Well, I got my new passport in time (phew!) and will indeed fly out on Tuesday for Innsbruck.
At Microlearning 2005, I'll be speaking about "The Web 2.0 and Microlearning", and the day after I'll be participating in BlogWalk 9.0. There may be a few places left for the BlogWalk; contact Sebastian if you want in. Hope to see you around!
OK, let's face it, for far too long I've not been mindful of lesson 1 of blogging: Do not put off the important posts. Which I've done countless times by now, always feeling I couldn't do the topics justice just right now.
Enough! cries my poor blogger-heart. So I'm finally taking time away
from sleeping to redress this. So without further ado, here are the
three most important links I've hung onto, but couldn't bring myself to blog (yet).
Ross Mayfield: Middlespace. The top-down will inevitably meet the bottom-up, somewhere, somehow. If done artfully, Good Things will happen.
Lee Bryant: Blogs are not the only fruit.
Awesome, awesome "State of Social Software" essay, recapitulating many
significant developments of 2004, signalling trends, and filled to the
hilt with linky goodness.
Speaking of Lee, his team implemented a killer
prototype "Tag this Page" feature for the BBC News site. At the last IA Summit I recall asking Thomas Vander Wal
how long he thought it would be before we saw mainstream sites inviting their visitors to
tag pages, and he said that from what he knew it couldn't be more than
a few months away. Let's hope he's proved right and this makes it to
BBC News, and from there to a zillion other sites. Just think how
useful it could be to have folksonomaps that let us help one another to find our way around all those important but
ill-architected (governmental, corporate, you name it) sites!
Stephen Downes and Brad Fitzpatrick come up with the simplest thing
that could possibly work for implementing genuinely distributed
self-identification in the Web 2.0 world. Why do we need this? Brad
lays it down thus:
A lot of other distributed identity systems aren't actually distributed, having one or more parts centrally controlled.
Logging in to a dozen websites every day is lame.
Sites that let you enter your name/URL/email/etc and show it without verifying you're you are lame.
You
should be able to keep one (or more) identities over time that stay
fixed, regardless of what services are still in existence and you still
use a few years down the road.
Essentially, the idea is of a
system where a user sets up an ID on an ID server, then only has to
enter login information once into her browser (for mIDm) or her
personal site (OpenID) to self-identify as the person who controls her
personal site. This ensures that, for instance, the comments left under
your name are indeed your own. (I've been amazed at how little
impersonation has occurred in blog comment sections so far, given how
ridiculously easy it is.)
This is also important because it puts social
filtering of external input to your site within grasp: friends-only or
friends-of-a-friend-only commenting policies become workable. Note the
concerns that have been expressed around the possibility of phishing, by substituting a misleading redirection for the one that is supposed to happen during the login process.
Dave Kearns describes these schemes as "Sxip without the verified ID server (OpenID has non-verified servers). Or SMBmeta with a more focused Identity purpose." (Sxip's blog commenting thingy is itself about to exit the oven now, by the way.)
Aaah. There. Feeling better now. Off to bed. (Note to self: shoot for a good 50% of important posts from now on.) What do you think? [] links to this post 3:29:44 AM
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Sebastien Paquet. Last update:
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