In the following some comments about the Program of the fifth day.
[some people asked me where they can find the slides, actually all of them should appear on the school page but at the moment only a few are there. I think/hope they will appear in the following days]
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In the following some comments about the Program of the forth day.
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In the following some comments about the Program of the third day.
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Some weeks ago, Tantek was introducing a new microformat hReview.
We are pleased to announce the first public draft (v0.1) of hReview, jointly co-authored by representatives from America Online, CommerceNet Labs, Microsoft, Six Apart, Technorati, and Yahoo!. hReview is an open microformat standard for publishing and indexing distributed reviews on the Web. This standard enables users to contribute, identify, and aggregate review content on their own web sites and blogs as well as on community sites.
I didn’t have time yet to dig into it but it is good that they analyzed previous attempts (I was trying to use RVW by Alf Eaton and to keep my list on Allconsuming but I didn’t put too much effort into this) and that they ask for Feedback; almost all the links are to Wikipages so you can edit them directly there.
In general I really appreciate the work of Technorati (I also wrote a paper backing their proposal of VoteLinks, submitted to Web Intelligence 2005: “Page-reRank: using trusted links to re-rank authority” (pdf)).
Some other link I’ll try to digest later on: jluster on hreview, hreview on technorati, hreview on del.icio.us, organizedshopping on hreview, adriancuthbert suggested to use this_is_an_hreview as common tag (tagspace?).
It would be great to have this format widely adopted so that the amount of decentralized published reviews will become soon huge and I will have a large amount a data for what I’m working on in my PhD: Trust-aware decentralized Recommender Systems. If interested, check my (a bit outdated) PhD proposal at my papers page.
Today during the lectures I was falling asleep some times. And you know what was waking me up everytime? The lecturer saying my name! Yes, like in primary schools!
But actually they were not saying “paolo” but “powerlaw”. I don’t know the phonetic alphabet so I cannot write it but if you try to pronounce it very fast you will see how much they sound the same.
In the following some comments about the Program of the second day.
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Wikimania 2005: The First International Wikimedia Conference will be held in Frankfurt am Main, Germany from 4 August 2005 to 8 August 2005.
Original research is welcome, but not required. Be bold in your submissions! Wikimania is meant to be both a scientific conference and a social event. (from WikiMania Call4Papers).
I’m thinking about going. By chance, can you host me during these days in Frankfurt?
Social Capital and Social Networks – Bridging Boundaries conference seems interesting. Moreover there is no registration fee and Junior scholars, graduate students and assistant professors, are invited to apply to attend the conference and receive lodging, meals, and up to $400 in travel expenses. The application deadline was May 5, 2005 (oops). I cannot make it but if you are in US, it is worth checking it.
I’m thinking about writing a book on Trust Metrics, or maybe about Trust Metrics and Recommender Systems. (I need to write my PhD thesis anyway so if I can get it published, this is a plus). Well, a search inside-books on Amazon for “trust metric” reveals this is not a too covered topic. Good. Do you have any suggestion? Publisher, topics, whatever. Anyway being able to search inside (almost) every book in one second is astonishing, sometimes I forget about how astonishing the Web is…
I forgot about another paper I wrote: Learning Contextualised Weblog Topics (pdf) will be presented at WWW 2005 2nd Annual Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics in Chiba, Japan, May 10th 2005. My boss was going to WWW2005 for presenting another paper and so we decided to submit our ongoing work to this workshop to get some feedback. We are still working with the system but we should be ready for prime time soon enough … stay tuned!
[I would have loved to meet Ethan Zuckerman that is the invited speaker at this workshop and whose work on media attention is just delicious. (I even proposed to help him in coding something for monitoring the Italian media world but it’s too bad I’m so lazy)]
If you like, check the paper Learning Contextualised Weblog Topics (pdf)
Abstract: In this paper, we examine how a topic-centric view of the Blogosphere can be created. We characterise the problems in aligning similar concepts created by a set of distributed, autonomous users and describe current iniatives to solve the problem. We introduce the Tagsocratic project, a novel initiave to solve the concept alignment problem using techniques derived from research in language acquisition among distributed, autonomous agents.