subject.cz/josef

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?

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…

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.

Trying to blog from an iGoogle gadget I’ve found just recently. I have been evaluating iGoogle gadgets lately and have found out, that there is no good TODO list! Or do I demand too much when I want a TODO list which would be in sync with my google calendar?

You have heard about it. 45 billions dollars are about to change their owner. There are various movements against it (including some Yahoo employees). ‘Microsoft is evil!’ say some. ‘I want internet and open source to kill Microsoft!’ shout the others. ‘I want Google to buy Yahoo and then to kill Microsoft!’ shout those, who (want to) believe in rumors.

I want Microsoft to buy Yahoo! - that’s what I am saying. And the exclamation mark at the end of that sentence is just a part of Yahoo! (see?;) brand - no excitement.

Why I want it? Because it’s good for the Web.

Microsoft owns the desktop. That means hundreds of millions of people. And the latest version of that desktop suxx big time. We all know it. Everyone knows it. Why does it suxx? Because it’s not web-enabled - everything runs just fine, as long as you don’t connect it to the Web - when you do that, you get a trojan horse - and that’s the better case. You can also end-up divorced, with no house and with your identity stolen - that all can happen to you just because of porn… eh… because of Web, I mean. It’s not that serious, but it’s not easy to use the Web today.

But we are living in the age of Web, right? And Web should serve us, not threaten us, right? Because we have social-services and folksonomies and all that stuff, which is so cool. Right?

There are millions of dollars being spent in startups developing more or less interesting services. But people are having problems just to browse to them! And if they start using them, they want them to become integral parts of their lives. People don’t want to browse the Web, they want to use the Web. I also don’t want to use my browser just to check my calendar and calendars of my friends! I want to have it on my cell-phone, in my desktop computer, in my living-room entertainment center or in my car. I want to have access to services I am using and to all my data without using the browser! I want to have my refrigerator synced with my calendar and I want my familly members to know that I am shopping today and what I am buying.

I know we all want it. This is our current vision of the Web - everything is connected. Mesh of content, people, services and devices. Network of things. Semantic Web. You name it.

Now thing about it - can we achieve this goal without those, who own the desktop? Maybe we can beat them. But war costs money - so isn’t it better to include them? That’s what Web is about - about inclusion through dialog and through open standards. Isn’t it? Yahoo! has been one of the main innovation leaders on the Web - they produce interesting (and open!) services, APIs etc. Microsoft, on the other hand, has been closed since the begging - it’s almost 30 years old company which was founded when there was no internet, nothing. Only Bill and Steve. So no wonder they think how they think - it is a cultular thing, which they need to change - and they know it. Yahoo! could help to teach Microsoft how to be more open and how to behave on the Web. Microsoft on the other hand, could teach Yahoo! (and all of us) how to merge with the world which is outside of the Web. They have been working on the digital household, PDAs and cell-phones for years. But it just didn’t make sense so far. With Yahoo! on board, it could start to make sense. It could be big. And good - because the whole Web could benefit from it.

Nice video, explaining what is the dataportability group about.

Yesterday, consortium led by Google (read Orkut) and consisting of many other big players in the social-world like MySpace, Ning, hi5, friendster and others, have finally published their OpenSocial API. It is basically a direct competition to facebook’s social platform initiative, released a couple of months ago. Facebook has been recently very successful in attracting developers, who have more or less interesting ideas for social net apps, but who want to implement them now and don’t want to spend months building the social nets first. So step taken by the OpenSocial consortium is logical - it is the first proper answer to facebook. Interesting thing about it is, that it involves so many important partners including MySpace, which fact makes it currently the biggest social platform initiative.

What it is
Direct competition to facebook, just more open. The consortium itself is saying, that it is a learn once, write anywhere set of APIs, web developers can use for writing various social apps (widgets), which can then run withing contexts of any social network supporting the API. Any social network can join, it just basically needs to provide OpenSocial APIs. It is open.

It is definitely good for web developers that they can now write apps by using a kind-of standardized set of APIs (did I mention that you write the widgets using standard JavaScript and HTML?), which will run on a wide variety of social nets. This will grow the developers ecosystem and consequently the user-base for all the involved nets, because they will finally start to provide their users with better services then just with today ‘community forum’ or ‘feed of your buddy’s videos from youtube’.

What it isn’t
It’s not an answer to the ‘closed-data-and-multiple-identity’ problem. It doesn’t provide any portable social environment or global object model by any means. We are not there yet. This is just a platform trying to be an answer to facebook, making the life of common web developer a bit easier and facebook’s life a bit harder.

It has been already a week since the conference ended. I would call it a success - after all those sleepless nights, we have delivered a functional, social-enabled conference website. It involves friends lists, session communities, plus related content feeds (per person and per session). Last but not least, it also involves the Community Equity pilot, which is basically a mechanism for measuring a social capital in the enterprise. Now we are working on the functionality for supporting pretty much any type of community our users will want to create.

The site was originally opened for 3580 Sun employees attending the conference. Now, after exactly one week, we have exactly 4137 Sun user accounts in the system. That means almost 20% user-base growth in one week!

Moreover - some people from outside have seen it and they seem to have liked it.

Uf. I have slept like 30hours in total during the last 14 days. We were finishing our current baby, the website for this year’s Sun’s Customer Engineering Conference (CEC2007), which is starting today in Las Vegas. Thats were the fear and loathing is. That’s right. It’s insane city, haven’t see much of it, hopefully will have some time to check all kinds of clubs and casinos soon. I have to give some breath to my employee credit-card (the best way to spend is to spend someone else’s money ;), so let’s rock and roll! But at first need to take some sleep - I am starting to have Depp-feelings and visions