From the stage of web2.0 Expo 2008 in San Francisco, Clay
Shirky talks about the social revolution carried by
web2.0 into contemporary society, from TV to Wikipedia and World of Warcraft.
And twitter still had to be globally recognized, in 2008.
Original video file and related discussion here
(courtesy of blip.tv). Score: 5 (insightful)
For those who understand italian, I’ve just published
an article on therubymine.com on the
upcoming Ruby on Rails framework release,
version 3.0: the big news is the merger with another ruby web framework, merb.
The sad conclusion: “humans are such herd animals”
The good conclusion: “virality has always existed, it’s not an invention
of Web2.0. Social networking is just a powerful tool for everyone that wants to
change the world”
The mean conclusion: “how much does it take to get people from their
computers to the real world after a virtual ‘heads up’ by some ‘dancing man’?”
Take the whole social environment, utterly unprepared to the media \(r)evolution happening in the last years, and let the hackers observe and talk/write about it. Bring in the lawyers, and let them recognize that “Houston! We’ve got a problem!”, whilst also they define it via lawspeak. Ask questions, and participate to interesting debates.
Now, deliver the 2007 big brother award to the Google Representative, let the sun dive in the hills, add a noticeable amount of Tuscany red wine, and get ready for the next day. Let the paranoia flow, while the hackers show how you can be traced and found via the cellular network and spied via wifi-networked cameras placed there for your safety.
We’re connected. We’re utterly connected. We’re sharing, we’re creating multiple identities, we’re exaggerating and becoming addicted, we’re earning money (maybe) from it, and if on one side we’re opening our minds to different cultures and points of view, on the other we’re just narrowing our visions because we find only the informations we search for, treating the Internet as a soft surrogate of the TV, annihilating critical thought, and even worse, demonizing the ‘net (not in the unix meaning of the term) because of the statements of some «politicians», forgetting that everything men have built in history are tools, and any problem tools cause it’s just a matter of how other men actually use them, not the tools themselves.
Of course kill 222 ; pppd call dsl-provider doesn’t work. YUCK. Let’s put a router in front of it.. configure, portforward, and start over.. then fdisk /dev/hdc to recreate partitions structure on the new hard disk, mkfs.xfs on all the new partitions, mount /dev/hdcX /target, pax -r -w -p e /{bin,boot,dev,etc,home,initrd,lib,media,root,sbin,srv,tmp,usr,var} /target… wait a lot for the copy to complete because of damaged sectors on the source hard disk, chroot /target, vi /etc/lilo.conf and substitute boot=/dev/hda with boot=/dev/hdc, run lilo -v while in the chroot verify /etc/fstab, and finally shutdown to remove the faulty disk, and boot again.. restoring lilo.conf. yay!
«Women! The knife grinder is here!» – Apart from funny jokes ;) the italian Apple Store together with Girl Geek Dinners Roma organized on May 16, 2009, a workshop about mobile lifestyle (focusing on the iPhone, of course).
Let’s start from the beginning: what are the Girl Geek Dinners? Linda explained to the audience (nearly 20 people) that a geek is a person passionate about technology in a broader sense: the GGD is a group devoted to aggregate women interested about the internet, new medias and technologic lifestyles. Women are often underestimated in geek communities, and this embarassing clichè generated a lot ofdiscussion in the past, and it’s still unsolved (in my opinion).
The GGD italian group was born in 2007 in Milan, and then arrived to Rome in 2008, and is also present in Bologna and in the Marche and Emilia-Romagna states.
So, the GGD group tries to generate a “critical mass” of geek women, to abolish a stereotype that “computer programmers / power users” are only men: in GGD events boys listen and girls talk, then they blog, exchange vCards (and PGP keys, I’d guess ;) and in general try to harness women power and skills in the field of the computer industry. Networking and a dive into social media is the most efficient way nowadays to reach a great audience, and to build rapidly the aforementioned critical mass: that’s why the GGDs event was focused on social mobile applications and general productivity ones. Presented by two official Apple Trainers (Simona and Riccardo), the workshop started @11.30 AM and lasted nearly one hour.
This is the second part of my recap of the nnsquad.it convention held in Rome on May 14,
2009, and hosted by the ICT consultants foundation Fondazione Ugo Bordoni.
In the first
part I described the morning session, dedicated to the definition of
Network neutrality, and how global economics can cope with it. The afternoon
was dedicated to more technical talks, and I had the occasion to hear telcos
spokesmen remarks over the current situation and possible future
developments.
The first speech started at 2.15PM and was held by
Prof. Vittorio
Trecordi (slides available here). He
introduced it by stating that net neutrality could possibly contrast with the
economic development and security assessment, because of the wiretapping needed
for the latter, tap that is strongly against the individual freedom to
communicate.
Strangely (or maybe not) enough, no mention was made to current ways to
bypass both wiretapping and localization of communicating peers: I’m
referring to the tor project, the most known
bastion that guarantees privacy and is currently used by
journalists working in "hot" areas, among many others.
Another point about legislation is that it isn’t the same in all
countries, althought the Internet is spread all over the world; moreover we
should define on what networks we should assess neutrality, because not
necessarily an IP network is connected to the Internet (think about ISP-owned walled gardens).
Also, again on the Quality of Service: Trecordi stated the Internet
succeeded because of its "hourglass model" and “the capability
to decouple communications services and network infrastructure”, but QoS
requirements (e.g. for VoIP) stress the protocol stack pile, moreover where the
network pipes are “overbooked”. Furthermore, even overprovisioning
fails, because of the decentralized architecture of the Internet, and
bottlenecks are mainly located in interconnection points between ISPs.
The preface looked pretty good: technicians, Ph.Ds,
telco spokesmen and politicians speaking about the internet, its inborn
freedom, and how to cope with this in a society where security measures are constantly increasing, and as such
contrast in a virtual world with no barriers whatsoever. Furthermore,
it’s a virtual arena in which everything can be free, not only information, and people is
becoming accustomed to it.
The first speech was held by prof. Kenneth Carter, directly from the
columbia university, and served as a broad introduction about the matters that
were explored (and sometimes repeated) through the day. In a nutshell, the big
question is: might ISPs offer different degrees of performance over different
sites (or charge for better performances), permit/block/surcharge access to
certain sites or via certain devices?
Filtering access to network services is a common practice over the internet,
as is filtering content, and not necessarily bad: think about spam filters to
prevent UCE and NAP filters
to prevent and mitigate DDOS attacks, or
antivirii/IDS [systems]. Also tiered service plans, where you get lower latency
or wider upload bandwidth if you pay more, are acceptable, because
“quality of service” isn’t an absolute value: it depends by
the kind of services the user uses. And in the majority of cases, he/she
doesn’t grasp (or even need to) the concepts behind them.
This is my recap of the first italian facebook developer garage,
held in milan on April 23, 2009,
and hosted by mikamai. the morning has been
dedicated to developer sessions, the afternoon to marketing & communication
ones. some videos of the event are available here.
Later I had the occasion to ask James about
whether FB was inclined or not to adopt OpenID
as an authentication method: he said that connect and OpenID both allow users
to have unique login credentials to access multiple sites, but connect also
allows to exploit the power of facebook social graph to allow users to
communicate and share information. so, the short answer is “no”.
Then I proposed him to implement OpenID on FB itself, so that connect could
become really a superset of openID, but he said that “as a company, these
are tough decisions I could not give an answer right now”. Fair enough
:).
UPDATE: on April 27th
2009, techcrunch reports they heard that Facebook will embrace
OpenID as a mean to authenticate users. Great news, looking forward for an
official statement from Facebook! :)
The second talk was held by Vincenzo
Acinapura, who described the basic means to create an application on the
facebook platform. He explored the technologies behind it (XFBML, FQL, FBJS), the main integration
points whitin the platform (notifications, publisher, ...), and he showed
sample code to implement some of the most used FBML
tags (fb:comments, fb:share, fb:feed, and so on). He
eventually remembered the importance of automating the deploy of applications,
and suggested to use capistrano to achieve
it.
I’m searching for a new pet. We already have two
lovely cats, but after feeling how alive a
house can be with many pets (after a beautiful night @ il
quadrato
mansion), I’m thinking about having another one to grow and love.
But, what kind of geek am I, if I don’t add a nerdy bit to it? So, after the
brain twitter interface about
which we talked about so
muchin the last
days,
this evening a quite random funny thought has stumbled into my mind: what about
getting a grey parrot, grow
it, learn it to talk, and letting him .. well, tweet his words using a
speech recognition system put right aside its bar and linked to a twitter
account? How weird would that be?! :D
Thinking deeply, the weirdest thing is that in 2009, a tweeting parrot makes me
think about a “parrot with access to twitter” .. and not a bird emitting its
natural verse. Am I overloaded by this social media thingie? Should I take some
vacation?
