Vanessa Sabino » information

Information in Bb

Bani — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 02:50:34 +0000

Programmer Day

Bani — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 17:59:44 +0000

Microblogging: is there an alternative to Twitter?

Bani — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 02:47:23 +0000

After the recent attacks that have caused a major downtime on Twitter, followed by many user accounts being compromised, I was wondering if there was a good alternative to Twitter.

In the past I had tried to use Jaiku, and I’ve considered it much better than Twitter feature-wise. Integration with IM and grouping of replies were the two main advantages of their system in my opinion. Channels are also a good idea, but they way it was implemented didn’t make it much better than the tag system used on Twitter. The one real drawback of Jaiku was that my most of my friends weren’t there. And they didn’t want to start using it because most of their friends (who are pretty much the same people) weren’t there. I’ve never been able to overcome this initial obstacle and get a critical mass of my friends in the system so that the others would also join. I was hoping that the Google acquisition would be more influential than I was, but when they released the news that they wouldn’t invest directly on the system, I gave up.

Now Meme. At first, it looks great, you don’t have the often annoying limit of 140 characters, and it is much easier to share pictures and videos. And then you are suddenly struck by the meaning of an image is worth a thousand words. Yes, they are. And when you have your timeline filled with them, there is no space left for anything else. Mere words just won’t draw your attention in the middle of them. It is overwhelming and people aren’t encouraged to contribute with something new because they are too busy consuming what is already there. With few exceptions, my friends can’t draw or make fancy videos. Most of those funny pics and videos I’ll forget moments after I see them. They aren’t personal and they won’t start an interesting conversation. Meme is a very interesting concept on its own, but it doesn’t serve the same purpose as Twitter. It is more like our generation’s replacement for those PowerPoints sent by e-mail.

So let’s get back to something in which the words matter. If you want to share a video, you just send a shortened URL with a brief description. Just like Twitter. But now I’m talking about Identi.ca. They take free software ideas seriously. They implement the OpenMicroBlogging protocol, their software is under AGPLv3 and content becomes Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. You can also post messages using a Jabber client. Apart from that, it is pretty much like Twitter. Unfortunately, that means it’d be hard to convince the average Twitter user that there is a reason to make the move. And without the right people, no reason is good enough to be there.

Where can we find the people, then? Well, when you are looking for something, Google can help! But this time we are not talking about the search engine, Google Reader is what we are interested in. What has started just as a RSS reader, today is much more than that. First you could share links, then links with your own comments, and now you can even add the comments without any link, just like in a microblog! You can share pages with images and videos, but the compact view makes it easy for people to scan through all the content and choose what they want to see. And there is the wonderful “Mark all as read” link that can save you a lot of time in the mornings. But although it has the features of a microblogging service, right now I don’t see people using it as such.

There is also Facebook, but the interface is so cluttered and clumsy that I don’t even think it is worth mentioning in a microblogging post. However, yesterday they brought FriendFeed, so we may have some interesting news coming up.

With that said, I leave the question to the reader*: is there an alternative to Twitter?

* (old trick learned from math books)

Blogging

Bani — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:19:00 +0000

Since I’ve read these slides by Jyri Engeström at an OpenSocial meeting I’ve been thinking if writing shorter and more frequent blogs would be the right way to go.
At the moment I write at two blogs and one microblog. But I also have five inactive blogs.
Here I try to discuss ideas that some people (including me) are really interested in thinking about a little further, to understand what is going on in the environment around us and how it makes a difference in our lives, so that maybe we can shape the future to our best interest. The posts usually have a minimum length so that the ideas can be expressed with a beginning, middle and end. At my other blog I write short news on a more general and popular theme, geek stuff. If I count the number of words written at each blog, they are more or less the same, although at my other blog they are spread in a larger number of posts.
Now, let’s see some numbers from Google Analytics. For the blog with shorter posts I have four times the number of visitors I have here, but the average time on site is exactly the same. That almost makes me think I should focus on writing shorter posts with more frequency. On the other hand, the feedback I get from the readers of this blog is much more insightful. So I’d be trading quantity over quality. And I don’t want to do that.
However, I can’t say there is a linear function between the length of the posts and the value it adds to my own life. When it comes to microblogging, if I interact with the right community of people I can extract useful information while not spending too much time writing or filtering a flood of posts.
Of course, considering that the content of my blogs are very different from each other and that my audiende is very limited I can’t really generalize my findings. But one thing that every blogger should keep in mind is who is the target audience, what they expect from you, and what you expect from them.

Wiki Books

Bani — Tue, 27 May 2008 04:20:00 +0000

Once Alexander Pope wrote

Forever reading, never to be read

That is what is happening here. Lately I’ve been too busy reading so I didn’t have time to write on this blog.

But I’d like to share with you some books written collaboratively that are worth reading:

- The Wealth of the Networks

- Code 2.0

- Wikinomics Playbook

Meta-info

Bani — Thu, 08 May 2008 02:15:00 +0000

I’ll use this post to explain about the title: Iridescence is an optical phenomenon in which the color seen in a surface changes according to the angle of view. This means that when more than one person is looking at the same thing from different perspectives they can be seeing different colors. This is how the stuff I plan to write about here works: different people see each project by their own point of view and contribute to it in a holistic way, creating a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. The name Iridescence is based on the Iris character from the Greek mythology, a messenger who travelled around bringing news to the mortals, and as such can represent the communication power of the Internet.

Update: change of plans, this blog isn’t moving anywhere for now.

Navigating the Ocean of Information – Past, Present and Future

Bani — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 02:20:00 +0000

In 1945, Vannevar Bush, considered the grandfather of hypertext, was already concerned about the information explosion in which we live today. In his essay As We May Think he wrote: “The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.”

Since then, with the emergence of the Internet and the evolution of the search engines, great progress has been made in this area. In the beginning, when the available information was very limited, a simple pattern matching to search for words was enough to return to the users the relevant documents. Because the number of documents was small, the user was able to rapidly inspect the results and decide if he had found the information he was looking for or not.

As more information was added to the world wide web, more advanced techniques to rank search results were needed, since it was no longer viable for the user to analyze all documents that contained the keyword. Many heuristics are used to try to determine the relevance of a document in relation to a keyword, such as its presence in the title of the page, the number of times it appears divided by the total number of words, the distance between the searched terms in a document, etc. In the same manner, information external to the document is also used to determine its relevance, such as anchor texts of other sites that link to it.

Ranking algorithms that take better advantage of external information tend to present better results. With the increasing volume of information available, companies desire better visibility in search engines results, a fact which gave birth to the area called Search Engine Optimization. The information contained inside a document is easily manipulated, therefore it is easy for a company to create a site with poor quality content that appears among the first results of specific queries. On the other hand, changing the relative importance that other people attribute to a site is more difficult. This led search engines to start using algorithms that give more weight to pages linked to by other important pages, the most famous algorithm being PageRank developed by the Google founders. In this case, the relevance of a link is determined through a collaborative production, in which all sites in the search engine database participate, lowering the impact that local optimization techniques could have in the global results, bringing better results to all of the users of the search engine.

Yet, specialists in Search Engine Optimization develop techniques to try to cheat even the more advanced algorithms by, for instance, buying several domains that link to each other, or paying sites with high visibility to include links to their sites. It is a constant war between search engines and spammers, the former trying to improve their algorithms and increase their computation power, while the latter study new ways to increase the visibility of their sites.

However, a new model to determine what is interesting in the Internet has been gaining more space in the last years. Instead of leaving the work to determine the relevance of a document solely to an algorithm that makes a superficial analysis of the whole Internet production, communities of people interested in the subject adopt this task, constantly providing and updating data about the quality of the documents. Many people believe this will be the future of the search engines. One such example is Wikia.

But how will people and algorithms interact, in some sort of Human-based computation, to achieve the best results? This question is far from a definitive answer, but rests upon the many people interested in working together for a solution.

Blog 2.0

Bani — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 20:47:00 +0000

This will be my second attempt of writing a blog in English.