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.

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.

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!

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.

Two days ago I was giving a talk at the International Scientific Conference, University of Belgrade (25-27th Sept). I have uploaded slides of that talk, for anyone who are interested in OA, e-resources, the usage of social media and software in education. Also, I created temporary wiki page that I need to sort out, until writings section of this blog comes to its place. There is video to be published and some of the photos on Flickr.

In general Serbian scientific community is not ready to embrace social software and Web 2.0 yet, and I was surprised that some of the speakers - e.g., Ron Davies from European Digital Library project was talking about very out-dated issues like semantic web  in ‘new’ EDL projects [seen/heard that back in 2002], but then there are numbers, million of numbers that are promising that project Europeana.net will be finished in 2, 3 years. Locally, there is high level of idleness, inconsistency and net/notworking. No surprises.

Radiohead just released a new video for its song “House of Cards” from the album “In Rainbows”.

No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.

Watch the making-of video to learn about how the video was made and the various technologies that were used to capture and render 3D data.

For more information on data visualization (and how you can download it),  you can click on Google code page. It is interesting that this video is published under the mixture of copyrights/lefts: the code is open source licenced to Aaron Koblin, and the data (not the music)  used to produce the House of Cards music video is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

I hope that this wonderful Radiohead song and the video will inspire and gather other visual artists and IT people to use various technologies in making something innovative in the future.

This weeks’ event in Torino, Italy -  Frontiers of Interaction IV brought, beside interesting speakers, video talk with digital guru Howard Rheingold, interviewed by Robin Good on vision about the future of mobility and pervasive techs. Fantastic video link covers major topics on online collaboration, digital divide, net neutrality, interaction and future of mobile techs, e-learning and other major issues in the future of social media and web.

[blip.tv ?posts_id=1049057&dest=-1]

I got email this morning from my old friend and colleague commenting, among other things, on my Flickr photo blog and 365days project.  One of the photos drew his attention to write these words that astonished me, because…:

I was very amazed about a picture from eating Serbian women. I’m not a psychologist, but sometimes when I often see this behavior, it comes up in my mind, that they are not happy, lack of love, attention and so, and as compensation starting to eat. And soon growing up their bums. And particularly what they consume: “ugly Mac-food”.”

…because these women are no fat, the context of this stolen click - photo (as the title says) they love to eat, they are not starving, they are healthy, normal women with [if so] a bit wider hips [but hey, why many men love those hip-hop and soul singers with hips, ‘bums’, and drool over photos of Monica Bellucci? And if you see below this photo, several people from different geo-spots made a comment and none of them (both female and male) mentioned that these girls are overweight or fat. I thought that curves make women feminine, and still think so. But this is not the end. When new information hits you in the morning, the other comes along with it, from the daily news. And it is a story of Czech supermodel who was attacked by Brazilian ‘fashion police’ that on recent runaway show she appeared to be fat, with the critiques on “back fat, love handles and cellulite”. Hello! Is this fat?

Maybe, these are the reasons why society and media push up young girls and women-to-be into sick state of mind and health: skinny, starving and sick go together. Recent article shows also that in the past two years there were two cases of girls who died from anorexia (eating for weeks only lettuce and Coke). After this story I got a bit intimidated by the photos of the food I posted on Flickr here and there, which makes me ‘fat’ and i guess ‘rich’ person according to the media.

I couldn’t help but wonder shall we live the healthy lives the best we can according to our set of standards or shall we follow the world ‘trends’, starve, die and be remembered as ‘beautiful and thin’ sticks without cellulite?  I guess many of us should re-examine our own values and listen to ourselves, our body and biorhythm trying to make a balance in life.

I’m suggesting you to watch this inspiring TED video staring key speaker Mark Bittman, and contemplate our eating habits, for the start.  As for me, I’m going now to have an apple for a snack, fish and veggies for lunch, followed by rich ice-cream for desert.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/danche24/2626913505/

UNESCO office in New Delhi, as a clearinghouse for dissemination and sharing of information and knowledge in all fields of UNESCO’s competence, published ebook Open Access to Knowledge and Information: Scholarly Literature and Digital Library Initiatives – the South Asian Scenario. I wrote earlier that some of the major edu. institutions started to practice free flow of information (some didn’t yet) by giving the open access to their repositories of electronic documents, realizing that locked archives are keeping their users, mostly academics, researchers, away from the source of knowledge and information. For global institution for Educational, Scientific and Cultural affairs - UNESCO, open access is “ an innovative mode of scholarly communication within the digital environment, which is gaining momentum in developed countries that already have necessary information infrastructure.” One of the conditions for information structure is developed information society, and the book presents successful open access initiatives in the South Asia sub-region, available in the forms of “open courseware, open access journals, metadata harvesting services, national-level open access repositories and institutional repositories.” It is good to know about South Asian initiatives and efforts in making the knowledge and information open! You can download this book here.

What is Twitter doing today?

I know what we’ve been doing in the last few days, using new tools: Tweetscan -SE for Twitter posts in real-time and Twhirl, desktop client for Twitter that enables you to post from this platform to multiple micro-blogging services: Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce. You might be interested in the following mashups, tools, applications, resources that could facilitate your everyday twittering:

- Quotably, makes conversations easier to follow.

-TwitterLocal, another desktop Adobe Air application that lets you to view tweets in your area (city, state, post.code, range of miles and search)

-Twixxer, enables you sharing photos and videos using Greasemonkey script.

-TweetStats, you can graph your Twitter status by hour, month, timeline. Service is a bit slow, usually three people waiting before getting your stats, and you can get amused with proverbs on patience. ah.

-GroupTweet, the concept reminds on google groups but this is micro twitter community made for sending private messages between you and specific group of your friends.

-12seconds.tv, short (12 sec.) video updates with your Twitter friends, for now in alpha version.

-multitweet.com, web based service - Twitter and Jaiku at one page.

-Twitsig, converts your tweets into images. Didn’t try this one.

Also, check out, via, the definitive list of the top Twitter clients and for Serbian readers there’s pioneering article (in Serbian) on micro blogging and Twitter can be read and seen in April ed.of PC press magazine.

Today I came across an interesting video, showing an irritated kid who was mocked and attacked by his older teen brother and his friends while socializing in his own private online space. The video was recorded by his brother with the intent of being “a documentary of how people can be obsessed by My Space.” In the video, the older teens are provoking the child into hysterical behavior and crying as he tries to defend his personal “my space”. They intentionally laugh at him and ask provoking questions, which makes the child hysterical. Teenage cruelty was expressed by classical passive-aggressive behavior with the goal of making this kid feel guilt, using strong accusations that his “obsession” with My Space is “killing us and our family”. The irritated kid was defending his private physical and virtual space, especially since for him My Space is a part of his everyday life (his friends to hang out with- social life).

Kids, and teens, are more often moving to the online playground during the early phases of their socialization and, using that medium, they build relationships and stay connected to their friends. Almost everyday the media talks about potential predators and bullying on My Space, but now I wonder if the real bullying (sometimes) comes from the family or the ‘closest’ ones (in the real world) , in some particular cases because they were not understood by adult culture.

Is My Space a poor excuse for a social life?

More of videos. Common Craft this time presents micro-blogging service: Twitter (in plain English).

Twitter is down this morning (again). This time without notification that something went wrong. Server crash or something else? I tried to reach the api, help, and the only tray of the bird I got from Google’s cache of www.twitter.com (as retrieved on 27 February 2008).  Far that I’m experiencing mind panic attacks if “Twitter is down for more than an hour”, but I got a bit annoyed of my favourite micro-blogging form. After reading interesting blog post of top 10 signs that you might need Twittervention, I came this morning to thought that this is done on purpose as we should all get back and update our blogs more often?

Thank you Twitter, and you… What are you doing?

How many times you have been poked by a friend, colleague, and affiliate? And what was your reaction? I had to write few lines on this as I am recently (massively) poked on Facebook. It was regular, surprisingly massively poking (not superpoking), not explicitly poked, but – just regular poke with two choices given: to poke back or remove poke.

Perceiving my Facebok space as my friendly social networking interactive playground receiving willingly or not many requests, superwall posts that ended in ’shrinked’ version of my FB extended profile, I stopped and wondered in the past few days: “what is happening recently with poking?” I’ve been for long time on Facebook, but never had massive poking notifications daily. Why are my pokers, poking me all the time? Regularly..

Many dictionaries as well as Wikipedia Poke define as gesture of action of tapping and/or softly jabbing another person with the tip of your finger or a pointy object. This is usually done to gain this particular person’s attention, and is commonly used as a form of teasing, joking around with, or annoying another person.

And what is Facebook poke?

Facebook as social network defines poke as social utility that connects you with the people around you.
What is the purpose of this form of interaction with your friends on Facebook with two simple actions? If we exclude implementation of poking in higher education in learning and communicating processes , we can consider other implications. Removing the poke could be interpretted by the friend as ignoring the poke, but poking back simply invites your friend to repeat the cycle.

In social networking terms, poke is contextual, and the context of poke is dependent upon the current level of familiarity between the ‘poker’ and the ‘pokee’. I remember last year I was invited to a group “Enough with poking, let’s just have sex “, and ignored request for the membership as I observed then poking as friendly virtual gesture with friends and colleagues , usually denoting verbal phrase: “Hey , what’s up?” , or “Look at me!”, saying” ”Hi”, to someone you already know well or screaming background form: “Hey, I’m here, online!,” or “Hey, I’m busy but just poked you to say I didn’t forget this and that or will be back soon’, followed usually by message/email. And there are pokes that are expressing more than friendly, primarily school behavior with connotation: “I poke you and now you have to poke me back”.
Poking for fun? “I won’t pull your hair/ponytail – but I’m poking you” - elements of (naïve) and light weighted flirtation. Therefore, poke can be flirting. Poke can be “I am shy but won’t to say hi”.

There are numerous possible meanings and interpretations behind the poke and in social networking technologies context poke can be perceived as: 1. showing the {romantic*} interest for the other, 2. High visibility, Low pressure way of getting attention 3. a lightweight interaction.

An interesting range of it’s meaning but we always have to have in mind the social context and the level of intimacy between two communication nodes.

When I expressed annoyance at today’s massive poking, one of my colleagues wrote in his status bar on Facebook that poking is fun and is not giving up, and I truly believe his perceiving of Facebook poking as light and ‘on the run’ social utility.
I’ve asked my friends what poke mean to them, but they didn’t know to explain… they just poke. While I was writing this text, friend of mine, IT engineer, tried to understand concept of poking. He said that poke is subjective, it can lead to misunderstandings unless all parties agree on what a poke is or all parties accept that they can’t know what a poke is. Maybe.

:smile :

Do you poke, and if so, what would you do instead of poking on Facebook, in a real life?