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:
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 for
MovableType 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
It looks like this summer Europe will be full of interesting events regarding Social Software and the like.
Serendipity wants that it was also during this 
The promise of the Internet was simple, but incredibly powerful: to be a medium through which we could connect and collaborate, for mutual benefit. It's happening. As the Net matures, we are learning to write as easily and fluently as we read.
They're talking about 
