Before continuing, let me say that I still haven't achieved all the goals I'm looking forward to, but since I don't know when I'll have more time to work on this, I thought it would be better to start sharing my considerations and plans now.

I chose a few guidelines to work with:
. "simple, informal, practial" layout and typefaces
. try to reduce the number of interactors "aggregating" where possible based on task
. give the reader the opportunity to figure out (and possibly experience) the context that originated one entry, leveraging on the life stream data (the aggregated list of events collected from other points of presence on the net, e.g. flickr, upcoming, twitter, del.icio.us)
. provide, where possible, different layers or zoom factors to consider the website content from.

Clean layout and typeface

This was the easy part. I started from the nice cutline theme, recently ported to MT4 by Byrne Reese, added a custom header and helvetica-fied all of it.
I also dramatically reduced the line height, that gives me agoraphobia everytime I look at Cutline blogs. I'm still not happy with the entry metadata line, maybe I could stick it all on a phantom left column, or maybe I could just get rid of it... we'll see.

Reducing Interactors

This blog usede to have an ajax powered search tool.
Now, the search has been disabled, mainly because I don't trust perl CGI performance on Dreamhost and because, let's face it, Google has all the answers: personally I grew so addicted to its pervasive assistance that more often than not, seconds after landing on a webpage looking for something specific, I hit cmd-K and refine the search from there without even looking for an internal search widget. Moreover, as you may notice from the elsewhere column, my data is more and more spread all across the web in a series of vertical silos, thus a "local" search is less and less relevant for an "identity" blog such as this one (identity being very different from meaning personal, but this is a long story).
So the bottomline is that search (maybe google powered) could make it back, but it's lower priority (unless somebody starts screaming out loud, that is).
Archive navigation is another interesting issue: it would be nice to provide a consistent metaphor for category, date, and possibly tag oriented navigations.
In the latest version of this blog there were "select" fields to navigate through category and monthly archives. Tags were browsable through a tag cloud.
Now, tag cloud remains an interesting metaphor for tags, provided that the tagspace is kept reasonably healthy. This means pruning the dictionary, creating clusters, renaming tags to cope with the evolution of the language or the conventions... and I can't see that happening easily (at present, this blog defines 673 tags). As for monthly and category archives, categories of this blog are a lot more than necessary (partly because this blog predates the tag era) so in a perfect world I should refactor them back to a manageable 4/5 headcount; this would make the "select" navigation option pretty useless (actually unconvenient, since the 4/5 pretty determinant category names will be hidden in the select). Time can't be refactored though, and this blog has more than 5 years of archives. Even if not all months have entries, there is still a considerable amount of voices to consider, so much so that the select field could be less than ideal.
So I was thinking of experimenting with a normal list for categories, paired with a similarly styled accordion based navigation for the dates. This should grant (at least in this phase) a good balance between visible information and effort required from the reader.

This is going to be it for today, next: context through lifestream and zoom factor.

As you know the Internet is a noisy place. Part of this noise is "visible", and is made by you and me, hyperjumping from one website to the other, leaving comments on site, writing our own blog, buying stuff on Amazon, searching google.
Most of the traffic on the net though goes unnoticed and is made by robots. Now there are good robots and bad robots. Good robots tends to behave so we're not concerned by them now; bad robots tend to either be there to spam, steal or hack into your website.
Usually there are pretty clever exploits to achieve these goals, but I find very enlightening to study even the magnitudo of damage they can bring just by being noisy.

Let me explain: it happens that I had a pretty old application that's been running fairly good for the last few months, out there in the wild, until the time, a few days ago, when it started receiving more and more traffic.
The traffic was of the "let-me-try-and-use-you-as-a-proxy" type, but even if that specific attack was blocked, an interesting side effect emerged: the session table (where temporary information about one interaction between the user and the site is kept) got quickly polluted and started growing at a scaring pace.

Now, if you're used to create web application, one of the basic tricks, together with caching the hell out of the website, is to disable all sort of unneded "user specific" data gathering. Here, for instance, there's a very good post on the topic, and on how to conditially enable sessions in parts of the site. What the post doesn't make clear (or not clear to me, that is) is that exceptions will still trigger the creation of a session. This happens, in other words, when the application can't map your request to an existing resource (action, file, image or other). Guess what, the spammy internet noise we mentioned earlier does exactly that.

If you're on Rails, one solution appears to be disabling session application-wide (even if you need them in all controllers) and then re-enable where needed. The post on Errtheblog has clear examples of how to do that.

Well, enough for this thursday night.
P.S.: MTOS indeed feels pretty sleek.

page is accessible to anyone who knows its address, so all that's left to do is to let your friends know about it.

However, nothing much happened in the past 12 monthes along this route: blogs are still growing steadily, new forms of user participation (e.g. twitter and facebook) became mainstream, APIs and standards are emerging both for managing digital identities (like the recent oAuth) and social networks alike (like google's OpenSocial or sixapart's elsewhere I'm)... but people still read feeds essentially in the same way as before. Feed reading is still a lonely experience, like fishing with line and hook; friends and fellow fishermen can point you to places known to host the richest schools, but finding, extracting and processing the good is still up to the individual. Well, I'm interested in exploring the concept of introducing nets, trawls and active cooperation here, moving from sport to commercial fishing, that is.

Recently there's been some effort (namely feedhub ) to algorithmically determine the subjective relevance of memes and conversations across the net... but I can't say I'm happy with it and here's the short version of why:
1. because the algorithm knows my "sources" but it doesn't know me: the reason why I'm interested in a specific topic at a given time will inevitably vary too fast or too randomly for the algorithm to pick up and adapt to.
2. because for the daily dose of mainstream entertainment, I already have Boing Boing and Techmeme, and they do quite well: they contribute to create that common knowledge texture that underlies conversation with my peers: if it's not signal, it's familiar noise.
3. it doesn't know about my social network. I subscribe to a lot of blogs: most of them are friends I like to be able to quickly sync with from time to time, plus they're on average more clever than me and occasionally come up with a brilliant connection; others are trendsetters and pundits that most of the time brag about pop topics (or themselves); others are rebloggers and nanopublishers specializing in some area of research or practice. From time to time, a sparkle bursts here or there, resonating across the network (often under disguised form) creating a chord. That's the kind of signal I'm interested in.

So I think that feedhub, like other human-driven (digg) or algorithmic (techmeme?) efforts before it, is great for picking up the general buzz and feel, even from a very customized perspective as feedhup promise, but they'll fail when it comes to extracting contextualized value (i.e. something useful to a specific goal).

Whoops, it wasn't that "short". Sorry.

Since I already invested enough of Your (and my) time with this post, I'll close it here, but expect some news on the SocialNewsReading front here soon :)--

SetEnv MOD_PERL ''

Masks and characters gain power and weight while you play them, until the point where the filter is just stronger than the signal. So, as 4 years ago, I put the weblog on a hiatus while taking the time to explore other voices.

These above were focused mainly on social events, thoughts and the neverending stream of consciousness.

However, the present blog has always been the best place where to keep track of geeky/techy achievements, and in these months I had the chance to realize how much of my personal learning path follows the way of technology and design. So here we go: a new post and maybe a new, gentler, stream of more focused journal of experiences.

Without further ado, since february life moved on quite a lot, so let's try to summarize how my context changed through the main points below:

Research

In the field of media, last year has been dominatede by McLuhan theories and (critical/smart) mass effects... while in these last months I've been focusing more on niche, interactive media like virtual worlds (particularly WoW and Second Life) and games and learning (forgive me if I don't use the edutainment word).

In the realm of physical spaces, while last year I tried to fill some of my huge gaps in architecture, nowadays I've been exploring object interaction (and in particular identification - barcodes or RFIDs, hardware hacking - arduino, and fabbers)

Social bla bla bla

On the events side, last year has been definitely a BarCamp year for me. 

This year, especially after the amazing RItalia experience, I've had a chance to reconsider the the interaction between tools (like BarCamps) and the people who use it: it's not (only) the people nor the tools that make the difference, you need both (yeah, basically you need the people, then the tools help in actually make them do something).

And speaking of tools, this year I've been definitely blogging less and enjoying network oriented social media like facebook and twitter more. And no, wait, this isn't exactly what was happening before: I spent years on deviantArt and Flickr, but there you needed an excuse (photos, in these two examples) to act as both a magnet and expedient to trigger the conversation. Facebook, Twitter... well, they're just about it: the ties that binds.

Last but not least...

Adding contrast to the lifescape (or of the importance of sending clear messages... to yourself, first and foremost)

I'll not explain this in depth now... but essentially this year has been a lot about letting go of sophistications. I know that my very argot doesn't suggest that but... well, bear with me for a while, I'll try to prove it :) and embracing a sharpened view of life.

For now, I'll say that I tried to switch from being serial mover to being a full time nomad, so that (maybe) eventually will understand and appreciate the settlers.

Similarly, I stepped from being a devsultant to dive into fulltime, bleeding edge hard-coder (and having fun doing it, thanks to Rails) so that will eventually slingshot back into a more defined consultantdom.

Well, that's all folks... stay tuned!

Also, I'll spend the weekend in Italy, but I reckon that resting for 24 hours straight is far too much and I thought to try and set up a loose meeting on saturday where we can have a walk, drink a coffee (or a beer, me getting british) and talk of achievements, innovations and ideas for today's web (and beyond).
I'd like to use the pecha-kucha formula for that (in short, 20 slides by 20 seconds each... and believe me, it's fun!): but go have a look at their site and then rush to the wiki to add your ideas and confirm presence.

See you soon.

P.S.: I'm officially on a recruiting mission for Headshift. All techno-wiz-ninja who wouldn't mind a office with a view of Tower Bridge please make themselves visible and let's have a chat, either in Geneva, Milan, Twitter, Whatever.

Phew, done. Feeling much better now :)
Feel free to consider yourself tagged, whoever you are. As for my personal curiousity, would love to read Lilia's 5 things, especially in this moment of her life (I mean, shifting of priorities and so on), but wouldn't force that of course :)

...and thanks for all the flu
'cos apparently I got enough last few monthes and so far I've been immune to this "uncommon" wave of flu that's keeping londoners out of the office in the first few days of the year... with the nice side effect of making the public transportation in London quite enjoyable even in rush hours.
And speaking of that:

New year, new fares

Italian railway prices got up 15%. Everybody's complaining about it. And I can understand that. Then I landed in London to discover that a single ticket in zone 1 is now 4 pounds (if you pay by cash), 33% up from last year... and skyrocketing the price for everybody who doesn't have an oyster card (or travelcard that is) from plain absurd to totally insane. I love this city :) ...but now please double the congestion charge too! (and spend all that dough to give some more love to southern transportation system please please please).

Now for the gargantua stub...

Italy and the twitterati
I thought it was quite late when I finally joined the twitter bandwagon a month or so ago, but it appears that the bulk of Italian blogmob discovered it just a few days ago... And, boys, are we swarming at it: I've been continuously receiving requests for spaghetti friendships for three or four days now.

... so much so that this snowball effect is starting to involve other tribes as well: yesterday evening dotBen was complaining about receiving a lot of requests from italian speaking people he could not understand...

...and apparently Luca is going to write an article on Sole 24ore's Nova (this note is a few days old, I think he wrote it yesterday night...), so we can expect the crowd of spaghetti twits to expand more and more, good!

...speaking of Luca (one of Italian blogosphere's hubs), yesterday morning he made the resolution of not twittering in english until the time he'll have international followers.
Now, that perfectly makes sense, BUT for the fact that by doing so you're seriously impairing serendipity, and somehow pushing angst: try consider user Alice who has just Italian followers, and therefore twitters in Italian.
User Bob who is Italian too and follows Alice joins the conversation at a certain point, doing a twitter that relates Alice's one. Since the original was in Italian, he'll probably decide to keep it in the same language... but what happens to Charlie, who is an english speaking friend of Bob (and not Alice)? He'll receive a twitter from a friend in an unfriendly language... or even if Bob twittered in English, there's a good chance Charlie will be interested in digging in more and maybe he'll even try to track back the conversation to Alice, finding just Italian messages... do that at scale, and you'll see Charlie getting upset quite easily.
Somehow the ghost of Orkut comes to my mind: the place was colonized by more and more Brazilian users, until everybody else (at least all those I knew) just left. And no matter how much I'm proud of my nationality, I think an Italian only twitter would be a dystopian scenario to say the least.

...finally this night Davide wrote a really interesting article that turned out into a good conversation on Twitter and (in)utility.
Basically he points out how there's a substantial difference in how twitter (and blogs before it) can be seen: as just a useless dump of private moments nobody else should (would) care about or as a storage for unfiltered "raw" thoughts that can turn into serendipitous inspiration pool.
He also invites people who still do not to try twitter/IM integration, which helps a lot in "getting it", and to try to log all those meaningful moments that make every day unique (these are my words, I hope I grasped the concept): author you are reading is good, an intuition about a new cooking recipe is good, place you are going to is good, the fact that you're drinking a glass of water is (generally) not.
I totally agree with that, but added a few considerations... here I summarize them in english:
1. there is no "correct" use of twitter (and the same thing is true for any tool), and during these weeks I've witnessed many different uses of it, ranging from persistent, semi-asynchronous chat ("@friend ehy, you gotta check this out!") to self-promotional ad space ("Bru has just posted this and that on his blog"). Nevertheless, the main successful characteristics appears to be its pervasivity/immediacy (IM and mobile integration - thanks to the 160 characters limit - being the magic tricks here) and the feeling of "constant flow" (leveraged through a cunning obfuscation of the navigation features).
I find it amazing how Twitter's success seems to rely on it being a stripped down, strongly constrained evolution of existing tools.
2. Never underestimate the sheer power of scale: small concepts can gain momentum and even meaning when repeated/iterated enough. Or maybe patterns can be discovered in apparently useless/insignificant habits that can lead to new ideas. Serendipity lies inbetween the lines of everyday life.
3. Hail to the ubiquitous twittering: I have this habit of always carrying a small (paper) notebook with me, where I jot down ideas and topics as they come across. Many of these ideas end up with a "to be blogged" tag attached... and this is something that never happens. What I can do now is just twitter them, so even if I will never go back to them for lack of time/will/inspiration, at least they'll be free to infect somebody else's mind (and possibly find a more proactive host).
4. twitter as "background noise" - background noise is something we like and look for no matter what we do: it can be the radio, a tv, itunes, IM, whatever produces some element of change and gives us that feeling of "flow" without requiring dedicated attention (but see also kathy's post on continuous partial attention for the other side of the coin). Well, back in the days I used IRC as my background noise device, then I switched to IM (which means a smoothie of msn, gtalk, skype, icq, yahoo! and AIM), but that tends to require a lot of attention because all messages coming from it are direct. Nowadays I'm switching to twitter, as it seems to have quite an interesting signal to noise ratio, and just one global "room" (as opposed to IRC, that is).

As for myself, I'd like to "steal" the meme from Svaroschi who published her own zeitgeist for the past year. So here is mine:
. London
. Headshift
. Reboot
. Barcamps
. Airports
. Architecture
. Nabaztag (+blogjects)
. Aesthethics
. Babysteps
. Italian pride

I'd say also twitter deserves a slot, but let's wait for it to consolidate... maybe next year :)

Finally, this should be the time for resolutions (see yesterday's rocketboom on the topic :) ). I've been thinking about mine for a while, then threw away the whole (far too comples) list, so eventually these are the de-mistified ones:
. laugh more
. play more
. indulge
. be serious about it
. build up "affordance"

And then we have the evergreens:
. drink less coffee
. give up crackling my bones (for the happiness of my dear colleagues)
. cook more
. start jogging
. go back to regular meditation practice

This is gonna be it. But I'd like to say bye bye (at least for this year) with a few inspiring words and a picture.
I found the picture on Zadi Diaz's while the words are from an article on Icon magazine, as reported by Fabio Sergio: these could seriously be good manifestos for the next few monthes (but maybe more)!
That's it, enjoy your time and see you next year!

"There's nothing intrinsically interesting about technology.
It's only as interesting as what you can do with it.
You can create some piece of 'convergent' nonsense - a printer that plays music and polishes your shoes - or you can project an image of a tree in a public square, make the leaves fall as people walk past and have them swirl on the ground as pedestrians walk through them.
The first is onanism, the second is poetry.

The designers collected together in our feature on interaction design (Simon Heijdens, Moritz Waldemeyer, Greyworld, Loop and Troika) use increasingly accessible forms of technology to make surprising, delightful things rather than strictly 'useful' ones (isn't it useful to make someone feel better on the way home from work?).
Now that, at least in the west, our design needs are largely met, the designer's role can become that of the humanist - or even magician.
Our electronic devices can be so much more intuitive, our public spaces so much more magical.
Advocates of a stricter notion of design may accuse the practices published here of playing around on the margins of the discipline.
To them I would say that perhaps what we need - as a society - is less design and more magic."

someone graffiti-bombed the hell out of Camden Town tube station over the holiday and it looks beautiful[...]

And he dutifully posted all pictures on flickr. Awesome!

Vittorio Pasteris proposes to discuss the topic at the next Italian BarCamp (the RomeCamp) and opens a wiki about it.

Ludo points out that yes, we (the Italian bloggers trying to join the Conversation) are really a small galaxy made of a few thousand self-referencing individuals (and he's got cool maps to prove that :) ).

Antonio and Svaroschi make clear that this is a common pattern among all social experiences, and there's nothing new or weird about it.

The conversation is very rich and juicy (even if may sound like deja-vu to many of you) so if you're interested in the topic and can understand Italian, follow the links above.

As for myself, I'd like just to add three points, mainly specification than full developed arguments:

Metablogging vs. snowballs
Sometime reading comments and posts about self-referentiality I feel there's a little bit of confusion in how the term is used: often in reference to conversation cross-referencing/quoting, while sometime it's used with the nuance of meta-blogging (blogging about blogs as a technology, social/cultural phenomena, etc.) that happens to be one of the main topic of my rummaging here. I suppose the whole self-referential argument is about the first use, as I can't really see what's wrong in using a tool/technology (media) to publish the results about a study on that same tool/technology (message).

Emergency needs google juice
Switching to self-referentiality as in snowball effect and cross-referencing, we must remember that this is implicit and unique of the hypertext medium: by using links to connect what we are writing with the reference we are quoting or the "object" of the sentence, we are actually serving more than on purpose.
First of all, we are doing our best to give the readers a way to go further/deeper in the conversation/topic, and possibly to find more and more links (that is, have access to more data that, hopefully, will aggregate as more useful information) to "join the dots" and eventually join the conversation itself.
Then we are declaring our trust and connection with the sources of information, thereby allowing specifically designed trust-metric algorithms (i.e. google page-rank) to rate each page (resource) based on the collective emergent trust with regards to specific topics/keywords.
Finally, as in good old academic tradition, we use cross referencing through links and quotes to give references to what we are reporting. This allows for peer review and, yes, tends to create an aristocracy of emergent gurus that are always used as paragons but (sorry) this is a legacy from the dear old academic way.

Managing expectations
While I was reading through all the noisy posts complaining about bloggers' self-referentiality I started thinking maybe it's just our fault... and by saying our I'm referring to all those bloggers that tends to (or used to) be quite visible in the Italian blogosphere landscape and (used to) focus on advocating blogs and web2.0 technologies as potential tool for world changing effort (Gaspar, Paolo, Antonio, Mafe&Vanz, GG, Luca I'm looking at you among others): try to imagine what happens when somebody, after reading all this utopic dreams about creative commons, emergent democracy and citizen journalism, stumbles into one, two, three, endless blogs (as Ludo says, Libero alone counts more than 50k) that use the blog just (and don't get me wrong: I don't mean there's anything wrong with this) to talk about themselves, their passions, fears, hopes, to boost their ego or, why not, to talk about a topic, gather attention and make money out of it.
One thing the social media advocate has to learn is to manage expectations.
Moreover social media advocates (me first) should never (ever) forget to always listen to young(er) voices: we know the (current) limit for a healthy social network is around 200 individuals, but maybe you should start considering your one along the lines of a sliding window metaphor. Let it go.
On the other hand, newbies (pass me the word) should understand that the blogosphere allows everybody's voice to be heard and, as such, the noise tends to be quite significant... please make don't be shy and make yourself visible, participate in conversation, say your opinion, and be kind to the individuals: nobody here's special, it's together that we can make a difference.

First thing I did when arrived in Milan was supposed to be having a proper coffee, but instead I had a (maybe not-so-proper) cannolo with Roi, which was an excellent mix for my mood. Then a walk through a Milan in a Xmas high (ehy, the Duomo looks so white and neat now that it's clean!) and finally the long commuting to my hometown, where I hit bed safe and sound at 1 o'clock in the night (well, after a few more social drinks at the loco artsy winery).
One thing impressed me a lot in the said winery: there, in a corner, there was a small box... with a bookcrossing sticker on it! If social media hit Alessandria, anything can happen. As the Time said (and everybody bounced), we are officially mainstream.

Being here also brought me back to one of my favourite blogging dilemma: which language, and which topics to which blog (assuming one I don't love to repeat myself). A while ago (that is, on the most recent iteration of the blogging dilemma) I decided to keep all the diary like entries, together with innuendos and research/geeky stuff here, while keeping the Italian blog for more fun, ludicrous (and somehow geeky too) stuff.
Problem is, Italy offers nowadays a lot of interesting conversations and quite an active social mediascape, and it's difficult to join them with this kind of setup: on average Italian readers stop at Giocolando and get just that "mask", ignoring this one.
A long story made short, I'm considering closing the Giocolando experiment for the time being, and maybe re-investing that time and effort in making contribution to other italian streams (Andrea, Leandro, Sergio, I'm looking at you :) ).