Just Bru

Domenica sera, A1, svincolo Bologna direzione Modena... 2 ore fermo in coda... ti sei mai chiesto come si formano le code in Autostrada? Quando non c'è uno straccio di incidente, né nebbia, né la coda prosegue fino al casello, perché improvvisamente, così in fretta come si è creata, quasi per magia, scompare. E allora ti ritrovi a fare pensieri strani e bassi, ti sorprendi mentre affermi tra te "beh? tutto qui? ma... ci fosse stato almeno un incidente!".
Terribile.

Spettacolo in-cre-di-bi-le: Graziano è stato in grado di trasfigurarsi ed entrare perfettamente nel ruolo dell'immigrato arabo, tanto che, arrivando di corsa all'Arsenale, non l'avevo nemmeno riconosciuto, dietro al mazzo di rose, di fronte al cancello...

Lo spettacolo in se, era caratterizzato da una scenografia essenziale (una sedia, un libro, un lampadario); palco con spalle all'ingresso, dal quale penetrava la luce fredda dei neon; interessante.
Un'ora e un quarto di monologo, con ritmo serratissimo, accidenti se sa come tenerti incollato!

La serata si è conclusa con una pizza sui navigli, colorita dai racconti dei dietro le quinte della Pentesilea di Stein.

Ma c'è molto altro...

Troppo è stato detto e scritto.
Troppo poco è stato fatto. Da me per primo.

No comment.

Una frase che lessi tanto tanto tempo fa, ma che mi segnò a fondo.
Mi è tornata alla mente oggi, emersa dalle nebbie della memoria, in quanto mi sono ritrovato a pensare con malinconica insistenza ad un'altra "Francesca", con la quale, nei panni di un novello "Paolo", ho condiviso la passione per un libro, una leggenda, una visione.

Found a reference to this movie from Bruno Bozzetto on LockerGnome.
Funny, it's a good guess at "the Italian way of doing things".... well maybe not all of us... or maybe yes, after all :P
Take a look (beware, it's a 2MB flash thing).

I was looking at the stats of CodeWitch today, and noticed that I had a good number of accesses from google with a search string of "September the eleventh".
"What the hell", I thought... so I tried to make the same research and... guess what? This is the FOURTH site on the list if you use that search phrases... :)
I'm beginning to think to be a v.i.p. ;)

The entry returned by google is the second of this blog. here is the link.

The entry is dated september 12th, but I read it just today. So William Gibson decided to stop blogging and go back to writing.
Well, besides the obvious we-will-miss-you-and-hope-you-get-back-soon stuff, his last entry made me think (!).

W. Gibson

"I’ve found blogging to be a low-impact activity, mildly narcotic and mostly quite convivial, but the thing I’ve most enjoyed about it is how it never fails to underline the fact that if I’m doing this I’m definitely not writing a novel – that is, if I’m still blogging, I’m definitely still on vacation. I’ve always known, somehow, that it would get in the way of writing fiction, and that I wouldn’t want to be trying to do both at once. The image that comes most readily to mind is that of a kettle failing to boil because the lid’s been left off."

He's got a point.

Back to the office.
Strange weekend, full of insights and enlightenment on one side, as well as blue, circular thoughts on the other side.
I'm again on the dev side of the universe ;)
Last week I played a little bit with php community engines, in the weekend I wrote a draft about that and now I'm jotting down the guidelines of my future project (it's not just "my" project, we are a team this time, so I hope this one will see an end ;) ).

I'm also restarting development on a handful of personal projects: MTLocation above all others.

c'ya soon

According to Wired magazine, it looks like the brits are going nuts for a new trend: toothing.
As expected, this raised a little rumor in blogspace: see references on MobileWhack, Joi Ito, suicidegirls.
For who's interested, there's already Beginner's guide to toothingand an Official Toothing! BBS.

Dunno if this could work in Italy too. Had a long conversation once with David about social and sexual habits and differences between the Uk / northern europe and Italy / southern europe. David was arguing that brits are far more crazy since they're intimately more shy... maybe due to the climate, or whatever...
well, that was the kind of pub conversation we used to have in archway, when the beer count raised beyond 10 ;)
Well, we'll see.

Today is Eugy's birthday!!!!
Should've had lunch with her and a few other friends today, but I was stuck with office maintenance, what a pity. Hope to mend soon.

Found this very interesting article on Wired News about a game called september 12th.

The very interesting bit is that this new game is not about onslaught and hate and so on... well, at least not in the meaning of its makers: the idea is that you have a lot of arabs walking a through their town and a few terrorists among them... you can shoot missiles at them, but doing so you'll eventually kill some civilian. Many more civilian will then come mourning the dead one, eventually turning into terrorists themselves.

Very interesting article, and good game. Take a look at it.

You may find also interesting to have a look at newsgaming.com. It's the home of the people who wrote the game mentioned above. From their main page:

We are a team of independent game developers who believe video games are not simply an amusement.

Games and simulations can also make us think about what is going on in this world.

Periodically, we will use games and simulations to analyze, debate, comment and editorialize major international news.

Come and join us.

Play with fire.

Well, it's over, at least for me... I'm back in the office right after a day split roughly equally between Bologna, Firenze, Perugia, and the train ;)
Webb.it has been a great experience. I have to compliment with the organization and to say thank-you-so-much to all the people who worked literally all day (and night) long to make it such a successful and enjoyable event.
Among these, a special thought goes obviously to the sikurezza.org staff and the ILS/Debian people; it's been a great chance also to give a face and a voice to many of them, who I was used to meet just on IRC before. Oh, and then there was the Community, also known as the geek's-paradise-branch-office-on-earth; there I was sitting between the POC.it people and some linuxers from Alessandria (Bobo, lalaura, Andrea, Paolo): yes, it's a small world, after all ;)

Here are some galleries with photo of the event:

• linux people
• POC

Ok, so let's turn a bit more professional and dive a little bit on the results of these two days.
I went there with the aim (apart from socializing) of growing my knowledge and understanding of three main topics: Social Software, Natural Interaction, and Interaction Design.
What follows are more in-depth considerations about these resulting from the seminars, chats, discussions and lack of sleep of the last two days

Topic 1 - blogs / social software :
I enjoyed very much the seminar entitled WEBLOG - URBAN BLOG by Andrea Toso (aka Axell) and Chiara Melotto (of kiarablog). After a brief introduction about blog's theory, they pointed the attention to a quite unexploited / unresearched scenario: the urban (or local) blog. That is, using weblogs to keep in touch or to influence a loco reality, being it a small town, a metropolitan area or a whole region. Actually, he said that blogs are intrinsecally "local" since they mainly refer to their author, the things he does and the place where he sleeps, eats, lives. That's an interesting point of view, and one that I, writing in a foreign tongue for a potential foreign public, never considered. Moreover, I started blogging just as a way, since I often move from place to place, to let my friends and relatives around the world know where I am at the moment and what am I doing; so the idea of geographical continuity was quite alien to me. But, thinking about it, is very powerful indeed! Actually most of the people out there lives in a city that's the same they grew in, or at least in a place they aren't expecting to leave anytime soon. This gives'em an interesting scope to exploit. More ideas are on the road about this... stay tuned ;)
Andrea also mentioned flash (smart) mobs as manifestation of the communication potential of media like e-mail and blogs, and eventually went deeper in the analysis of how urban blogs can help in creating a successful communication channel between citizen and public administration. This is very interesting, especially if coupled with the idea of geographic RSS aggregators. GeoUrl, who I collaborated with in order to code MTLocation plugin forMovableType is just an example of such aggregators ;) Now the point is: what determines the success of a weblog, or a community? Social Software Weblog has recently published an article about what drives bloggers, being it almost always fame, and the fact that with more and more milions of people beginning their own blog, fame as in global renown is becoming a mirage, and the need to shift people attention to "micro-fame", that is recognition among one's peers (family, friends, co-workers):

Gordon Gould

am not sure how to best do that but I think that if we look at things like photography, we can see how it evolved from a very specialized and insular community of Photographers into a mass-market of snap-shot takers.  Will blogs do to publishing fame what the Kodak Moment did to photography?
I don’t know.  Perhaps they already have.

Another interesting new but promising resource about community growth process is Growing Pains:

Virtual communities are living organisms: they have (or lack) energy, grow, and have a lifecycle. To make them successful, their evolution needs to be fully understood. Research on the evolutionary dynamics of virtual communities is still in its infancy. With this blog, I hope to contribute to a fascinating and much-needed research discussion on how to alleviate the growing pains of virtual communities.

So, if fame's the actual good consumed by the population (bloggers) of this ecological model, and being communication with the citizen the aim of local public administration, then Urban blogs could actually be successful since they grant loco bloggers a good deal of this "micro-fame" (recognition in your own city, for example).

The next step is to actually study how information and memes spreads around the net.
Wired has recentrly (yesteday!) published this article about an experiment made by Sam Arbesman, who just submitted a meme to a site (kottke.org), asking to spread it around, and then sat down and studied how the net responded to it. The results of his analysis (which he called the Memespread Project) are downloadable here. If you're interested in this topics, you'll probably find interesting this research at HP Labs about dynamics of blogspace

Just to end this (maybe too) long rant about blogs and the web, I'd like to point out a link to a seroes of link I found on Lilia's blog about how the web is about changing people's attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors


There are 2 more topics I should blog about, but I 'll do that in next posts

I was reading this article on the BBC UK site, reporting a list of the most expensive cities in the world to live in, when I suddenly realized that, as for now, that matches exactly with the list of my preferences (well, maybe substituting Osaka with New York)... curious enough...

MOST EXPENSIVE CITIES

• Tokyo
• London
• Moscow
• Osaka
• Hong Kong

Sadly I had to reconsider my travel plan, which it means I won't be able to attend STES next monday in London.

I must admit that I had no idea who Enzo Baldoni was, not until a few days ago, not until the news of his kidnapping in Iraq echoed through the blogosphere to me.
It's strange to know new things from blogs:
on one side, they seem as coming through layers of cottons, they come somewhat filtered... but when you try to understand what this "filter" is, you see that it's just the lack of the kind of amplification from the mass media we are used to, and that with just a few clicks you can actually access and open up a true hurricane of details, points of view, gossip and anecdotes about it.
That's one of the features of blogs. Bad? Good? Sincerely I don't know, and it won't be today the day to judge that.
What I know now is that Enzo Baldoni was Italian, was a journalist, a pacifist, that was kidnapped on August 19th and executed a few hours ago.

...and that he was a blogger too.

E.G.B.
Enzo Baldoni è fondamentalmente un Grande Pigro. Viaggia per caso, quando proprio non può farne a meno, sull'onda delle coincidenze. [...]

Un giorno, senza saper bene perchè, parte per Baghdad...

Rivoluzionari a parte, Enzo Baldoni fa il copywriter e il critico di fumetti, è il traduttore italiano di Doonesbury, di Lauzier e di Miller, ha scritto di fumetti e di guerriglieri, di lebbrosi e di personaggi strani in generale su Linus, Diario, Specchio della stampa, Venerdì di Repubblica e altri periodici. E' tutto a
www.balene.it/enzo.

Knowing a man from his blog is not so strange as getting in touch with a news from a blog.
After all, I'm used to read books and diaries of all kind.
So now, after having read most of his posts, I can also appreciate the lighthearted, smart and witty language and the excellent choice of images that made up his "style".
What I was not prepared to was that strange feeling, like having something in common, being part of a same tribe... part of course is because he was Italian but, in part, I think I feel like a fellow journalist could feel. Same tribes, as I said... he was a blogger too.

Reading from Emily:

Interesting insight on teenagers in South Korea from The New York Times. This part caught my eye, related to cell phones:

“Hye Jin, who has had a mobile phone since the seventh grade,sends text messages without even glancing at the keypad. In class, she looks straight ahead, holding a pen in her right hand, punching away messages with the left on her phone under her desk.

Ehy, I can do that too! Am I a 60lvl SMSer then? :)

Six months and one week. My last post on this blog was written right before LIFT conference in Géneva.
There, speaking with Martin, I just came to the conclusion that the image that was projected by this website was not anymore resembling the man behind it.

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!