And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.
from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15
(Red Letter Edition)
Read about The Book of Mozilla on Wikipedia.
(found via Kevin)
In the academic world there is often confusion about the concept of trust. Or better the same world “trust” has two different meanings. From now on, I’ll try to use (and push) these 2 different words for the 2 different concepts: Soft Trust and Hard Trust.
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According to w3schools stats, Mozilla usage is growing fast.
The latest figures state that Mozilla had a 9.0 percent usage share in February, up from 8.2 percent in January. The W3Schools data indicates that Mozilla’s usage share has more than doubled in the last twelve months.
In the meantime even the stars seem telling you: “Use Firefox“. (Via Adot)
ISF04 – 3° Incontro Nazionale di Ingegneria Senza Frontiere (2004) – 12, 13, 14 marzo 2004 – Genova – Italia.
Ci sara’ anche un Workshop su Information e Communication Technologies (ICT)
La registrazione e’ aperta.
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Email is where knowledge goes to die. I couldn’t agree more.
I realised today I didn’t write yet an entry about my PhD Research Proposal “Trust-aware Decentralized Recommender Systems” (TaDRS).
So here it is the PDF file. If you have any comment or criticism, I’ll be happy to hear from you.
The PhD research proposal is a little bit outdated (29th May 2003) but I didn’t have a blog at that time. Enjoy and let me know what you think.
UPDATE:
Abstract
This PhD thesis addresses the following problem: exploiting of trust information in order to enhance the accuracy and the user acceptance of current Recommender Systems (RS). RSs suggest to users items they will probably like. Up to now, current RSs mainly generate recommendations based on users’ opinions on items. Nowadays, with the growth of online communities, e-marketplaces, weblogs and peer-to-peer networks, a new kind of information is available: rating expressed by an user on another user (trust). We analyze current RS weaknesses and show how use of trust can overcome them. We proposed a solution about exploiting of trust into RSs and underline what experiments we will run in order to test our solution.
At =-” href=”http://alex.halavais.net/news/archives/000798.html”>Rolan the Datapimp, Alex asks himself if collecting orkut.com data automatically with a script is legal or ethical.
Actually I scraped Epinions.com site for data and I don’t care too much about this nonsense copyright mess.
I really don’t understand these strange licences (or ToS, Term of Service). Could I say that this site can be accessed only on thursday if the humidity is above 3 something? That the email I send you can be read only with a certain program and only between 3pm and 4pm?
I totally agree with Alex when he says
… I could pay a few students minimum wage to record this data manually. Would that be acceptable? What if I had them sit in a lab and hit each page, saving a local copy? This would appear exactly the same as a scraper to Orkut, and would yield exactly the same results, but would presumably be acceptable.
Basically, I think noone can tell me how I can experience some digital content. I agree with World of Ends
You are never going to prevent us from copying the bits we want.
Reminder for myself: I need to open a webpage with “impossible-to-accomplish licences and ToS”.
Yahoo dumps Google search technology. You can decide by yourself if Yahoo! is better than Google by comparing search results on this double-search-page (found via OlandeseVolante).
A wonderful alternative: FireFox
Reviewr “ties into the API exposed by Ludicorp’s […] new social software application, Flickr and hooks it up to the API exposed by Amazon. The point is that using Reviewr allows you to search for reviews of products by people you know and trust.” (via Hublog)
Interestingly, as I was proposing in a previous post, Friendr limits the number of contacts an user can have. It was not a totally dumb idea after all…
Check the services already created using the API and the services documentation (1, 2)