I hope that Western civilization is enjoying Christmas and Winter holidays as I’m fighting the deadlines several days before my holiday and turning off the interwebs.  So it is official: from Saturday, December 27th 2008. - January 12th 2009.,  I’ll be offline and on holidays which means that you have three more days to email, comment, ask, interact with me, after that I am in the analogue world (again proving to those picking up on my geekiness that I am not addicted to interwebs ::smile:: ). I may read only direct messages from BrightKite friends though.

I’m going to focus on people and things that I’ve been pushed back lately because of some current things and hectic life in the past few months, to enjoy some quite time, help those who need my help, meditate, read real books, watch films on my list, practice yoga, contemplate and draft the project(s) that I’ll commence and that will mark 2009.  Hopefully, I’m moving to practitioners way, but it’s too early to reveal anything.

The search for the perfect laptop for my needs, research, conferences, travels is still ”ON’, if you get to some updated information -leave a comment, I’ll get back to you after the Holidays.  Also, I am amazed by ‘The power of Social Web’ action for new laptop as I’ve reached so far 35% of donations for such a short time.Thank all of you who have understanding for the science, research and academic life. There is still few days left till the cause is closed though.

See you in January when I ‘ll be refreshed and ready for new exciting events and travels.

Srećni novogodišnji praznici, nova 2009. i Božić! ~ Happy Holidays and New Year 2009!

Reminder for those who are into science blogging: you have two more days to participate in PLoS ONE  Second Birthday Synchroblogging Competition, it is right time to submit your posts! You can find here how.  Still, you have time to vote in the 2008 Edublog Awards. Check out nominations, there are some great edublogs.

Those who are planning to attend or participate in ScienceOnline09 , you can follow updates on FriendFeed , my Twitter timeline or Bora’s site.

I know that PayPal issue is painful in Serbia for years - each year I write a post about this and lot of comments are coming my way here, but I just hope very, very soon that people in Serbia can use normally PayPal.

Anyway, these days I got  feedbacks on Twitter, via gmail and here that some people at some regions cannot proceed their contribution to edu.cause for new laptop. The main issue is if you are not logged into your PayPal account you will probably receive page in Dutch (NL -the place where is my PayPal account open). This is because redirection to PayPal is executed by flash inside widget ChipIn (one of the reasons I do not like flash). I wrote today to ChipIn tech support and I am expecting reply.

Until then, you can donate by logging to your PayPal account or when redirected to page in Dutch to follow these two simple steps that I marked on the screen shot. You enter some sum (step 1), and below you’ll get a drop menu with the list of the countries - let’s say you’re in US (Verenigde Staten in Dutch). Next thing you select your country (step 2) and the page will be loaded to your language. Give me some credits for learning Dutch! ::smile::

Creative Commons, which produces licenses implemented in 50 different jurisdictions until now, including  Serbian project, coordinated by CC legal lead Nevenka Antic, on December 15th  celebrates its 6th Birthday around the world. Regarding this occasion, Creative Commons Serbia, Wikimedia Serbia,  and Free Software Network Serbia, organises at the Faculty of Mathematics, of the University of Belgrade (room 718, 4th floor) on Monday, December 15th at 6 p.m. - presentation and debate about free software and free scientific, education, artistic and media production to emphasise the importance of free licensing in information society. I’m inviting you tomorrow to join CC birthday world wide celebration, and embrace open source.

Last Christmas and Holidays I’ve spent in lovely analogue world receiving updates from Twitter via sms, interacting and communicating apart from (the failures of) GPRS, micro-blogging applications, my browser.  GRPS is not reliable especially for Holidays. I was so happy to have wifi on my PDA only for interwebs and mobile for texting and twittering.

Since Twitter doesn’t support anymore facility of receiving free sms’s on my mobile device, I am testing few services these days, and came to conclusion that the only micro-blogging service that treats you with free of charge sms, direct messages and other notifications is - BrightKite. I found many Twitter buddies there, both International and local (locals should sign up) who post micro-notes, comment under each one of them, post/upload their mobile pics - and it is cool! Service doesn’t charge you any received sms or direct message, if you live here in Europe. You can also send Brightkite notes on Twitter, but I still didn’t figure out how you can receive tweets on Brightkite for free. If someone knows - let us all know!

While I’m testing all micro blogging possibilities for the upcoming Holidays without GPRS or wifi dependence (just in case) - you can sign up and friend me at BrightKite.

Despite the fact that ‘Belgrade and Beyond’ blog exists in other form {digital serendipities}, I am still writing  about interesting events and electronic resources on Belgrade, Serbia. For those of you who are not familiar and you happen to reside in Belgrade for some reason, this information may be valuable to you.

Belgrade Foreign Vistors Club (FVC) presents the online community for foreigners in Belgrade, created by  Jonathan Davis. Beside Belgrade FVC there is Belgrade Foreign Visitors Club Wiki, an online information resource for foreign residents and visitors to the city of Belgrade, where you can find high quality community edited information resources and guided directories with useful links.  Also, check out Belgrade FVC forum where you can interact with other members, Twitter feed, and there is Facebook group informing users with current events, reviews, recommendations. I hope you’ll find this information and links useful especially if you are planning a trip to Belgrade or maybe to move here.

Today is World AIDS Day. Few days ago one photo made a confusion among us - from Twitter, FriendFeed interaction [me likes FriendFeed more and more], to Bora’s blog where discussion on the action of Serbian Ministry of Health has moved. Today, bumper, bumper was jumping and staring at me from all new-stands in the city.

Other than that: Pownce is closing and moving to Six Apart! Those of you who have used this micro-blogging service, you can export files, message until December 15th, as the main Pownce website is closing down two weeks from today.

Today is Cyber Monday, but not in Europe. I hope you found good discounts for gadgets and nice computers. And I still need laptop!

to be continued…

…but I’d really like to receive Twitter updates on my mobile device as it was from year and a half ago when I could get sms directly to my mobile inbox: no browser, no applications, just plain and simple receiving text messages from the people I followed and sending directly from my mobile operator. I really miss Twitter with sms for a long time:

Sending updates to Twitter while you’re away from your computer makes things much more interesting. It’s all done through text messages (aka “SMS”), which you probably use all the time anyway, so there’s not much to learn.Twitter doesn’t charge anything for this, but be sure to know what your text plan looks like with your wireless carrier. If you use your mobile in Canada, The United States, or India you can also receive updates via SMS. You can text “OFF” to stop receiving and “ON” to start again.

Now the only information I have got when I tried to update with new mobile number was:

I am not Twitter addict but I’d really like to receive sms’s on my mobile device: is there a way for some European countries to make this come true? Through other services, e.g. Jaiku? What is your experience?

http://www.gapingvoid.com

Few days ago I’ve announced statement about education cause (new laptop) as well as testing the power of Social Web.  And I’ve hit the number 10 the other day, and still growing. I’m really surprised that there are some results! And we keep going on. Let’s see what will happen. I want to thank to people from UK, USA, Germany, Netherlands, Swiss, Italy, even from Berkeley University.  I am not enthusiast that I’ll reach the goal till the end of December (my PhD research is stopped, as I’m dealing with literature right now), but I hope I will be able to buy a new laptop before Science Conference in US mid-January.

Keep spreading the word! Apart from testing the power of the Social Web & edu. cause, I am also open for consultations or any of your questions regarding Social Web (services), Web 2.0 applications, social network issues, blogs, wikis’ issues, strategic Web planning for online communities, talks, any advice on above (in exchange for services) - you can email me!Official form to come soon.

If you’re not familiar with Twine - it is web 2.5 (towards web 3.0) tool that keeps track of your interests by collecting online content, brings it all together by the topic of your interest, so you can have it all in one place and share it with anyone you want. Even more, beside personalized or collaborative  way of collecting content, sharing interests in communities, learning about new things, getting personalized recommendations.

Before I invite you to join and share with you an interesting Twine I found out recently, I’d like you to know that Twine is powered by semantic Web [one of my fav. anticipated topics since 2002]. This means the system automatically learns about your interests, groups, then makes connections and recommendations tailored to you by using RDF standards (Resource Description Framework language), URI (universal resource identifier) and OWL (Web Ontology Language). For more information how these three main components work in Twine check this page.

You can join Twine anytime and find interesting content - depending from your interests. I use Twine since May 2008, when it was ‘invite-only’ - this is me on Twine , and recently I found out great new resources on Full text. And it is free! Full text is the name of this Twine and it’s enriched with free databases and scholarly search tools, open access journals, which is opposite of locked academic online full text databases, archives or libraries that you have to pay for (or your University/ institution at least). As a preacher of the open access - if you are researcher, student, involved in academia or maybe professional interested in specific area,  this is place with great resources. Please give me a feedback on Twine or meet me there.

Twine Official on Vimeo.

Can social web services be used for science and research causes?

This post is for those who are surprised to see on my web site the widget (on the right sidebar) with the cause: new laptop. I work on my PhD research (I’m in the phase of collecting data, literature review parallel with other activities: writing papers, conferences) and have no back-up, support from University or any other body (Ministries, e.g.) such as scholarship, paid PhD work, or finances for the travel, research costs, books, other material, and of course the computer. In Serbia seems that education and science has always been in shade.
So, everything was working fine (well, ‘little dragon’ - dead laptop and i have had hiccups in the past 4 years many services, interventions, etc.), until it died few days ago and I am using interwebs in Internet cafes, and temporarily friends’ laptop.  I was contemplating to buy laptop that will help me in my research, while moving, travelling - light, functional, reliable machine. And I decided to be the MacBook (13,3″), or Dell from recommendations).

Since ‘98, I’ve been pioneering many things, projects on Web (in academia and science Serbian community), and still working on projects that I am not paid but rather volunteering. I have never monetized my blog.

I will quote/modify here a part [in the context] of David Weinberger’s (one of my fav.bloggers and IT persona) Dislosure Statement: “No one pays me to write this blog or to say particular things in it.  That includes all forms of compensation, including offers to be the guest blogger, asking me for free advice or tell me that what I do is so wonderful. I don’t run ads,  no one pays me under the table, and I don’t sell t-shirts or coffee mugs”.

I am no advertising wizard and have no tricks, I believe that the knowledge is the power. I also believe that the digital divide or information poor/rich society is not the lack of technology but the problem of the system in the country.  I believe in open access, open knowledge and sharing.  And I believe in my cause. In this case: new laptop.  I want to see how this works here.

As PayPal doesn’t work in Serbia (still), a friend helped me to have my PayPal account abroad, and now I use ChipIn widget to check and monitor the power of social web.

The plan is if half of my followers and readers donate  $5, $10, $50 or $100 , that would be more than enough for a new laptop. But you can still just donate $1.00  if you like. The aim is $1200, the timeline is Dec 31, but would be nice to get laptop from Santa a bit earlier.

Everyone can see my current status on ChipIn widget, so let’s just see what happens!

Do you find yourself posting more than ten tweets per day? Do you spend more time on Twitter and other micro-blogging services and less blog reading? Your blog posts, because of the hectic life and time (!), became rare as snow in May? You find that your friends and colleagues rather read your Twitter timeline following every single tweet you send,  than your (ir)regular blog entries? If so, welcome to (sour) times where micro-blogging services are evolving and resembling the blogosphere. Do they?

People are spending more and more time on micro-blogging sites such as Twitter, Jaiku, Plurk, also using FriendFeed facility not only to share interesting and useful links with their friends and allies but to chat, report, promote, discuss, rant on different topics. I have three group of people I follow on Twitter: endless ‘chat’ in real-time for hours on the latest gadgets (during morning hours/working European time), afternoon twitterers (East Coast of US) on elections and economy, and late night West coasters on education syllabuses, everyday situations, rants. Technology, politics and education.

Are micro-blogging forms new web 2.5, web 3.0 ‘form’ of  IRC rooms, forums, discussion groups of instant interaction, a great medium for distributing immediate attention that pushed blogs on aside?  But then, blogs are still for me the greatest social networking place with possibility of interaction through comments (more than 140 characters) but also I couldn’t help to notice symptomatic blogging situation where people are following more twitters than RSS.  Since more people micro-blog, blogs themselves are becoming aggregates of tweet digests with referred content. Probably some of you got into this page as I’ve sent short tweet with tinyurl message about it.  It is up to you (your blogging behaviour) if you’ll comment here or send me @replies on Twitter or send likes emoticons on FriendFeed.  Are micro-blogging services changing dynamics of your blogging activities? If so, how? Comments welcomed!

Today is the world’s the first- ever Open Access day, celebrating the growth of international movement that uses the Internet to throw open the locked archives, libraries, online databases, information flow in general,  that once hid and restricted knowledge.

One of the definitions of ‘open’ denotes ‘a piece of knowledge is open if you re free to use, reuse, and redistribute it.”  The concept of open access has already started to spread rapidly beyond its original roots in academia and software.  Other statements encourage the unstrict sharing of research results with everyone, everywhere, for the advancement and enjoyment of science and society.

Open Access is the principle that publicly funded research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication, and it’s gaining ever more momentum around the world as research funders and policy makers put their weight behind it.
The Open Access philosophy was firmly articulated in 2002, when the Budapest Open Access Initiative was introduced. It quickly took root in the scientific and medical communities because it offered an alternative route to research literature that was frequently closed off behind costly subscription barriers.

Founders and promoters who jointly announced the first international Open Access Day, that is marked with lot of events, locally and internationally, are SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for FreeCulture, and the Public Library of Science. To see a list of participating countries, universities, campuses,  visit the Open Access Day Web site. Also, you can participate in synchroblogging competiton by posting on some of the questions.

I have been writing, talking, preaching about open access of e-resources, software, movement, issues  (oh, so many times) on conferences and in practice being as one of the editors of E-LIS/E-prints open access archives, and still believe that OA can make a difference in the publishing world, academia and the freedom of information.

How are you contributing to Open Access, today and every other day during the year?  What do you do to support Open Access?

Remember Science blogging conference this January? Well,  next year free three-day event ScienceOnline09, will be held from 16-18 January 2009, at Research Triangle Park, NC. This annual blogging science conference brings together scientists, educators, bloggers, students, journalists to collaborate, discuss, demonstrate online strategies and software for promoting public and better understanding of science.

See the conference wiki for further details, as well as conference program and check out interesting sessions and topics we will talk about.  If you are interested to participate, you can register here. If some of you are planning to go to NC, USA earlier next year, buzz me via contact email.

Recently, I’ve read in media  the results of the survey by “xy” marketing agency (don’t want to advertise them here) who did research of the usage of Facebook in Serbia. This is my response and strong argument against  superficial output without research corpus statements of the author, agency, and unverified data published. I loathe these strong unverified allegations that appear officially. What it was about?

All Serbian media published the ‘results’ of commercial marketing agency’s survey about the popularity of the “sites for youth” in Serbia and they came to conclusion that the most popular are Facebook and My Space.  Beyond this general data, there are other things here I want to share with you, those they have ‘found out’. According to them, their target group was youth, age 18-25:  30%  of the examined population use everyday Internet and 61% of them have Facebook profile, and 37% have profile on My Space.

“They [youth] see Facebook as serious web site which enables them to communicate with people who live far away, to find soul-mates, and to have fun there. They are also emphasizing that those who don’t have Facebook profile - are ‘out’ ” (translated from Serbian, they are not cool, my remark).

Furthermore, the author of this research says that young people are noticing lot of fake profiles and (re)presentations, and Facebook is the reason they communicate less face to face, and therefore conclusion: they have negative Facebook opinion, privacy issues,  and connotation including the Facebook addiction. These three sentences on Facebook was everything we got from ‘research of marketing agency. Yuck!

Now I have to say something and respond to this kind lump of smattering, no survey corpus, non reliable conclusions.

First, this kind of surveys are ‘ordered’ from marketers or agency for certain [non - academic] purposes not to mention that companies of this kind try to demand and fence their users in certain boxes and or pre-ordered groups. Why? There is huge list of e-market interests in Serbia for future (re)shaping their users and making fertile e-ground for new ‘projects’ and investments.

Second, on this survey’s ‘results’ published in all Serbian media:  this unverified data should be kept under huge question mark and reserve from several reasons. There is no corpus of the research - no numbers of people included in this survey: what Serbian networks? Is it University network? High School network (there are no high school networks created on Facebook in Serbia, in general, dear agency)? No-network search of the users? All Serbia network? Methodology? Data? Charts?

For your information, including today: there are 143,891 people in Serbia network, and further - there are 1,619 people in the University of Belgrade network. Does this mean that the author and the agency did survey on  10,000 people? Or maybe 1000? We will never find out that. Did they send their questionnaires to classmates from high school, university, colleagues, ex housemates, lost friends so they have qualitative kind of output? There is nothing in this survey  that would show or notify us about indications regarding research (where is summarized corpus with quantitative and qualitative data?).

As above mentioned privacy issues: they are talking about privacy issues but they didn’t mention the most important fact that those teens and youth are exposing their FB profiles to the public along with their photos from parties, open for public. I got feedback data (youngsters) in Serbia network, as i was noticing and reporting to some of them that their profiles can be seen to everyone (along with photos).  From my direct talk with them, they didn’t know that their profile is exposed (not literate enough to find and adjust privacy settings) and this is the most often case with the group of undergrads who simply was not familiar with privacy mechanisms.  They were in shock (”oh my god!” reactions, and “I thought it was ‘friend only”) “,  which indicated that this small sample of youth in Serbia are self-aware that Facebook is network !read Network! for gathering with friends with whom they know from real life and re-establish connections (already existing) with, primarily, high school mates, university colleagues, etc.  They don’t care about strangers  or unknown people pending on ‘friend requests’ list. Of course there will be ‘collectors’ of strangers and friends for such purposes (we have them in everyday life), but finding soul-mates? I’m afraid , dear agency, that Serbian youth are gathered around Facebook for different reasons but finding soul-mates. They are soul-mating on other places.

“Conclusion there is negative Facebook connotation including the Facebook addiction” is hideous and contradictory if we have in mind above numbers (61% have Facebook profile and is the most popular site). If Facebook is such a bad and negative social network site, then why would many thousands of Serbian population get connected, socializing  with their friends, colleagues, classmates and communicate with them on daily basis? They are on Facebook to hang out with their friends and classmates in pre-existed relationships from real life, or re-connecting with those they’ve lost contact with, or connecting with their allies they never met face to face. There is huge University of Belgrade community on Facebook who talk about upcoming exams on the boards, exchange information, how-where-to find that book for exam, info on conferences, projects, etc.

Few years back, when I was doing research for my Master thesis - the existing surveys of Telecom (national telecommunication company) or CePIT(center for the research in Information-communication technologies) , have got not only explained methodology and all important basic data from their research, but also they’ve created user-friendly charts as you’d read at any e-journal, magazine out there. Open accessed and published to all media.

Said that, I am strongly arguing against this kind of public superficial announcements in media with suspicious outputs as millions of people in Serbia are reading them and (probably) taking them for granted, without having in mind the facts (Serbia network on Facebook as well as the other networks -university, work, region), social-technological context, survey corpus, criteria, purpose.  Question everything, question me!

On socio-ethno-anthro context of “you are  noone if you are not on Facebook” in Serbia,  I will write in the upcoming texts.

This is the name of the presentation on Saturday, October 4, 2008, in O3one Gallery in Belgrade as the part of regular program of  B-LINK festival of New Communications. It was created two years ago as a rare example of an initiative to show and adequately promote creative and innovative tendencies within web environment, primarily in domains of experimental art, web design and now researching new technologies and the impact they have on society.

Social Me section brings ID/Entity where I’ll be presenting with my co-author, visual artist and lecturer Aleksandar Macasev, educational content on Identities (personal, social, national, virtual) using different forms:  video, micro-video forms, blog, live casting.  Co-authored blog - “Me Virtual You” - will be opened for the public after the talk and presentation. We will not be physically present: Aleksandar will tune in from New York (where he works and lives) and I will be at the other geo-spot on BlogOpen meeting giving a talk. This is great opportunity to test communication performances in virtual space with attendeees and partcipants in physical space (gallery) while we are on different geo-places. You are welcomed to come and see what’s in there.

In the past few days, since I removed my blog on this address, many of you have sent emails, messages asking about certain site sections, plug-in’s, etc. I know that some people are not that tech savvy,  but in my personal opinion blog is very clear, clean and  simple to navigate. Anyway, here’s short navigation tour through site: links under the header are pages that you can jump from-to anytime, home button is above in the left corner, brings you back to blog.

./seredipity page leads you to another (external) links, including my old Belgrade and Beyond blog, my tumblr, short story on virtual Id/Entity - wiki page that I need to sort out, contact etc.

.about page i’ll try to up-to date as often as I can, .networking brings you the list of social web services and sns/sites where you can connect and interact, but I’ m mostly seen at Twitter, Delicious,  Flickr and last.fm.

.projects/activities as well as .writings (material is scattered all over the web, sites and wiki pages, soon to make it neat) should give you the scope of what i’m doing, current /past projects, participatory activities, other presence and contributions, where i’m going, talking, lecturing, etc.

.photos is an interesting part as photography is one of my hobbies, and i’m taking part for over a 7 months in Flickr’s 365 days project (which denotes to post each day a photo, not any but of self - a part, portrait, piece, whatever). It ain’t no easy but it is good for practicing discipline, overcoming some photo insecurities and practicing. I’m inviting those of you with Flickr accounts to join me in this project and buzz me there.

Many folks asked me about .lifestream page and plug-in i’ve implemented in site. It’s great interactive live stream of activities on all web sites I’ve got feeds where you can follow/read my bits&bytes. Personal version of FriendFeed.  Useful micro -information. Credits you can find at the end of this page.

.links page is created for staying in touch with colleagues, friends, there are some affiliates, institutions. The list is random and is updating on daily basis, so if I miss someone, please remind me or send me an email. I don’t mind love links if you share same/similar interests with me.

And the most important central part is blog.You are more than welcome to comment, participate, suggest, write some reflections and thoughts on posts I’m writing. You can use direct comment form below each post (which is preferable), and for specific matters you can always contact me. Not to forget that if you didn’t grab my feed - it’s tiny rss box on the sidebar, as well as my fav. email form where you can receive updates via email.

Share and enjoy!