Yearly Archives: 2008

Facebook Opensource, license and motivations to contribute

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Facebook is open source! This is an incredibly good news.
The license they chose is interesting.

Facebook Open Platform (except for the FBML parser) is licensed under a Common Public Attribution License (CPAL), which follows the Mozilla Public License (MPL) with two additions:
1. That you include attribution to Facebook on any modifications.
2. That network deployment, or making modifications available over the network, counts as distribution, which makes the license appropriate for Web services.

I would have bet for an Affero GPL instead, what is the difference and why did they choose CPAL instead of AGPL?

About motivation, well, t-shirts ;)

If you’d like to contribute to Facebook Open Platform, please sign and return our Contribution Agreement. We’ll evaluate any submitted patches or features to decide whether they’d be strong inclusions into the overall Facebook Open Platform release. If we incorporate your changes, we’ll send you a t-shirt!

International Forum on Enterprise2.0, June 25th 2008, Varese

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Enterprise 2.0 comes to Italy: the International Forum

My friend Emanuele Quintarelli organized an amazing International Forum on Enterprise2.0, June 25th 2008, in Varese. Participation is free but you have to register.
The programme looks very interesting and every speech will be available both in English and in Italian.

Enterprise 2.0 has been widely recognized as a radical shift in the way organizations work. A mean for improving performance, reducing costs, moving towards an informal way of learning, supporting innovation and building engagement and motivation.
Collaborative, informal, emerging models – wikis, blogs, social networks, tagging, prediction markets – have been disseminating passion and a new mindset all over the world, opening up unexpected sources of competitive advantage. Innovation breaks down old paradigms and marks a path of change from: top-down to distributed approaches, from closed to open and interconnected models, from rigid control to flexibility and adaptivity, from a hierarchical to a starfish-like organization.

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Video and slides of sci.bzaar.net merged with Omnisio

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Thanks to David Orban I discovered Omnisio and so I took a chance to merge my slides with the video Gianandrea recorded during my sci(bzaar)net presentation.
Using Omnisio is very easy, you just provide the URL of a video online and the URL of slides on slideshare.net and then you can optionally synchronize slides with video by drag and drop.
You can see my video/slides on omnisio or embedded here below. Slides are in English but I spoke in Italian.
</p> <div><a href='http://www.omnisio.com'>Share and annotate your videos</a> with Omnisio!</div> <p>

Help translate the video “Mandela describes the concept of Ubuntu”

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I’m going to speak about Ubuntu this afternoon, so I thought I might show the 1 minute, 37 seconds video in which Nelson Mandela describes the concept of Ubuntu. In order to make it easier to understand it I added English subtitles using dotsub.com, a great Web site in which anyone can help translating a video in his own language. Please help in translating the video in your language and spread the concept of Ubuntu! It is easy and fun!

UPDATE: I added the subtitles in Italian as well.
I hope I didn’t violate the license. I was not able to find the license in the Ubuntu site. According to wikipedia, the video is copyright of Canonical, Ltd. released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 and I uploaded the video on dotsub under this license. Let me know if the license is different. Note that the video file is in the Ubuntu CD which you are allowed to make copies of and share it, but I’m not that good with licenses to understand what this means.
Anyway, help in translating the video in your language and spread the concept of Ubuntu!

Amazing talk by Bernardo Huberman: attention, opinions, wikipedia, sell your friends, cooperation, SlimVirgin, recommendations, Paris Hilton, tags, sex, wow, wow, wow!

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Today I attended an amazing presentation by Bernardo Huberman, director of the Information Dynamics Laboratory at HP Labs, titled “Social Dynamics in the Age of the Web”. Below the roughly editing notes I took during the amazing presentation. They are not intended to represent what Bernardo said but just to give you (me!) some pointers.

His first slide was just a painting by Bruegel “Village Feast” and discussed about “how sociologists would try to understand the situation, the relationships in the village” and how this would take a lot of time! He also cited some research about 4 widows in a village in Norway who were “studied” by a researcher for 5 years.
The alternative we have now is called Web/Internet and allows to collect tons of social information very easily, but beware, you lose a lot of details!

Then he brought up the issue of “attention” (You put things there (Youtube, Flickr, …) because you think someone is going to read it…)
Cited his paper “Assessing the Value of Coooperation in Wikipedia”. Question: “How good is Wikipedia (on average)?” Not interested in controversial articles. Predicting the number of edits a wikipedia page would get. Log-log distribution of edits on wikipedia pages.
Question: “the articles with lots of edits are the best ones?” “How to measure quality?” First approach: pagerank of page URL but not too representative of quality. Then got the Wikipedia featured articles.

Story about one of the most active editors SlimVirgin, there was even a “hunt” for understanding who SlimVergin is.

Attention: the economics of attention. Information is now plenty available. Information has now no value. Some time ago “give me information about a hotel in New York”, and you paid for this info. Now go on the web and find lots of info about hotels in New York. You cannot ask to be paid for this information now, but few years ago yes!
Instead attention has a lot of value now! Attention is what is scarse (at least online).
“Economics is actually the science of distribution of scarse resources.”
“All this scientific citation game is an attention game”.

“How do people compete for attention? Imagine if now there are other 3 people giving talk, then things becomes interesting!!!”
“Spam is a phenomena of trying to get attention.”

He studied Viral marketing on Amazon.com and showed us two very different recommendations networks. For a medical book, recommendations network very spread (almost random graph). For a Japanese graphic novel (manga), recommendations network very power-law (4 people (hubs!) recommended this book to everybody!!!)

Temporal dimension: How long it takes for recommendations to propagate in the social network?

Stimulation: novel stimula fades (if you get a spike in the finger after some time you feel a sort of basic pain but not the pain you felt in the beginning. You get used to it. When novelty fades we search for novel experiences. Paper: “Novelty and collective attention” (2007)
Hypo: attention decays in time as a strecthed exponential
There is a phase transition (Bernardo is a physicist): a critical value in which prioritizing by novelty is ok but then prioritizing by number of diggs (he studied novelty and ranking on digg.com)

The second part was about opinions. Q: How epinions form and evolve?
Salomon Ash: group polarization. The basic idea at that time was “discussion in the agora will bring toward the middle, not towards the extremes”. But his experiment invalidated this common perception.
And then Cass Sunstein (which I love!), read Republic.com!

Is there group polarization online or not? It depends … on cost of providing your opinion.
On Jyte.com it is just a yes or no: costless! –> extremes! group polarization!
Amazon reviews are costly (take time to write them!) –> no group polarization.

Why? Possible explanation: over time, you give reviews only if you have a possibility of impacting the average, only if you disagree with the consensus already reached! He studied Amazon and IMDB.
Suggestion he gave to Amazon: “Want to produce good reviews for a book? Start putting bad reviews for that book and people will flock to give their (opposite) opinion!!!”
He is staudying right now ratings on Youtube over time.

Comparing ratings with reviews and ratings without reviews on Amazon!!!
If you write reviews (costly), you tend to disagree with the average (low ratings for movies with high average, and viceversa)

Question: people behave differently in online environments?
Yes but the new media is sucking in a lot of people, especially young people … we’re moving there, wikipedia is a phenomena you cannot deny.

“We are going back to the village, but the village is not defined by physicality” (tribes).

He told us that now you can selling your friends on facebook, on ebay!!!! You can go on Ebay and sell there your Facebook friends!!!
My personal comment: “this is what I call Social capital!!!” ;)
A quick search gave me sellyourfriends.com, the Facebook application which I added to my Facebook profile or read what blonde2.0 has to say about (blonde2.0, great! ;-)

“Most people in myspace don’t even know about wikipedia”

“Quality and attention are not correlated”. Paris Hilton is an attention genius, she nows what is novel in people’s mind. The only reason for which paris is famous is that she is famous. So attention is not correlated with quality.

I asked him how he does see science in 30 years. There will be no more scientists by profession because everybody will be a scientists (blogger baiscally)? He said he believes there will be even more need for scientists because specialized knowledge is hard.
Well, persoanlly I think that, since before we were saying people compete for attention and you are more likely to get attention for short, catchy, bursty sentences (possibly with the word “sex” in it), a stupid idea just flashed into my mind so why not writing it in this chaotic post? “Is there space for a sciencetwitter?!? Divulgate your research in less tha 150 characters!” At least it could be fun! ;) Spreading it to my sci.bzaar.net pals.

Somehow Orkut became a trash site for brazilians (not his words), Google woould have liked to make it a facebook of course, so, if google was not able to control the eveolution of a social network, well, this means it is not easy at all!!!

Last note, I think I overexxagerated with the tags in the title, would “sex”, “virgin”, “Paris” make this post the most accessed? We’ll see …

WebValley: young minds of Trentino for a summer of collaboration and investigation

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WebValley is the FBK-IRST summer school for dissemination of interdisciplinary scientific research. The selection is now open so, if you are a student, you can apply for WebValley 2008.
The WebValley formula is to create a team of enthusiast and motivated high school students (18 y) tutored by IRST researchers. The team accepts a challenge by a scientist collaborator from Ecology, Biology or Social Sciences, and develops in 3 weeks a new web-based prototype for data analysis and management. Also characteristic of the WebValley formula is that the project activities are developed mostly by group work, and that they are located in a high-tech lab but in a small size Alpine village, to show that web access may support new types of innovative actions also in the periphery. The project is run by about 20 students and 3 resident tutors, supported by junior researchers and expert programmers from IRST and other experts in the field.
I’ve the honour to be one of the tutors and I’m really looking forward for this experience.
This year, we accepted the challenge from OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) and from June 23th to July 12th 2008 we will study how new Web technologies can be used in order to measure and pursue the progress of societies, with the goal of allowing people to make sense of social indicators and pushing a well-informed use of statistics in evaluation of public decisions. WebValley 2008 is a pilot project in the Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies. We look forward for the challenge and the opportunity!

Did I mention that the selection is now open and you can apply?

Below a video from a 2-days meeting we recently had at Centrale Fies, a terribly cool ex hydroelectric plant now used for events and performances, with all the past students (the project is ongoing since some years) but there are more videos. as well.