Yearly Archives: 2004

Best social software? Orkut? No, Epinions.

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I tend to agree with Danah about Orkut. In particular, I think Orkut does not model the real social network of an user. I speak of Orkut because is the buzz of the moment and its being in affiliation with google makes it the big expectation. But the same arguments could be used against many of the social network applications listed on socialsoftwareweblog.

The question is: “Why should I not accept an invitation from a totally unknown user that pretends to be my friend?” There is no negative consequence in adding someone as friend.
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3 videos you are not going to see in Tv (at least in Italy)

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1. Helicopter Killing (Via Joi)
This is not a computer game. Description on demand media
Link to Bittorrent file

2. Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam in 1983 (via Indymedia or The national security archive)
Link to wmv file
Saddam’s process will be interesting.

3. 14 spots against bush created by volunteers at bushin30seconds (via New Global Vision)
Link to page Link to Quicktime file

Microsoft: “don’t click on links!”

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noIE.gif (Via BoingBoing) Microsoft’s crapware browser, Explorer, has more security vulnerabilities than my block has dope-dealers, but this is ridiculous. MSFT now advises its users to not click links, but rather to type them in by hand:
Micro$oft says:The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER.

It’s like if a door constructor would say: “Since we are not able to make good doors, don’t touch the handle because you could get hurted”. In a competitive market, this productor would be out of the market in few seconds.

The alternative? Easy! Download Mozilla or Firebird.
Mozilla is a wonderful browser, is Free Software (Free as in Freedom) and works perfectly also on M$Windows.
Note also that Mozilla has now a global usage share of 1.8% and is increasing.

SongBuddy and Decentralized Music

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Yes, YASN (Yet Another Social Network). Have you noticed that Add as a friend is the most common link in websites created these days?
Anyway, this time we have SongBuddy. Social software + online music: an explosive pair!
SongBuddy is a new way to find music that’s already available on the Internet. By finding songs on bands’ and labels’ sites and sharing the address of those songs with your friends, you can explore music you’ll love that you wouldn’t hear anywhere else. So sign up, make some friends and list some music. You won’t even need to install any software, SongBuddy works with your current media player.
Here my profile.
SongBuddy also produces a FOAF file representing your friends and uses the MusicBrainz RDF namespace.
The term of service is also very good!
Unless otherwise specified, all content on this site is copyright SongBuddy LLC. You may use the data on this site under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0 Creative Commons license.

Another similar site worth mentioning is Webjay by Lucas Gonze but I haven’t had time to try it yet.

This post also appears on the open channel playlistlogging

World Economic Forum Davos 2004 included a session on blogs

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Even if I’m more interested in the World Social Forum 2004 (see also on Rediff), it is worth noting that the World Economic Forum 2004 included a session on blogs!

It is good or bad that this group of people started to speak in public about blogs? We’ll see but I’m very unconfident.

Read more on Whiskey Bar or read some quotes I extracted from the article (since its content is released under a Creative Commons licence, it is perfectly legal to reproduce it here and to share it):
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Google Social Networking

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I have seen on Many-to-Many that there is a new social networking service, Orkut.com.
The site states that the service is in affiliation with Google.
Orkut.com was created by Orkut Buyukkokten, who works for Google. Actually, what is fantastic about Google is that this company invites its engineers to spend one day a week on personal projects! Read more on Cnet.

Since joining Orkut.com is by invitation only, I ask to everyone that is already in to invite me. Thanks.
Membership to orkut is by invitation only.
If you have a friend who’s a member of orkut, have them invite you to join.

UPDATE: I got an invitation by Jeremy. I’ll post more about how Orkut looks from inside soon. In the meantime, if you want to be my “friend”, just ask! ;-)