Categories
geo Web 2.0

Wherecamp, Therecamp

Disclaimer: This is a dashboard/notepad-like stream of ideas and questions, rather than a proper blog post šŸ™‚

WherecampEU, Berlin

An amazing time with some of the best minds around. Some points I’d like to put down and think about later:

1) Ed Parsons (@edparsons) run a very interactive session about what kind of open data developers expect from public authorities and companies. One of the questions asked was “would you pay to get access to open data?“. This issue has long been overlooked. Consider for a moment just public authorities: they are non-profit entities. Attaching an open license to data is quick and cheap. Maintaining those data and making them accessible to everyone is not. As developers and activists we need to push the Government to publish as many data they can. However, we want data to be sustainable. We don’t want to lose access to data for lack of resources (think about Tfl’s TrackerNet). Brainstorming needed…

2) Gary Gale (@vicchi) and his session on mapping as a democratic tool can be reduced to a motto: We left OS times, we are in OSM times. Starting from the consideration we don’t talk about addresses but about places, part of the talk was dedicated to the effort Gary and others are putting into defining a POI standard. The idea is to let the likes of Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places, etc…, store their places in a format that makes importing and exporting easy. Nice for neogeographers like us, but does the market really want it? Some big players are part of the POI WG, some are not.

3) I really enjoyed the sessions on mobile games, especially the treasure hunt run by Skobbler. However, some of these companies seem to suffer from the “yet another Starbucks voucher” syndrome. I’m sure that vouchers and check-ins can be part of a business plan, but when asked how they intend to monetize their effort some of these companies reply with a standard “we have some ideas, we are holding some meetings“. Another issue that needs to be addressed carefully – and that seems to be a hard one – is how to ensure that location is reported accurately and honestly. It doesn’t take Al Capone to understand you can easily cheat on your location and that when money are involved things can get weird.

4) It was lovely to see Nokia and Google on the same stage. Will it translate in some cooperation, especially with respect to point 2)?

5) I can’t but express my awe at what CASA are working on. Ollie‘s maps should make it to the manual for every public authority’s manager: they are not just beautiful, but they make concepts and problem analysis evident and easy to be appreciated by people who are not geo-experts. And by the way, Steven‘s got my dream job, dealing with maps, data, and RepRap šŸ˜€

6) Mark run a brainstorming session about his PhD topic: how to evaluateĀ trust in citizen reported human crisis reports. This is a very interesting topic, and he reports about it extensively on his blog. However, I’m not sure this question can have a single answer. What I feel is that different situations might require different models of trust evaluation, to the point that each incident could be so peculiar that even creating categories of crisis would result impossible. Mark’s statistical stance on starting his work might return an interesting analysis. I’m looking forward to see how things develop.

7) Martijn‘s talk about representing history in OpenStreetMap exposes a big problem: how to deal with the evolution of a map. This is important from two points of view: tracing down errors, and representing history. This problem requires a good brainstorming session, too šŸ™‚

8) Can’t help but praise Chris Osborne for his big data visualisation exposing mcknut‘s personal life šŸ™‚ And also for being the best supplier of quotes of the day and a great organiser of this event, as much as Gary.

What didn’t quite work

Just a couple of things, actually:
1 – live code presentations are doomed, as Gary suggested. They need better preparation and testing.
2 – no talk should start with “I’ve just put these things together”. Despite this being an unconference, that shouldn’t mean you want to show something bad quality. Or anyway give that impression.

Me wantz

Next time I wish to have:
1 – PechaKucha-style lightening presentations on day 1, to help people understand what sessions they want to attend
2 – similarly to point 1, a wiki with session descriptions and, upon completion, comments, code, slides, etc…
3 – a hacking/hands on/workshop session, on the model of those run at #dev8d.

Categories
recommender systems Web 2.0

Does the world want recommendations?

NewScientist reports on April 30th that Futureful, a Finnish start-up, is building a predictive iPad based search engine that will use a recommender system. By harvesting information from social feeds from Facebook, Twitter, etc…, its algorithm take the topics that are trending, it analyses the users’ interests and behaviour, and recommends new topics that might interest them.

Eric Schmidt is also quoted as having said “The ability to tell me things I didn’t know but am probably very interested in is the next great stage of search“.

I am possibly cynical about this topic and have extensively blogged (Who wants to be recommended?, May 2009) about the problem of appropriate recommendations and the ability to surprise of such systems.

The problems I see relate to how you are supposed to evaluate a system whose task is to generate surprising recommendations. Especially in academic research, the success of a recommendation engine is traditionally evaluated using a very simple metric: take a list of users choices on the given domain, hide a number of entries, check if the recommender system returns them upon analysing the remaining ones. Straightforward, although several other metrics have been proposed.

Now, how are you supposed to evaluate a system that doesn’t have a reference list? We can surely think of many metrics, some of them quantitative, some of them qualitative (or even social-based):

  • the probability a user follows the suggested link
  • the strength of the trust feeling towards the recommender
  • the fact that a user suggests the recommender system to other users …

However, a metric needs to be meaningful and qualitative metrics often lack this meaningfulness. If I’m a user and I want to be surprised, I will be probably following any random link. I often do that in what I call my serendipitous Wikipedia crawls. My favourite recommender system is, above all, Twitter: I only follow people that make me learn something interesting. Not one of the people that Twitter’s “Who to follow” system recommended me was relevant to me.

So I am a bit confused: what exactly a predictive search engine is really trying to achieve?

Categories
geo geomob mobile Web 2.0

GeoMob, 12 May 2011

A good level of participation for yesterday night GeoMob. Despite two speakers’ defections we had a well balanced schedule (one big company, one researcher, one startup) and a rich Q&A session. Here’s my usual summary with some thoughts embedded.

Microsoft Bing Maps, by Vikas Arora (@vikasar), Solution Sales Specialist
General show-case talk as we often have from big companies. However, some interesting products seem to be coming out of the Microsoft pipeline, especially StreetSlide and the partially related Photosynth. Some awesome novelty (although not immediately usable) like the amazing live Augmented Reality video stream on a static image view. I’m not totally sure the GeoMob crowd is the right one to show AR šŸ˜‰

There was some good debating about updating StreetSlide imagery, thanks to a question by Ollie. This is a well known problem in Google StreetView, especially in busy London High Streets where shops sometimes change hands multiple times in a year. As a result, by the time StreetView imagery has reached Google’s servers it displays a vintage version of reality. Vikas claims that by partnering with Navteq they will be able to update images every 4-6 months.

Vikas earns the best quote of the night award: “I can’t say much about Nokia except that it’s good for us”.

Mapping Surnames Geographically, by James Cheshire (@spatialanalysis), UCL Geography
I was absolutely fascinated by James’ work upon discovering it on the National Geographic Magazine some months ago. The general subject of this talk is showing how surname origins and popularity can be displayed on a map. Two works were presented about surnames in the US and in London.

The talk and the Q&A session highlighted both the power of a map to show surnames but also its limitations. There are obvious problems of visualization: short and long surnames being displayed in different size, choice of colours, positioning, density, granularity.

Although the map itself is a beautiful item, I think that its dynamic version, able to show the nth most popular surname,Ā is more useful, but only if used… dynamically. What I mean is that in places that are true melting pots like London what it’s interesting is not what surname or surnames are the most popular, but rather what’s the distribution of names of a certain origin in a given place. In other words, given the assumption that certain surnames can be related to certain communities, it’s interesting to see that the first five most popular in a given area are sometimes from five different origins.

James was open about the issues of visualising surnames this way, especially about how to treat granularity (e.g. the Irish community in New York is not as big as it would be). There is lot of work to do in this area and a map is only the tip of the iceberg of research, development, coding, and imagination.

Introducing Eeve, by Jan Senderek (@jansenderek)
Impressive UI analysis for this young start-up whose goal is to let people have fun creating and sharing events. Jan, their CEO, delivered a very interesting talk about how UI can lead to a great mobile application. Their strategy of “mobile first, then web” is interestingly different by that of many other startups around. Event creation and sharing seems to have a mind-boggling peculiarity: initially, events will need to be created in the place where they will be held and shared immediately. No forward planning allowed, which sounds strange but might capture the fantasy of party goers. They plan to extend the service to let event organisers create entries.

The (long) Q&A session seemed critical but was truly interested. First of all, turning myself into the bad guy, I asked what makes them different from their competitors. I’ve attended GeoMob since 2009 and this is at least the third company introducing a similar service, and their unique selling point is not extremely clear. Surely, UI seems to be really good for their app, but is that enough to get to that critical mass of users needed to succeed?

Secondly, the business model seemed not very well defined. Although as any stealth startup Eeve wouldn’t probably disclose too much about it, the general perception was that they need to think about it a bit more accurately, and Jan admitted that.

However, I also have the general impression that small companies presenting at GeoMob (not just Eeve) tend to come just with their shiny iPhone application rather than with the backstage work which might be of great interest. This also gives the wrong impression that most of them are trying to monetise upon nothing more than a mobile app. As it turns out, one of the other LBS introducing at GeoMob a similar event-based app was also selling a CRM system to event organisers which is where their main revenue stream comes from. None of this was mentioned at the presentation and we were left wondering with the same questions.

I won’t mention all the discussions about stalking and privacy: we’ve done that for all companies providing LBS, so nothing new from that perspective. But it’s always good to have our @StevenFeldman pointing that problem out.

To be honest, I’m curious about Eeve and will probably try it out (paying attention to privacy, of course :P). It would be nice to have a report on how many users join the system and especially their B2B strategy.
Maybe for a next GeoMob?

Categories
policy politics research

Research and democracy

This is the content of my letter published by the New Scientist.

It refers to Dan Hind’s proposal, on a previous issue, to make research topics subject to public scrutiny in order to create a “democracy of research” free from the action of lobbies. I suspect this is dangerous at worst and naive at best, as this would make the lobbies’ work much easier.

Hind was not available to comment.

From Giuseppe Sollazzo, London, UK

As much as it is true that public scrutiny is the base of every democratic system, I’m not sure that this concept can be easily applied to research anywhere but in an ideal world. Exclusion of people from the voting system based on their level of education would be considered anti-democratic, but what happens when the electorate is ignorant?

In the US, the incoming Republican House majority leader, Eric Cantor, has instigated a public vote that has already favoured cuts in science funding over other areas and is now being used to determine where these cuts should be made (11 December 2010, p 7).

Would Hind let people who voted for Cantor, Sarah Palin and the like decide how to allocate research funds? If not, the democracy is flawed. If he does, good luck to the rest of us.

EcUmIqifkycj
Categories
art Web 2.0

This blog in a cloud

Thanks to Wordle this is my blog’s word cloud. Unsurprisingly, and forgetting a minute interesting appearences as get and way the winners are users, data, and recommendations.

Categories
art

Vacuum tubes can be art

I rarely watch online videos that last more than 30 seconds. However, this time I couldn’t stop for the whole 17 minutes this video lasts.

It’s about a French ham radio operator who makes his own vacuum tubes. The great thing of this video is that it merges great technique (the guy does really know well what he’s doing) with an almost hypnotic jazz soundtrack. The elegant and delicate way he executes all the process is, in its own very nerdy way, totally artistic. No surprises, he’s French.

The making of the tubes is explained on his web-site. It’s in French, but Google Translates it pretty correctly.


Fabrication d’une lampe triode
Uploaded by F2FO. – Technology reviews and science news videos.

Categories
Uncategorized

Christmas Time

This blog, as usual, has been dormant for a while. I’m not one of those blogger who spit out everything passing through their minds but I generally like to report events, technologies, and research ideas that I’m really enjoying and understand.

So, let me deviate a little from my usual scope to report a little bit about myself and my expectations for the new year.

Firstly, in my day job, I was promoted from my previous post. I’ve been working for a year and a half at St George’s University of London as a Systems Developer and Administrator. Last July a colleague left, so I applied to take over his post of Senior Systems Analyst which I finally got in November. I’m now in charge of the mail and backup servers, and of taking care of the storage systems over our distributed network. Most interestingly, after having the chance of dealing with the implementation of our Common Research Information System using Symplectic, I’ve been able to initiate a couple of projects that I believe will greatly improve our services and our positioning as an educational institution in 2011:

– the development of a new process for service support, using Request Tracker
– the design, deployment, and marketing of a mobile portal.

I believe that both projects will help – given the cuts we’ll be experiencing – improve the quality of our services and reach a wider audience. Internal behavioural changes will be needed and a lot of inter-departmental cooperation will be required to let everyone accept the changes and I’m already working on the advocacy sub-projects.

Secondly, 2010 has been a great year of Geo development. After starting to get interested in the topic a couple of years ago, I got in touch with some great people that are really helping me expand my knowledge and views. For 2011 I expect to increase my practical skills and manage to do some work in the area – the first opportunity is exactly our corporate mobile portal, which will have extensive location aware capabilities.

Eventually, as a photographer I finally managed to experiment some techniques like HDR and do some nature photography in the Salt Ponds of Margherita di Savoia. In 2011 I’m planning to do all I can to turn semi-pro, launching a photography website and organize my first theme exhibition in a local cafe.Ā I created my own Christmas Cards this year, with the photo you see below: it’s a picture I took in Bologna, where I was living up to 2008, and it’s the Christmas Tree we have every year in the main square.

That’s all for the moment. Enjoy your holidays, whatever you wish to celebrate šŸ™‚

Christmas in Bologna

Categories
geo geomob

The several issues of geo development: a chronicle of October’s GeoMob

GeoMob has returned after a longer-than-usual hiatus due to other – and definitely very interesting – commitments of our previous Mr GeoMob, Christopher Osborne. It was a very interesting night with the usual format of four presentations covering aspects of research, development and business. Here’s my summary and comments.

Max Howell, @mxcl – Tweetdeck

I’m a bit unsure on how to comment the involvement of TweetDeck into the GeoSocial business.
Max’s presentation has been focused on the integration of their application with FourSquare. It’s a tightly coupled integration allowing users to follow their Twitter friends using the locative power of Foursquare, i.e. putting them on a map. Max gave out some bread for our brains when commenting that “Google Latitude is not good for us because it gives out location continuously, whereas we are looking for discrete placement of users on POIs“: this is a real example of why more-is-not-necessarily-better and, in my opinion, the main reason for which, to date, Latitude has been less successful in catalysing users’ attention on locative services.

However, I’m not totally sure why TweetDeck foresees its future into becoming a platform to integrate Twitter and FourSquare into a single framework. “Other apps put FourSquare functions in a separate window and this is distasteful“. Is it really? And how exactly will TweetDeck benefit, financially but not only, from this integration? “We spent a lot of time on FourSquare integration but unfortunately it’s not much used“. They should ask themselves why.
Their TODO list includes Geofencing which might be interesting so let’s wait and see.

Matthew Watkins, @mazwat – Chromaroma by Mudlark

For those of you who don’t know it yet: Chromaroma is a locative game based on your Oyster card touch-ins and touch-outs. They’re still in closed alpha, but the (not so many?) lucky users (I’ve asked to join the alpha 3-4 times, but they never replied) can connect their Oyster account to the game and take part to some kind of Gowalla for transport, based on the number of journeys, station visited, personal and team targets.

Two things to be considered:
– open data and privacy: upon joining the service, the user account page is scraped for their journeys. Matthew explained they approached TfL to ask for APIs/free access to the journeys data but “due to budget cuts we’re low priority“. Apparently they’ve been allowed to keep on doing scraping. The obvious issue is a matter of trust: why should someone give their oyster account access to a company that, technically, hasn’t signed any agreement with TfL?
This is worrying, as to get journey history data you need to activate Auto Top-up. So you’re basically allowing a third party to access an account connected to automatic payments from your payment card.
Secondly, I can’t understand TfL’s strategy on open data here: if they are not worried about the use Mudlark is doing of such data, why not providing developers with an API to query the very same data? Users’ consent can be embedded in the API, so I’m a bit worried that Chromaroma is actually exposing the lack of strategy by TfL, rather than their availability to work together with developers. I hope I’m wrong.
– monetising: I’m not scared of asking the very same question to any company working on this. What is Mudlark’s monetisation strategy and the business viability of such strategy? It can’t be simply “let’s build travel profiles of participating users and sell them to advertisers” as TfL would have done that already. And if TfL haven’t thought about this, or if they’re letting Mudlark collect such data without even letting them adhere to some basic T&C, we are in serious trouble. However, it’s the declared strategy by Mudlark that does not convince me. Matthew suggests it might be based on target like “get from Warren Street to Kings Cross by 10 am, show your touch-ins and get a free coffee” or on the idea of “sponsor items” you can buy. Does this strategy have a market that is big enough? And, as I’ve already asked, why should a company pay for this kind of advertisement that is potentially available for free? If the game is successful, however, it will be chaos in the Tube – and I’m really looking forward to it šŸ™‚

Oliver O’Brien, @oobr – UCL CASA Researcher

Oliver has recently had his 15 minutes of glory thanks to some amazing live map visualisation of London Barclays Cycle Hire availability. He went further to develop visualisation pages for different bicycle hire schemes all around the world – before he received a Cease&Desist request by one of the companies involved. As a researcher, he provided interesting insight to the GeoMob showing some geo-demographic analysis. For example, weekdays vs weekend usage patterns are different according to the area of the world involved. London is very weekdays-centric, showing that the bicycles are mainly used by commuters. I wonder if this analysis can provide also commercial insight as much as Chromaroma’s intended use of Oyster data.

Thumbs up for the itoworld-esque animation visualizing bike usage in the last 48 hours – stressing that properly done geo-infographic can be extremely useful for problem analysis. Oliver’s future work seems targeted at this, and ideally we’ll hear more about travel patterns and how they affect the usability of bicycle hire schemes. I can’t really understand why he was asked to take some of the maps down.

Eugene Tsyrklevich, @tsyrklevich – Parkopedia

The main lesson of this presentation: stalk your iPhone app users, find them on the web, question them and make them change the negative reviews.
An aggressive strategy that can probably work – and I would actually describe Parkopedia’s strategy as positively aggressive. They managed to get a deal with AA about branding their parking-space-finding-app in exchange for a share of profit.
Eugene’s presentation was more about business management than development. Nonetheless it was incredibly full of insight. Especially on how to be successful when marketing an iPhone application. “Working with known brands gives you credibility, and it opens doors“. The main door that this opened was actually Apple’s interest in featuring their app on the AppStore, leading to an almost immediate 30-fold increase in sales. This leads to further credibility and good sales: “Being featured gets you some momentum you never lose“. This is a good lesson for all our aspiring geo-developers.

Categories
geo Web 2.0

The past (and future?) of location

I must say – without making it too emotional – that I feel somewhat attached to geo-events at the BCS as my first contact with the London geo-crowd was there over a year ago, with a GeoMob including a talk by the same Gary Gale who gave a talk last night. That was, at least for him, one company and one wholeĀ  continent ago – for the rest of us the “agos” include new or matured geo-technologies: Foursquare, Gowalla, Latitude, Facebook and Twitter places, plus our very own London based Rummble, and minus some near-casualties (FireEagle).

Some highlights/thoughts from his talk:

The sad story of early and big players
– early players are not always winners: this can happen in a spectacular way (Dodgeball) or more quietly (Orkut has not technically been a commercial success, for example) – but also
– big players are not always winners: it’s all just a little bit of history repeating, isn’it? Remember the software revolution? The giant IBM didn’t understand it, and a small and agile company called Microsoft became the de-facto monopolist. OS/2 is still remembered as one of the epic fails in software. Remember the Internet revolution? The giant Microsoft had its very own epic fail called Microsoft Network. It took them ages to create a search engine, and in the meantime an agile and young company with a Big G became the search giant. Some years later, the aforementioned Orkut, started by Google as a side project, didn’t have the agility and the motivation to resist to Facebook. The same might happen about location services.

Power to the people
The problem with big players is that they take the quality of data bases for granted. Foursquare et al. found a way to motivate users to keep the POI database constantly updated by using a form of psychological reward. Something that Google hasn’t quite done.

Now monetize, please
Ok, we can motivate users by assigning mayorship and medals. Having a frequently refreshed database is a step ahead. But how do you make money out of it? “Let’s get in touch with the companies and ask for a share of the profit” can work for some brave early adopters. But it will not take long for companies to realize they can use the data – for free – to make business analysis without even contacting foursquare. “Become mayor and get a 10% discount”. What other data analysis should motivate them to pay for it? Knowing where a customer goes next? Where they’ve been before? Maybe to get higher profile in the searches, like in google searches? In the ocean of possibilities, the certainty is that there isn’t yet an idea that works well. “Even Facebook lacks the time to contact the big players to negotiate discounts“. And if you think about the small players it’s even more difficult (but if Monmouth offers me a free espresso I’ll work hard to become their Mayor!).
The way many companies are trying to sell it is still pretty much old economy: sell the check-ins database to a big marketing company, blablabla. Cfr. next point.

Dig out the meaningful data
Ok, we have motivated the users to keep our POIs fresh. But they want to be mayor, so they exploit APIs. Their favourite bar has already a Mayor? They create another instance of the same place. They create their own home. I’ve seen a “my bed”. Is there an algorithmic way to filter out the meaningless data? Surely not in the general case. Moreover, as Gary stressed, simply “selling your database starts eroding its value“. Because the buyer needs to find a use for that mountain of data. As for now, such use is not evident, because most of the data is not meaningful at all.

“If Augmented Reality is Layar, I’m disappointed”
Some time ago I noticed a strange absence of overlap among the geo-crowd and the AR-crowd. The latter presents ideas that have been discussed for years by the former as a “revolution”. One problem is that maybe we have augmented reality but not a realistic augmentation, mostly because of reduced processing power on mobile devices. Ideally you would like to walk down the broadway, see a SuperMario-like green mushroom that gives you an extra shot of espresso (to me it’s like getting an extra-life), catch it, and claim the coffee in the shop around the corner. Unfortunately, GPS is not accurate enough (Galileo might solve this problem soon) and walking down all the time pointing your phone camera to the road will only drain your battery (and probably get you killed before you manage to catch the mushroom). It’s not just an issue of processing power and battery life, though. Even with that, there’s a serious user interaction issue. AR glasses might, partially, solve that, but I can’t really believe that augmenting reality is *just* that and not something that empowers a user’s imagination. Geo-AR is on the boundary between novelty (“oh look, it correctly puts a label on St Paul’s cathedral!“) and utility. And currently on the wrong side of it.

The director’s cut will (not) include recommendations
“I’m sure we’ll make it to the director’s cut” – Alex Housley complained in the typical flamboyant way of the Rummble crowd about being left out of the presentation. “We believe trust networks are the future“. Yes and no. I agree with Alex in the sense that how to provide appropriate recommendations is an interesting research problem (but also here)Ā  and the key to monetization of any service. It’s technically not the future, though: Amazon has been using recommendations for years, and I’ve done purchases myself prompted by their recommendations. Trust networks have been extensively used in services like Netflix. What Rummble is trying to do is a more direct way of exploiting trust networks to enrich recommendations, bringing them to the heart of the application. I’m sure that recommendations will play a role in monetizing the geo-thing and that even trust networks may, too. What I’m not sure about is if recommendations will be as they’re now. Without a revolution in the way users perceive local recommendation – that is, a user interaction revolution – they’re not gonna make it. Users need a seamless way of specifying the trust network, and a similarly seamless way of receiving the recommendation.

Categories
security Web 2.0

Luttazzi, la mala fede, e la ragione

[Sorry, this post is in Italian]

AGGIORNAMENTO 2 (14/6/2010):

Una pagina chiamata ā€œCaccia al tesoroā€ compare su web archive giaā€™ a gennaio 2006: http://web.archive.org/web/20060112195056/http://www.danieleluttazzi.it/?q=node/144. Quindi, esisteva a gennaio 2006. Indicizzata circa 2 mesi dopo la sua creazione.

Si noti un dettaglio: node=144 invece di node=285. Con un formato di URL fondamentalmente diverso. Ovvero, cā€™eā€™ stato un cambio di CMS.

Questo chiaramente non toglie nessuno dei discorsi sul plagio, la copia, eccetera, ma quanto meno svuota lā€™accusa di cospirazione, che per quanto mi riguarda era fastidiosa (e non utile ai fini ā€œmoraliā€ della discussione, che eā€™ quella di stabilire se e quanto sia lecito ā€œcopiareā€/ā€citareā€, con o senza riferimento). Non c’e’ stata, almeno per questo post, alcuna retrodatazione: esisteva gia’ nel 2005.

AGGIORNAMENTO (14/6/2010):

– Per correttezza, il gestore del blog ntvox, quello che per primo ha parlato di questa vicenda, mi ha chiesto di precisare che la questione di web.archive.org non e’ l’argomento chiave del suo blog, che invece e’ piu’ interessato alla discussione generale della liceita’ del copiare battute, e alla mole di battute apparentemente copiate da Luttazzi. Sebbene l’argomento venga citato nel blog, e’ vero che non ne e’ la questione fondamentale.

– Giusto per ripetere fino alla noia: mi sto formando una posizione sull’intera questione, e tale posizione ovviamente e’ personale. Questo blog e’ pero’ un blog tecnico, e questo post si riferisce solo agli aspetti tecnici di una prova usata in modo, a mio parere, tecnicamente errato. Non vuole essere un richiamo ad altre prove, o presunte tali. Ci sarebbe da discutere su cosa costituisca indizio e cosa prova inconfutabile; cosi’ come su quali siano i requisiti tecnici di quella che puo’ essere ammessa come “prova”. In questo post mi concentro sul perche’ questa specifica questione non possa essere ammessa come prova, per mancanza di requisiti tecnici. Full stop.

(fine)

Non lo nascondero’, fino a ieri mattina “ero” un fan di Daniele Luttazzi.
Dopo aver letto le notizie sull’eventuale “plagio” sono diventato un ex fan deluso.

Eppure qualcosa mi ha spinto a verificare le informazioni riportate, in particolare riguardo quella che viene ritenuta la prova “schiacciante” della mala fede del comico romagnolo.
Credo che ci siano delle ragioni prettamente tecniche che, invece, difendono tale buona fede o quanto meno dimostrano che le prove portate a suo carico sono, nel migliore dei casi, inconclusive.

Premetto: di professione faccio l’informatico, mi occupo di internet e networking, ho una certa esperienza personale di gestione di siti internet.

L’accusa: Luttazzi avrebbe copiato delle battute da famosi autori satirici e, onde evitare di essere smascherato quale plagiatore, avrebbe scritto sul suo blog due post in cui invitava a una “caccia al tesoro di citazioni”, retrodatando questi due post in modo tale da non destare “sospetti”.

Reperti dell’accusa: i due post in questione sono recuperabili dal blog di Luttazzi e sono:
– http://www.danieleluttazzi.it/node/285 datato 9Ā  giugno 2005
– http://www.danieleluttazzi.it/node/324 datato 10 gennaio 2006

Prove dell’accusa: il sito internet http://web.archive.com. Tale sito permette di recuperare tutte le versioni precedenti di una pagina internet. Cercando su web.archive.com le due pagine in questione, vengono riportate le presunte “data di creazione”:
– per il post 285, tale data sarebbe il 9 ottobre 2007 (oltre 2 anni dopo la data riportata da Luttazzi)
– per il post 324, tale data sarebbe il 13 dicembre 2007 (poco meno di 2 anni dopo la data riportata da luttazzi)

Da un punto di vista tecnico-informatico, in realta’, quelle due date sono fuorvianti.
Quello che sfugge all’accusa e’ un piccolo dettaglio tecnico: la data che web.archive.org riporta NON e’ la data di creazione della pagina. Si tratta invece della data in cui tale pagina e’ stata raggiunta per la prima volta dai “robot” di web.archive.org. Se oggi viene creata una pagina internet, questa pagina ci mettera’ un certo tempo, piu’ o meno lungo, ad essere “trovata” da web.archive.org. Questo tempo puo’ richiedere, effettivamente, anni.

Ci si potrebbe chiedere, dunque, se due anni siano un tempo ragionevole per l’indicizzazione di un sito popolare come quello di Luttazzi. Chiaramente non e’ possibile, a rigor di logica, avere una risposta certa. Statisticamente parlando, pero’, abbiamo degli indizi piuttosto seri che i post non siano stati retrodatati da Luttazzi. Basta prendere alcune pagine a caso dal blog, e verificarne data riportata e data su web archive:

– http://www.danieleluttazzi.it/node/277, data blog: 3 aprile 2007, MAI archiviata su web archive (forse questo dimostrerebbe che la pagina non esiste affatto?)
– http://www.danieleluttazzi.it/node/286, data blog: 10 gennaio 2006, prima data web archive: 9 ottobre 2007
– http://www.danieleluttazzi.it/node/289, data blog: 1 novembre 2006, prima data web archive: 9 ottobre 2007
– http://www.danieleluttazzi.it/node/291, data blog: 14 marzo 2007, prima data web archive: 9 ottobre 2007 (per questa pagina viene riportata anche una modifica risalente al 2 agosto 2008, prova che dal 2007 in poi il sito di Luttazzi e’ stato costantemente seguito da web archive)

Si noti che molte di queste date risalgono a ottobre 2007. Anzi, allo stessa data di ottobre: il 9. La stessa data del presunto post incriminato. Motivo? L’intero sito e’ stato indicizzato a partire da ottobre 2007. Prima non era presente su web.archive.org.
A maggior riprova di questo, basti guardare http://web.archive.org/web/*/danieleluttazzi.it/* Questa pagina contiene l’elenco di TUTTE le pagine del sito danieleluttazzi.it presenti su web.archive.org. E’ facile verificare come fino al 9 ottobre 2007 il sito NON fosse indicizzato. Tant’e’ che in quella data sono state aggiunge letteralmente centinaia di pagine a web.archive.org

Lo stesso vale per altri blog.

Prendete, ad esempio, un altro comico molto, Beppe Grillo:
– http://www.beppegrillo.it/2005/01/il_papa_e_infal.html data blog: 31 gennaio 2005, prima data web archive:
7 febbraio 2006 (oltre un anno dopo)

o quello del “cacciatore di bufale” Paolo Attivissimo:
– http://attivissimo.blogspot.com/2005/12/come-sta-valentin-bene-grazie-e-ha.html data blog: 31 dicembre 2005, prima data web archive: 16 gennaio 2006

Succede anche al noto quotidiano online repubblica.it, seppur con meno attesa:
– http://www.repubblica.it/ambiente/2010/04/27/news/marea-_nera-3646349/index.html?ref=search pubblicato il 27 aprile 2010 e non ancora su web archive; la pagina, tra l’altro, riporta un attesa di circa 6 mesi per entrare negli archivi (nel 2010, potrebbe essere stata piu’ alta nel 2007).

Se questo non prova che i due post in questione siano stati scritti davvero nel 2005 e nel 2006, diciamo che quanto meno e’ un indizio piuttosto forte che le date non siano state modificate manualmente. E comunque dimostra chiaramente che web.archive.org non puo’ essere usato, come e’ stato fatto, come prova per accusare Luttazzi di essersi difeso in mala fede, in quanto l’indicizzazione comincia troppo tardi.

Le valutazioni sul fatto se sia o meno lecito usare battute di altri non spettano a me da un punto di vista tecnico, ma al pubblico di Daniele. Di cui, ammirando prima di tutto lo stile di performance, torno a essere “fan”, dato che questo piccolo giro tecnico di verifica ha ristabilito la mia fiducia nella buona fede della sua difesa.

Mi piacerebbe che blogger, giornalisti, e altri accusatori verificassero il funzionamento di uno strumento tecnico di cui, evidentemente, hanno capito poco, prima di sbandierarlo come prova di mala fede.