April CTO Breakfast Report
Today we did something different at the CTO breakfast and brought a projector for 5 minute lightening demos. Nathan Conger from Novell went first and showed the new SUSE Enterprise Linux Desktop. We saw Beta 10. This is available from OpenSUSE.org. Nice integrated wireless network management. Virtual desktops are a rotating cube. Windows warp when you drag them. Windows can live "on the corner" of the cube. An official DVD player will ship with the final version. Window transparency built-in. Expose-like behavior. All-in-all, pretty flashy. Support for Visual Basic macros in OpenOffice. Windows users now have to envy SUSE
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The Participation Spectrum
Ross Mayfield has an excellent essay on the spectrum of participation, the choices we have about how much of ourselves to put into any given activity on the Web. He points out that high engagement activities like leading, moderating and collaborating build a sort of collaborative intelligence that's greater than the collective intelligence we get from low-threshold activities like tagging or commenting. Writing--blogging--is somewhere in the middle because you can use a blog merely to comment or you can use it to refactor, moderate, and lead. Your choice...
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Audio Interviews
I was listening to the latest installment of Paul Figgiani's The Point podcast this morning. Paul is IT Conversation's senior audio engineer and all-around go-to-guy for anything audio. In this podcast Paul mentions that he's bought some new gear for his studio and had phone lines installed so that he can record interviews. Doug Kaye's done this in the past, but as he moves into his new role as master and commander of the Conversations Network he's been load shedding. Paul will be making this service available to IT Conversations hosts who want to record phone interviews, as well
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IIW2006: Monday Activities
It would be helpful for us to get a count of people who are planning on attending Monday's afternoon session, the dinner that evening, or both. If you're planning on being at either of those activities, please visit this page on the wiki and add you name to the appropriate list.
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Story of Digital Identity
Kaliya was on Aldo Castaneda's Story of Digital Identity podcast this week talking about the Internet Identity Workshop. We're expecting a good crowd.
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Kim Clark on Modularity
I attended a UTC (formerly UITA) breakfast this morning where Kim Clark, President of BYU Idaho and former Dean of the Harvard Business School, was the featured speaker. (photos) Pres. Clark talked about harnessing the power of modularity. I reviewed his book, Design Rules, in January. Design Rules is about modularity in IT and the advantages that it gives. Design Rules was hands down the best book I read in 2005. I think anyone interested in infotech should study it. He begins by pointing out (with a graphic) the staggering dominance of IBM in the IT industry in the
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How Does OpenID Work?
I've been trying to dissect OpenID and make sure I really understand what's happening. The spec is the ultimate source, but obviously covers all the bases. What I wanted was a picture, but I couldn't find one. So, I made one. Part of the problem with understanding the spec is that the text tells what has to happen, but there are some implementation details which, while variable, as still helpful for decoding the ins and outs of the most common scenarios. For implementation details, I turned to a Web proxy to help capture the HTTP request/response pairs. The one
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ITC Show Ratings
In yesterday's IT Conversations newsletter, I neglected to save the text before I uploaded it to the system that sends it out. The only thing that had changed since the last save was that I'd added ratings to the summaries from last week's shows. Since some people really like that part of the newsletter, I thought I'd remedy the problem here: Tom Barton: High Order Bit (No rating yet) Jeff Bonforte: Yahoo! and Emerging Telephony (Rating: 3) Chet Kapoor: Innovation and the Open Community (Rating: 3) Rebecca MacKinnon: East meets West (Rating: 3.8) Tim O'Reilly: The O'Reilly Radar (Rating:
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ITC Forums
One of the features on IT Conversations that gets little attention from listeners is the forums. On each show's detail page (example), there is a link called "Discuss") that links out to a forum. If you follow it, you see a forum page just for that show. The ITC system creates the first post for each show, essentially getting the ball rolling by posting the show's summary. But, for most shows, that's all that ever gets published. There's almost never any discussion. This is a little surprising to me given the amount of traffic that ITC gets and the
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LDDI Replaces UDDI
Dave Linthicum says: With lack of interest in UDDI there seems to be a need for another directory standard to come up and take its place. From Will there Ever Be a Common Directory Standard? | By Dave LinthicumReferenced Mon Apr 24 2006 16:48:55 GMT-0600 (MDT) I propose LDDI, a system built using RESTful techniques and microformats that creates a human and machine readable directory for Web services.
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Evangelizing a Blog
Guy Kawasaki has some tips for evangelizing a blog. I've added the link to my piece on How to Start a Blog. The number one piece of advice for getting your blog recognized from almost every where you look will be the same: write things people want to read. In the end, there's no substitute for that. That said, there are things you can do to promote your blog and build an audience.
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April CTO Breakfast Reminder
Just a reminder that April's CTO breakfast will be held this Friday (Apr 28) at 8am in the usual location (Bldg L, Food Court of Canyon Park Technology Center). This time we're going to try something new. I'll have a projector there and we'll invite (at the meeting) 2-3 people to give 5 minute demos. So, if you've got something you'd like to show, bring a laptop or a URL. This doesn't have to be something you made. It could simply be something you think is cool and that the entire group would enjoy seeing. On the other hand,
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Highlights for IT Conversations
There were several shows that caught my attention last week on IT Conversations. I'd intended to blog about these separately as I listened to them, but time marches on... Thomas Malone's presentation from Accelerating Change was one I'd heard in 2004 at SuperNova. Malone's book, The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style and Your Life, is the basis for his talk. Both the talk and the book are worth your time. Malone's thesis is that whenever new cheap materials show up in the economy, they change the way we
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IRAs Reduce Risk
I was speaking with Aldo Castaneda this morning about Identity Rights Agreements. Aldo was one of the co-authors, along with Kaliya Hamlin and myself of a position paper on IRAs. We had a good time talking and there were some good thoughts, but one in particular that I wanted to record dealt with getting business to accept IRAs. The problem, of course, is that if IRAs are seen to come from "privacy nuts" then business will perceive a lot of risk for not much reward. IRAs will be seen as creating a liability where none existed before. There's an
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DIM Workshop 2006
I've been asked to be on the program committee for the ACM CCS2006 Workshop on Digital Identity Management, which will be held November 3, 2006 at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. The tagline for the workshop is "Exploring User-Centric Identity Management." Papers are being solicited on the following topics: Basic principles -- what makes an identity system user-centric? Client-hosted identity Consistent UI for identity transactions Identity lifecycle management Identity Metasystem Identity theft prevention Privacy-enhancing identity management Private Credentials Social networks Strong authentication Unlinkability of Transactions URI-based identity systems Papers are due on July 7, 2006. This should be
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It's Not 500 Channels Stupid
I remember reading an article in 1996 about "what is the Internet and what does it mean to me?" in one of those airline magazines that are always sitting in the seat pocket when you get on a plane. The bottom line of the article was that the Internet would bring 500 TV channels into every home. I remember thinking that this poor author just didn't get it. The Internet would bring millions of channels into our homes. I used to try to characterize this as a everyone as a media creator, but that didn't really capture it. Now
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IT Conversations RSS Feed is Not Feeding
There's something wrong with the RSS feed for IT Conversations and it hasn't published a new show since Sunday (Thomas Malone). We're working on it and hope to have it fixed soon. If you use iTunes to listen to IT Conversations, note that the default settings will only download the most recent show. That means that when our RSS comes back, you'll miss all but the last show. I've actually changed mine to download all the shows so that I don't miss them if I happen to not have iTunes fired up one particular day. To do this, go
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LDDI: Microformats for SOA Registries
My student, Tom Warne, has been working on a project we call LDDI for the last 9 months or so. LDDI is short for Lightweight Description, Discovery, and Integration. LDDI is briefly described in the short paper LDDI: Microformats for SOA Registries. LDDI Usage Scenario(click to enlarge) LDDI uses microformats and HTTP to achieve a usable registry service for SOA. The idea is quite simple, but also fairly powerful since it makes a human readable Web site into a machine readable registry service. Because it's based on XHTML and HTTP, it is browser and search engine friendly. Tom has
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Navigating with Tags
Jon Udell has pointed to a new set of services that InfoWorld is using to help people navigate the information on their Web site. They're beta right now, but Jon expects they'll go live on the main InfoWorld site sometime in the future. The place to start is with iws and search for something you're interested in. Once you've got results, clicking on any of the tags will limit the search results to just those with those particular tags. This uses the second tool, iwx. This is a very fast way to narrow in on the relevant articles for
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IIW Gear Available at CafePress
Shirts and other stuff with the cool Internet Identity Workshop logo are available now at CafePress. All this is at cost--there's no markup. If you're planning on coming to IIW May 1-3, I'd really appreciate you registering as soon as possible so that we can use reasonably good numbers for planning food for breaks, etc.
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Fuzzy Boundaries
The January 2005 issue of ACM Queue contains and article by Roger Sessions called Fuzzy Boundaries that does a good job of discussing the differences between objects, components, and services and when to use each. This is a difference that's hard for students to grasp at first and I suspect many a veteran programmer would have a tough time explaining it, even though they understand it intuitively. To start with, we have to acknowledge that each of these has the same abstract purpose: stick some code behind a well-defined API and are designed to respond to requests from a
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IHC WiFi
My wife's having some minor outpatient surgery done today, so I've been at the hospital, waiting... To my pleasant surprise, I found that they have a public WiFi hotspot. They seem to be blocking quite a few ports, which is odd since I assume this is outside their firewall. But hey, I'll take what I can get.
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Redirecting a Blog Domain
Jordy Gunderson moved Paul Allen's blog to a new domain and put together some information about how to do that with minimal loss of search engine traffic. There's some other tips in the sheet I put together when I moved my blog from one system to another. One of the things Jordy mentions that is easy to forget is being sure to redirect example.com to www.example.com. People expect that and often just don't type the www. Jordy also points to a free link checker. That's a good thing to run over your site periodically whether you're moving or not.
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Navigating User Centric ID Systems
If you've been following along, you'll remember that I set up a OpenID enabled MediaWiki for the Internet Identity Workshop. Yesterday, Johannes Ernst told me that you can use MyLID to sign in as well. Cool. This works because MyLID not only understands LID, but OpenID as well. I've been wondering how to make the wiki accessible to LID, OpenID, i-names, InfoCard and others, but may have had it backwards. Because MyLID (the identity provider) is multiprotocol, the IIW wiki (the relying party) doesn't have to be. That is, if MyLID, MyOpenID, 2idi (an i-name broker), and other identity
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Using Audio Clips
I hadn't started producing a weekly IT Conversations news podcast like Doug did. He's continuing his for the Conversations Network. I may do that in the future. Even so, I want to comment about shows I especially enjoyed. I did that yesterday with Larry Weber's talk from Syndicate. I tried something new: audio clips. Audio clips are one of chronically underused features at IT Conversations. You may not have noticed, but underneath the "Play Now" controls on each shows detail page is a link that reads "Create a Clip or Excerpt." When you click on this, you get a
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Larry Weber and Customer Experience
I really enjoyed listening to Larry Weber speak about his view of how the Web will change in the face of "user-generated media," his catch all for blogs, wikis, podcasts, and everything else you can imagine. Larry is a well known high-tech PR person who's thought a lot about how new media influences the behavior of companies. It was especially interesting to me because of some other ideas and work I've been doing on enhancing customer experience in eCommerce and online service contexts. One of the key ideas I walked away from in the talk was that commercially oriented
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InfoCard and MediaWiki
A few days ago, I mentioned that we'd put up a version of MediaWiki that supports OpenID for the Internet Identity Workshop. I know that Johannes Ernst and others trying to get it all working with Yadis generally. A month or so ago, Kim Cameron InfoCard-enabled his Wordpress blog. I'd love to see this all working together. Is there any MediaWiki code that does InfoCard yet? If so, can these things co-exist?
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AJAX Progress and Challenges
I just put up the latest installment of the Technometria podcast at IT Conversations on AJAX Progress and Challenges. A few months ago, Bruce Grant, Ben Galbraith, and Scott Lemon were all at my CTO breakfast and we had a really good discussion of AJAX issues. I decided continuing that discussion in the form of a podcast would be fun. We're all local, so I got everyone together in a conference room and we each put on a headset. The result was a great discussion of the history, current state, and likely future of AJAX, Comet, and other interactive
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Obsoleting Grades
I recieved an anonymous hate email this morning that read in total: You made my grade obsolete. Ugh...You suck like no other This intrigued me. I'm not sure what it means to "obsolete" a grade. Is this a student, angry at a policy I have made? A former employee angry that they lost their position? I don't know, but I'm curious.
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Social Playground or Media Sandbox?
Thomas Barnett, who I interviewed on my Technometria podcast a while back, has an interesting perspective on how technology influences geopolitics. In a recent post, he claims that online trends will ensure that ten years from now, the Web "will be more the New Core social playland than the Old Core media sandbox (not that Disney-ABC aren't trying)."
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SSNs and Security
A colleague of mine is taking his son to Washington D.C. with him on business and they decided they wanted to tour the White House. To get approval, he sent a note to his Senator's office. They asked him to send his and his son's Social Security Numbers via email so that they could do a security clearance. He objected and said he'd prefer to fax them the information. They responded that this was OK, but that they'd be sending the SSNs to the offices of other Senators and Representatives to coordinate their tour with other groups. Of course,
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Identity Privacy Contracts
I had a nice chat with Jeremie Miller this morning and he pointed me at a post I'd missed from Peter St. Andre on what he calls Identity Privacy Contracts. This is a well though out discussion on the levels of protection one would want in identity rights agreements. I think there will be a lot of discussion on this at IIW in May. Identity Commons is being reborn and hopefully this can be a mainstay in it's mission. To work, IRAs or IDPCs need organizational muscle, legal work, etc. Identity Commons, reconstituted, is probably the right place to
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Reality Week at IT Conversations
As I listened to the shows we published on IT Conversations last week, I kept getting the feeling that the week's theme should have been Reality IT. I enjoyed listening to Oden Shakar's "East Meets West" presentation from Pop!Tech. Dr. Shankar is the Ford Motor Company Chair in Global Business Management at Ohio State University and author of the book The Chinese Century : The Rising Chinese Economy and Its Impact on the Global Economy, the Balance of Power, and Your Job. His talk about China's likely rise to be the world's largest economy over the next several decades
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Mozy to Safety
John Jonas recommends that you Mozy to safety. Mozy is an online backup service and tool. You get 2Gb free is you are willing to read a newsletter once a week. Even the 5 and 10Gb service is pretty cheap. Unfortunately the only client is for Windows, but they're "working hard on developing a Mozy client for other platforms." Uh-huh. My back up solution works like this. I always buy another of whatever sized harddrive is in my laptop (120Gb at the moment), put it in a firewire enclosure and backup using Synchronize Pro. I make a bootable image.
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Audio 101
One of my new duties as Executive Producer is recording what we call the show IDs and the intros and "outros" for the IT Conversations series. The show ID is the very first portion program that introduces what's coming up: "Up next on IT Conversations..." The intros and outros are the pieces that are specific to a given series: "And now, here's out presentation from Emerging Technology..." I have a pretty good set up, MOTU Traveler firewire mixer, Audio Technica mics, and so on. My goal is to get good sound, but I noticed as I recorded some things
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Learning the Ropes
My first week at the helm of IT Conversations has been fun and challenging. Doug had me doing a lot of work behind the scenes for the last 3 or 4 weeks, so I was pretty familiar with the software systems that he's crafted that make everything work. Even so, being "in charge" was definitely a different feel from knowing that I could just punt the ball to Doug whenever there's a problem. The IT Conversations plumbing is complex, but remarkably effective. There's not many sites like IT Conversations out there, so almost all of it is custom. Doug,
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Separating Authentication and Authorization
Yesterday I was talking to Kelly Flanagan, BYU's CIO about the OpenID enabled wiki we have for the Internet Identity Workshop. I'd love to see BYU put an OpenID server on top of their directory. That way I could easily have my students authenticating on my wikis and blogs. Of course, BYU has all kinds of APIs for doing this, but I have use certain development environments, have permission, etc. Solutions like OpenID are much more loosely coupled. Our discussion ultimately got down the distinction between authentication and authorization. OpenID is a pure authentication system. It doesn't even support
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New Digital ID World Blog
Phil Becker and Eric Nolin has started blogging at ZDNet, moving their old Digital ID Blog onto the ZDNet blog machine (where I blog on Between the Lines). Welcome to both!
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AJAX Color Tool
Here's a nifty little AJAXy color tool demonstration. Once you pull out the tool, drag colors from the bottom of the box to the black boxes on the right hand side of the Web page to see the effect of that color on the layout.
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OpenID and MediaWiki
Ross Mayfield generously donated a wiki for the Internet Identity Workshop and we used it to good effect for the event last October. This time there was some interest in using OpenID (and even Yadis, if possible) to do authentication and it just so happens that Jonathan Daugherty has created an OpenID patch for MediaWiki. With some help from the group at #openid on Freenode, especially Jonathan, I was able to get a patched copy of MediaWiki up and configured to use OpenID. It's now the official Internet Identity Workshop Wiki. Here's what I did to make it all
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Celebrating Extraodinary Acts of Kindness
Some Heros Aren't This Easy to Recognize Kirton and McConkie and Connect Magazine (where I write a monthly column) are sponsoring the XO Awards for extraordinary acts of kindsness in Utah. Here's what the say: We're all surrounded by amazing people who do selfless heroic things (neighbors, teachers, grocers, etc.) If you have someone in your life that deserves to be recognized for extraordinary acts of kindness, nominate them for the XO Awards. Please help us celebrate these extraordinary people. Click here to nominate someone to receive an XO Award. Hurry! Nominations will be accepted from March 15-May 15,
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At the IT Conversations Helm
Doug Kaye has asked me to be the Executive Producer of IT Conversations, one of the real pioneers in podcasting. Doug's not moving on, he's moving up. As the audience has expanded, the range of topics that could be covered goes well beyond infotech. Doug has started the Conversations Network to cover a broader range of topics. IT Conversations is one of the channels in that network. Soon there will be others, but I'll leave those announcements for Doug. I'm not leaving BYU. In fact, I see this as a great compliment to my professorial duties--akin to being editor
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Liberty and Federated Identity
When I wrote about Federated Identity Governance for InfoWorld, I spoke to 5 or 6 companies who were successfully federating identity and had been dealing with governance issues. Most of these were also members of the Liberty Aliance. A few people have asked me how it happened that I wrote an article about federation, talked to so many members of Liberty, and yet failed to mention Liberty Alliance in the article. The easy answer is space. I had to cut 500 or 600 words as it is and was trying to get the key ideas into the space I
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Video Podcast on IT Conversations
Michael Geoghegan Today's IT Conversations podcast is a talk by Michael Geoghegan on monetizing podcasts. Podcasters intent on monitizing their shows should also consider opportunities to leverage their valuable podcasting skills. So argues Michael Geoghegan who has successfully monetized both of his original podcasts, and gone on to forge a full time career as a podcaster-for-hire, launching successful shows for large media companies such as Disney. In this talk, Geoghegan highlights the special window of opportunity for podcasters wishing to sell their skills in these early days, before podcasting becomes a commodity. From IT Conversations: Michael Geoghegan - Making
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TechNewsRadio Interview
Steve Holden interviewed me at ETech for TechNewsRadio. We talked about ETech, attention, and digital identity.
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Blatant Ripoff?
I'm not sure what to make of this. Last month, I was interviewed (for about an hour) by Celeste Biever who was writing a story on InfoCard for New Scientist. The story came out yesterday. Also yesterday, I got a Google News alert that pointed me at this story from TMCnet. The story seems to be the New Scientist story, at least the first few paragraphs are the same--New Scientist puts the rest of the story behind a paywall. The TMCnet story references New Scientist, but provides no link and doesn't say that Celeste Biever is the author. TMCnet
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