Ludoo

Daniele, the author of the ASP blog engine Dblog, just sent me an email to announce the release of version 2.0. Being a Unix guy (even though I work in a mainly mainframe/Windows based company) I did not know about Dblog until tonight, but as it's one of the few Open Source projects developed in Italy I feel it my duty to announce it here. I hope Scoble notices it.

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Reading Clay Shirky's A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy this morning for my proposal (BTW Ross, sorry for being late in replying to your thoughtful email, will do it soon), I was struck by how well Weblogs Inc's Star System implements three of Shirky's Four Things to Design For in Social Software:

The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in.

Second, you have to design a way for there to be members in good standing. [...] Have to design some way in which good works get recognized.

Three, you need barriers to participation.

WI's Star System has been running on a few of their blogs for the past couple of weeks, and it's a reputation system built on top of their readers' comments:

• users are identified (and comments approved) using their email addresses
• good comments have scores, and the system tracks and displays members with the highest score
• comments are approved only if the user's address is valid, by clicking on the comment approval link sent by email

The benefits for good commenters are not only in seeing their nickname listed in the blog's sidebar: if they provide a personal URL their nickname points to it with a link that shold bring some traffic (especially from the big blog like Engadget or Autoblog) and, missing the rel="nofollow" attribute, gives them ranking and linking status in search engines.

Jason is a not only a very smart businessman, but a real innovator. Now off to lunch. Update: Jason linked to this post.

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Nick Denton's New York Times interview mentioned today by Scoble gives me the occasion to write a few thoughts I have been ruminating after LesBlogs, which I have been discussing for the past week or so with David Tebbutt in an ongoing email exchange.

Is there a "blogging revolution"? Yes, despite what Denton says to the NYT reporter. But the revolution is over, what we are seeing now is its secularization. A few things struck me at LesBlogs, all distinctive characteristics of revolutionary movements that, having exhausted their innovative charge, turn themselves into institutions:

1. the emergence of a new, self-referential establishment with its periphery of sycophants and wannabes (including myself probably)
2. the superficiality and repetivity of many discussions, which showed a suspect resemblance to a political party's official doctrine (or a large company's vision)
3. the feel that much of what was being said was for the benefit of potential customers, or of the many journalists attending the conference

It's very clear to me that a new hierarchy/power structure has emerged, with lots of capital at its disposal with which to fuel enough hype to try and push social software in the enterprise. It won't be long before we see CEOs and top managers falling for the new buzzwords, and forcing blogs/wiki/etc, onto their users and IT departments, without having a clue what they're about.

As for LesBlogs, I have finally understood why Dave Winer insists that BloggerCon remains a users' conference...

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It may be the first time an Italian blog makes the headlines in national news. Gianluca Neri, the host of the popular group blog Macchianera, has published today the full "declassified" text of the US report on Calipari's death in Baghdad. Gianluca has been the first to notice that the Acrobat file of the report distributed to the press was not encrypted, and had basic editing operations still enabled. Copying the text and pasting it a new file allowed him to restore the full text, circumventing the black mask applied to classified parts. The news is making the rounds of all national newspapers and TV stations. A commented timeline of the events (in italian) on Webgol. Bravo Gianluca.

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