is your neighbor a sex offender ? Paranoid use of google maps
Google maps has finally come to Italy. Now you can get all the street information you need directly from your favorite next big-brother. An interesting (?) use of google maps is this Family Watchdog servicethat help you locating sexual offenders in your area or in your town. I really feel very uncomfortable with this service... I guess that my European mind can't really accept all this privacy violation.
world of warcraft naming
Charlotte Hagström, aka Berthamanson, an honored member of the Truants is doing a research about naming in World of Warcraft. "How do you choose your name?" "what's the relationship between your name and yourself?" "do you choose a name that fitted well with you character or with yourself?". A lot of questions that could easily lead you (as they leaded me when I answered) to the fashinating subject of RealWorld/onlineworld identity issues. I just realized how complex has been the choice of Baldanders (name took from a Borges book) as my unique nickname for all my online-gaming activities.
If you would like to helo Charlotte on her research you can email (charlotte.hagstrom@etn.lu.se).
April: good news
Back in Italy just in time to take part at "the greatest show in the world" (C the Guardian, Saturday April, 8th): Italian general election. After a whole night too close to call this morning we waked up with the Unione (left wing party) that seems to have slightly won over Berlusconi's Coalition "Casa delle Libertà".
This is a good news. A very, long waited, good news.
funology
MS Symposium on Intelligent Environments is end. We saw a lot of funny things during these days, we've met very interesting people and we discovered such an interesting convergence between social sciences and Computer sciences. Well, this convergence often is resolved in computer scientist that does sociology or sociological analysis (with very few methodological precautions...). Anyway our last morning here in Cambridge (Fabio just left and I'm leaving tomorrow morning) was quite interesting. The last invited keynote speaker was Françoois Pachet from the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris who talked about a couple of projects they are currently developing. Apart from the project, that are strictly related to the music, what I found very interesting is the concept of fun they are working on. Following their research fun is everything that is able to enact reflexive process in the user: reflexivity is fun. What the call reflexivity is nothing more that the ability to observe ourself and to start thinking from a critical perspective about it. This aspect is observable in every kind of generative process... you do something, than you can start observing what you've done and thinking about yourself. More interesting is that this aspect is obviously widly present in the way people use (and have fun with) Internet today: blogs, podacasts, videoblogs etc. etc. are all activities that allows a high level of reflexivity because they involve a lot of observers: you product, you, your visitors. From this perspective reflexivity explain what could be obvious: all these activities work because they are fun!
observing a group of coglioni
My fried Fabio and me were waiting for this moment. As expected (Fabio did some nice work on this) after our prime minister Berlusconi said that All Italians that are going to vote for the other candidate are "coglioni" (here in Cambridge coglioni is usually translated as asshole ) a peak of posting has been saw on technorati just take a look at this picture and try to figure out when Berlusconi explained us his personal point of views about Italians:
Intelligent environment?
As I should have said before, me and Fabio are in Cambridge (UK) for the International Symposium on Intelligent Environments hold here by Microsoft Research. Today we had a great keynote speaker: Don Norman. He had a cool speech against the idea of Intelligent Environment. I've got the felling that the idea of Smart-stuff communicating with other smart things all around you and ordering milk when you finish it is loosing its cool effect. Probably we won't live in a smart house even in 10 years from now... surely we are going to use better (and smarter) device, buit nothing that would take care to much about taking decision for us. Our everyday life, as the usual expert says, is always a special case.
videoblogging week
videoblogging week in coming!
April 3-9, seven days of vlogging. One video a day!
Get involved and get ready to do some serious vlogging!
TAG YOUR VIDEOS:
Be sure to tag your videos with “videobloggingweek2006″
Like this:
videobloggingweek2006.
Stephanie Bryant calls it The Week of Vlogging Dangerously:
Who: YOU!
What: 1 week (7 days) of posting a videoblog post every day.
When: April 3-9 (to get a full weekend in at the end)
Why: because it's fun!
