MacBook Pro and the Bleeding Edge
One problem with life on the bleeding edge is that there isn't as much infrastructure built up and parts are scarce. Take Apple's MacBook Pro, for example. I've got a gleaming example sitting by my desk that I've been playing with for a few days. It's very fast at some things and Rosetta works well. Too well, perhaps. You might forget to upgrade some G4 apps to native ones because they still work passibly. But, that's another story. Two problems I've run into so far. First, Apple switched to SATA drives for the MacBook Pro. That probably gave them
Continue reading...
Google's Serendipitous Uses
Derrick Story has a nifty tip for using GMail to convert Word docs to HTML. Just send it as an attachment to your GMail account and then select "View as HTML" next to the attachment. I just tried it with this Word doc and got this HTML document. Very nice. Now, if someone would just get around to building a tool that you drag a Word doc onto and it uses GMail to convert it to HTML and deposit the result in the same directory, that would be awesome.
Continue reading...
WWW2006 Conference Wrap-Up
Rent-a-cop at the convention center. They look very professional here.(click to enlarge) So, WWW2006 is wrapping up. There are still a few sessions and dinner tonight with some new friends, but for the most part it's done. Overall, this has been a good conference. When I looked at the conference program before I came it was overwhelming and, frankly, there wasn't much that looked all that interesting based on the titles that I scanned. In spite of that, when I got here, I found that it was rather easy to focus on specific tracks that looked interesting and there were
Continue reading...
Late Breaking News Session
My presentation on LDDI was in the "Late Breaking News" session since we basically missed all the deadlines. There were some other interesting presentations in that session as well. Daniel Harris and Niel Harris (no relation) presented Kendra, a non-profit initiative to create an open market for digital goods. They presented Kendra Base, a tool for describing digital goods using meta-data. They describe it as "a semantic information publishing and querying system prototype." They also called it a "provocation," meaning that they're hoping someone can do it better--they're just exposing the ideas. The user shouldn't have to know RDF,
Continue reading...
Teaching with Games
Russell Hunter sent me a link to this article about using games in the classroom. As I mentioned earlier, this is an issue that I've grown a little concerned about. In the article David McDivitt, a high school teacher from Indiana, talks about a controlled experiment he did with his 20th century history class. 65 students were taught a subject (status of Europe prior to WWII) using classroom discussions and video games and 45 were taught the same subject using traditional methods including a textbook and classroom discussions. All were given test before and after the week-long experiment. The
Continue reading...
China, the Internet's Broken Link
Danny Weitzner, W3C, at WWW2006(click to enlarge) Danny Weitzner from the W3C started out today's plenary session with a discussion of the Internet and Society called "China: A Broken Link on the Web. Is it the case that if everyone's a publisher, then too is every government a filter and interceptor? He starts off noting the story of Yahoo! "helping jail a Chinese writer" and made some interesting points: Yahoo! has no basis for ignoring Chinese law while obeying the laws of other countries. That leaves the choice of simply not doing business in China. There's an argument that being
Continue reading...
CS Department RSS
The BYU CS Department has added RSS feeds to it's Web site. Now, if I could convince the CS department to not send them to the faculty mailing list, I'd be set. Otherwise, I just see them in RSS after I've deleted them from my mailbox. A good first step though...
Continue reading...
Identity Management Panel
I attended an identity management panel moderated by Arnaud Sahuguet of Google. On the panel were Rick Hull, Bell Labs, Conor Cahill, Intel, Kim Cameron, Microsoft, Mike Neuenschwander, Burton Group, and Stefan Brands, Credentica & McGill University. Arnaud started off with the famous "no one knows your a dog" cartoon and the ACLU pizza video. He asked each panelist how many different identities they have. The answers ranged from 40 to 313 (Cahill knew exactly). Kim said he uses classes of identities (my own strategy) for different kinds of sites. Converged networks (wireless, television, Internet) make the problem of
Continue reading...
WWW2006 Conference Dinner
The conference reception was held at Edinburgh castle. I've been taking photos while I'm here. Here are a few from our visit to Edinburgh Castle last night. Edinburgh Castle Edinburgh Castle's Main Gate The Firth of Forth from Edinburgh Castle Tim Berners-Lee chatting with a bagpipe player at Edinburgh Castle Yesterday my nine year-old son asked me if I'd seen a bagpiper yet. I hadn't, so when I saw on at the castle, I went over to take a picture. Interestingly Tim Berners-Lee was chatting with him, so I snapped a picture. The trip to the castle was a
Continue reading...
Free the Data!
Free the Data! Panel(click to enlarge) A specially arranged panel session called Freeing the Data was moderated by Kieron O'Hara (Univ. of Southhampton). On the panel were Daniel Weitzner (W3C & MIT), Daniel Harris (Kendra), and Jeremy Frey (Univ. of Southhampton). Jeremy Frey is a chemist and took the position that any scientist doing research should not only make results available, but the data as well. But making the data available isn't enough. We need to make it findable as well. Moreover, we need the context to be available and machine readable. Another issue with data is correctness. Published papers
Continue reading...
Detecting Cloaking in Web Pages
Baoning Wu from LehighUniversity(click to enlarge) Here's something I'd never heard of before: cloaking. Cloaking is the process of returning different pages to a search engine crawler for a given URL than you return to other users. You can imagine why people intent on getting higher search engine rankings than they deserve might want to do this. When you change the meaning of the page (rather then merely its structure) it's called "semantic cloaking." So, how can you detect semantic cloaking? Baoning Wu from Lehigh University presented work aimed at answering this question. (See the paper.) You can't reliably detect
Continue reading...
Improving Search Results Inside the Enterprise
Pavel Dmitriev from Cornell(click to enlarge) Organizations often use search engines as part of their corporate information infrastructure. The problem is that inside corporations creating Web pages is typically much more difficult than it is on the Web at large and consequently, links to pages are a much less useful indicator of page relevance. How do you solve this problem? I attended a presentation by Pavel Dmitriev from Cornell that discusses one such solution. (See the paper.) Within an organization, users are much more likely to be interested in improving the results from a search engine. Dmitriev and his co-authors
Continue reading...
DIDW and IIW: Two Great Tastes that Taste Great Together
The Digital ID World conference will be held September 11-13 this year in Santa Clara. We're going to have a 3/4-day IIW event on the 11th before the keynotes begin in the late afternoon. We're hoping to attract some of the usual IIW crowd to DIDW and some of the DIDW crowd to IIW. I'd like to see more cross over there. Attendees at the IIW event will qualify for a discount registration at DIDW. We'll have details forthcoming soon. Watch this space!
Continue reading...
Knowing the User's Every Move
I sat through Richard Atterer's talk on User Activity Tracking for Website Usability Evaluation and Implicit Interaction. (See the paper.) The problem is that putting code on the client to track user actions is invasive and users aren't likely to put up with it. On the other hand, putting the code on the server misses JavaScript actions that don't result in server requests. Their answer was to use a rewriting proxy called UsaProxy that rewrites any page you request to make sure their tracking JavaScript is included. Very clever and related to some other things I've seen for modifying
Continue reading...
Visualizing Flickr Tags
This afternoon I popped into Andrew Tomkins' talk on Visualizing Tags over Time. The paper was nominated for a best paper award. The research looks at visualizing Flickr tags. Images and tags form a bi-partite graph that encourages "pivot browsing." Tag clouds represent the default way of visualizing tags. Tags are not fixed in time. Does the temporal structure lead to a representation that allows up to surf through time and pick a gestalt sense of what was happening over time? He demos a visualization that scans through the tags for each day, picks out representative tags and then
Continue reading...
Symmetric Queries in XML
Also in the XML session, Shuohao Zhang from Washington State University spoke on Symmetrically Exploiting XML. This paper was nominated as a best student paper. (See the paper.) XML queries are asymmetric because they're hierarchical. Rearranging the hierarchy requires changing the query. This work is aimed at making a single query work across multiple structures. This is useful when you don't know what the schema is, for heterogeneous or irregular data, or when the schema evolves. Axes (parent, child, ancestor, descendent, preceding, following, etc.) are all directional. This work proposes a non-directional axes called closest. The semantics is a
Continue reading...
XML Screamer, a Fast XML Parser
This afternoon I attended the XML session. The first speaker was Eric Perkins who spoke on XML Screamer, an integrated, high-performance XML parser/validator. This paper has been nominated for the best paper award. (See the paper.) XML parsers are slow. Many people think that the human readability of XML is what makes it slow. How fast should we be able to go? Reading through an input file should take about 10 cycles/byte (1GHz processor). Xerces-C does 6Mbytes/Sec/GHz. Expat is 12Mbytes/Sec/GHz. What's happening with all the other cycles? Eric walks through the steps required to parse a file. There are
Continue reading...
Mashups, Web Data, and APIs
Frank Mantek, Jeff Barr, Dan Theurer, and Kevin Lawver(click to enlarge) I decided to take in Rohit Khare's panel on Next Wave (Business) this morning. This was part of the developer track that has normally been Rohit was kind enough to invite me to the panel dinner last night. It was fun and I Dan Theurer from Yahoo! was first up and used the theme "What Powers Web 2.0 Mashups?" Dan introduced the Yahoo! Developer Network. The first APIs that Yahoo! launched were the search APIs a little over a year ago. He showed a long list of APIs that
Continue reading...
The Next Wave of the Web
Plenary Panel(click to enlarge) WWW2006 was started this morning with an introduction to the technical program. The conference is very competitive; of the 697 papers submitted this year, 84 were accepted or 11%. The plenary panel was entitled "The Next Wave of the Web." Nigel Shadbolt (University of Southampton) was the panel chair. The panelists were Tim Berners-Lee (W3C), Richard Benjamins (iSOCO), Clare Hart (Dow-Jones), and Jim Hendler (MINDSWAP). The discussion was mostly about the semantic web. Shadbolt asked Berners-Lee what the achievements have been in the semantic web since the first article appeared in Scientific American. He pointed to
Continue reading...
MoodViews: Analyzing Mood Data from Blogs
Krisztian Balog(click to enlarge) Blogs are one of the places on the web you can reliably find people's writing about their moods. Krisztian Balog presented a paper called "Decomposing Bloggers' Moods: Towards a Time Series Analysis of Moods in the Blogosphere." This can be used to produce interesting data. For example, MoodViews tracks a stream of mood-annotated text from LiveJournal. MoodViews tracks, predicts, and analyzes moods on blogs. Moods have a cyclic component. Some moods depend on time of day, some on the day of week. You can show a correlation between major events (say the London Bombing) and mood.
Continue reading...
Detecting Splogs
I went to a session on blogging this afternoon. One talk was by Tim Finin on detecting splogs. He is part of the ebiquity research group at UMBC. He and his students do some interesting work in recognizing splogs. Tim wrote a funny splog bait post to see where it would get picked up. Here's an interesting data point: the in-degree distribution of authentic blogs are described by a power-law, but splogs are not. The same is true of the out-degree. Ping times for real blogs is periodic according to the sleep cycle of the blogger. Splogs ping on
Continue reading...
UTC Calls Hatch a Champion of Technology
I just got to the conference center in Edinburgh. The trip wasn't bad--I slept most of the way from Chicago. When I checked my email, I had several emails that people had forwarded to me pointing out an email from UITA requesting that members attend a $500/person fund raising reception for Sen. Orrin Hatch. The announcement read, in part: In recent years I've worked closely w/ Senator Orrin Hatch and found him to be a true champion of technology issues in our country. Since he's had such an important impact on our technology community, I hope you'll join me
Continue reading...
WWW2006
I'm just getting ready to leave to WWW2006 in Edinburgh Scotland. I'll be blogging interesting talks and events after I get there (sometime tomorrow). You can follow my coverage by looking at my www2006 tag or even subscribing to my www2006 specific RSS feed.
Continue reading...
May CTO Breakfast Report
We spent a good deal of time talking about offsite backup and things like Jungle Disk. Jungle Disk is a application for Windows, OSX, and Linux that uses Amazon's S3 as the storage substrate. Bruce brought up Verisign's PIP, an OpenID service. This is particularly cool, I think, because its shows there's some momentum behind user-centric ID when big companies start to jump in. Michael Graves, of Verisign, was at IIW2006 and he talks about PIP on his blog. We discussed how to build good teams and companies. We were surprised to see that getting it right the first
Continue reading...
Using Live Clipboard
Steve Farrell sent me an example of using Ray Ozzie's Live Clipboard. Ray's talk from ETech 2006 went up last week at IT Conversations--it's worth listening to so you understand what Ray's doing. Steve is a proponent of microtemplates. The Web site says that the "goal of microtemplates is to make it as easy to publish dynamic information as it is to publish static information." They're complementary to microformats, one of the staples of Ray's Live Clipboard. I'm just learning about microtemplates, but they seem like a great way to avoid long chunks of JavaScript that do nothing but
Continue reading...
Software Symposium 2006
No Fluff Just Stuff is hosting a software symposium on June 16-17. It's still not too late for the early bird discount. The program and content look pretty good if you're interested in Java and agile methodology. I'm a little miffed that it's on a Friday and Saturday. I generally boycott conferences on weekends and so don't plan on going. I resent the encroachment of these kinds of activities into what I consider my leisure and family time. But, if you don't and you're in the Salt Lake area, you might enjoy the conference.
Continue reading...
Hardware Video Encoders and Decoders
I need to broadcast video, fairly high quality, line-of-sight. The basic idea is to broadcast an encoded signal over a 5.7GHz link using some Motorola Canopy gear. In February when I needed to do this, I hired a company who used hardware encoders and decoders from a company called Integral Systems Design, but I can't find them in Google. Any one know of this company or similar boxes? I'd love to pick some up on eBay or something so I can avoid the ongoing cost of renting.
Continue reading...
SOA Forum Wrap-up
Halley Suitt(click to enlarge) My laptop was giving me grief yesterday (I think it's a memory problem) so I didn't get to everything I was planning on writing up. For example, I went to Halley Suitt's talk at Syndicate in the afternoon. Halley is one of the early bloggers and a great writer. She writes Halley's Comment and is the CEO of Top Ten Sources. She's also a sometime contributor at IT Conversations, doing a show called Memory Lane (I'd like her to do more shows--hint, hint). The panel on SOA Governance went very well and we had some great
Continue reading...
SOA Name Change?
I got an email from Pheloxi in the Netherlands who informed me that SOA is the Dutch acronym for sexually transmitted disease. I guess if InfoWorld does a European version of the SOA forum, they may want to change the name. :-)
Continue reading...
Rocketboom
Amanda Congdon(click to enlarge) I went to Amanda Congdon's plenary session at the end of Syndicate. She's the host of Rocketboom, a videoblog that deals with serious and not so serious news. I've heard of Rocketboom, but hadn't seen it before. I enjoyed the clips she showed and will probably go have a look from time to time. They are getting 350,000 unique views per day and half that is international. There's only about 6 staff members, allowing the production timeline to move at a very quick pace. Syndicating video requires working with multiple formats: wmv (multiple versions), mov (multiple
Continue reading...
Dave Weinberger on Tagging
Syndicate, another IDG event, is happening at the same hotel on the same days. I had some time before my talk on digital identity, so I snuck up to the third floor to heard Dave Weinberger talk about tagging, a subject that near to my heart lately. What's the big fuss about? After all, aren't tags just keywords and metadata? Sure, but they're metadata written in ordinary language without a special vocabulary and are (usually) applied by the reader, rather than the writer. For some reason, people are more willing to tag other people's work than they are their
Continue reading...
Getting Started with SOA
I'm at the InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum today. I'm moderating a panel on SOA governance and speaking on digital identity. The conference is completely sold out. I was part of a team that wrote a feature for InfoWorld last week on the SOA lifecycle. I've watched (and helped) InfoWorld move into this space over the last few years and I think they've done more than just report on what's happening: they're part of the conversation and clarifying concepts in helpful ways. Bruce Graham, BEA(click to enlarge) Tony Bishop gave the opening keynote. He's the SVP for Corporate Investment Banking
Continue reading...
Your Cell Phone Is Watching You
One of my favorite programs from last week was Nathan Eagle's Where 2.0 presentation on using cell phones to predict user behavior. Using only publicly available data, Eagle was able to deduce relationships between pairs and groups of individuals. There are privacy concerns to be sure. Your cell provider already has much of this data. Every time two cell providers merge, what little protection we get from disparate carriers is broken down. What interested me most though it not the privacy concerns, but the potential to infer and enhance social interactions using the wearable computers each of us carries
Continue reading...
eVoting Security Holes
I put a piece about Black Box Voting's report up at Between the Lines. The report found significant security problems. The investigation is a result of Bruce Funk's courageous action in letting independent security experts look at his Diebold machines. Should we panic? No. But we ought not to dismiss this security concern out of hand either as Diebold seems to hope we will. More states should subject more voting machines to independent tests by real computer security experts. If there's nothing to hide, then this should be a relatively painless thing to do. The fact that Diebold and
Continue reading...
Utah Senate Blog Is Effective eGovernment
The Utah Senate Site blog was featured in a story at Stateline.org. Joining the nation's growing proliferation of political Web logs, or blogs, the Utah site was the first of its kind to strike up a digital dialogue that included entries not just from state Senate Republicans but also from minority Democrats and lawmakers in the opposite chamber. Unfolding comment by comment, the unofficial daily log often paralleled official debate taking place under the dome -- with the added bonus of anonymity. From Power blogging debuts in Utah capitolReferenced Fri May 12 2006 10:23:04 GMT-0600 (MDT) Ric Cantrell, on
Continue reading...
Grabbing Cell Data
Nathan Eagle's presentation at the Where 2.0 conference has some very interesting information about how easy it is to deduce interesting facts by monitoring cell phone location and proximity. Todd Biske has taken that and turned it into a call for better logging in SOA applications for the purpose of improving usability. This point to the need to carefully construct security policies around XML documents that are passed from place to place so that this kind of monitoring can occur without compromising sensitive data.
Continue reading...
Browser Statistics Redux
It's been a while since I looked at browser statistics for Technometria. There's been some big changes. Here are the browser stats for 2006 to-date. BrowserPercentage Internet Explorer50.76 Firefox36.20 Safari7.69 This is interesting because in the fourth quarter of 2005, IE garnered 56% and Firefox had 30%. This is a trend that is consistent with my earlier snapshots. That's a pretty big shift. Admittedly, my blog attracts techies and they're more prone to using Firefox, but I think it's a shift that reflects where things are headed. The reason I noticed this is I was wondering about screen resolutions.
Continue reading...
Social Computing Symposium
Ross Mayfield is blogging the Social Computing Symposium. There a lot of information about games and their application and social impact. Good stuff, given my questions about the space.
Continue reading...
Speeding Up Tags
A while back, I added a tag cloud to my blog. The idea was to replace categories with tags, a much more flexible system. I bend the Movable Type (MT) keywords and search to my purpose. One thing I did to make that work was modify the search script in MT to search keywords exclusively when it's called with the SearchElement=keywords option. My next task, which I describe here, had three goals: Make something with a prettier URL Add RSS for tags Speed things up The last point was important if I wanted this to work at any kind
Continue reading...
Conversing With Your Customers
I just posted an essay on Conversing With Your Customers. This will be my Connect Column for July.
Continue reading...
Opening Finder Folder in iTerm
I saw a little script in Macworld that allows you to right click on a folder in Finder and have it open in Terminal. I often find it handy to use the command line and the Finder simultaneously, so this seemed like a handy thing to do. Note that you can always open the current directory in Finder by typing open . at the command line. The problem is that the Macworld script is set up for Terminal and I use iTerm because I like the tabs. I found this script but it required the installation of some other
Continue reading...
IABC/PRSA Spring Conference
I spoke, along with Bruce Fryer and Charley Foster at the spring conference of the Utah chapters of IABC and PRSA. Most of the audience was either public relations or marketing and communications folks. The subject was blogging. Charley live blogged the talk as we went. I put together a set of del.icio.us bookmarks that record the sites we mentioned. The main message: speak with a human voice and be honest or don't bother. We also went over my notes on how to start a blog and told people to study Scoble's corporate blogger manifesto. This was a lot
Continue reading...
MovableType Congifuration
If you've upgraded to MovableType 3.2, here's a clue for you: delete your old mt.cfg configuration file (since it's been moved to mt-config.cgi). MT will continue to read mt.cfg even though you're busily editing mt-config.cgi. This can be frustrating.
Continue reading...
Learning CSS
A friend of mine is learning CSS. Like me, his standard MO when learning something new is to just look at the source and start playing around until you get it right. Mostly that works for CSS, but I found that there were some subtle points that I didn't just pick up and having a book helped. Here were two I found very useful: The Zen of CSS Design : Visual Enlightenment for the Web (Voices That Matter) by Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag, based on the CSS Zen Garden, was not necessarily useful for learning CSS (although
Continue reading...
Clueless in SimLand
I was listening to Edward Castronova's PopTech! presentation (Gold From Thin Air: The Economy of Virtual Worlds) today and had a scary thought. I've never been into video games, but as I listen to presentation's like Ed's, I always feel like I'm missing something. Not the fun and adventure, but that the world is moving to a new place and I'm not following. I've always prided myself on staying up with technology and not being stuck in the last decade, but now I'm not so sure. Maybe there's this whole world out there that I'm conveniently ignoring. For example,
Continue reading...
Reputation Podcast
Tom Maddox had his podcasting gear at IIW2006 and was interviewing people both days. He was just sitting in the main hall, so there's quite a bit of background noise, but they material is pretty good. So far, he's published the following: Christine Herron Phil Windley Dick Hardt The Intention Economy Doc Searls
Continue reading...
TiVo's Got Podcasts
This weekend, I noticed that my TiVo could play podcasts. I don't know how long that feature's been there, months probably, but I just found it. Unfortunately IT Conversations isn't on their pre-populated list, but there were some that I was interested in. For example I listened to the latest TWiT this morning while I was getting ready. Here's a few thoughts and observations: This is a no-brainer for TiVo. Lot's of free content that they can put on their box for little effort and garner a "new" feature. You can add podcasts not on TiVo's list, but you
Continue reading...
IIW Identity Space Map
Kaliya created a wall hanging from butcher paper and lots of little colored construction paper icons to hang on it. This was hanging on the wall the entire workshop and people were free to add to it. The "map" was designed to represent the evolution of Internet or user-centric identity over the last 2 years or so and look into the future about a year. Kaliya had already pre-populated it and I took a picture to represent the intial state. The above picture is the final state, at the end of the conference and reflects everyone's additions. Steve carter
Continue reading...
Bose Service Rocks
Last month by Bose Quiet Comfort Headphones broke. A little piece of plastic on the right side of the head band broke, allowing the right earpiece to flop out. I was bummed; these aren't cheap headphones. I called Bose expecting a run around of one sort or another. Instead, I got a flat-out "send them back and we'll replace them free." No receipt proving purchase date, nothing. Just "send them back." The new ones arrived today, about a week after they received my old pair in the mail. Very impressive.
Continue reading...
IIW2006 Wrap
After a day of decompressing from Internet Identity Workshop, I've had a few random thoughts that I thought I'd record. I was very pleased with how things turned out, that participation, the venue, the food, everything. Here are some specific things: First, Kaliya (aka Identity Woman) did an amazing job of putting the program together. She does this professionally, so if you're running a workshop that you'd like to do in a "unconference" format--she's someone you have to hire to do it for you. You won't be sorry. The Computer History Museum was a great venue for this sort
Continue reading...
SOA Governance Panel Reprise
We'll be doing a reprise of the SOA governance panel at the SOA Executive Forum on May 16th in New York. The panelists will be: Ed Vazquez of Sprint-Nextel. Ed's the Group Manager of the Web Service Integrations & SOA. Jeff Schneider of MomentumSI Johannes Viegener of Software AG. Johannes is Vice President of the R&D Crossvision Suite Michael Hill of HP. Mike is the Global Director for Enterprise Architecture & Governance This should be a great panel. Ed and Jeff were on the panel in March and did a bang up job. I've heard good things about both
Continue reading...
IIW2006 Kudos for Unconferences
Kim Cameron has some very nice words for IIW2006 and the unconference format on his blog: Everyone in attendance was awe-struck by the IIW 2006 that just took place in Mountainview. It was incredible. With Doc Searls and Phil Windely navigating at the macro-level, the amazing Identity Woman Kaliya orchestrated an ”unconference” that was one of the most effective events I’ve ever attended. It’s clear that creating synergy out of chaos is an art that these three have mastered, and participants floated in and out of sessions that self-organized around an ongoing three-day hallway conversation - the hallway actually
Continue reading...
Speaking at Yahoo! on Reputation
Yahoo!(click to enlarge) I gave a presentation on identity and reputation at Yahoo! today as Chad Dickerson's guest. The talk (slides) introduced user-centric identity and then introduced the reputation framework that my students built. I hope we'll have releasable code and a paper available soon. I'm looking for funding to support further development of the framework. If reputation is interesting to you or your organization, contact me. I'd be happy to talk to you about what we've done and how you might be able to participate.
Continue reading...
v|100 Selectees
vSpring has released the names of the v|100 for 2006. "The v|100 was conceived by vSpring as a tool to recognize the region's outstanding entrepreneurs and to support and promote partnering and collaboration among the state of Utah's top entrepreneurs." I'm happy to say that I'm among them for the third year in a row, particularly since the nomination and selection process is done by the entrepreneurial community in Utah.
Continue reading...
Wiki Wednesday
After the day was over at IIW, Eugene Kim was headed down to SocialText to speak at Wiki Wednesday, so some of us tagged along. The evening was nice enough that we moved it outside. A very informal and nice conversation. Eugene was being controversial and said that recent improvements to wikis are missing the point. Wikis are transformational tools for communities. They are neutral space. So what features are needed and central to the notion of a wiki? Yet wikis need single sign on. Lightweight SSO solutions are viable. If wikis are supposed to be about community, then
Continue reading...
IIW2006: Wednesday Sessions
Randy Farmer leads the skeptic session(click to enlarge) Kaliya started the day with a call for anyone else who wanted to create new sessions and then did a "spectrogram." She put a long piece of tape on the floor and asked questions where people arrayed themselves along the spectrum represented by the tape. She interviewed people at spots on the tape. A good way to get a feel for how the group is thinking about some things. I did my session on reputation and showed off the reputation system we built in my 601 class last semester. Generally well received
Continue reading...
IIW2006: Tuesday Afternoon Sessions
Doc, Dave Winer, and Don Park(click to enlarge) The afternoon started for me with a session that Dave Winer led on identity in OPML and RSS. There's a need to identify owners and authors in OPML and RSS without creating email addresses that can harvested by spammers. This is a good time to have this discussion because OPML 2.0 is being spec'd. The <head> section in the spec includes a <ownerId> that is defined thusly: [T]he http address of a web page that contains an HTML a form that allows a human reader to communicate with the author of the
Continue reading...
IIW2006: Tuesday Morning Sessions
Monday Dinner(click to enlarge) Last night's conference dinner was very well attended and very good. We started the morning in true unconference fashion by putting together the agenda. This happens by having anyone who wants to lead a session write it down on an 8.5x11 inch piece of paper and post it on a time grid on the wall. Everyone who posts something gets an opportunity to say something about their session. the agenda is fairly full and there are some good topics. Putting together the agenda(click to enlarge) Kaliya said that the guy who invented open space spent a
Continue reading...
IIW2006: SXIP, InfoCard, XRI, and Doc
The new "just right" room(click to enlarge) We moved upstairs to accommodate the crowd and ended up with a lot more elbow room. Dick Hardt was the first speaker after the break. he gave a new version of his famous Identity 2.0 talk. Dick mentions BCeID, a government identity service that forms a basis for digital identity in BC. I've long argued that governments have abdicated the responsibility for provide commerce supporting infrastructure online. (By "infrastructure" I mean legal frameworks more than hardware and software.) BCeID looks to be mostly about government online services, but Dick points out that he's
Continue reading...
IIW2006: Identity, Lexicon, and URLs
The identity map(click to enlarge) One of the nice things about an informal workshop is the freedom to rearrange things as necessary. Doc, who was opening, was running a little late, so we re-did some of the schedule. Eugene Kim was first up at IIW. Eugene's job was to introduce the ideas behind user-centric identity. He introduces the concepts of identity by introducing himself. User centric identity is about users controlling their own identity. Where does that lead us? Eugene Kim(click to enlarge) Eugene contrasts the idea of single sign on with portable identity. While many people use a single
Continue reading...
IIW2006: Getting Started
The Internet Identity Workshop starts today. I'm actually sitting in the Computer History Museum right now, getting things set up. It's not too late to come, if you're interested. I've added a one day option to the registration page. That includes snacks, lunch, and dinner (on Tuesday). I'll be live blogging, as will others. Instead of doing some kind of Planet aggregator like I did last time, I figured we could just advertise that we were using iiw2006 as the tag and then count on others, like Technorati to pull them all together.
Continue reading...
Explore Technometria
Popular Topics
- Actor Model
- Authentication
- Blogging
- Decentralization
- Event Programming
- Identity
- IIW
- Internet of Things
- IT Conversations
- Javascript
- KRL
- Kynetx
- Picos
- Programming
- Programming Languages
- Reactive Programming
- Reputation
- Sovrin
- Startups
You Might Also Enjoy
- Self-Sovereign Identity References
- Best Food Blog on the Planet
- Live Web Whitepapers
- My Slides
- My Videos
- CTO Breakfast
- Essays
- CIO Whitepapers
My Books
