Just Bru

As you may have noticed, since the beginning of may codewitch.org has a whole new layout.
The reasons are mainly that:

• 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

I looked around a lot, and found in sniffles's, Joi's and Ado's designs most inspiration.

I also added a fotolog and a Wiki, in order add new dimensions to the blogging experience...
So by now I have tools to share knowledge with you on two channels...

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

...and in two temporal and author dimensions:

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

These tools still needs some work to maximize cross-referencing and integration, but I think this kind of setup can become a very interesting approach to knowledge management!

This thoughts have been quite influenced by an Article of Nova Spivacks and by his metaweb graph.
Obviously, if you're interestad in any of the topics discussed on these pages, feel fry to contribute to the Wiki and all other tools :)

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

The official definitive program of Culture Digitali convention, to be held on June 4th in Naples has been released. The program is very interesting, and includes, as you can see below, the participation of Gianluca Nicoletti, Joi, Loic, Paolo Valdemarin and many many others.
It will be fun :)

Eccoci finalmente pronti con il programma definitivo del Convegno. Poichè molti link puntano al programma di massima originario, mi sono permesso di aggiornare anche quel post.
Ricordo a tutti che la parte digitale del convegno è già in corso su questo weblog e che per partecipare basta seguire le istruzioni.
Infine, per la contrazione delle date, abbiamo modificato il banner di Culture Digitali, che dovrebbe essersi aggiornato automaticamente (chi lo avesse salvato sul proprio server è pregato di sostituirlo).

Culture Digitali:

I WEBLOG E LA NUOVA SFERA PUBBLICA

Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II

Facoltà di Sociologia

Napoli, Complesso di San Marcellino - 4 giugno 2004

Ore 09:00: SALUTI

» Enrica Amaturo. Preside della Facoltà di Sociologia dell'Università di Napoli Federico II

Ore 09:15: INTRODUZIONE EPISTEMOLOGICA

» Derrick De Kerckhove. Studioso di New Media, è docente di Sociologia delle Culture Digitali presso la Facoltà di Sociologia della Federico II.

» Paolo Valdemarin. CEO di Evectors e sviluppatore (insieme a Matt Mower) di ENT (Easy News Topic)

» Discussione

Ore 10:45: Coffee Break

Ore 11:00: I NUOVI SPAZI DELLA CRITICA

» Jacopo De Michelis. Responsabile della collana Black di Marsilio.

» Alessandro Zaccuri. Giornalista, critico e scrittore.

» Alberto Abruzzese. Professore ordinario di Sociologia delle comunicazioni di massa, corso di laurea in Scienze delle Comunicazioni, Università La Sapienza.

» Gianluca Nicoletti. Conduttore di Golem (Radio Rai).

» Discussione

Ore 15:00: I WEBLOG E LA DISCUSSIONE POLITICA

» Joi Ito. CEO di Neoteny, membro del Net Advisory Network per la campagna elettorale del senatore Howard Dean.

» Loic Le Meur. Responsabile per l'Europa di SixApart, membro del World Economic Forum.

» Stefano Cristante. Insegna Sociologia della comunicazione presso l'Università degli Studi di Lecce.

» Rosanna De Rosa. Docente di Comunicazione Politica alla Facoltà di Sociologia dell'Università di Napoli Federico II.

» Discussione

Ore 17:00: Coffee Break

Ore 17:15: I WEBLOG NELL'ECOSISTEMA INFORMATIVO

» Beppe Caravita. Giornalista del Sole 24 Ore.

» Luca De Biase. Giornalista e scrittore.

» Antonio Sofi. Coordinatore del Master in Giornalismo On Line dell’Università di Firenze

» Discussione

If you want to see what's warblogging (well, actually war-moblogging) like, take a look at the links in this page.

SixApart just announced the new release of MovableType.

the BlogMob effect
Aside from the changelog, that's really interesting, and the fact that the new plugin api opens a new universe of possibilities to third party developers, there are two big news that made the blogosphere (or at least the part of it that I live in) shake today so much so that, by the time I'm writing this, 6A site's still unreachable. For what it concerns me, this is the first time an event in the blogosphere creates a "slashdot" effect. As I was saying a few minutes ago on #joiito, I was used to see this effect when a famous portal higlighted some big news, acting like a lighthouse pointing his beacon to the target host. This is different thing: the meme spread through the net as a rumor, and more and more people either went to see what was happening, or either wrote their own trackbacking comment. All this traffic (trackback is much heavier activity than simple browsing) brought the site to its knees...

...the news
First one is licensing. Much of the rumor is about the fact that MT isn't free anymore. Well, this is not quite true: there's a personal edition downloadable for free :) Still, there are licensing limits on this edition: no more than one author and no more than 3 blogs. This is also interesting: for what I've been able to test in 1 hour of playtesting, there are no license enforcements in the code. Just a matter of licensing trust. I appreciated that.
Oh, and here's an post about 6A's commitment to a free version.
Second news is the contest: if you are a MT plugin developer, there are prizes for 20k$ awaiting you. You just have to submit your work before june 18th and... be resident in one of many countries... that DO NOT INCLUDE ITALY :(
Really can't see why?!?
Looks like the upcoming version of MT-Location won't be part of the contest... what a pity, isn't it?

Edit: For anybody interested in the contest-eligible-countries thing, here's the official reply of SixApart to my request for explanation (i'm gonna quote just the part of the letter that's pertinent):

We are excited about the contest too, but unfortunately, we had to abide by international laws now that we're bigger than Ben and Mena's living room. I don't know the details, but our lawyers looked it up and there are issues that make it very difficult for us to include Italy. Very sorry...but I swear this wasn't our choice. :(

So, thank you very much 6A for your reply, and goodbye to dreams of glory ;)

As a side effect, there's been a very interesting session on IRC about blog engines, with guest stars like photomatt maker of wordpress, and rayners of MT Plugin Manager. Here's also a link to a post by Steph about requirements of a good blog tool. Must read.

Just read this crosslink on thesocialsoftwareblog. I find interesting that these arguments are now matter for business oriented courses, isn't it?
The training will be held May 17 - 21 2004

Blog, Wikis, Social Networks - what can social software do for you?
From the Wall Street Journal to Business 2.0, everyone’s talking about social software. This affordable online course will help you get past the buzz and find out what’s in it for you.

Organizations today want to foster knowledge, deepen working relationships, and create a collaborative culture and esprit de corps. Social software can deliver on this promise.

Taught by industry pioneers Tom Mandel and Lisa Kimball, this affordable executive briefing will pay off for your organization. You will try social software tools in a safe and guided environment. You will engage with social software leaders and exchange experiences with your peers and colleagues. Sign up today, and begin learning about a topic of great importance to your organization and your future

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.

Now, nor my hard drive nor my mailbox is that messy (well, maybe it is now: the figure shows it as it is now, at top of it messyness, in the middle of a stressful business month), but there are few things I could definitely use:

• 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.
  

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…

Found an entry by Loic about PubSub, a new search engine that let's you build "searches subscriptions" in the blogosphere, and then creates RSS feeds you can subscribe to (and browse from your beloved aggregator, for instance).
The idea seems great. Going to test it!!!

This adds to a bunch of other "blogtools" I'm studying at the moment.

As time passes and I find more and more interesting news sites and blogs out there, I'm observing two (quite logic, to say the truth) behaviours:

• I started making a "natural" selection between the RSSs that fills my aggregator. Some monthes ago started to appear categories in which I divided the feeds, then those same categories've been ordered in a quite dynamic "preference" order, but I still used to at least read all the headlines.
  Now I often just give a blink to the headlines while marking "all as read"
  
  this opens up some room for discussion on PhotoReading experience. In fact, I observed that I can often recall most of those general headlines even if I actually didn't read it "consciously". This stands perfectly in line with photoreading techniques, and explains as just another application for speed/photo reading.
  

• I'm growing more and more addicted to the aggregator. In the sense that I tend to be "snob" versus those blogs that don't have an xml feed of some kind.
  I realized this today, while reviewing my old (pre del.icio.us) bookmarks and noticing that I have not visited most of the link in the "blogs" category since a lot of time ago.
  

Going back to the "city" metaphor, it's like I got used to the "RSS" subway, so much so that I seldom choose to have a walk and look at those zones of the city that are not connected to a subway station... sad but true, it makes sense.

Everybody's talking about this: between thursday and friday all Italian cellphones got an sms from the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, remembering us the opening hours of the pollsand the documents needed to vote. Even SmartMobs reported it:

In what it claims was simply an effort to boost turnout, the Italian government has sent millions of cell phone users text messages on voting procedures for this weekend's European and local elections.
[...]
A consumer advocacy group Adusbef, estimating the cost of sending the flood of SMS messages, at more than $6.9 million, demanded to know who was footing the bill.

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

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.

I started using TinderBox as a way to organize my notes on Notes on Natural Interaction paper.

Reading Alessandro's notes really fired up a lot of medium to long time forgotten synapses... found that these topics really can be an active and very fertile fields, being nourished by and finding joint advantage from and for very different fields such as computer science, art, philosophy, communication theory, cognitive science, mechanical and audio engineering, just to name a few.

As for Tinderbox as a tool, I'm starting to understand its metaphor, even if I'm not sure if it's me who's bending it or it that's shaping my natural way of doing things... which brings me back to one of my favourite questions: "better to have a strict, compulsory workflow (constraints) or let the user be free to follow his inner mechanics?"

Last week (Aug 18-19) I've been attending the First Foaf Camp 2004, where I had the chance to come in close contact with RDF/FOAF technolgy and with a lot of interesting people who are actively working on this topic.

What I realized then is that FOAF is exactly the answer to what I felt lacking in blogs: real context management.
Basically, FOAF and weblogs look like two sides of a same coin: actually, both are described as "digital identities", by their own evangelists, but if blogging is the "humanistic" side of your digital identity, FOAF can be its semantic web counterpart, a cluster of pure data that both humans and machines can read.
FOAF then could be excellent to represent a blog(ger)'s context, which is made up by his physical location, his social network, interest, contacts, and so on...
On the other hand, a blog can somehow complement with the FOAF adding depth, content and personality to it.
Like blossoms and flowers growing over the branch of a tree, blog entries can attract the attention of information carriers and help the spreading of it, so that the tree (and it's "genetic load") can grow and prosper.

The effect of these thoughts is that my MTFriends MovableType plugin, written to be a proof of concept in the application of XFN and FOAF to blogs, and still in its alpha state (at version 0.2), already became obsolete in my mind, since I'm seeing now a much more interesting and global view.
And from this better spot, I see that also MTLocation, my other geo-location oriented plugin for MT, is getting unappropriate, and this scares me a little bit :)

So, why is that?
Basically because currently plugins are storing their information in a dedicated database inside the MovableType engine. Which is nice, but in the end, if I have the chance to put all my identity info in a RDF file, chances are that I wouldn't like to have all this info being duplicated elsewhere.
Moreover, everybody already has his own favourite way to manage contacts, events and so on locally (Mail, iCal, Outlook, Mozilla, Evolution, whatever), so centralizing everything into MT is not really a wise choice (at least given my limited coding power).
Best thing is to find some kind of bridge to collate all digital identity info in a FOAF file, and then concentrate on the actual integration between FOAF and blog, which in this case will consists of a plugin providing a set of tags for accessing data contained in the file.

Serendipity wants that it was also during this FOAFCamp that I found a possible answer to this bridge request: the Gnowsis Semantic Desktop Integration by Leo Sauermann. This is a really cool application, that collects data from software like Outlook and (among other things) keeps an updated foaf file of yours, letting you even add new data, notes, and so on.
Pitifully, it's just working on Windows right now (release date should be in September), but good Leo promised access to some beta program soon :)

So, what's going to happen?
Realistically, current plugins will keep on living for those who are not interested in mangling with FOAF and the Semantic Web, and are happy with the idea of managing all metadata about their digital identity from MT backend. This means that you'll still have bugfixing releases of MTFriends and MTLocation.
But on the other hand, I'm looking forward to create a more general MTFOAF plugin that integrates all these features in a single Plugin, basically (and thoroughly) defining the "context" of the blog's author.
So this new plugin will have a single configuration parameter (foaf url), and will do two very simple things:
- parse an RDF file
- provide template tags to integrate information in MT blogs

UPDATE: New version (0.3) of MTFriends is out.
This release features:

• MTXFN tag, for XFN enhanced links to people
  
• auto_xfn global filter - for automatically adding the "rel" attribute to known people's pages (see also autoxfn for blosxom).
  

Anil writes about MTFriends plugin on SixApart's ProNet:

Six Apart Professional Network If you're interested in the XFN (XHTML Friends Network) specification, you'll want to give the MTFriends plugin a try. It's a great first step, and using Movable Type 3's new plugin architecture, it should be possible to expand into a full management screen to update your XFN information from within Movable Type.

Here is the first announcement, along with some considerations on XFN and blogs.

Finally last night I had a few time to play with FOAF.
What I came up with is a first proof of concept of the MTFoaf plugin I was writing about a while ago.
This alpha version implements provides a very basic tag API that can be used in Movable Type templates to access data in a FOAF file. For example, it can be used to manage blogrolls, "about" boxes, location information and so on.

By now, MTFoaf is built as a monolithic piece of code and uses Ben's XML::Foaf (and thanks danbri for the hint!) to handle most of the parsing and interaction with the foaf source, and RDF::Core to extract geo-location info. The plan is to move away from the monolithic design to a "plugin" based architecture, with a common layer for MT interaction and separate plugins implementing specific vocabularies.
Enough technicalia, see here for more info (or you may want to WikiDiscuss this entry).

After uploading some of the BlogWalk pictures to my flickr account, I just made all my photos of the event availble here in the local gallery.

Adriaan just released yet another piece of cool Mac code: 1001.

That's a Flickr client that makes use of the recently released API to retrieve and show recent photos on your desktop.
It even has a neat transparent bezel that stays in a corner of the screen showing the latest picture.

And uploading is as easy as dropping an image on the 1001 icon. cool!

I'm just bouncing this news posted by Clay Shirky on many2many:

Clay Shirky

IMsmarter.com is a service designed to add GMail-style functions to your IM conversations, by setting up a proxy service that archives all your IM conversations, making them persistent, accessible from multiple clients, searchable, combinable, etc. (They also have a blog feature, where you can set up a blog through the service, and sub to blogs created by other IMsmarter users, but that feels added-on and irrelevant compared to the main offering.)

Pitifully, it doesn't support yet my IM of choice...
Update: Tried to configure the service with Proteus, and actually it worked (at least for ICQ), regardless of what the official documentation says... ;)

from the Operating Manual for Social Tools:

David Weinberger

A design that makes groups happy will make people and users happy, but if a design makes individuals happy but not groups, then the ASN has failed.

more and more precious bits of the conversation going on about what makes a socially successful (and thus potentially killer app of its own) tool.

The first time I head this word (that identifies amateurs pushing their hobbies to professional quality standards) was during Culture Digitali, last June, where Jacopo gave this excellent speech about the phenomena.
I took a personal note to study more on the subject, especially given this sensation of being a Pro-Am would-be myself and not even knowing about it ;)
Then I forgot about it, as often happens...

But the world (luckily) goes on, and it was just a few days ago that Wikipedia, announced WikiNews a news magazine written by "citizen journalists".
Then again, just yesterday, SmartMobs reported that London based think tank Demo published a report called The Pro Am Revolution.
Great! Now I've something interesting to read on the train tomorrow ;)

Here comes another cool exploit of social software platforms: Geo-location of tagged images on flickr.com
The experiment isn't open to the public (yet), but there's a mappr group where to find all such images.

Smart post by Proserpina on flickr.
The caption is about the opprtunity to donate 1 euro sending an sms (from any italian cell phone) to 48580.

This is the press release of the initiative, in english.

While bloghopping this morning, I found, via A Whole Lotta Nothing, this article about the nature of flickr:

I’ve been trying for a week or so to figure out what flickr is. I mean I know it’s a photo sharing site, but what makes it so damn interesting? Then, last night, I finally figured it out: flickr is a MMORPG.

It's definitely quite original, and imho utterly correct.
As a sidenote, chances are this comment of mine won't be so original, since at this time the popdex rate of this article is second only to links related to the earthquake, the MN2004 risk, and Reggie White's death. Going back to antenna's article, what really interested me is that, in trying to explain the success of flickr vs other YASNs, rather than giving the old “flickr and del.icio.us give us a new funny way to do things that we already did” swing that we all know and love (for example, see here for a great discussion about this topic), focuses instead on the fact that flickr's ui offers us a gaming backbone:

It presents a primary “plot” (upload photos and look at other people’s photos). This backbone gives users an immediate sense of the “story” of the site. But this central narrative exists in a space which allows for relatively freeform interaction, and the UI also helps nudge users off the main path with teasers like “Do you have a Cameraphone? Learn how to send photos to Flickr.” Like a video game, there’s a sense of progressive disclosure.

Indeed that goes pretty against my old motto about web designs, that sounds like “I want it all and I want it now!”... but he's got a point: this kind of designs have a charme.
It's got the same magic as DeviantArt, but with a far more friendly UI. You get teased to what you like, and if you get lost or can't find what you're looking for, there's always the small sitemap at the bottom of the page to cheat through!

Maybe it's time to go back to some emotional design ;)
By the way, today I learnt something.

Bouncing this straight from Loic's blog:

Already 30 bloggers around the world and especially from Sri Lanka and India post around the clock on Tsunamihelp.

It provides news and useful information to the families of the casualties and anybody trying to help. You can help, too, by linking this blog, by sending them useful information you know about the disaster, or if you are a blogger, by blogging with them on how to help and taking the shifts.

Last night I was commenting with a friend the tsunami and the fact that is more and more clear that bloggers have an edge when it comes to timely spread information.
So I said, “maybe it's time for something like Bloggers without Borders... look! it even sounds nice”.
Well, it looks like the meme was in the air... here's the first post, bounced from Joi's blog:

We have found our compassion in this one. Yet, one thing remains and is badly needed, says a friend of mine who just arrived in Sri Lanka and will be contributing what he learned in eight years in Uniform. People. Not the odd-job bystander, not the “activist”, and certainly not the journalist. What is needed most, today, are qualified specialists. Demolitions experts to safely destroy dangerous structures, Doctors, guys and gals who know how to handle a syringe or a gun. The latter is needed more and more as the looting increases and food and medical supplies are being raided by black marketers.

Textually.org reports some numbers about the results of the send-an-sms-donate-an-euro initiative blogged a couple of days ago.

Italian mobile phone users have donated more than 11 million euros (15 million dollars) for the victims of the Asian tsunamis through a text messaging arrangement that seemed to set a trend, reports the AFP . “The Rome daily Corriere della Sera said Italians could contribute one euro to tsunami disaster relief every time they sent a text message, thanks to an agreement between the country's four mobile phone companies and its main television channels.

11 Million euros, in just a couple of days, is a really interesting number... that means that (on average) 1 in 5 Italians sent an SMS.
Lessons to be learnt: make something trendy, and Italians will be no match for anybody else ;)

This post by Suw made me curious about the 43things service. It's an intersting one indeed. It brightly mixes the power of folksonomies, social sofware and "weighted" display of information. For example I can declare that I want to learn japanese, and 43things will automatically link me to all the people doing it at this time (and what they're saying about), who already did that (and if it was worth). On the other hand, my declaration will "strenghten" the thing: The more people want to do that, the more it becomes "big" in the map. Once I've completed the task (say, visit Japan), I can rate it and/or also write an entry on the subject. Finally, I can invite people to this goal, while 43things provides me link to other "choices" of who's doing this thing (the Amazon way...), or browse through tags associated to the thing (the del.icio.us way...). On its way, cleverly includes some google ads ;) Definitely inspiring.

So now you can browse through my 43things, and even subscribe to the RSS.

Hint: If it only could output and/or be configured through FOAF...

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.