Montag, 28. Juli 2003

Mobile Mobbing
Da fiele mir so manches ein. Österreich hat mit den Flashmob-Blog  seine POI ( via smi ) Report on Rome Flash Mob . N... [thomas n. burg | randgänge]
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Dotcom Garden
via Providence Journal's Sheila Lennon.Thank you, Sheila... and you, too, Google Alert... [www.gulker.com - words and pictures from Silicon Valley]
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Lone Genius Blogger circa 13th century
Mechthild of Magdeburg was a beguine mystic who kept a vernacular diary of her spiritual revelations that was widely circulated by copying out in longhand. She was a blogger in a time before printing and postal service, much less electronic networks, existed.

She journaled her experience including visionary insight into spirituality, love songs and responses to critics who reacted inamicably to the notion of a woman writing about anything, much less faith. She wrote from her 30s until the time of her death.

Her writing is collected in the book 'Flowing light of the Godhead', which contains 267 passages ('posts') from a few lines to a few pages long. What we call blogging is actually a very old form... [www.gulker.com - words and pictures from Silicon Valley]
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Scary referrers I have known
Hmm.... in my referrer logs I see a number of people coming to me via iaea.org which I was a little surprised to find was the International Atomic Energy Agency!  What have I gotten myself into... [Curiouser and curiouser!]
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Weblogs and political discourse. Boston Globe: Blogs shake the political discourse. [via Der Schockwellenreiter]

Interesting to see how opinion leaders in the weblog community push towards political relevance of the weblog discourse. Well... seems the whole weblog community wants to be opinion leading somehow... By owrede@khm.de (Oliver Wrede). [owrede_log]
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Comment Authentication Prototype.

I've built a prototype of the comment signature system discussed earlier. The prototype consists of an authentication server which anyone can register with and support on this blog for verifying signatures. So far it seems to work.

To gain the ability to sign comments:

  1. Add the following HTML to the head section of your homepage/weblog: <link rel="sigserver" href="http://simon.incutio.com/auth/confirm" />
  2. Create a comment authorisation account.
  3. Log in to your authorisation account and add the bookmarklet it provides you with to your browser.
  4. You can now sign a comment on this site (and any others that support the prototype) using the bookmarklet. You must activate it while looking at the entry page containing the 'Add Comment' form. The site will do the rest. Note that the bookmarklet will fill in the name, email and url fields on the form, saving you the hassle.

To add support for comment authentication to your own blog (assuming it uses PHP):

  1. Grab this file: sig-confirm.inc.php. It contains a function which can be used to confirm a signature. It requires IXR, which you can download from here.
  2. Make some minor modifications to your 'add comment' form, to make it compatible with the bookmarklet. You need to assign ID attributes to the input fields for name, email and URL of 'commentFormName', 'commentFormEmail' and 'commentFormURL' respectively. You also need to add a hidden field like this one: <input type="hidden" name="signature" id="commentSignature" value="" />
  3. Modify the code that processes the add comment form. If 'signature' is not an empty string, the comment has been signed so confirm the signature by calling the confirmSig() function (documentation of the arguments is included in the sig-confirm.inc.php file). If the function returns true, flag the comment as signed. I suggest doing this by saving the signature variable along with the rest of the comment.
  4. When displaying comments, be sure to visually indicate comments that are "signed".

The system is decentralised, so if you want to host your own authentication server rather than relying on mine feel free to grab the PHP code (warning: it's a bit of a mess) and use it as a starting point.

This is more of a proof of concept than anything else, so feedback and suggestions would be very welcome.

Incidentally, this isn't the first time this problem has been tackled. See here and here for details of a system that uses PGP to sign and verify comments.

[Blogging]
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Wir Blogger, reich und berühmt. Irgendjemand (ich war's nicht!) hat den Schockwellenreiter in die B.Pages, Kategorie Weblog, den Katalog für Berlins beste Webseiten, aufgenommen.

Also rankt mich, was das Zeug hält... [Der Schockwellenreiter]
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