Albert Tanutama

If you’d like to know how social software can make an impact, I believe del.icio.us would be a great example. Now, according to the definition:

del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others. What makes del.icio.us a social system is its ability to let you see the links that others have collected, as well as showing you who else has bookmarked a specific site. You can also view the links collected by others, and subscribe to the links of people whose lists you find interesting.

The idea of this application as stated above is simple – save your bookmarks on the Web, rather than on your PC. First, delicious makes it simple to save, using bookmarklets. Then you can categorize it using (multiple) tag, much like gmail’s labelling system.

The thing gets really interesting once the system support social connections. Delicious automatically displays new bookmarks at its homepage. It describes who post it, how many people have that item on their list and display it in reverse chronological order.

For the past few days, I managed to find quite a number of interesting new websites. It is easy to take note which sites are popular because delicious highlighted those sites according to the number of people have bookmarked it. Its “copy this item” is quite useful despite I usually launched the site and use my post bookmarklet once I’ve verified its quality. It is also interesting to note that we can click to see people who have bookmarked that particular item because we might share common interest. I could see their bookmark items, and might even more interesting websites. I could also learned their bookmark categorization system. It seems that delicious could have come out with really interesting data set – and cool apps.

I’m impressed with the fact that delicious is really kind of community effort, where individual can enjoy benefit of using the application, and at the same time, the more they use it, the more useful the application has become. As if they do not have any trade off. I think delicious could be a good case study for social software, specifically – and future of application, generally.

I watched “The Incredibles” yesterday. Great movie – very entertaining. And personally, the best pixar movie! It has plenty of fast-paced scenes, which probably prepare them for their upcoming movies, “Cars”. Read the review @ metacritic and here or visit the official website.

Meanwhile, Center for the Digital Future has identified the 10 Major Trends Emerging in the Internet?s First Decade of Public Use. Another interesting report comes from OCLC “2004 Information Format Trends: Content, Not Containers“.

Finally, have you heard about OS-tan? It’s personification of operating system using japanese cartoon character. Hmm.

Google has released new beta application called “google scholar”

Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

I’m impressed. I’m looking forward if google would allow me to save the search result into my online profile – hence, I could work on the reports and projects anytime, anywhere. Something like mySearch from Yahoo!

Paul Resnick has a blog -”Paul Resnick’s Sabbatical Musings“. He’s author of “Beyond Bowling Together: SocioTechnical Capital” article.

Technology, to him, should be able to improve togetherness and activities that will generate “social capital”. This capital will have implication on how we exchange resources, mobilize activities, as well as route information. There are lots of opportunity in this area when we understand social aspect of technology -like Howard Rheingold’s smart mobs.

Zhouzhuang is the second city that I visited after Shanghai – just few hours ride by bus. The city has the “venesia-like” canals and “gondola”. The city became famous because of a painting by Chen Yifei which depicts Twin Bridges found there. As a result, this city is full of tourist!

The gondola ride is worth to try. It costs 80RMB for max 8 person (they are strict on this). If you want the boatman (or woman) to sing, you need to pay additional tips. They have pretty strong voice. The ride took about 30 mins. It is truly a tourist village. Almost all houses there have turned into shops (You won’t get lost there btw. Just find the main river). What’s unique (apart from the bridges and old houses): Pork legs (Lots of shops that sell this – and only this particular bodypart) – and some sweet cakes that they slice it into very thin one.

I bought a unique instrument made of dried gourd and tubes. I think it is called hulusi It has pretty smooth sound, and at the same time, could have bag-pipe kind of sound.

Just a caution, since Zhouzhuang is not a big city: be careful of your belongings, and be careful about the stuffs in the hotel. Some of the item must be purchased. And they might do some unethical practice. Some of our tour members have this bad experience of extra charge without using those items.

As promised, I’ll post bits of my last vacation here (some technical issues, pics will follow at later time).

Shanghai is the largest city in China with population of 16 millions. It is an industrial and port city, much like Singapore: river and ports, tall buildings that suggest similarity with HDB. According to the local custom, a local guide should be attached to our group during our visit around Shanghai. It was surprising to know that the local guide could actually talk in Indonesian (He took course in Beijing for just 8 months).

We visited Jade Buddha temple (Yu fo si) that housed two Buddha figures: a reclining and a seated (Sakyamuni) Buddha. It was made of white jade from Burma. You can’t take the picture of the seated Buddha, because it is sacred, and to protect the stone. The temple itself is not that old (established 1882).

Near the temple, there’s a local tourist shop that specialized in fresh water pearls (It is a custom to visit local industry shop as well). They showed how to get those fresh water pearls from the clams (each clam could produce 20 pearls!) and how to identify real pearl from fake ones (one of them is to scratch on the glass pane, the powder will come from the real one -> I doubt anyone would do so).

Nanjing lu is major shopping streets in Shanghai. I love the satay found there – they are dipped in the curry powder. Perfect in the cold weather. Don’t forget to throw the iron stick back to the box provided.

At night, we took optional cruise to see Shanghai by night (it costs about 80RMB per person). Buildings around Huangpu river are lighted up from 730 to around 11. I recommend to get to the boat early or not to take at all (I should have done the latter). The boat was extremely crowded (though it is about 3 to 4 storey high). It was pretty difficult to get nice place to sit and enjoy the scenery (I must admit, pretty beautiful. Chinese people loves to use animated neon lighting to decorate their building). I managed to find a neat spot near the dragon head on the second level.

We visited Pearl TV tower on the second day there. It was the icon of the city (since pearls are famous local industry there). We got into the second pearl with high speed lift (it’ll be great if the we can see outside from the lift). Pretty great to have the bird eye view of the city.

Our next two local industries were medicine and silk shop. You’ll see extreme demo – touching of 600C iron chain (by the saleslady) to see how effective one of their lotion product. Gosh… The visit to silk shop was pretty neat as well. A fashion show and a demo. You got to see how the silk cocoon is transformed into the silk thread or into filling material for bed sheet and pillow. It takes 4 person to scretch the silk.

If you’re interested to find books and art supplies, try Fuzhou road. There’s 7 storey high bookstore. There’s also small art supply shop, with really good price. For 40RMB, I got Windsor and Newton’s water color and acrylic paints (made in China obviously).

Lastly, Yu garden (Yu yuan or mandarin garden) is a famous old town in Shanghai to grab souvenirs. There’s a famous teahouse, called Huxinting teahouse with 9-corner bridge. I didn’t really find anything really interesting there tho I bought a musical instrument called the tube, much like a recorder, but with the sound of a clarinet.

There’s nothing to worry about the food and the restroom in Shanghai. They are pretty decent. Well, just hold your breath and just don’t do big business there

Jay Allen’s Blacklist plugin for MovableType is really cool plugin. Yesterday, there were about 200 spam found in this blogs. Seemed that the comment prevention approach that I did was not working In addition, to remove those comments through mt interface is really painful. There’s no specific interface to manage those comments (mt only displays 5 most recent comments).

Obviously, I could simply ignore those problems, since most of the spam happened in the old posts, which I rarely visited again (Now I wonder what’s the purpose of doing so except invading people’s ‘privacy’). However, I’ll have to spent my server space to accomodate those spams. No way! Well, this blacklist plugin really do wonders. I managed to remove > 100 comments within 2-3 minutes. The installation is really (surprisingly) simple, esp I haven’t used mt plugins before. I just need to download, unzip, put several files in appropriate directory, set some user rights, and voila! It is ready to remove spam. Thanks Jay!

Finally! I arrived back @ Singapore on 4 Nov midnight – after 17 days of exciting trip to China and 4 days in Indonesia. The food was great. The view was fantastic and the tour-mates were fun! I visited about 10 cities: Shanghai, Zhouzhuang, Wuchen, Hangzhou, Huangsan, Nanjing, Chengdu (and Leshan), Jiuzhaigou, Guilin, and Guangzhou. If you haven’t heard about those cities, no worry. I’ll write more about those cities in my next post (plus some pics). Cheers.