Curiouser and Curiouser! on paolo-valdemarin

Buono Italiano

Wed, 20 Nov 2002 21:29:50 +0000

Just got back from Italy. Had a good time. Paolo & Monica are great hosts and treated me far better than I deserve! We had a lovely meal in Gorizia. I don't think I ever saw the name of the place but it's wine and fish were both excellent.

We did get some work done and I think we're on to something interesting. Expect more soon.

activePaolo

Wed, 27 Nov 2002 13:57:58 +0000

Outlined weblogs? Just a little experiment with Marc Barrot's activeRenderer and iframe: check it out (it might take a while to load...)";->" [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

» Sweet ;-)

Okay also on Paolo's advice I am experimenting with changing my quoting style and indenting the material being quoted. To me, right now, it looks totally weird and unnatural. I hope it will grow on me. I guess it renders my little red chevron meaningless as well. Such a shame, I liked that little chevron...

I want to buy a castle

Sun, 09 Feb 2003 22:03:44 +0000

I never did before, but now I do.

I've found my dream castle.

Home again, home again, jiggity jig

Tue, 11 Feb 2003 22:36:07 +0000

Just bad from 3 fantastic days in Italy. Paolo and I have been scheming (no this is not a reference to my burgeoning interest in Lisp) and we've got something pretty cool in the works. More details soon I hope.

Of course I am now struggling to type on this non-Italian, non-Mac keyboard. If I don't watch out he'll have me converted. Now, where's that Cmd key ;-)

Gotta love those soft shadows

Tue, 11 Feb 2003 23:37:14 +0000

Look who's here.

Here's Matt Mower and me in my home/office in Gradisca now. We've done a lot of planning about future products and development in the last two days. Very cool. We also plan to buy a castle, but this of course will happen after the new products ";->" [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

Is this an iMac I see before me..?

Catch up...

Fri, 14 Feb 2003 09:53:57 +0000

Just catching up...

Had drinks with Rick and Roger on Wednesday night in central London. I hadn't seen either of them in quite a while so it was good to catch up. Add Paolo to the mix and i've had a very interesting week!

Yesterday was spent getting the liveTopics release together. It was quite frustrating but I think I should have it done by this afternoon.

Testing Paolo's softshadowmaker

Fri, 14 Feb 2003 10:31:16 +0000

<%softShadow( "http://matt.blogs.it/images/sippi/Picture 46.jpg", width:"320", height:"240", alt:"Mississippi on her favourite box" )%>

I've always loved the way Paolo's images have lovely soft shadows around them. Unfortunately as one of the artistically challenged I've never been able to do it myself. I asked Paolo if he could find a way for me to have soft shadows too...

He came up with a very neat solution which we've now packaged into a Macro that you can download and use yourself. Enjoy :)

To get the soft shadow around my picture I used:

<%softShadow( "http://matt.blogs.it/images/sippi/Picture 46.jpg", width:"320", height:"240", alt:"Mississippi on her favourite box", 0 )%>

Socialising with the SocialText crew

Tue, 25 Feb 2003 20:28:11 +0000

Good conference call today between Ross and Adina of SocialText and Paolo and I. We all shared of our vision and our plans for the future which seem to be quite complementary. It's good to talk to other people doing interesting things in this space and I hope that we get an opportunity to work together. Certainly we both believe in the importance of supporting standards which, for us, means a big focus on RSS2.0 and XTM.

Happy birthday to you

Wed, 26 Mar 2003 08:47:05 +0000

Only one year. One year ago today I opened this weblog. Yesterday I went trough the last 12 months of posts. I didn't read them all, but... well, I saw my life passing before my eyes. There are some posts that I wrote about one year ago that look like they could have been written yesterday while others belong to a very distant past, when my company and my life were different, we had other projects, other dreams. A lot of stuff has happened since them, good and bad. Among the good thing, I must say that weblogging in the last year has been a great experience, more than 61,000 "unique visitors" came on these pages, more than 1,5 millions hits. I have met a lot of incredibly smart people in the blogosphere and some have become friends. A warm thank you to everybody for this wonderful year. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

Paolo is among the nicest people I have had the privilege of meeting and getting to know. I don't think that would have happened but for his blog, so:

Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday Paolo's blog,
Happy birthday to you!

Just one question: Are the English and Italian blogs twins?

Birthday present for Paolo's blog

Wed, 26 Mar 2003 16:20:18 +0000

<%googlami( "Paolo Valdemarin", "Paolo")%> wanted a macro that would link directly from a term like Paolo Valdemarin to the first hit returned by Google for that term. Here is a macro that will do that. (To install, right click the link and select "Save As" then save it as googlami.txt in your Radio Userland macros folder).

To use it you would use the source view in the post editor and type in:

<%googlami( "what i want to search for")%>

and it will generate a complete HTML link for that search. If you want the text for the link to be different to the term, pass a second parameter with the text of the link, e.g.

<%googlami( "Paolo Valdemarin", "Paolo" )%>

Consider it a 1st birthday present for your blog :)

Topic Rolls near reality

Thu, 27 Mar 2003 23:38:44 +0000

Some while ago I talked about the facility for users to share topics with each other. I was just beginning to experiment with topics and blogging and, at the time, was thinking of an ad hoc P2P mechanism by which users could ensure they were talking about the same thing by using the same topics. I called this concept a topicroll playing on the theme of the blogroll.

More recently Paolo and I have been working on making use of topics to create a superior Action Journalling environment. Paolo has also been involved in the Italian Blog Aggregator project about which he has written on several occasions. These efforts have begun to dovetail and I wanted to document some of what we are doing.

For a while now liveTopics has provided the ability for Radio users to associate multiple topics with their posts. This allows for fine-grained, ad hoc, associations between posts in a much more flexible way than categories allow. Release 1.1.3 (due RSN) adds also the concept of topic types and these are central to our efforts.

liveTopics types are a way of classifying topics into functional categories. For example the default types created by liveTopics are:

generic
person
project
place
time

Each topic can belong to only one type (which defaults to generic). Now my topic Paolo can be classified as being a person topic. Now all topics are not equal and our software can start to provide useful interfaces based upon topic information.

Systems such as the Italian Blog Aggregator may want to define a control language for topics rather than allowing users to make up their own. Even if it does not wish to control the topics, it may be useful if users can pre-fill their topic list with system defined topics. That's what the topicroll is all about. Now we're going to implement it.

To begin with we have choosen to use the OPML format for the topic roll (later on we will probably implement them in XTM as well). Whilst OPML is not a semantically ideal language for describing a topic roll it has a number of advantage for us right now:

It's simple: It basically has only 1 tag so it's pretty easy to get along with
It's a standard: OPML is already used & understood around the world, we're not inventing it ourselves
There are tools: In principle you should be able to create a topic roll in any OPML editor and load it into liveTopics and vice versa

As an example you can see my current topicroll for yourself (although I notice that Radio doesn't seem to make anything of it, I wonder if my OPML is bad).

[28/03: With a little help from Paolo the topicRoll OPML is now fixed and the outline works in Radio!]

The next step is to allow liveTopics to import topicrolls from other locations.

New Home

Mon, 31 Mar 2003 08:57:02 +0100

Some of you may already have spotted that my weblog has moved. With grateful thanks to Paolo I have relocated C&C to its new, permanent, home @

http://matt.blogs.it/

(With apologies in advance for the likely upheaval over the next couple of weeks as things get straightened out)

Announcing: ENT v1.0 Easy News Topics for RSS2.0

Fri, 11 Apr 2003 13:59:53 +0100

Paolo and I are pleased to announce the release of the first public draft of the Easy News Topics (ENT) specification. ENT1.0 is an RSS2.0 module designed to make it really easy to incorporate topics into RSS feeds. Why would you want to do that? Because it will help to enable a raft of new, smarter, aggregator products.

RSS has become very important to a lot of us and we are starting to see its penetration into the business world as well. We think that integrating topics will help aggregators applications to scale to meet the future needs of users as well as delivering some very powerful applications. I've spoken before about the kinds of thing I want my aggregator to do:

group posts from many feeds by interest.
filtering posts I don't want to see
scoring & promote posts
recombine different feeds dynamically.

I hope that ENT might help bring all these things a little closer. We also see a role for classification in bringing new ways to order, view, and, search weblog data.

We are offering ENT1.0 to the community (under a Creative Commons License) in the hope that we can foster these applications and many more, that we haven't even begun to think of yet.

I will soon be releasing to the public the next version of liveTopics which will be ENT compliant. At that point any Radio user will be able to easily add topic metadata to their RSS feed. We hope that there will soon be many applications available to make use of it.

We look forward to your comments.

Birthday greetings to my good friend Paolo

Tue, 29 Apr 2003 14:05:55 +0100

It's Paolo's birthday today :)

k-collector goes live

Tue, 13 May 2003 13:45:29 +0100

Paolo and I are now subscribed to a single shared cloud (called WWWW) of topics using the k-collector server and client for Radio.

This means that our posts will be aggregated together by k-collector on the basis of the topics we use. The demo interface shows a simple hierarchical view but we have lots of other things planned.

Another poweful feature of this setup is the shared topic roll. Because we are both subscribed to the WWWW topic roll we use the same topics and any topics we create are automatically made available to other subscribers.

For example I am creating a topic 'Paolo Valdemarin' to attach to this post. In a little while Paolo's client will automatically have this new topic available for those moments when he wishes to talk about himself!

Implementing Trackback for Radio Userland in 3 easy steps

Sat, 14 Jun 2003 10:24:05 +0100

Paolo was wondering whether we could setup the standalone Trackback server and use it to implement trackbacks for Radio Userland. It turns out (as this post proves) that the answer is yes! All that was required was to install the CGI and then write a macro for Radio Userland and embed it in the #itemTemplate.txt.

The macro is supplying the RDF metadata that Trackback depends upon. In order to allow the standalone trackback server to serve multiple blogs I have added a unique prefix (in my case @matt.blogs.it) to the unique post ID's supplied to the trackback server.

TMac has landed

Tue, 26 Aug 2003 15:33:43 +0100

Thanks to Paolo I have joined the hallowed halls of the choosen ones. The newest addition to the fold here is TMac (short for Tooting Mac) which is a PowerMac G3 running OS X 10.2.6 and, for a machine that is 4 years old, doing it pretty bloody well.

Today I was listening to iTunes radio streaming a 128K audio channel whilst Paolo and I were talking over iChat AV and iCal audio chat using iChat (oh I was downloading the latest iCal in the background too). The audio chat was the biggest strain but I doubt a 400MHz PC would have done as well.

Altogether I am really impressed with this little Mac. Thank you Paolo.

(Also many thanks to my Dad who got TMac working again after a serious bump during transit)

Proud to announce K-Collector 1.0

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 15:14:55 +0000

Can it really be a year since that fateful day when Paolo and I scribbed on a whiteboard in Ronchi? Can it really be six months since Paolo, Simone and I gave the first demo of the K-Collector prototype?

Time flies when you're having fun and the last year with my new partners at Evectors (Paolo, Simone, Monica and Fabrizio) has gone so quick my head is spinning. Or maybe it's the champagne because today we are announcing the launch of K-Collector 1.0!

I'm so proud of what we've achieved together in the last 6 months. The product is better than I could ever have imagined it would be, and the best is yet to come!

Social Tools for Enterprises Symposium in London

Tue, 08 Jun 2004 12:24:14 +0100

Now that we have the agenda sorted I am happy to announce the 1st, London,

Social Tools for Enterprises Symposium

which Evectors is organising ably supported by KM Cluster and a group of the usual suspects (see the Wiki for details). We think this is a great opportunity to start showing people that social tools (both people tools and software tools) are ready for prime time and deliver bottom line benefits to enterprises.

The event will be held on Monday 12th July at the Bloomsbury Square Training Centre. We've got a great list of people leading sessions which we hope will be a bit different to the usual chalk & talk conference fare. We really want a conversation to emerge from this event which will help to enlighten people interested in social tools but unsure how to put them to best use in their own contexts.

So we have:

Stowe Boyd - Corante Research & A Working Model
Lee Bryant - Headshift
Prof. Marc Eisenstadt - Knowledge Media Institue
David Gurteen - Gurteen Knowledge
Euan Semple - BBC
Phil Wolff. - A Klog Apart & BlogCount

Paolo and I will also be there.

I think it has the potential to be a great event and a great day I hope that you will come and join us. Please tell all your friends!

STES weblog launched

Mon, 28 Jun 2004 23:42:27 +0100

Today we launched the STES weblog. In the coming weeks we hope this will be a great resource for learning about the event and the excellent group who will be leading our sessions.

By the power of modern medicine

Sun, 04 Jul 2004 16:54:39 +0100

So, finally, we made it to Wien.

I flew to Italy on Thursday ready for us to make the journey on Saturday and have dinner. Friday evening over barbequed fish & chips Italian style I felt a little unwell. By 4am the next morning I felt very unwell. One trip to the ospedale later, it turns out I got tonsilitis (for the first time in about 15 years). The doc took one look down my throat, recoiled in horror, and hastily wrote me a prescription for some antibiotics. I have to say, as unwell as I felt, my experience of Italian hospitals has been quite positive.

The drugs worked wonders and today, whilst not 100%, I felt able to travel. We had an easy journey and my navigation skills were up to the task of locating Lerchenfelder Straße. Paolo and I checked in and then went for a wander around town. We didn't get to see much of the city centre last time around so we thought we'd make the most of a beautifully sunny Sunday afternoon. Vienna is a nice city to wander about in.

Now i'm back in the hotel soaking up the broadband and wondering who else might be here.

Mon, 05 Jul 2004 22:15:06 +0100

In BlogTalk 2.0 Thomas & crew have, once again, brought together a lot of interesting people & wherever possible conversations are flourishing as evidenced by tonights get together. It was good to meet Phil again after a year and to meet Mikel for the first time, especially as his talk prompted lots of interesting ideas we might look at for K-Collector. After a day where I had felt very tired and jaded I found the atmosphere quite reviving.

I had the pleasure of dining with Paolo, Mark Bernstein, Stephanie Hendrick, and Therese Örnberg. Mark gave a very interesting keynote this morning which provoked lots of questions for me. Stephanie & Therese gave, I think, the most stylish presentation of the day (including an amusing near-death audioblog to end) and their discussion of presence and spaces was stimulating. From my perspective a happy coincidence that we all ended up together. We had an interesting discussion about a range of topics spanning language, blogging, literary discourse, topics, flame wars, comments & trackbacks, software tools and how you build them, tinderbox, Dave Allen, and test first development.

Taking antibiotics means I cannot drink alchohol so my opinions whilst maybe better formed were far less robust than usual & I was open to colonization ;-) I got persuaded that comments are bad and that even trackback requires considerable architectural revision to work properly. Mark's suggestion of making trackback default to being private (i.e. you get a file of trackbacks and you decide what, if anything, to do with them) seems to be a good one. I think this can be assisted by some sort of intelligent filtering of trackback contents & authorship to help you decide about those you do & don't want to handle. I think emulating the LinkedIn FOAFOAFOAFOAF network model could be useful in this regard.

Also, based on comments by Stephanie and Mark, I have finally concluded that I must do something in K-Collector for the Lilia's and Jim McGee's of this world who used (and maybe still cling to) liveTopics. I think that part of my problem has been misunderstanding where they are coming from. liveTopics, for me, was a stepping stone towards a larger vision which, at that time, I couldn't achieve. But for them it was actually what they were looking for. No wonder then that I've had a hard time convincing them that K-Collector is better.

I haven't quite worked out the answer yet but I think it may be as simple as offering some kind of discriminator where you can choose whether K-Collector should default to showing you only your own work, or the work of the community as a whole. We may even have enough smarts in the database to do this without requiring additional work but I'll have to get some clear space (i.e. after STES) to think this through properly.

Almost four years for me too

Mon, 27 Mar 2006 11:37:03 +0100

Paolo writes:

4 years don't sound like a lot of time from here: it's about 12% of my life.

My blog comes up to 4 years in May, I can't remember the time before I blogged. What was it like?

Paolo was the second blogger I met (introduced to me by ex-blogger Marc Barrot who was the first). That was a good time, it was exciting and an affirmation of what I think we hoped blogging might be.

I'm not blogging much anymore on the English part of my blog, I write a little bit more on the Italian side. I'm not involved in many conversations or I don't feel I have much to add to what is discussed. The atmosphere is changing, pretty soon you won't even be able to say that blogging is not "mainstream media".

After 4 years of pouring stuff out I think we're all a little jaded. Terry and I have talked about this often; That feeling that you've nothing interesting left to say.

But I don't believe that's true, and I think the reason that neither Terry, Paolo, or myself have closed our blogs is that lurking feeling that the spark may come back. Interesting things happen all the time and sometimes to us.

Here's to four more interesting years! Happy birthday paolo.evectors.it!

Valdemarins

Mon, 19 Jun 2006 12:11:25 +0100

Despite my current car trouble (gearbox again damnit!) I managed to hook up with Paolo and Monica before they headed off on their US trip.

We caught up over some pretty good chinese food (at the London Hong Kong restaurant on the Bath road) and talked a little about BloggerCon and Gnomedex. Alas I cannot make it to these events but I do hope to make it to BlogTalk Reloaded in October. In fact Paolo and I have talked about driving there together as we have in the past.