Alas, I got information from the screen that there is an issue in the processing of my reservation aka system error. Please try again and if the problem persists (which does), to contact them (JAT airways) for further information. So I went back to the front page of JAT airways site and dialed number of call center {+38111311 2123}  for reservations via my mobile phone. I emphasized I am calling from Rome, that I failed to buy ticket via their web site, also stressing out that their reservation system is not working and I showed my concern that the system (they call it Amadeus) has been eaten my monies from credit card. Then after 10 minutes of checking out the status – they confirmed that Miss Radovanovic tried to buy ticket (they even saw my seat number), but then they weren’t sure so they redirected me to new number {+381112010117} to colleagues in Internet payment section of JAT. Did I mention that the girl who was on the other side of the line asked me three times if I’m calling from Belgrade or Rome?
Anyways, a woman at Internet payment section told me with humble voice that she cannot give me the reason why their web site is not working as I was pissed by then and wanted explanation. She only guaranteed me that my monies from credit card are not withdrawn so I am safe, and if I want to pay my e-ticket reservation I need to call a call center  (again +38111311 2123), this time a guy named Aleksandar told me that this procedure will last a bit longer after I said I’m calling from abroad and from mobile. I thought what the heck, I just want my ticket and to finish with it. Then the procedure of everything I went through the web site started but via phone (name, address, time, date, passport no., etc), and when I was about to make a phone payment, this man asked me with suspicious tone in his voice if I have credit card (such nonsense question, I wouldn’t buy e-ticket if I don’t own it, right?), and after saying “yes” to all those hideous questions (If I am the owner of the card, where I am right now, what’s my mobile number, am I calling from where, etc.), I finally made it to get my confirmation of e-ticket to my inbox. My bank also confirmed the transaction via text message notification, but what really made me angry was the time and money (hey – all in all I’ve spent 20minutes calling JAT airways, Belgrade from my mobile in Rome) I’ve spent in action via phone instead on their malfunctioning web site. What’s behind – only people in JAT management know.

The worst thing is that this problem exists for years and they are not fixing it!!! Every time I go to their web site hoping that things have changed – I get confirmation on the spot that they didn’t change. And I am not the only one who did notice and protest about this issue. So today I was reading  BBC news that Serbia is set for visa-free  EU travel from 2010, which means that Serbian citizens want to travel without nuisance of waiting for visa’s which is good on one side and on the other- Serbian JAT airways web site is not working!  This is so hypocritical and paradoxical at the same time: giving them hope whilst many emerging and basic things in the country are not functioning regarding e-everything: e-banking, e-payments, e-government, e-administration, e- whatnot.
This is the notice and caution to ALL of you who are planning to visit JAT airways web site or in worst case to try to make reservation.

Disclaimer: I wrote this text as revolted and dissatisfied citizen of Republic of Serbia, who lives world wide and who is not being able to use the web services that are presented on JAT web site. I respect the efforts and the work of aviation crew of this company who is so far doing their work fairly good. This negative critique is addressed to JAT management and their customer service, the way of communication with customers, web site malfunctioning, false representing their services on web, and disrespect to their customers.  If you don’t change your policy and be brave and make a statement on the web site that your e-system for reservations, booking, contact is NOT working – you are misleading the people.

Some concern I’m sharing is that streaming over the phone cannot be possible anytime, everywhere, depending on many factors: providers, mobile telecom companies, fees/charges, mobile devices and their ability to support (or not) wifi, availability of free wifi hot spots, social networked compatibility among users, the type/model of mobile phones (see the list of supported phones), etc.

In this test video you’ll notice that during the time I was showing to Gauri Qik, streaming online my first Qik video, and notifying my followers on Twitter,  there were also parallel broadcast of the conference happening somewhere in the world. Beside alerting your friends on Twitter and on the other social networks, there are options for live chat, comments, and geo-mapping. More thoughts about mobile social technologies to come.

Qik test

How Follow Friday works? Basically,  Follow Friday helps people recommend other Twitter folks. As a way of recommending people you follow to other users on Twitter, Follow Friday  is presented with hashtag #followfriday or #ff. The purpose is that those who are being recommended would (potentially) gain new followers. After suggesting the name of the twitterer,  the practice is to write why you are recommending them as suggested people to follow. Some twitterers follow this practice, but many people don’t as they just write Twitter user names without stating the reason(s) why one should follow those people. Otherwise, the conversation moves into typical micro memes. Here is an example of the correct usage of FF:
@danbri  because he is the semantic web expert and co-founder of FOAF #followfriday.

The twitterer who came up with the idea of  ‘”Follow Friday” movement said that #ff has lost a lot of its original charm because too many people are making wild recommendations without any justification, in order to collect and get more random followers. I was also asking why Friday? No one so far explained this, either because is TGIF expression that many users say on Twitter every Friday, as it is more relaxed day for casual gaining new followers or because the idea that the creator of this movement likes the music of The Cure (read: Friday, I’m in love! aka I am sharing love for these followers).
This week I had a chance to talk with, above mentioned Twitterer,  Dan Brinkey on work matters, and later I was contemplating the idea of Follow Friday concept as micro communication FOAF (Friend of a friend) convention, and came to conclusion that beside recommendation and connecting people aspect, Follow Friday has communication facet of “describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do” . Twitter user ID’s are describing people, person who recommends the friend is the link, and description line “why I recommend this person to be followed” presents things they create or do. This way FF allows people and groups of people to describe social network relations without the need for a centralization.

Beside suggesting other people to follow and explaining why those people are useful to follow, there is another phenomena that I’ve noticed last Friday: massive retweeting of Follow Fridays of other people tweets. I was in wonder why would people retweet them and came to the thoughts of meta –meme Twitter user’s tagging  and collecting potential followers. This would be an example when sharing (info, contacts) is not caring but rather micro trading (silent request for an expected requirement of following back). What follows next  is an interesting to investigate as  communicative (non) behaviour amongst Twitterers that is in permanent flux.

Once upon a time there was paper based TOEFL, human TOEFL test (no muss-no fuss) I had certificate in 2003 (for US purposes then). Now I was asked to go through iBT TOEFL (not that my English is bad or something but just as “”formality”). iBT TOEFL stands for Internet based test TOEFL. I didn’t prepare for it as I am pretty confident in holy 4’s – Reading, Listening, Speaking and Writing sections, but I wanted to go to the forum community and check out what other folks say. Mostly PhD scholars and many professionals – English native speakers from United States preparing for the test weeks and months in advance. Many of them “failed” or didn’t reach the score that the institution asked from them and all frustration, sharing information can be read on TOEFL community forum.

Then the little light bulb alarmed me, and after reading testimonials I thought I should prepare myself in technical way: go through sampler I got for free when I registered and paid for test, plus a good friend of mine managed to hack into Kaplans’ version of iBT TOEFL book/interactive software with 4 test simulations. This all happened in 2 days period prior to testing day, and have to admit that I was a bit discouraged as:

1. iBT TOEFL  test is everything but objectively measuring and evaluating your English language skills (especially referring to Speaking and Writing section). First two sections (Reading and Listening) are based on questions and four answers. It is complexed as it “measures” not only grammar but comprehension, the ability to interconnect through different passages of the text, how fast you absorb data from all the interdisciplinary fields, but yours. And of course, time is so limited.

2. I appeared an hour prior the test and found a mess in testing center with lot of Italians totally confused and frenzied. Did I mention that I took the test in Rome?  In so called training center with few rooms so called computer labs? [disclaimer: you are lucky if you can skip iBT in Italy, you'll know why in the next paragraphs].

3. iBT TOEFL is highly academic content test created for graduate students and professionals in different area of human activity. There are lot of unfamiliar narrow-professional terms that you never heard because they are not your area of study. You must know how to navigate through many passages and interconnect the information, even tiny details. You have to use your memory all the time and focus, focus. Offered answers (usually two of four of them) can refer on the sentence or the word because they are so damn similar – so you have to decide either one or two. If you make here mistake, you loose the point. In other words – try to figure out what the author wanted to say. This usually works if you have optimal conditions for test-taking, but…

4. Conditions on the test day: I was so determined, cheered up, and super happy to finish with that, and what I found were computer rooms with no functioning AC’s (cooling system), some of them stopped to work on 35 Celsius degrees (hot, hot very hot). Windows were closed. We were boiling. No air, no thinking. My brain couldn’t process any information on the part Reading and Listening. I was so angry cursing paleontology eras and the changes in the Earth core, Whales and other species that are dying, and the problem how to decrease CO2 in deep blue ocean. Then, when people started to complain due to the lack of the oxygen, many of them left the room, organizers opened the windows and the noise from the street interfered with our headsets and Speaking section. During the speaking I was so revolted that I talked and talked and couldn’t wait to finish with writing. Another hideous iBT thing: you have 10 seconds to prepare what you heard and read and then to summarize all in 30 0r 45 or 60 seconds. Then you have Q and A’s from academic lectures heard/read on the topics that are not familiar to you. Bullshit! Pardon my language, but this is true. Writing was pretty easy for me as I don’t mind to write surrounded by cacophony. So that was about test (infra)structure and conditions.

5. Also, you have only 10 min break in between Reading/Listening and Speaking/Writing section – just enough to go to the toilet, drink some water, and eat tiny chocolate if you are lucky as the clock on your computer is ticking. So beside timing your reading of the academic passages from marine biology, archeology, maths, etc. you should time and practice going to the toilet, mind you. To do test properly usually takes 4- 4.5 hrs.

6. Hypothesis that iBT TOEFL is big money sucking-machine. Two important sections of the test (Speaking and Writing) are evaluated by humans. Now comes catch 22: many of them are not academics or objective. Many cases showed that they give much lower scores on these two, so the test takers could ask for rescoring (which costs additional money) and they would raise up score up to 4-6 points. A pharmacist I was talking with in the last 3 days, a woman from California is taking the test for several times as she had bad scores in Speaking section and her employer asked for specific score (e.g.30). She is very frustrated as she told me she believes that iBT TOEFL is a big money-sucking machine because there are lot of people like her that have to keep taking it on and on again until the requested score!

7. Focus/concentration/attention and distractions play a huge role with this kind of tests where you need to be super mechanically capable to multitask and give the feedback that are correct. Otherwise you lose points. Now I understand why some people spend weeks preparing it, but again I think this is the most hideous test that exists. It doesn’t represent your real knowledge of English. iBT is so vague, have holes, that when I talked to some academics many of them told me they hated it. Really.

Finally, I don’t expect high scores, I messed up first two sections that required 100% of concentration, optimum conditions for test taking that I didn’t have. I guess I will never “fit” into desirable candidate for gaining the maximum or close to it, but I know that my English is so damn better than 99% of people who came to take the test. I don’t want to prepare with manuals “how-to” test for dummies. With all respect to those people as I know they practiced for months and I know their speaking English is so poor, but I’m studying and learning (still, ongoing) my English since the age of six, use actively, work and live in English speaking environment, and if test shows the opposite I don’t care.

I just hope those who might care will read this and don’t take for granted my bad scores of iBT TOEFL. Anyways, we’ll see in two weeks.

Since this was my first text on semantic web and the electronic information online, I’ve digged around  to find it in open accesses repositories and found some traces – though in Serbian and though in Cyrillic.I know that many international people who do speak English would like to read it, especially my metadata colleagues and supervisor who adores ontologies. Well, my academic, research and practioner’s interests have moved on since 2002, and frankly speaking I’m not huge fan if i had to chose, but anyways, would be nice if someone translate this text from the official publication from the conference.

Don’t expect fireworks as this was first text on semantic web being published in Serbia or Yugoslavia then. Since I don’t have time at this moment to upload all of my talks, papers, presentations, {I need idea how to sort out all of my papers, talks, texts, publicaitons in general – here}, and the wiki I’ve created some time ago – I’ve abendoned, and other presentations are either on SlideShare or some wiki, here’s and abstract in English, and if there’s someone interested to translate the text from Serbian into English – please do write at danica [at] danicar [dot] org, or give just send me the feedback. It’s very interesting text with some primers for those who want to know about semantics.

SEMANTIC WEB AND ELECTRONIC INFORMATION RESOURCES
Danica Radovanović

Abstract

The usage of electronic resources depends on good possibilities of searching and concept of the Semantic Web can be convenient solution for information retrieval (IR). WWW (World Wide Web) enables, with help of the search engines and huge number of available (meta)information, data that can satisfy user information need, but only at some extent. At the same time, there are more and more research efforts to increase the efficiency for IR until one gets as much as relevant information on the Web. As one of the latest results of this W3C efforts, Semantic Web presents a group of organized technological standards, IT products, and information linked in such a way that can be easily indexed and semantically filtrated through process of classification on global level. Semantic Web and its principles make IR easier because it can be also observed as very useful and successful way of representing data on WWW or as a group of globally linked databases. The architecture of Semantic Web consists of three important IT standards: XML (eXtensible MarkUp Language), RDF (Resource Description Framework) and the ontologies. Semantic web is still under development and is not in common usage but it promises that it will radically improve the possibility of searching, sorting and classification of information.

Key words: Semantic Web, electronic information resources, information retrieval, information representation, Internet, standards

I am looking forward to see this tradition for fostering new technology and social media topics emerge  as well in the future, as such events are necessary in SouthEast Europe. If you are planning to attend the conference, buzz me on Dopplr or email.

Having in mind that the open access databases, archives, repositories are hopefully present in technology, education, science, and that the iron metal systems are behind us (hopefully), let’s say that the technology, science, academia are striving to be open. A friend of mine in our talk this evening mentioned to me good news that his teacher, professor at University is referring kids to use Wikipedia. He also says that he can find, as being soon graduate Computer Science student, very useful tips and data on programming or scrips, coding right in Wikipedia.

The full text documents systems or reference ones beside the interactivity and collaboration (in the case of Wikipedia), and others academic document repository systems at institutional level for capturing and disseminating information- need what we call social software and the usage of social networking tools for sharing. Moving from static locked systems, new ones are a dynamic web-based applications that use an advanced open source software technology for facilitating interoperability and promoting coherence in knowledge management and information exchange (hello web 2.0, and web 3.0!). Such dynamic systems require sharing tools for exchanging data, browsing data, and merging records, collaboration (from Aim, bebo, Linkedin, Digg, Facebook to Twitter, Friendfeed, Netvibes, etc.). For example: something in the form of the widget like you see the one below this post (Share this! or Add this!) for the sake of social bookmarking and exchange data amongst IT professionals, academics, social networkers, researchers, everyday Web users.

And today another colleague asked me to talk about Twitter’s purpose and usability in such systems. I will just mention one thing here as it requires deeper analysis: Twitter is useful not only for dissemination of information or sharing any information, but also as interactive collaborative playground where everybody is there (Here comes everybody!) and especially after 3 years of being present not only as as micro-blogging tool but as well as a space for networked publics that looks like (and is) micro-global village with individuals role in it. So why Twitter? Simply, because everyone is there. Your allies. Some people more or less on Facebook or My Space or Linkedin, but Twitters’ infrastructure’s been spread in all human activities. Including science. Technology. Academic world. Celeb-circustry. You name it.

I’m looking forward to see how open access systems will and are responding to current changes in Social web fluctuations, but as far as we know it using social bookmarking, sharing, social software tools in general didn’t hurt any sci-tech system. It can make it only to be more open and dynamic.

More on my Flickr. Still contemplating idea for photo-log book for my 365 days project. Any ideas?

…and explores the transformative possibilities of this new computing paradigm for culture, commerce, and personal communication. The report also considers potential consequences for privacy, governance and security, and it includes policy recommendations and advice for the new presidential administration.

As there are lot of publications waiting for me to read, you can enjoy and download free copy of this book here.