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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!

Discovered and unleashed this on #joiito and, in a few time, the image shows the result.
Very intersting.
It's a bot that listens to an irc channel, tracking social networks as they born and grow, and snapshots them creating images like the one shown here.
...so you can even mount them on a movie if you like. Cool ;)

This can build up in more than a few useful apps, where you can, for example, monitor (and then eventually correct, or speed up decision making upon) the flow of a conversation or roundtable or whatsoever. This could also be useful to study what happens once you see patterns in the mess of traces you and others leave?.

Yesterday night I've seen Pay it forward and found it so... so inspiring!!!
Well, for those of you who haven't seen it (and trying to not put any spoiler here), it's the story of an eleven years old child who's given this "exercise" on the first day of the social studies course:

Find an idea that will change our world.
Then put it into ACTION

Interesting, isn't it?
Well, what the boy does is even more cool: he builds up a social network (hmm a multi-level structure, actually, since it was just working in one direction). A social network built upon the idea of doing good actions in order to change the world.
This is the schema:

• find three people who need your aid, and do them a favor. Make it something big, something they can't do by themselves.
  
• once you've helped them, tell'em the rules, and let them find other three people in need.
  

It made me think... about social software (strange, uh? :) ). Yep, and the potential power of 'em. Power to influence the people, at a rate and in a range far more interesting than most traditional "marketing" tools. We already know that, and if I were a little less tired (maybe I'll do tomorrow) I could certainly find some good papers on this.
Even the game I followed a few days ago was a clear example of this power: the day after that, I made a survey and found that something like 70% of my (Italian) blogosphere followed it. And it was a silly game :)
As a sidenote: my dear friend Michele argued that it could have something to deal with the 23 skidoo conspiracy :)

Anyway, just think of it: what makes blogs so different from mailing lists or mail-chains? because that's the point! To cut it short, I think it's a matter of motivation: first of all, when you get an (e)mail, you get an interrupt. That requires a series of operations on your part to stop what you're doing at the moment, set an ideal "bookmark" on it, go to the mail, open, read, evaluate it (unless, of course, you were actually mainly reading emails).
While, if you go and read a blog, you are already doing two things:
1) you made a choice, and used some of your emotion to go and visit the page. For as little as it may seem, it's still a choice.
2) If you're reading my diary, chances are you identify yourself with pov, or at least with some thoughts of mine. This is how mass-media works, from ads to soap-operas to realityshows to detailing "personal" stories during the news... all this "tricks" aim at making you identify with the casual "hero", and thus make you think as he/her, and thus, in the end, influence your choices.
So, why not doing it once for "good"? Why not using blogs to spread some positive perspective on life, things, people? After all, it works on the other side too: Moody posts will influence those reading us. Well, it's also a fact that moody posts are usually "more successful" than cheerful ones in bringing attention to the blogger... this is another interesting point, and it's got to do with interaction in a more general way. I'll have to dig more...

So, do you want to change your world? Because I do. Not the world, that's impossible, just mine, that's ours, because if you're reading this, you're already part of my world too, and vice versa. Wanna help? :D

hmmm... I think there's enough space here for some digression on blog-research ethics... but maybe tomorrow.

Have a good night.

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?

As an example of both how successful a website can be to attract international attention, and of a good way to tap this potential, take a look at freekaneko.com:

We are conducting a publicity, and fund raising. We need a lot of attention from the people of the world. You can help us by telling the issue to your family, friends, and co-workers. Also, translation volunteers (and English proof readers) are needed to let the people know this issue.

Freekaneko.com marked a million hit only a day after an opening. Also, we raised 10 million yen ($100,000) in 2weeks

More details about the Iasumi Kaneko case in this earlier post by Joi Ito

Take a look at passionofthepresent.org, about the genocide occurring in Sudan.

See also Jim's blog for more info on how to help in the googlebomb to stop the genocide.

Looks like Joi's getting pretty much press attention these days:
Usa Today just published a very interesting article, and many other sources displayed the same article (thanks to Loic for this link).

Moreover, in Italy appeared an interview to Joi on L'Articolo newspaper. Take a look at Culture Digitali for a pdf version (in Italian) of the interview.

And, speaking of Culture Digitali, it's just a few days away now... good!
Actually the convention started some weeks ago on the site, but now we also have an IRC channel:

• irc.freenode.net
  
• port 6667
  
• /join #culturedigitali
  

Post borrowed from Suw's blog. If you plan to come to Vienna, leave a note there.

Suw

If any of you are going to BlogTalk 2.0 in July, there's now a wiki on Joi's site for people to make arrangements.

I'm going to be arriving on 3rd July and departing on the 9th, and am particularly interested in meeting anyone involved in EFF/Creative Commons/copyright/copyleft/DRM issues.

It looks like this summer Europe will be full of interesting events regarding Social Software and the like.
This one also happens to be in Galway, definitely a beautiful setting ;)

Paolo Massa

1st Workshop on Friend of a Friend, Social Networking and the Semantic Web (FOAF'2004) *1-2 September 2004, Galway, Ireland*, sponsored by SWAD-Europe and DERI http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/events/foaf-galway/

Many of the interesting conferences about these topics happen in USA. So, if you are in Europe, you cannot miss this one!
In the committee there are many people that I learn to know by email or by reading their blogs but I have never met. I hope to meet them physically in Galway.

Waiting for Foafcamp, I'm trying to refresh my memories of semantic web and FOAF concepts alike.
I'm putting interesting pages on del.icio.us too (here you can find all del.icio.us bookmarks about FOAF).
Also, I'm having lot of fun with FOAF explorer and using it to update my foaf.rdf file.
Anybody interested in joining can easily do that using foaf-a-matic tool.

At the same time, I'm studying XHTML Friend Networks too, which looks really fun, especially if combined with FOAF. Still not sure it's the best way to deal with bottom-up social networking, but definitely worth some brainloops :)

I put on my "would be nice TODO" list a Movable Type FOAF plugin.

Update: looks like cool people at FOAFnet are already doing some neat work to create a standard for FOAForiented application development...

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? :)

The Event
Leaving tomorrow for London. This time the "official reason" is BlogWalk4, my last (after Naples, Wien, Enschede and Amsterdam), meeting for this intensive "SocialSoftwareSummer".
This time I double checked both camera and batteries, so expect the fotolog to be back soon with plenty of new stuff!

This is the first time I got invited to the BlogWalk, and sincerely can't wait for a good discussion on the topic, which this time will be: "The future of work under influence of social software, e.g. blogging within the firewall" ;)
I'll try to blog something about the topic before friday. Also expect summary and thought refactoring posts after early next week.
And of course, it will be yet another great opportunity to know and meet all kind of awesome people from the blogosphere (I'm glad to see there are already two dinners on the plan, and that the location for the meeting is a very nice pub I already "tested" ;) ).
You know, in these cases the problem is choosing where to sit down... it always happens to me that I'd like to follow all the discussions going on around the table, end eventually I end up with bits and pieces of each and every chat. Greedy me ;)

but London is far more than that...
Of course, there's more to London than just BlogWalk ;)
I can't wait for meeting Ezio, David, and all those wonderful people who make my London "tribe".
Actually I'd love to have some more days to spend there, especially since London Design Festival will start on monday, but...

The way back
...I really have to be in Milan on Sunday, to go and spend some time at the 62th International Bicycle Exhibition to support (and take some pictures of) the Slywayteam (whom I happen to be an advisor of ;) ).
It's been a while since the first public appearance of Slyway, this April at the Ruotati zero emission vehicle fair in Florence, and press attention is growing ever since.
This time in Milan there'll be the official presentation of the SlyWay Recumbent bike series. Good luck Stefano!

TODO list
A few notes on things to do before BlogWalk:
- get an Airport for my Titanium
- get a new Battery for my Titanium
hmm... what a pity the new Apple Store in London will not open before late november

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?

Found Today on SmartMobs:

"Well, it isn't really a generation, it is more a mindset and way of working - but answer the five questions below to find out"

1. Do you wear a computer?
2. Do you text?
3. Are you wacky when you're not wified?
4. Have you have turned some of your “remembering” over to a technology object?
5. Do you participate in online reputation systems?

Yes I am.

Oh and there is also the link to this SmartMobs concept map. I love concpet maps, quote them and they'll make everyone feel awe even if you really don't understand a word of what's written on 'em :P

It's coming. Two weeks of conference on the topic of online social networks.
Registration before February 9th is $35.00 US (price will go up to $50.00 after February 9th).

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.

The images you see above (I know they look small but click on them and you'll be teleported on flickr's big version... just come back then ;) ) depict a graph built with Graphviz, harnessing the power of FOAF to visualize the social connections within the O'Reilly network.
I found the link to this post via Nicolas and as him, I blog this because I really still find FOAF relevant and daily wonder how to turn it friendly enough to the public in order to detonate a critical mass around it.
In the meanwhile, I must admit that microformats (and in this particular case XFN), are definitely alluring...

So last week started with the geekdinner, and it was great.
Special guest: Dave Shea. I did just one decent photo and it's been the start of a nice geek version of hide'n'seek between me and Cathy. Geeks just wanna have fun.
Seriously speaking, you can dig flickr for tons of pictures of the night, while Ian posted a transcript of the Q&A session.
My impression of Dave was really good: basically he looks kind of Yeah man, we've got this load of crappy tool s to work with (html4, css and all), but that's no excuse for not getting things done, c'mon.
Oh and you can read Dave's own wrap up here

After little more than one week, this evening there'll be the WikiWednesday.

And... well, of course on the 8th there'll be the Future of Web Apps workshop. Pity it sold out more than two weeks ago... have to find a way into it, any idea?

Don't know if I'll make it to this night's wikiwed, but hey, it definitely looks like London is quite a place to be now!

Basically 800 people are now attending this Carson Workshop Summit about all that's neat and cool and 2.0.
And I'm not in. Grrrr. Sold out.
"So what?", you may ask.
So here comes the power of social software and its crowd: Suw is there and taking notes like hell (girl, you rock!).
Meanwhile, the wiki is filling with proposals for after conference drinks and meetups.
Blogs, flickrs and delicious links are on their way, too.

In the end, almost like being there. Aside from the people, that (also for the already mentioned reasons) is what realyl makes the difference.

Also, my dear desk buddy Al is there (grrrrrrrrrr!) so I hope in some knowledge sharing soon ;)

Will you be in London on Feb 28th and willing to meet the local Rails community?
Paul Birch is organizing a PizzaOnRails get-together.

Join the mailing list for more details.

Do you feel smart?
Do you feel simple?
Do you feel social?

...but, most of all: can you survive London's weather?

Excellent, so what about taking a trip by the Thames and joining us during office time by the tower bridge?

We are enjoying so much our time building today's and tomorrow's social something something (concept courtesy of Lilia) that really we feel like it's time to share the fun with more passionate people.

So, you know the deal: unfold your mind maps, ready your tag clouds and send us a CV at jobs here at headshift.com.

The morale is high but the crew really could use some ruby knowledge, a coldfusion master and a few project manager minds.

Forgot to blog this last week, but I think it's an interesting bit, so here we go.
When I had to plan my trip to denmark, once realized that monday will be a bank holiday I decided to spend the weekend in lovely Copenaghen.
It also sounded like a perfect chance to go couchsurfing once again, so I quickly picked up three or four names and contacted them. Oddly enough, got answer only from one, saying I had not enough references (I have 5 positive and no negative) and no "security level" (true, I never paid for it)...
which makes perfect sense, but reminded me of the different, personal threshold and values for "trust". And the fact that couchsurfing allows individual to discriminate so granularly probably means they chose fairly good indicators: I may not agree with the idea that paying for the service is actually an indicator of good attitude and intentions, but now I know that for other people that's paramount.

Anyway, since I like happy endings, let's quickly move on to the end of the story, where I remembered of a conversation with Regine about this other network created by Copenaghen based Henriette Weber "who basically is a young female who is tired of busting her entrepreneurial budget when there is things (dinners, conferences, vacations) in other countries (or cities) she wants to attend". It sounded perfect, so after another email I ensured my couch in the city for tonight. There are also a few interesting consideration here, that as usual deal with the strange connection that the blogger community builds: whereas with couchsurfing is always like kind of a cocktail of curiousity/mistery/expectation about the host/guest culture, attitude, interests, in this case I know a few more things about my host, I know how she writes and what she's actually up to nowadays, and I'm sure we can share a lot of interesting conversations about what went on during HyperText for example.
Once again, the blogosphere spots an additional dimension versus the general "tribe" concept where a group of people identifies themselves under a common concept/idea/interest: bloggers share a media, and that empowers connections.

Olga is presenting artstream, her art project on how to improve museum experience through the cunning use of mobile technologies and web2.0.

Basically the idea is that you can comment and “fav” pieces of the exhibtion, see extra elements like video interview with the artist and social functions like audio comments from other people.

Then you can switch to offline mode, where you can re-organize the experience, managing contacts, comments and so on.

Personally I think this would be quite cool an application, bringing actual social power to museum consumption, which is something that usually ends with the end of the visit itself, and is bound to be synchronous. Actually some work in this direction can already be seen at the V&A for example (with podcasts and community events)... yet another potential evidence that this is a good path.

Oh, and it makes use of shared google calendars :D

ups, it looks like the 400 seats were gone in a matter of hours... and there's a 200ish waiting list out there... geez, the media-whatever crowd in London is getting big.

Well, I think I'll miss this one. See you at the next geekdinner.