Luca Venturini’s Blog

Photos: here. Videos: Critical Mass, Massers, Bicycle Accident, Golden Gate Park Cork e Tunnel Adrenaline

In the last 15 years, on the last Friday of the month, San Francisco’s bicyclists meet up to demonstrate that cities can be for bicycles, too.

The event is called Critical Mass. The main idea is easy: meet up as a group and go around in the city. But when the cyclists are 4000 or more and they ride all together, there is the chaos: a critical mass that blocks the city. The critical mass movement has no leaders. At each corner in the ride, the group decides where to go. Everything seems to be casual.

Media coverage is intense: six television trucks, five helicopters, an airplane and a fixed television cameramen at the start.

I’ve seen every type of bicycle, I think (A bird, a bmw bike, a rickshaw, bikes that can be ridden lying, an old bicycle ridden by the world famous soccer player Zola, High bicycles and double bicycles). A lot of people wear strange costumes or hats like this hammer hat and this petroleum field hat. The cops were riding, too. I made a video with a patchwork of massers: video

If you ask the massers why they are causing all this traffic, they just say: “We do not cause traffic, we are traffic”. The base idea is to go around the city riding a bike. But what can they do with red signal lights? The way they developed is what they call corking. Only the head of the big mass halts on red lights, then some massers block the intersection, staying in front of the cars. Other massers give change to the corkers, until every bike in the group is passed. Some people were asking the police to stop the corking of the massers, but most of them are happy with the massers. Sometimes a driver will start to become afraid and will start to honk their horn. If it happens, all the riders start to laugh and scream.

Sometimes, all the massers stop in an intersection. Yesterday, it was two times. The first was at an intersection with an highway. The second was when the riders met a motorcycle group. There began to develop a little tension then, because the motorcyclists started to burn their tires on the road. Then, each biker went down and started to lift the bicycles up, often with much screaming. Here is the movie.

The whole event was 4 hours long: We started at 6 p.m. from Embarcadero heading to Fisherman’s Wharf along North Beach. Then we headed to downtown and then to Golden Gate Park and finally back in the Haight neighborhood. Then two or three laps around Union Square, screaming like Indians in battlecry. At the end, we were still along Market Street heading toward Mission, where we ended tired on the grass of Dolores Park. At the end, it was 9:30 p.m.. We had ridden 20 miles. Video.

When the world famous San Francisco’s slopes descend, it is very fear-provoking. Everyone goes down very fast, screaming. You think that if one cyclist crashes, then everyone can go over the top of him. At first, I started to film the descent, but at the first down slope, I had an accident. Here is the movie of the accident. I hurt my right elbow and my left leg. My jeans were torn (I’ll not send the photos of injury). At that point I decided to put two hands on the bicycle and put away the camera, but at night there was a great descending tunnel. I filmed it here.

It’s great to think that the massers say that they want a city better for bicycling. If you hear it and you come from the metropolitan Roman Jungle, you want to laugh. By the way, next big critical mass is the 25, 26 and 27 of May: The Rome interplanetary Critical Mass.

This year the Italian government asked for a mandatory document in which each company should produce a list of its customer and vendors.

In some ways, I’m a little optimist and I hope that something can change. Then this kind of artists of bureaucracy finds something new that surprises me. So today, the Italian government can find the data about the IVA tax in the following documents:

• periodical (quarterly and monthly) reports I send during the year,
• annual IVA tax report I must send by January 20,
• list of customers and vendors to be given by april 29,
• IVA report to be sent by the end of october.

The IVA tax balance is always the same, but some bureaucrat wants to see the same balance four times. Each time the report is different, so you have to study how to fill out four different reports during the year.

Next Sunday is the deadline for one of these reports. Sunday? Yes, correct. In Italy, everything is closed on Sunday, but this deadline is on Sunday.

Someone says that the report should be prepared and sent online. There should be software for this, but nobody knows where it is or how to download it. I’ve found an accountant forum where the accountants and bookkeepers are asking each other what to do about the problem.

Then I went to the Agenzia delle Entrate site. It is the Italian government agency for taxes. There is nothing about this deadline. No software, no words about the deadline, just nothing. I tried to search the site, but I found nothing. If you call you can wait on the line 4 or 5 hours.

Online, one can find a lot of myths about this report and this deadline. Someone says that you have to ask your customers and your vendors if you can disclose their names to the Italian government. Others are asking why should you ask them and what to do if they do not give you the agreement that you can divulge their name. Others say that your customers must say yes to this agreement to divulge their name to the goverment. But why should I ask for permission if they must agree to it? It is something like a big game with all the Italians playing it. Those laws are written by someone that never worked in the business.

Then I’ve found a document like this. It states that the privacy agency is working on the law that enforces the ability to divulge the list of customers and vendors in order to understand if there is a privacy violation. Privacy? By the government? What are they saying? On that document I found that the deadline is changed: October 15.

In Italy, people work up to July for the government and from July up to December for themself. But you have to add to this balance up to 15 days to understand what they want from you during the year. In the meantime, nobody can work in Italy. Is it a problem? Not for them. Welcome to Banana Republic.

Photo Credit: Argento_Vivo

Today was the last Web 2.0 Expo day, but everyone in the world is writing about this. I prefer to write about what I’ve seen at the Creative Commons Salon SF made up by the Creative Commons guys.

Jay Dedman opened the evening presenting the new SpinXpress.com’s “Get Media” feature. With this you can find the Creative Commons object to use in your videos. Jay is a CNN International veteran who now plays with Vlogging (Video Blogging).

Following Jay, Liz Dunn with Technorati presented Where’s The Fire: a system that brings the most important news of the blogosphere to the attention of the user. News is selected by means of a continuous poll by the users: something like a Technorati internal digg. I’ve also known that for years, everything produced by Technorati is released under a Creative Commons license.

Have you never searched for some data online? If you’ve never tried it, you don’t know that you can never find anything. A lot of sites write, comment, and play with data, but not bare bone data. Sometimes bare bone data are more explicative of 1000 words, but you cannot find them on the Internet. A good answer to this problem comes from Brian Mulloy, Dimitry Dimov and Sara Wood with swivel.com: a 2.0 start-up company focused on data: bare bone data.

Seth Mazow works with Interplast: a medical doctors’ association that works in the third world (foto); something like the doctors without borders of plastic surgery. Seth has announced that the movie “A Story of Healing”, Oscar awarded in1998 as Best Documentary, is now released with a Creative Commons License. Seth illustrated that the earning curve naturally sloped down year by year. So, ten years after the start, they decided to release it under a Creative Commons License. Now it is the first CC licensed movie to be awarded by the Academy in the story. I’ve seen the documentary and it is really a must-see. Click here to see it. Take a look, copy it and share it with your friend: Creative Commons Licenses rocks.

The evening presenter was the Creative Commonist Jon Phillips already met by me with Jay Dedman at the Super Happy Vlog House.

Here are the Foto and video.

Still events 2.0 waiting the big one: Web 2.0 Expo 2007 that starts Sunday.

Wednesday I went to the Google Campus to attend a Usability 2.0 conference. Today it seems that if you don’t call something “2.0″ , then you are a nerd. There I heard Sean Kane with Netflix, Jon Wiley with Google and Luke Wroblewski with Yahoo. A lot of the guilty came from each part of the Silicon Valley. One asked me if I was coming from Rome just for this event. Politely I said that it would be a little too much. Here are the event photos (a nice one is the sushi on surf).

Thursday night at Crossroad Cafe’ there was the Sflickr meeting: the meeting of the San Francisco’s Flickr users. At a photographer meeting, one should take photos, but I thought that a lot of photos would have to be taken and that a video was more original.

My jacket without sleeves let people think that Iwas a real “pro” photographer, but when they saw my photo machine everything became more amateur.

Last weekend I attended a lot of events.

Thursday I went to hear live music: Richard Buckner at Cafe du Nord.

Friday I spotted the Grand National Rodeo at Cow Palace, followed by a country music performance. The rodeo was really funny and Gary Allan’s music wasn’t bad.

Saturday I was riding around in the neighboorhood of the AT&T Baseball Park and I decided to go to see the game. I’ve played Baseball for years in Italy but I had never seen a live American game. When I went in line, a man gave me an extra ticket as a gift. I tried to give some money to the man, but he politely said no. When I left the game, I found that I had attached my helmet to a pole without the bicycle that was standing there free of the chain.

Then at night, I went to see The Frames, an Irish band that was really great. If they come to your city, go to see them. I think that Saturday was my lucky day, because when I was in line outside of the historic Fillmore, another man gave me an extra ticket as a gift, just the same as happened in the morning at the baseball game. I tried to pay him but he too did not want money. I don’t understand but maybe here in America, people always take an extra ticket to give it at someone in the line…