subject.cz/josef

I like this - aMap is a new service, allowing you to create an embeddable widget for arguing with others on any topic you like.

How does it work? You state a problem/question and your opinion/answer. The system then allows you to support your opinion by ‘arms’ formed by main and supportive arguments. The outcome is a mindmap, wrapped in a pretty good-looking, embeddable (flash) widget you can post anywhere on the Web. Others then can use this widget to argue with you in a structured manner.

The service was created by Delib which is supposed to be an Online Opinion Research and Public Consultation company and a part of the Team Rubber. I am just wondering what they do with all the (structured) data they collect, apart from printing aMap books.

Check out my first aMap below. I have chosen a bit more serious topic (content) as a contrast to the cartoonish L&F of the widget (form). Of course I hope I am wrong…

Is this a vulgar viral campaign promoting the Sony brand? Like ’spread your brand as much as you can no matter of the consequences’ ?

Definitely not, but it’s quite funny, especially because it involves serious-looking anchorman wearing tie and swearing as hell!

Got this via twitter

Got this from one Czech Economy blog - the cat in video below really loves Czech Crowns (CZK), and seems to be uninterested in USD… Does it mean something?

I got stuck in the lift this morning and it was not for the first time during the last few weeks. We have a nice, modern lift in the appartment building where I live. It has a fancy dashboard, with 2-digit display. Whenever you touch a button, it responds with ‘beep’. You can even enter negative numbers in there (there are 4 floors above the ground and 2 beneath). If you enter a number out of the range (like -3) the display shows ‘Er’ (means Error) and patiently awaits your next command. Doors open and close automatically. There has to be a computer in it.

Today, I was in my usual morning rush. I got into cabin and pressed the ‘0′ button, because I wanted to go to the ground floor. The ‘0′ appeared on the display, the computer responded with ‘beep’ and the doors closed as usual. I was expecting the lift to start moving down, but that’s not what the computer wanted. He rather opened the doors again and then he closed them. He repeated this several times and then he closed the doors for the last time and turned off the display. I was standing there, trying to press the buttons. Nothing. No beeps. The computer obviously crashed and I got stuck in there.

After several minutes, the computer went back on, judging from the buttons which I was punching with my fist at that time started to beep again. I got out of the berserk mode and carefully pressed ‘0′ again. The lift has started to move. I was saved.

In the previous house where I lived, there was a also a lift. It was quite an old-fashioned lift. You had to manually close the doors and when you pressed the button, it didn’t play any sound - it simply started moving. You couldn’t enter a number which would be outside of range, because each floor in the building had it’s own, unique button. I used to be living there for about 20 years. I remember the lift not working like 5 times during that whole period. It had no display, no beeps, no computers. 99,9999999% uptime. That was cool.

Mankind has been using elevators for centuries . There were no computers in them and it was good. In the beginning, some of these lifts may have killed a few people, but we have learned how to make them better, safer and more reliable with less and less casaulties every year. Everything worked just fine.
Then, at the very end of 2nd millenium, someone highly incompetent but responsible for innovation in some unnamed elevator company has decided, that adding a computer into their high-tech product line may be a cool idea. Since then, computer-enhanced lifts have flooded the market.
I hope that guy has died by hunger, stuck for weeks in one of his frankenstein elevators.

Staring today, I am changing my ‘One line Bio’. I am adding ‘I hate computers’ to it. Because I really do. Not all computers, you know? Only those, which are somewhere where they shouldn’t be, where they don’t belong to. Like unwanted visitors - sitting on a chair, drinking your coffee, talking crap and stealing your precious time. Hours of your precious time. Days of your precious time. Shortening your lives, piece by piece, eating your nerves.

I hate computers in elevators.

Here is another comment on another ongoing discussion in the blogosphere, this time around RW/W’s Marshall Kirkpatrick’s “controversial” article about the death of Enterprise RSS market. Neville Hobson got involved as well and more will probably follow soon.

Marshall is arguing, that the enterprise market for RSS is dead and most of the companies which have been offering RSS readers seem to be failing and not making money.  But what is the ‘Enterprise RSS market’? Market of RSS readers or market of feed readers? The first one may be dead, while the latter one is on the verge of success. But let’s start from the bottom…

I think there is a bit of misunderstanding of what RSS really is. Let’s admit it - RSS is a protocol. It’s nothing more, than just an XML dialect, used for expressing streams of updates of some (web) resource. These streams are called feeds. Read more on wikipedia if you don’t believe me. RSS is a protocol, enabling the web-based, asynchronous communication based on the subscription model - if you for example find this blog interesting, you can subscribe to its feed .

Since the beginning, several companies have been trying to make money on feeds and all those various feed reader makers (like the ones Marshall is mentioning in his article) are among them. Yes, some of these companies may be dead, but IMHO for a reason which is completely different to the ones currently discussed. The reason for their failuer is competition in the form of various social networking sites.

The thing is, that it’s not about the RSS as such (or Atom for that matter), which IMO REALLY is too technical term. RSS/Atom are just protocols enabling people to communicate in an asynchronous way. It’s more about the utilization of feeds and subscription model - and these do not seem to be dead to me! Just look on facebook or twitter. They are all about the asynchronous communication. They are all about following (subscribing to) each other’s feeds! By making friends with someone on facebook, you subscribe to his/her updates and once you do that., you will start receiving them into your News Feed on your homepage and you don’t care about the protocol behind the curtain.

Simply put - feeds and asynchronous communication got  much better productized through social networking sites than through the feed urls presented as those silly icons. Most of today users of social networks don’t care about RSS, but they do care about News Feeds in their social networks. The same is IMO valid for the enterprises which seem to be adopting social networking technonologies much better, than the original, old-fashioned RSS-based ‘copy-this url-into-your-feed-reader’ model.

Quite recently, some of the world’s best bloggers (Note: ‘best’ in the ‘number of readers’ metrics) were involved in quite an emotional discussion about improving the twitter search by adding some notion of author’s equity (TechCrunch, Scoble, Scoble, TechCrunch and TechCrunch again).

Two equity metrics were discussed so far:

1. Number of followers the author has.
   
2. Number of retweets for an individual tweet.
   

As Scoble rightly pointed out, deriving the importance of tweets by number of followers is tricky, mostly because it doesn’t express author’s competency in a subject domain the concrete tweet is from/about. He is giving an example of himself tweeting about ’supply chain management’, which is certainly not the reason why most people follow him on twitter. He also rightly suggests to use the metadata (like retweets, favorites, links, clicks, reshares on the friendfeed,… etc.). However, all these solutions are just very basic and incomplete, as the problem is more general. It is IMO generally about measuring the quality of contributions to the community.

This is what the Community Equity (CEQ) is all about. Yes, we have it implemented in our internal SunSpace project, which is a content-centric wiki system with social networking features, but it could be very easilly applied to the asynchronous communication use case of twitter, friendfeed, blogs and possibly of the whole global social network as such.
It is however important to realize, that twitter is not a standalone service - it plays quite an important part in the ecosystem of myriads of various online services, where users create, share and discuss various types of content. Thus, measuring the quality of twitterers and their tweets could be done by the following simple semantic mashup of:

1. Author’s contributions to various content services, e.g. blog posts, videos on youtube, images on flickr, slides on slideshare, …, and yes, tweets on twitter. The more services are used, the better (=more accurate) the results.
   
2. Metadata related to these contributions, like ratings, comments, downloads, reuses, …, retweets, numbers of followers, and last but not least tags. Some of the metadata are more or less specific to the individual services - for example ratings are quite commonly used across different services, while retweets are specific to twitter-like ones only, etc.
   
3. Tags define topics and thus subject domains the contributions are from/about/related to.
   
4. CEQ service implementation(s), computing equity values for individual contributions, contributors and consequently tags (thus answering the question What is author’s expertize/competency in a given domain/topic?).
   CEQ implementation may be generally different for different (types of) services. In SunSpace, we currently have it for the document-centric wiki use case, where things like ratings, downloads, views and reuses are used as inputs for the computation. This relates to the metadata specific to different services mentioned above.
   This btw. means, that Scoble and others are actually discussing the meaning of metadata (like no. followers, retweets, etc.) in the context of the twitter service. Its obvious that there are not enough types metadata in twitter - for example no ratings and tags - and that’s why it needs to be mashed up with more services…
5. Search using CEQ values for filtering/ordering of search results.

We have already been working on making this part of the next SunSpace release rolling out sometime early this year. To have this fully working on the public web, full-featured semantic web with shared concept models and open social networks would be needed. And that won’t happen soon.
But it makes sense to start with small now - the discussion has already started, which is good. It would also be nice to allow users to tag and rate tweets. Forwarding (=reuse) of tweets may be another feature worth considering.
Btw. - did you know that CEQ will be open sourced and public soon?

Happy New Year to everyone reading this. Health is the most important thing, especially nowadays, when some are saying it’s the end of capitalism as we know it.

Apart from other things, I am planning to blog more in 2009…

I know that this post comes a bit late, but I couldn’t write it much earlier - I was busy. Shel Israel (apart from other things the author of well acclaimed Naked Conversations) did an interview with our very own Peter Reiser. In the interview, Peter explains what is the value of social networking technologies for the Enterprise and also shows a few screens from our CE2.0 system we have been working on during the last year or so. Watch the video below, or go to Fastcompany.tv Global Neighbourhoods Channel for other interesting stuff.

Last week I was in Salzburg, attending the Kiwi kick-off meeting. Kiwi (standing for Knowledge in a Wiki) is a Semantic Wiki project, funded by the European Union. It aims to research and to develop an advanced Semantic Wiki vision, which would help with knowledge management in knowledge-intensive organizations. The term ‘Knowledge management’ got compromised in the past, mostly thanks to solutions which didn’t work. This project should be different, because:

It involves several partners from all around the Europe, from both the academia and industry and Sun is one of them - we are serving as use-case providers. As we hope, this combination could help to give researchers working on the project enough ground for their ideas. One of the use-cases serving as a framework for the future research and development is knowledge management in Sun’s Open Source communities, particularily in the NetBeans community. You can find the list of participants and their descriptions at the Semantic Web Company Blog.

It aims to support social convention developed by people working in knowledge-intensive environments, rather than to expose them to fixed designs and workflows (which cannot be designed right and thus often need rework). This means applying wiki model not just on the system’s content (as in wikipedia), but also on the information architecture and presentation (as nowhere I have seen so far). The project aims to develop advanced text-extraction, reasoning, personalization and onthology management practices.

This all means, that rather than developing some traditional fixed system, the goal is to create a semantic social platform, which would shape and evolve based on the nature of the community using it. Bottom-up they call it.

At the end of this post, let me thank folks from Salzburg Research, who have organized this event. It was great - thanks!

I’ll be blogging about things related to the project from now on, so stay tunned.

Why do foreigners come to Prague? For historical monuments and buildings. And (of coruse) for (cheap and good) beer. But how cheap the beer really is?

You have probably seen a plenty of google-maps-based mashups already - google maps provides perhaps one of the most popular public web APIs. http://www.nelso.cz/mapa-cen-piva-v-praze/ is google-maps mashup, showing areas of prices of beer in Prague, in Czech Crowns (CZK). It nicely shows, that sometimes you can go just a few streets further and save quite a lot of money (depending on your drinking habits). This could come pretty handy especially for those, who need to save money now.