.
Second, I changed the layout of the wiki a little bit, so now it should be more usable (or so I hope): moved the "action" links in a box on the right, modified the homepage and so on.
Third, I finally installed K-collector beta plugin for MT. Technically, it lets me add "topics" to a post while editing it, thus defining the post "context" through a metaphore called w4 (what, who, where, when).
Kc "suggests" me some topics, and then lets me choose more either from a list of available topics or by adding new ones.
Moreover, my posts will be regularly aggregated in the main k-collector site, so they'll be easily available to other people browsing for topics I chose.
You can notice the "effect" on the bottom right of each post (but just in the main index, at least for now): this post, for example, belongs to: Blogging tools, k-collector, Knowledge Management, MovableType, Wiki, and TWiki (the last one is new, curious to see if I'm allowed to actually create one ;) ).

In this great post (in Italian, dunno if there's an english version somewhere out there), David Weinberger shares his doubts and points of view about the U.S. elections, wondering if and how the internet could have been used to change the outcome. He suggests that the campaign was still too focused on the "broadcast" paradigm instead of the bottom-up, grassroot, one.
Oddly enough, as I discovered during the little chat I had a few days ago with Phil Wolff, the "blogger army" involved in the Kerry campaign was pretty huge, multi-layered (from alpha-bloggers to local chapters to individuals) and quite influential.
So what?
So probably it just didn't reach a "critical mass" value to get it to through the traditional media information barrier... I remember Derrick De Kerchove, no more than 10 days ago, during his speech at WebDays, saying that during the Dean campaign blogs and the internet were just an experiment, now during the Kerry campaign they were a useful tool, but not yet determinant, and probably next elections will be decided by the internet campaign.
He also foresaw Kerry loosing the elections, and motivated that with a smart quote from McLuhan... something like "those who are hot on TV will loose in the end".

Now I'm following this thought pattern...
Ross Mayfield writes about Middlespace as the place "Where the bottom-up and top-down meet".
Lilia connects it with the synergies between formal and informal learning.
Now I'm wondering what could be the analogy in the social dimension: is there a place where bottom-up movements and top-down hierarchies meets? Where is the Social Middlespace?

There's an interesting conversation going on out there about the Personal meme:
Gene Smith, in this post draws a parallel between Personal Information Architecture and Personal Knowledge Management, showing Lilia's pKM diagram and the standard IA one.
Jess McCullin on IA/ adds a link to Vanderwal's Personal Info Cloud.

Starting to wonder if a better focus for this kind of stuff would be on Relationship rather than just Personal...
Anyway, curious to know what's coming out of PKM Workshop (part of KM Europe). Lilia? :)

I was reading through the last post on Mathemageinc, and thinking of a similar question that has been asked to Giuseppe Granieri during WebDays.
Lilia refers to blogging as a new, value adding, way to do things: thus it becomes just a different tool to organize your thoughts, daylife, research, whatever. In this sense asking how much of your time does blogging require is exactly as asking how much of your time does breathing require?
Giuseppe instead chose to refer to blogging as a "batch" process, building up and refactoring in the backstage of our mind 24 hours a day, and requiring "practically" just those few seconds needed to actually write down the post.

They can seem very different approaches at first (the one focusing on a personal, work on the run approach, the other highlighting the information/message-centric point of view) but actually both of them agree on the fact that somehow (given enough commitment at first, I'd add) blogging integrates well with personal habits, behaviours and thought patterns alike. And I think that's because there's nothing really new in using tools for handling memories and meaningful experiences.
Man did this ever since, and Cicero's Room, Bruno's wheels, moleskine, post-it and blogs are just different techniques to achieve a common goal.
Mind prefers to work with phisical...

As I wrote, blogs are just the new kids on the block of this noble family of tools.
Nevertheless, blogs add a new dimension: the social one.
If I use a moleskine to take notes about what happens to me, what works and what works not and so on, that will be my unique personal treasure. I'll be the measure of my own improvement and success.
But when I blog something, this same knowledge instantly becomes available (as information) to a certain number of other people (usually sharing focus or at least some interest with me).
It becomes an undying shared good, and as such, can be useful in more than a way:
- obviously I can use it as a memo and/or to back track best practices (and this is the traditional journal's duty)
- other people can find out the answer to some of their questions in what I write, or instead
- other people can share some experiences of theirs that, in similar situation, was determinant in achieving their own goal
- by looking for common contexts could be possible to create statistics or even forecasts for future projects
- and so on...
In essence, the result is the creation of a spontaneus, bottom-up, shared, knowledge base where serendipity and collaboration becomes natural... and all at the cost of letting the knowledge worker breathe :)

The traditional tools used to build knowledge bases are actually quite expensive in terms of time, just because they're yet another tool to be used and learned, while the blogging (but maybe should be better labeled "social software") approach offers a new set of very simple tools to be used instead of (or in collaboration with) the old ones, with the added value of the social feedback!

Anu writes this short post on his blog:

I want to say something about this,
CorporateBloggingBlog: Internal Blogging More In Focus - Blog Consultants Beware
but I don’t have the time right now, and if I just consign it to del.icio.us or a bookmark then I’ll probably never see it again.. Having it on here means I’ll eventually get shamed into saying something…one hopes.

After reading this line I thought back at my evergrowing del.icio.us account, but also at those entries I mark as “Keep New” or clip in Bloglines, as well as the long list of blog drafts... I realize nano/personal/callitwhateveryouwant publishing actually helps a lot in getting things done, since it speeds up a lot the drafting/referencing/reviewing/publishing workflow, but at the same time procrastination is still a sexy beast. I recognize the trap is in the “save as a draft” or “put a bookmark here” phase, since no time is associated with the action, actually making this choice valid for an indefinite amount on time. I wonder if a small workaround like a “remind me in 1/2/5 days” checkbox could save some thought from the limbo...
On the other hand, you can always rely on the social pressure effect generate by having an “incomplete” post on the blog, as Anu is choosing to do this time.

Just a few days ago, Clay Shirky reported about taggle: A proposed Google for Folksonomies; the idea was to have a tool letting to search through all the stuff on the net (being it images, links, whatever) associated with a given tag. The article ended with this little provocation:

If Flickr, del.icio.us, and umpteen other sites cooperated, then an uber-tag-search service might just work . . .

The first answer came a couple of days ago in the form of the taggregator, a tool able to browse through flickr and del.icio.us folksonomies, and display a jointed result. And the blogosphere wowed.

Now technorati make its move: technorati tag-based search!!!
Simply by adding a tag: prefix to your searches you can now browse through flickr, del.icio.us, and blog posts pertaining to a given word. See the result for the tag cooperation, while here you can peek at the usual weighted map.
Supported methods for tagging a post include category-based tagging (for software supporting categories and RSS/Atom syndication, like Movable Type, WordPress, TypePad, Blogware, Radio), and link based tagging.
See technorati's help page for more info.
This helps me solving a little doubt I about how to better tag my posts: if to use the keyword field, or maybe just adding categories over categories. Now technorati pushes me towards a possible solution:
I created a top-level category named “tag”, and put this post under the subcategory “test”. If this is going to work, as I'm sure it will, I'm going to add tag for posts there as subcategories, while keeping top-level categories for more “macro” definitions (type of post, or for example)

Question: Wouldn't it be great to integrate the k-collector in this tag system? Paolo?

Many more news came from the technorati front in the past week. In brief: developer contest is over, more flexible searches, quick claim of new blogs, and the searchlet (you can see it working here in the sidebar).
Suw gives a more detailed overview at strange attractor
Oh, and it broke the 6 Million blogs mark ;)

Update: Danah adds some interesting thoughts on the current limits of the technorati tag thing. Here Giorgio Baresi of Caymag reckons that categories as they are used nowadays do not grant a sufficient level of granularity.

Spent the last three days wandering around Italy.

Thursday I was in Florence, at the Media Integration and Communication Center viewing a demo of the master thesis of Panda.
He's finishing up an interactive table (that is a surface acting as a screen, upon which the output is projected, and enhanced by a computer vision system that recognizes the movement and gestures of the users as input) that realizes a knowledge management application. He promised to publish more about this on his blog soon... Stefano? :)

Spent friday in Assisi finishing up stuff in the old office, packing things and especially my dear oboe. I spent one wonderful year in umbria, and had a lot of brilliant experiences, both workwise and humanwise. I'm also really glad that the year I foresaw was exactly the time it took to accomplish all the tasks and close the projects, even if so many things changed on the way. The overall balance is extremely positive and satisfactory. And now, I'm officially available for hire again ;)

Yesterday I was in Bologna, attending the bloggers.it event.
The first part of the event was about the announce of the partial acquisition of bloggers.it by sdb, and the presentation of a new portal/tool/service called ioconsumo.it that invites bloggers to write posts about stuff they bought. There is no revenue at the moment for the blogger, except for visibility. Nice that not only bloggers.it users can participate, since the platform allows to cross post to Blogger.com and “other” (not better specified). The service is still in beta, and I'm having some troubles in testing it (I had to ask twice for the password in order to login, and I can't access the account editor right now), but seems really easy to use.

The second part of the event was a discussion, moderated by Manila Benedetto (aka Princess Proserpina) on the theme “Blogs as idea pools [...]”. These are some of the most interesting bits of the discussion:
One of the main topics has been the usual blog vs. journalism (a lot has been said for example during Culture Digitali event in Naples last June). Here Antonio Sofi described how the journalism world (at least in Italy) has got a typical in or out approach to new media. But as online journalists are slowly but steadily gaining more acceptance, so blogs hopefully will.
Furthermore, he describes three “journalism” uses for blogs:

1. Residual Journalism
2. Distributed Journalism
3. In-depth Journalism
4. time-off/no-brain/all-gossip Journalism (the most widespread) :)

Always on the subject of credibility, Francesco Locane explained the risk of taking blogs as official source of information. To better describe the concept, he detailed the information loop that happened in the past august, when Italian journalist and blogger Enzo Baldoni was kidnapped in Iraq. I agree with Francesco on this, but also think that the danger comes when, as in the example above, one blogger or amateur journalist becomes the single critical point through which the information flows, this is matter for professionals. Nevertheless, the strenght and thruthfullness of blogs as news media comes from their speed and sheer number (many sources reporting quickly small bits of information (and/or different points of view), as happened during the tsunami in Asia on December 26th, or during the earthquake in Italy in november), not on their playing the professional journalist role.
Funny enough, at the same time, but on the other side of the ocean, the Blogging, Journalism & Credibility conference was taking place. Lot of stuff on the site, that even provides “advanced” tools like a bloglines blogroll, an archive of conversation transcript, a del.icio.us link feed.

After the conference, I had an interesting chat with Antonio and Manila about the opportunity of making a joint effort to enhance the interaction between localized blogospheres, especially at an european level, a topic I fancy a lot. Expect more to come soon!!!

Lilia writes something about her new research on information overload, that is turning to be more about practices of dealing with information.
As usual, I feel quite in sync with her thought, and what surprises me is the timeliness with which she blogs on topics I'm interested at this very moment. Probably it's just another tribe side-effect.

• How do you manage multitasking? Strategies, tips and tricks to handle multiple processes...
• How do you manage working with multiple sources needed for a task? Especially when there are a lot of them and they are in different formats (emails, files, paper documents, IM talks, coffee-table discussions).
• How do you manage awareness? How do you monitor multiple sources of information that could be useful in the future?

Though a lot could be said on this, at first thought these could be my answers:
- Multitasking: I manage multitasking (when I'm able to do it), by procrastinating as little as possible, and sorting out the really small stuff as it comes (pretty much like GTD). As I'm used to work with pretty immersive/complex task context switch is what I fear most. I can deal with several tasks but only as long as they are at the same level and/or pertaining a similar field. That's why I tend to wipe away the small urgent attention-critters first.
- Multiple sources/awareness: Paper is still my swiss knife. I keep a post-it block and a notebook at hand, and jot down any info that could be useful. If I'm online, I may also use my wiki, but that's mainly for refactoring and/or sharing with others, and comes as a second step. The matter is that basically the first thing I do is (usually) draw, not write. Blogs used here for awareness too.

Keeping along this line of mutual agreement, she also wrote this excellent post about blogs in the frame of Covey's urgent/important matrix (nice to think to urgent stuff as “urgent can wait” ;).
Definitely worth a look, or even better print it and make it read to your “no time to blog” friends.

Oh, and thanks to Lilia I discover that the BlogTalk2 papers are now available also as a book at Amazon.de as well as at Libri

I'm sorry I haven't been blogging much these days. No, really, it's not that I feel like a holy service or anything, but blogging actually helps me in building some kind of mental discipline about staying informed and staying active.
Yeah because I'm starting to feel an enourmous difference in the quality of time spent simply consuming resources (being that just time, money, or information) and time actually spent building something out of it.
In meatspace, this is the difference between sneezing lazily on the couch and actually walking the street or participating in conferences, for example. In blogland, this is the difference between lurking and writing... more in detail, I recognize several different levels of commitment and matching satisfaction: chatting (almost no trace is left of what you're saying, the conversation is limited to synchronous consumption) , newsreading, (social) bookmarking (that is posting reference of an interesting article on a site like del.icio.us or spurl), reblogging (that's the practice of taking an article and republishing it, usually adding a small personal comment), commenting (when actually building on a conversation through personal ideas and opinions), “self-centered” blogging (as in this post), cross-reference blogging (when a post is part of a wider conversation, with references, new ideas, refactoring and so on).

That said, the reason I haven't been blogging much is that I'm trying to commit more to my degree, and I also spent the last couple of days playing with broadcasting technology, as I posted here. I'm planning to write more also on this subject, but so far, after two days of transmission are:
1. The effort required by webcasting, even if “just” for 8/10 hours a day and seldom speaking, is enormous, compared to blogging... but equally enormous is the feedback and the ego boost coming straight from listeners, even if they are far far far less in number than the readers of your blog (current record is 5 streams). I cannot say if this comes from the broader channel or from the innate emotional power of music (and thus it's tribe aggregating effect), though.
2. There's an interesting effect on the learning curve, that I already noticed on other proAm activities in the past. With the aid of open (free) technology, cooperation and the emotional commitment granted by the participation and satisfaction of others (the listeners in this case), there's been a remarkable thrust both in quality of the product (the broadcast), and in... how to explain... “minimum accepted standard”, I mean that I'm suddenly far more demanding about what I want to get from tools of the trade and myself as well (and now I want jingles and fake commercials, for example).

Maybe Antonio Cavedoni could share some of his experience on this topic from the Zio Radio experiment...

More than one time in the past I blogged about accusing too much information load coming from news reading and leading to an increasing blog-panic, downward spiral effect.
In an urge to solve this problem of mine, I first looked at the emergence theory, great numbers, long tail, folksonomy and all, but if on the quality side the solution seemed perfect, the truth is I wasn't satisfied at all by the granularity of the solution: fine-tuning emergent channels is still a difficult, slow and far from certain process.
So, for now, I still consider “large-scale” emergence as a great tool for serendipity (which is one of the things I value most), but for day by day specialistic information gathering, I still feel the need for a more trustworthy, predictable tool.

Well I was skimming through the conversation on or about FooCamp and BarCamp, when I stumbled into this post from Suw.
She describes the feeling that was common to the many people who had to watch the streams and follow the events on attendees' blogs or irc (I was part of the crowd even if I had no chance to get on irc in those days).

Here in two lines you get the idea of the spirit of the twin events:

A couple of weeks ago, if that, Chris Messina, Andy Smith, Tantek Çelik, Matt Mullenweg and Ryan King thought that it'd be sort of cool to do a BarCamp for all the people who wanted to go to FooCamp but didn't get an invitation. No animosity, no competition, just an open source version. Only rule: If you come, you present (or help).

I rashly suggested that I start the ball rolling on BarCampUK. Not that I don't have enough on my plate already, but the guiding principle behind BarCamp is self-organisation. That is to say, there's no finding speakers or setting up a schedule - people just pitch up and present. Or hang out. Or hack code. Or whatever. [...]Why not here?

So, who's up for BarCampUK? We need a venue. A date. Wifi. Maybe some T-shirts. And a bunch of geeks who want to just get together and throw ideas around. (Of course, if there's anyone who wants to help me with the unavoidable logistics side of things, so much the better.)

Needless to say, this is the kind of event that I was really looking forward to, so I'm already signed in.
If you're interested in giving a hand or participating in such a crazy setup, head for the wiki and signup!

Suw, just one thing: September is so full of wine fairs here in Italy, it would be too hard a choice, please make it in october :P

Moreover, chances are that on September 23 to 25 there will be the WebDays here in Turin.
Last year's edition was quite interesting, full with a brilliant lunch with Derrick De Kerchove.
Really looking forward to this year's programme.

After living for about six monthes using just gmail as my main mail agent, I decided to give a chance to other programs and check for new (hopefully) useful features while on the way.
Basically I split my mail traffic and in this period I'm handling it part with gmail, part with Mail and part with Thunderbird.
So far, I realized that Gmail's conversation clustering feature is quite addictive.
Although, I found these useful practices for the other programs:
Mail.app's MailTags, that lets you add flexible tags and priority to each message.
Here's how to use Thunderbird's label and saved searches to implement some of the principles of the GTD method.

Here it comes, ethnography strikes back. As I wrote the other day, it's creeping in my everyday life, and this time again it comes from the Nicolas' blog.

A good project and resources about digital ethnography can be found here. It’s called DEW (Digital Ethnography Workgroup). and it’s led by Edwin Hutchins (mister ‘distributed cognition’) [...]

The point of this ‘digital ethnography’ is that digital technology can play an important role in each step of an ethnography: site selection / observation-interaction data collection / transcription / coding /analysis / publication-archiving. This page summarizes how this would work.

I guess when it comes to study how digital technologies can improve the way of doing things (together, as in cooperation), ethographies are something you have to deal with.

What amazes me, day after day, is how far from pure computer science these research is leading me... now I'm in anthropologists' turf, but I've been wandering through social scientists', psychologists' and cogscientists' in the past few monthes. I wonder if it'll bring me back "home" someday oneday.

So we are almost there.
Next week now I'll be discussing my thesis and hopefully get my degree in computer science at the UPO.

Main resource for writing it has been wikipedia. It, together with various blogs, has been the only source of enough coherent information about magmatics and fluid topics as web 2.0, semantic web, research in fields like virtual teams, emergence and user interfaces.
As for the document itself, it's coming out much less glamorous than I thought, and my mind on that is that it's such a huge and rich argument (title going to be: A Web Wide World: (lower case) semantic applications for virtual teams) that much of its beauty comes out from sheer complexity, and trying to render it out of its natural hypertextual context will inevitably ruin most of it (unless of course you're a natural born writer, which I'm not).

Anyway, I'm carefully keeping track of all the wikipedia articles I'm pillaging to complete the writing, since I plan to give them back (translated) to the Italian wiki. I think this could be a nice deal to keep the ecosystem healthy.

The Guardian published yesterday this article presenting an interesting exercise: an adaptation of last 100 years of music history in the form of the London Underground Map. Nice to know that I work close to The Beatles ;)

The article is quite detailed and explains which choices have been made to keep the map as coherent as possible (basically one music genre for each line, key cross stations assigned to most eclectic artists).

PDF available for download here.

[Via Londonist]

In august 2004 I remember a very nice dinner in Amsterdam hosted by Marc Canter.
During the dinner, Marc explained this cool new company who was taking on where FOAF "left" (or well, this is what I remember from that evening) as in trying to develop and push an identity management infrastructure enabling users to keep control of all their identity data and at the same time get maximum advantage from services using this new technology. The company name is Sxip. The protocol is SXIP and the infrastructure is sxip. But I may be wrong :)

Anyway, little I've heard since then about the whole thing, except for an authentication module for Drupal and the occasional blog post here and there (of course I may have been a little distracted too :) ). Similarly, typekey, 6A's own authentication system and, I thought, a potential concurrent of sxip, settled as a standard, but with little or no penetration of the world "outside" 6A (typepad, movable type and livejournal).

Now suddenly, I saw the logo back in an e-tech picture and then this post about sxore, the new commenting system powered by sxip.
They're promoting it as:

sxore is an identity and reputation system for blog authors, readers and commenters. By acting as an intermediary between blog posts and comments, sxore provides a framework of identity for participants in the blog dialog. At its simplest, this framework stops comment spam by requiring commenters to prove that they're not automated spam bots, and by providing moderation tools to blog authors. At a more sophisticated level, sxore enhances blog quality and enriches the blog dialog by applying the principals of Identity 2.0 and the technology of the sxip identity architecture (based on the SXIP Protocol) to provide authors and commenters with personas relevant to their blog interactions.

From what I see it is "just" a glorified comment system. Which is good, of course, but not really revolutionary.
They put a strong accent on identity management as in "stopping spam" and "gaining a reputation", which is great, of course... but made me realize that the most widespread "reputation system" in use at the moment is probably gravatar, which adds no real identity enforcement to the blog (so no anti-spam facilities here), but on the other hand is really immediate, easy to setup and adds eye-candy cool pictures of your friends all over, which is quite appealing.

Now, going back to sxip, what would be really revolutionary (and this kind of architecture has the potential to do it) would be to foster conversation tracking across blogs, comments, wikis and social software in general. This happens also to be the graal of the moment, with players like the evergreen technorati, del.icio.us, but also new comers like digg and cocomment.
The nice thing is that, since sxip is a distributed architecture, every user could actually choose her favorite Homesite where to store all data... and this could range from a blog hosting company, to a social bookmarking site to, eventually, the user's own main blog/website (thus making all "give my data back" geeks happy, me first).

Roughly, it could work like this: suppose Alice comes to Bob's blog and she wants to leave a message. Bob's blog will ask for authentication and let Alice sxip in and comment through sxore (so sxore will know about the comment).
Similarly, suppose that Alice now wants to answer Bob's post with a post on her own blog. Alice can just log into her own sxore-powered blog (and this is the missing piece at the moment) and write the post. Sxore will know about this too and, as a bonus, can also track the relationship and "trust" between Alice and Bob based on the number of links, relationship tags (XFN), and comments between the two.

If anybody out there is looking for the next killer app to develop, please suits yourself.

Quick update: I just signed in sxore to peek at the look'n'feel. Signing in actually was not exactly "natural", but somehow I made it and finally I got in.
First thing I discovered is that Movable Type is not a supported blog engine at the moment (only wordpress is), so I registered Giocolando (my Italian blog), which is wordpress based, and downloaded the plugin. The installation is pretty straightforward, you just have to unpack, activate it through the web admin interface and insert a code provided by the sxore website. The disturbing thing that happens immediately after is that the blog appears to hang for a while, probably while sxore sucks RSS data in and sets up the service.
Even more annoying is the fact that nothing seems to change afterward :)
Probably it depends from the fact that I'm using a cutting edge installation of wordpress, but as I leave comments on the blog nothing happens on the sxore dashboard (if you want to see a working example of sxore, you can head to the Identity 2.0 blog).
Aside from this, now I've a perfectly neat and polished hud where I should be able to manage incoming comments, whitelists, blacklists, full with RSS feeds of the whole thing and a nicely guessed icon of mine grabbed from either flickr, gravatar or whatever :)

P.S.: If you want to play with the sxip architecture, here you'll find development kits for both Membersites (site "client side" of the architecture) and Homesites (the "server side"), as well as a sxip authentication module for MediaWiki.

Or, power to the whispers.
An interesting discussion emerged today here in open space, yet far away from the water cooler: let's build a filter that wipes out from our newsreaders all those topics that went “too” loud, since they'll be probably crap ;)

Piers Young does a few considerations starting from this article from David Weinberger about if and how much we are leaving the "old way" of simple knowledge and embracing a more "complex" one. Instead of splitting the conversation between many blogs, I point you there if you want to comment or add your considerations (hopefully my own comment will be accepted by then ;) )

For me, the advantage of everyone being able to do this together is the breadth of our combined cultural and educational backgrounds is at the same time great forge for new ideas, and a powerful rigorous testing ground.

The disadvantage, though, is that, as you engage in this process you cannot help but be aware of how much more complexity there is in the world than was apparent, and how hard it might be to see any simplicity.

Why renaissance?
Well, to tell the truth this will be the theme at reboot, the übercool (un)conference that's going to happen in a few week's time in Copenaghen. This theme has been haunting me for a while now since I was (and still am) trying to organize my ideas in a sort of demo/workshop/
roundtable to submit to reboot itself.
Eventually I thought there could be no better moment to end this seemingly endless transition from the "old" All Things Bru