The Internet is based on open data, based on open standards and open specifications to enable conversations.

For the web, the conversation has turned from open source to the data and markup behind it. Data is becoming as important as source. An open web needs open data coming from open specifications. Three major specifications have been created, all from different backgrounds – OpenID, OAuth, and OpenSocial. They share a lot of the same goals and views, but have been created ad hoc with no overarching community that transcends the projects.

David Recordon announces the start of the Open Web Foundation. Modeled after the Apache Software Foundation, the Open Web Foundation’s goal is to do for specifications what open source has done in its arena, building open community for incubation, licensing, copyright. Impressive support for the Open Web Foundation has come from companies such as Yahoo, Facebook, Plaxo and many more who want to continue to build the web on open standards.

IT Conversations | O’Reilly Media Open Source Conference | David Recordon (Free Podcast)

MP3 audio

So, Mr. Jones writes back!  Apparently, he’s a fan.  Ha ha ha.

Writes back to what, you ask?  Well, a response to an email about the Toasty Torpedo ads… which stemmed from earlier emails about Subway’s lack of customer respect.

from Jones, Tony <tjones2@quiznos.com>
to ERiC AiXeLsyD <world.and.lunar.domination@gmail.com>
date Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 9:53 PM
subject RE: The Quiznos Toasty TorpedoT ads?

 

Eric,

I enjoy your observations and yes, the Torpedo ads vs. the reality can seem diverse. Of course, with the type of bread that is used in this offering, heavier than most, I have found to be very filling and I speak from experience… I love the tuna torpedo, if properly made, and have a difficult time trying to eat more than one in one sitting. I have tried to order two and ended up about 1 ½ till being way-too-full; The heaviness of the bread, even though it looks like a breadstick, serves to be quite filling; Also, yes, the various forms of our past ads have been quite innovative and sometimes just plain ‘rebellious’. Our image has historically kind of gone down that road… with ‘baby bob’, etc. In fact, we have even had past campaigns of ‘being pioneers’…which is somewhat accurate…. First to toast, first with select breads, and first with gourmet sauces…etc… the Subways, and others competitors of the world, have graciously copied some of these endeavors. Etc…

On a side note though…. You are gifted and creative with the pen… with an edgy insight into ‘areas in need of improvement’ for various businesses; Have you ever thought of getting into an independent consulting capacity… or maybe franchise news journaling? Your giftedness at using humor along with wit, and poking fun at the various misuses, and abuses by brands could end up with a great following; Franchising and branding is such a HUGE industry, I’m sure there would be an equally HUGE following for this kind of venue. Just a thought man,

Have a great week,

Tony

Ah ha! Flattery will get you everywhere, I guess. Consulting? Me? So, people will pay me to do this stuff?  I wonder that the hell franchise news journaling is?  I may have to get to Googling that, or at least asking Mr. Jones where to start.  I still don’t think I can call him “Indiana”, though.

At any rate, I look forward to any comments.  I know you’re out there reading, and I’m getting feedback via Facebook & Twitter… but you can comment here too.  It’s all good, and it helps out my WordPress stats.  Ha ha ha.  You can even get your avatar to show up here if you use Gravatar or (I think) OpenID, or if you’re already logged into your own WordPress account.

Hallo Welt,

die Url jedes WordPress.com-Blogs lässt sich als OpenID verwenden. Das ist der Grund, aus dem ich dieses Blog angelegt habe. Ob später mehr kommt, wird sich zeigen.

hoagyvore

Non ho ancora capito come funziona l’OpenId!

Nemmeno io. Però leggi qui…

Ma se non capisco l’inglese!!!

Si llevas un tiempo usando un ordenador con acceso a internet, seguramente hayas pasado por SourceForge más de una vez para bajarte algún programa, y es que SourceForge dispone de una servidores con la mayor cantidad de software libre del mundo, aplicaciones como eMule, Ares, Filezilla, Bittorrent, 7-zip, Audacity, GIMP, VirtualDUB, CDex, XAMPP, PDFcreator, phpBB, phpMyAdmin, MediaCoder o DEV-C++ tienen su sitio en SourceForge.

SourceForge es un software de colaboración para la gestión de desarrollos, sin embargo está disponible gratuitamente para desarrollos de software libre, de forma que si vas a crear software libre, SourceForge te ofrece hosting gratuito así como varias herramientas como pueden ser una wiki, un foro, un blog, un microblog, libro de visitas, un gestor de tareas, o incluso una forma cómoda para pedir donaciones para tu proyecto.

Aún si no quisieras utilizar las herramientas de SourceForge para gestionar tu proyecto, puedes usar SourceForge para FeedBack o resolución de problemas con algún software que tengas que usar y esté alojado en SourceForge. Yo por ejemplo haré uso de OpenCV, el cual está alojado en SourceForge, de forma que si tengo alguna duda o encuentro algún error (bug), puedo comunicarme con los administradores de OpenCV a través de SourceForge, o puedo recibir notificaciones cada vez que OpenCV publique una nueva versión.

SourceForge soporta OpenID (al igual que Facebook, MySpace, WordPress, Google, Yahoo, AOL, o flikr entre otros), de forma que si te has registrado anteriormente en uno de los sitios con OpenID no necesitas registro.

Una vez registrados, hacemos click en Account para acceder a todos los servicios de SouceForge.

¿A qué esperas para crearte una cuenta? Aunque yo soy nuevo en SourceForge, si tienes alguna duda puedes comentarla y estaré encantado de intentar ayudarte.

At Cliqset, we’re striving to create a better approach to how people can share their thoughts, connect with other social networks, meet new friends, discover interesting things — and this week, we released our Bookmarklet feature. It’s one more way that we’re helping you to connect, discover, and discuss, no matter where you are around the Internet.
Our Bookmarklet encourages you to share sites or articles you love as you surf the Web. To first integrate the Bookmarklet, click on Sharing within your Settings. You then simply drag the Share on Cliqset button to your browser toolbar, where it will live permanently.

The next time you come across a page you want to send out to your Cliqset pals, or to other networks, just hit Share on Cliqset (within your toolbar). A pop-up command box will instruct you to then enter any additional message and select with which integrated services you wish to share – just like your Cliqset status bubble on the home page.

The pop-up will alert you that the page has been “Shared Successfully!” and other readers can now begin responding to your post.Try it out and let us know how you like the new feature!

 

[disclaimer: this post is related to my work as CEO of Glubble]

OpenID

Yesterday was a big day for Glubble, a private social network for (extended) families including small children. We introduced the ability to register and log in to Glubble with existing accounts from other services using OpenID.

The continuous battle for the consumer has led to a wilderness of services fighting to lock in the identity (data) of the user. Services require the user to register with e-mail addresses and passwords, forcing all of us to maintain multiple identities across services. Once in, its hard to get out again.

Ideally I would like to see services appear that have only one purpose, to protect your identity on the web. It’s like a bank which only serves you and your identity and doesn’t have any other commercial activities (like advertisement based business models for example). It ensures that you are in control of your identity. Your identity, and related to that the ability to control your privacy,  is probably the most valuable thing on the web and we tend to give it away easily for some fool’s gold. It’s nearly impossible to create a marketplace for identity providers, mostly because there is no business model that can create such a market. We don’t understand nor care its important, and currently we aren’t willing to pay for it.

The next best thing besides neutral identity providers is OpenID. OpenID allows consumers to re-use an existing (and trusted) identity. If you already have an account with Google, or Facebook, or whatever, OpenID let’s you re-use that account to register and log into new services. After speaking with Chris Messina, OpenID advocate, we decided to implement OpenID for Glubble. I believe we now may be the first service for families on the web supporting OpenID.

The benefits for the consumer are huge. A nearly 1-click registration and log in process replaces the need to remember yet another e-mail address and password combination. We’ve gone live with it yesterday, and although it is premature to discuss statistics, I can say now that already 50% of new users are registering with one of the OpenID options we currently provide! I expect this nr to increase when we add more providers in the coming days.  If you want to, you can give it a try here.

At Glubble we are committed to putting the user in control. Providing an OpenID registration and log in is the first step. We will continue to add more controls that empowers the Glubble user to take control of his identity and privacy. We ‘re doing this the hard way (everything on Glubble is private by default, and we let the user decide what he wants to share publicly). But in the end we feel it will help the consumer to become more aware of the need to be in control of identity and privacy.

OpenID is the first step, and we are very happy with it

ICQ ist pöse. Warum? Nun ja, es ist proprietär, die Nutzungsbedingungen sind recht fragwürdig und auch sonst funktioniert es eigentlich nie so, wie man es denn gerne hätte. Dateiversand ahoi!

Aber wie das Leben so ist, kommt man einfach nicht drum herum. Zum Glück hat ja schließlich jeder dort mittlerweile eine Adresse, von den ganz hartnäckigen MSN-only Jüngern mal abgesehen (Pest oder Cholera, anyone?).

Und so unterwarfen sich die Nutzer den proprietären Protkollen. Alle Nutzer? Nein! Eine kleine Gruppe von Geeks leistet nun schon seit Jahren erbitterten Widerstand – oder so ähnlich. Jedenfalls konnte das dritte große Protokoll, XMPP (auch Jabber genannt), nie bis in den Mainstream vordringen, auch wenn es sich unter Linux-Nutzern schon lange großer Beliebtheit erfreut.

Einer der geschätzten Vorteile gegenüber MSN und ICQ ist der dezentrale Aufbau des Jabber-Netzwerks, von dem auch reger Gebrauch gemacht wird. Jeder kann seinen eigenen Server betreiben und sich als “Nummer” eine E-Mail-ähnliche Adresse erstellen, mit der er zu anderen Jabber-Nutzern Kontakt aufnehmen kann. Auch Unternehmen wie Google oder GMX setzen für ihre eigenen Messenger auf XMPP und sind daher größtenteils kompatibel zur restlichen Jabber-Welt. Im Klartext bedeutet das: Wer dort eine (E-Mail)Adresse sein Eigen nennt, bekommt auch zusätzlich eine Jabber-Adresse untergejubelt. Wie viele potentielle Nutzer also noch gar nichts von ihrem Glück wissen, kann man sich in etwa vorstellen.

Trotz aller Unterstzützung nutzt der 08/15 DAU aber dennoch weiter sein heiß geliebtes (gehasstes?) ICQ/MSN. Wofür auch etwas Neues, wenn sich das Alte über Jahre bewährt *hust* hat? Mal ganz davon abgesehen, ist die Freundesliste sowieso nahezu vollständig.

Ein wichtiger Punkt: Die Nutzerbasis

Ein Messenger ohne Kontakte macht wenig Sinn – daran ändern auch Google oder GMX absolut nichts. Facebook könnte allerdings, um mal zum Punkt zu kommen, diese Nutzerbasis liefern. 300 Millionen registrierte Nutzer, die prinzipbedingt das Portal intensiv nutzen, sind jedenfalls eine beeindruckende Zahl. Einen internen Chat gibt es immerhin schon über ein Jahr und die Öffnung des Dienstes per XMPP steht kurz bevor. Das könnte der Durchbruch sein!

Mich würde es jedenfalls wundern, wenn Facebook keine saubere Jabber Implementierung liefern würde. In der Vergangenheit haben sie schließlich schon gezeigt, dass sie gewillt sind, neue Techonologien zu fördern und voranzutreiben (z.B. OpenID).

Die Schattenseite ist allerdings nicht zu übersehen: Der überwiegende Teil der Jabber-Nutzer wird sich wahrscheinlich früher oder später an Facebook binden. Die Freiheit, einfach einen anderen Server zu nutzen, würde natürlich bestehen bleiben – die Server-Vielfalt wie wir sie heute kennen, würde sich aber wohl komplett wandeln und neu verlagern, nicht zuletzt zugunsten von Facebook.

Aber hey, zu meckern gibt’s immer irgendwas

Hello everyone..

A few weeks back, I came across a new term that has been getting rathwer popular since quite some time on the net – ‘OpenID’. Now, a lot of people  might be using it in some form or the other, but perhaps, not all of us understand what and why is it..

So, What is OpenID ? To understand it, first imagine how registering and using different sites work. Most of us are registered on various sites – these may be social networks (like facebook, orkut etc.), shopping sites, forums, and other such sites. Now, there are a few issues with how things work normally :

1. Firtstly, registering on a site is a multi-step process which needs to be done repetitively – a recent study showed that many visitors avoid registering on a site simply because they are too lazy to fill up all the registration information. However, automatic form-filling (like in google toolbar) could help somewhat by automating the form-filling.
2. The second problem, which is  what is of more concern, is remembering the password. Either the user keeps the same password on all sites which increases the chances of identity theft (you will be surprised at how many sites store your actual password and not its encrypted/hash value on their servers – ever got a mail from a site after registering, mentioning your password in the mail ? – well, beware of such sites). In the above option, if a a ‘hacker’ could get your password on any one site, he could potentially gain acces to your identity on all the other sites. The other option is that you keep different passwords on different sites   – but then, remembering them is a complete mess ! You either cannot remember them or you need to use some password manager to gain access – again a problem since it involves extra step and because you may not have access to the password manages on a public computer.
3. A third problem, is that if you use many social networking sites, there is no link between the friends you have on one site to the friends on another site – you cannot simply add frineds on Facebook and then hope that the same would also appear in your friends list in Orkut !

In comes OpenID – “one ring to rule them all”  – it is like your one single identity across the whole web and one central/unified way of signing in towebsites. So, now, if you go to an openID enabled site and press register, all you have to specify is your openID, and then perhaps your openID password, and then the site where you are registering will pull in all your information and your contact information from the openID provider’s site (with your permissipon ofcourse) and you are done – no need to fill up forms, remember passwords of search for your friends !! Simple and effective. Also, because now your password is only visible to the openID provider’s site, and no other site sees/knows it, you only need to protect and remember a single passwors thus making identity-theft less likely.Also, if all your frineds on one site are using openID, its simple for any of the other site to pull your frinds’ ids from one site and add them to your friends listr in other !

Now that the concept of openID is clear, lets see what is openID – it is actually a form of URL (e.g. openid_provider.com/myname) – without going into too much technical detail, whenever you enter your openID URL to any site, that site will contact the openID provider website (openid_provider.com in the example above) and will authenticate you and your information. For more technical details on how it works, refer : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID#Logging_in

Naturally, the question that comes to mind is, who is openID provider ? Since the past year, the openID has become quite popular. So, many sites have  been providing openID – infact, you already might have one or many of them. For example, blogger (my blog url : http://itsaneesh.wordpress.com/ is actually also an openID), wordpress, livejournal etc. provide you an openID when you register. Google also makes an openID for you when you register (although, its slightly different in that your google openID has a long alphanumeric sequence as your openID) as does  flickr, yahoo and msn etc. (see : http://openid.net/get-an-openid/ for more details). In fact. for users of google – you might have seen “Sign in with a Google Account” button on many third-party sites – all of these are utilizing Google’s openID features)

An alternate way of getting ypur openID are from sites meant solely for this : some good examples are – http://chi.mp/ , https://claimid.com/ , http://www.yiid.com , http://www.myid.net/ , https://www.myopenid.com/ , https://pip.verisignlabs.com/

While understanding openID etc, I visited and created my openID on the above mentioned sites, and personally, I liked yiid the best (mine is at http://aneesh.yiid.com/)- as it gives you a page where you could mention all the sites/communities you are a part of and also, allows you to link multiple openIDs together so you could sign in to yiid with any of those. Another one I really like is chi.mp as it gives you a personal free domain (mine at http://aneesh.mp/) and a page which you can customize, along with a blog, photostream etc.

Lastlys, as openID becomes popular and the de-facto standard for logging into sites, the id will become a persons unique identity on the net – you go to a photosite, and see a photo or a comment on another site by  “http://itsaneesh.blogspot.com/” , you know its the same person who created this blog ! Of couse, this also brings about concerns of privacy – but you have the control on it – its no different than real worls – you have one unique face and you are known by it – you simple hide it when you want to do something you don’t want people to associate with you !!

So, now that you are more aware of what is OpernID, hopefully, you will start noticing its existence and its advantages at more and more sites – share with me on how you feel about it. And if you still don’t have one, well, what are you waiting for ? – go, claim your identity !

Enjoy !

Aneesh..

PS : I still cannot decide which platform is better for blogging – blogspot or wordpress. Till the time I do so, please find the same post also at :

http://itsaneesh.blogspot.com/2009/11/one-ring-to-rule-them-all-openid.html

The fans demanded it, so we got the band back together! Chris Messina, Joseph Smarr, and I shot an episode of The Social Web TV at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View during this week’s Internet Identity Workshop. So much has happened since we last shot that this is our most jam-packed episode ever!

You’re on Cliqset! You’ve updated your status and shared a picture or bookmark. So what’s next? It’s time to start and join conversations, connect with friends, find interesting people to follow and maybe even share their content.

Where to start? Building community is important to us at Cliqset so we make it easy for you discover new friends, invite a friend or even invite your community. On your home page you’ll find that the far right column we have several options that are dedicated to helping you build your community. They include:

Invite friends: it’s as simple as entering their email address and we’ll do the rest.

Find people you know: Another way to build your community is to search your current contacts and invite them. If you go to: http://cliqset.com/people/find you have several options to search your
Google, Plaxo, or Yahoo contacts and from there you can choose which of these contacts to invite or skip the process altogether, it’s totally your call. You can also search for people at any time in the search box to see if people already on Cliqset by entering their email or name and we’ll let you know if they’ve registered.

Follow Suggestions: We also suggest 5 people that we think you’ll find interesting – you have the option to follow or remove.

The People Link at the top of your home page: The ‘People link ‘allows you to enter someone’s name and search the entire Cliqset community.  Try it out here: http://cliqset.com/people/following This page also gives you the option to see who exactly is following you.

You don’t have to do all the work. We also give you a leg up in finding interesting people and content as well. On the login page we have a scrolling list of recent activity at Cliqset – if you see something interesting there search for them and connect!

Also you can follow any of us at Cliqset – we’d love to connect with you!

Cliqset: cliqset/user/cliqsetsupport
Robyn: cliqset/user/rockinrobync
Darren: cliqset/user/dbounds
Charlie: cliqset/user/Charlie

Look for next week’s post where we’ll talk about all the services you can integrate and how that makes the conversations in the community so much richer.

Until then, make your introductions – let us help! Cliqset is your online community in real-time we aim to bring all aspects from the interests you share, the content you discover, the topics you discuss and , the connections you make.

El concepto está basado en el protocolo estándar OpenID 2.0, y en realidad no es nuevo ya que Google ya anunció hace unos meses que estaba trabajando en colaboración con otras empresas para ofrecer un sistema de registro simple.

El éxito de OpenID no ha sido demasiado elevado a pesar de sus buenas intenciones, pero en Google creen que la idea es válida y se han unido a otras empresas como AOL, Facebook, Microsoft Plaxo, MySpace y Yahoo para ofrecer un sistema que permita registrarse en los servicios de los demás mientras uno tenga usuario y contraseña en uno de ellos. Por ejemplo, podríamos registrarnos con nuestra cuenta de Google en Plaxo.

Fuente: theinquirer

On the heels of the OpenID Summit, we roll into the Fall Internet Identity Workshop. There are folks here from companies large and small, from grass roots effort, and from the government. I may add more color in text over time, but let me get the ball rolling with some photos to capture the event for posterity. It’s photoblogging time again!

Opening Circle:

Joseph Smarr, CTO of Plaxo, shilling for his session:

Angus Logan of Microsoft and Kevin Marks of BT co-lead a session on optimizing the UX for consenting access to data:

Afternoon breakout sessions:

The “unconference” schedule:

Michael Jones of Microsoft kicks off a session on the prototype browser extension for an Identity Selector:

Chris Messina leads a double-session on Activity Streams (so he gets two photos!):

Self-portrait, in the Activity Streams double-live marathon:

Eran Hammer-Lahav of the “Hammer Stack,” bringing lots of spec-development experience to the Activity Streams working session:

Late afternoon collaboration:

I spent this afternoon at a great OpenID Summit, hosted by Yahoo, and featuring some of the leading figures in the industry from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Plaxo, AOL, PayPal and others. This was a real working session, with frank sharing of lessons learned from deployments by these companies and active discussion about how to move forward together as rapidly as possible. There is now a *lot* of horsepower being applied to making OpenID part of the core Web experience.

Interesting to note which companies did not have representatives here. (The two most notable: Twitter and LinkedIn, both of which could really play a big role in online identity.)

One highlight was Michael Jones of Microsoft demoing a prototype of an OpenID identity selector browser extension:

Here’s Yahoo’s Aanchal Gupta, reviewing all the great progress they’ve been making on improving the OpenID user experience:

Here’s Joseph Smarr of Plaxo, who rallied the troops with a combination of hard-hitting analysis of how much work is still to be done, along with an inspiring reminder of how this community has worked so well together to solve problems with solutions like the “Hybrid” of OpenID and OAuth. (Slides and video further down.):

And Luke Shepard of Facebook, who explained that Facebook “does OpenID because it’s good for our business”. Luke, like Joseph, shared important feedback from the perspective of a “Relying Party”:

Allen Tom of Yahoo and David Recordon of Facebook led the technical breakout after all the presentations, driving toward a list of items to tackle in the next six months. David reminded us that the 2.0 version of the OpenID spec has been out there since 2007.

I’ll add more content as it comes in. Here’s the deck Joseph used for his talk, “What an RP Wants, Part II”:

And some video clips from Joseph’s talk:

Update: Joseph got a post up about his talk, with some additional color.

Hooray! You’re registered and ready to get cookin’ on Cliqset. But where to begin? Our newest and super user-friendly version caters to social media power-users who might be Cliqset novices, like yourself, and need to learn the ropes. Let’s focus on the status bubble: It lives on your home page, right below our friendly invitation to “Share what’s on your mind.”

Photo: will prompt you to select a pic to share from your hard drive,

Bookmark: makes it easy to share your bookmarks or articles you find interesting,

or Review (signified with an appropriate Roger & Ebert thumbs up image):  allowing you to discuss or criticize a movie, restaurant, or book , really anything you want and rate it with 1-5 stars.

With Cliqset, you can choose to send these updates to your pals on Cliqset or to a whole host of social networks. By clicking on Services, listed in the uppermost toolbar, you can choose to integrate with 70 other networks of which you are already a member. Once you have successfully integrated with a service, it will show up on Your Active Services, posted on the right-hand side.

Back by the home page status balloon, you can select from among your now integrated services, making their icons bold, to alert Cliqset with which service you’d like to share your activity. Now you’re ready to shoot out a message, to be viewed and perhaps commented on or liked by other engaged users. This may be the post that generates a week-long debate or introduces you to a new circle of friends, so let’s make sure it’s perfect.

A few Insider Tips:

• View Feature: Once you update an activity (on Cliqset or on another service you’ve integrated within Cliqset) it will now be associated with a unique URL that links back to Cliqset and gives you a “forum” to host a conversation around it. So if you want to have a chat about a news topic or blog post that you had shared, you can point your audience to that unique URL to engage in dialogue and converse in real-time about the topic at hand.

• Share other people’s content you find interesting: Once you’re up on Cliqset and have followed a few folks, you can now share their activities to the audience you think might find it of interest. Click “Share” underneath the activity and you’ll be able to select which social service you can share it with, including Facebook, Twitter, etc.

And BOOM you’re ready to start engaging in colorful online conversations on Cliqset! Keep checking back with me, here at the Social Blog, for more Cliqset how-tos and insider tips!

Negative Views

• For general users it might NOT be the preferable way.
• Users who have less tech knowledge would think twice or might get confused since they are not aware of open id mechanism.
• They have to avail an open id from a certain provider which might be annoying to them.
• They might hate it because they will be redirected to another site.
• They might not trust your site with their credentials or how you handle their credentials.

Positive views

• It’s trustworthy because you are not asking for their credentials.
• It’s faster once logged in because a user needs to login to their open id provider once – the second time, they won’t even see the provider’s page.
• Many people skip a site because they refuse to maintain yet another username/password credential.
• Open id is becoming popular. In the future, that might be the preferable way to login to a site.

Conclusion

Provide both ways of logging in to your site. That way you satisfy both types of users. No one will leave your site from the fear of registering to your site.

-Saj-

A common complaint of the St.  Louis Post-Dispatch’s online edition concerns the incessant racist and divisive blather spewing from the comments section.  Here’s a thread on urbanstl.com highlighting this point.  Following are some suggestions for improvement.

Utilize federated login via OpenID by allowing clients to authenticate w/ their existing Facebook, Google and similar accounts. Real names and pictures can be posted easily. Anonymity is the enemy of civility.

Oh, and clearly the Post Dispatch doesn’t have the resources to moderate the countless discussions. Enable the crowd to moderate ala digg.com!

It ain’t rocket science, peeps. And if it is, just hire people from Boeing!

It wasn’t long ago that your “community” referred to the neighbors
within a certain radius or the colleagues with whom you worked.
Connecting with these folks to raise support for an issue or
neighborhood block party often posed a challenge. If you were trying
to raise interest for an issue or invite people to an event, outreach
might involve phone calls or canvassing the area and distributing
flyers. Once you got the word out you would have to sit and wait to
see if the people you’d reached out to had the same interests and
concerns you had. Ultimately, you never knew if your neighbors truly
shared anything in common with you — beyond a zip code.

Back then, “community” would happen at the Community Center – the hub
of activity inside a regional area where both adults and children
would gather to connect, visit, play games and even share photos. All
sorts of activities were taking place here and people made the trip to
connect to enjoy life together.

But, in this age of the real-time Web, it’s become easier than ever to
find or build a community with like-minded people who, most often, do
not live within your zip code. As technology evolves, our degrees of
separation have gotten smaller. Social networking has helped us push
past the geographical boundaries, and has helped us to engage based on
common interests. It’s now easier than ever to become an activist and
rally support for something we feel passionate about. And businesses
can create awareness, solve problems, and generate great customer
experiences with the click of a mouse.

But building relationships online is still not that easy. It requires
clear channels of communication and common interests. At Cliqset,
we’re working hard to foster community regardless of zip code and make
it simple for you to develop your own network, and interact with
others, just as if you were meeting them at the local coffee shop or
community center.

Inside Cliqset, once you discover something that interests you, it’s
very easy to start a conversation around it just as if you were
meeting up with that person in real life. We’ve made it easier for you
to share your life online by allowing you to share more than your
status updates or interesting links – you can engage more deeply and
share what you are doing on other networks and talk about that in
real-time on Cliqset.

At Cliqset, we encourage you to start real-time, dynamic conversations
about the things that interest you most, and watch as others join in.
We want you to share and discuss your lives, thoughts,
accomplishments, reviews, pictures….you name it. Looking to solve a
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Keeping track of user ids and passwords for different websites is a a pain. OpenIDs aims to solve that issue by giving the user the power to use the same id on websites that support OpenIDs (i.e. Google, Facebook, Flickr, etc).

For developers who wanted to implement OpenID in their website, an easy way to do this is by using RPX. For Joomla developers, things just got easier with UltiRPX from ultijoomla. You can follow the instructions from their website on how to install and use UltiRPX – http://www.ultijoomla.com/faq/49-ulti-rpx/181-how-do-i-install-ulti-rpx

After installing, setting up the apiKey and enabling the plug-in and module, in no time I am now able to login using my Google account in my website! There are some minor issues I have found. See details below.

Issues I found with Ulti RPX:

1. The rpx apiKey is clearly shown in “view source“. From the RPX website, the api key should be kept as secret.

Fix: Remove the hidden <input> tags with name=”apiKey” in the UltiRPX module and component. After I have removed the hidden input tags, everthing still seems to be working fine.

2. The default template view for Ulti RPX module (view/tmpl/default.php) is missing an form end tag </form>.  Because of this all my other forms are not properly being rendered.

Fix: Add the missing form end tag </form> default template view for Ulti RPX module (view/tmpl/default.php)

I probably send these list to ultijoomla later as I am still running some tests. I hope you found this useful.

Don't go there

What’s up with OpenID.org? In September 2009 they changed their site

“to incorporate a secure, easy to use OpenID”

Well, that’s nice.

I say ‘apparently’, because no-one told me. The new site is awful – anyone who is not tech-savvy will have a hell of a job finding out why they can’t use their OpenID to log into their favourite sites.

The fact is that they’ve changed their password encryption system (reading between what few lines there are, here) and old (pre Sep 09) passwords won’t work anymore. No email to tell you that, no easy way to find out that there’s been a change, no help, feedback hidden down several clicks.

What a massive fail. Fortunately, I’m not with OpenID.org. My friends and colleagues who are, are switching,

During the week of October 13, 2009, a very rewarding informal meeting of digital law library developers, administrators, and researchers took place at Cornell University’s Legal Information Institute. The gathering was graciously hosted by Dr. Tom Bruce. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a number of issues respecting free access to law, legal information institutes, and digital law libraries. Photos of the meeting are available here and here. Among the participants were:

• Professor Daniel Poulin, Director of CANLII & LexUM Laboratory;
• Marc-André Morissette, Chief Analyst at LexUM Laboratory;
• Pierre-Paul Lemyre, Head of Products and Business Development at LexUM Laboratory and a Ph.D. student at University of Montreal Faculté de Droit, studying the effects on legal systems of free access to law & legal information institutes;
• Daniel Shane, Software Developer at LexUM Laboratory;
• Elmer Masters, Director of Internet Development at CALI;
• John Joergensen, Reference & Circulation Librarian at the Rutgers University Camden Law Library, and developer of the Rutgers University Camden Law Library Digital Collections;
• Stuart Sierra, Assistant Director of the Program on Law & Technology at Columbia Law School and developer of AltLaw: The Free Legal Search Engine; and
• Sara Frug, Brian Hughes, Daniel Nagy, & David Shetland of Cornell’s Legal Information Institute.

On October 14-15, the following topics were discussed:

• Professor Poulin, Marc-André Morissette, Pierre-Paul Lemyre, & Daniel Shane discussed information acquisitions, text-processing methods, the treatment of images in court decisions, and administrative matters, respecting CANLII;
• Dr. Bruce, Daniel Nagy, & Sara Frug of Cornell’s LII, & Elmer Masters of CALI discussed their use of Drupal to present a variety of types of content, their text processing methods, and the costs and benefits of cloud computing;
• Dr. Bruce, Daniel Nagy, Elmer Masters, and Tim Stanley & Nicolas Moline of Justia discussed using OpenID & OAuth to enable streamlined authentication & access to online legal resources;
• Dr. Bruce, Professor Poulin, and others discussed various methods of legal metadata standardization, including encouraging courts, legislatures, and administrative agencies to adopt publishing standards, and the development and promotion of OAI4Courts as a means of standardizing metadata for court documents, to enable sharing and aggregation of such metadata in open repositories;
• Stuart Sierra described his methods for automated acquisition of US Federal Court decisions, as well as his text processing and data management techniques at AltLaw;
• John Joergensen described his methods for automated acquisition of court decisions, text processing, procedures for digitizing print and microfiche legal documents, and digital preservation techniques, at the Rutgers University Camden Law Library’s digital collections.

On October 16, the following topics were discussed:

• Prof. Poulin discussed the former challenges of adding secondary sources to CANLII, the new possibilities of adding commentary and user generated content to CANLII, and his desire that CANLII be a generative system, in Professor Jonathan Zittrain’s sense of that term in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It;
• Dr. Bruce, Prof. Poulin, Elmer Masters, and all the participants discussed their plans for sustaining innovation in the coming years at LII, CANLII, & CALI, and for developing business models and strategies;
• Dr. Bruce emphasized the need to develop standards to enable sharing of metadata and legal information objects among digital repositories, and to educate reporters of decisions about the need to enable information sharing in legal digital publishing;
• The LexUM team discussed two different approaches to taxonomies that they have tested respecting CANLII;
• Pierre-Paul Lemyre demonstrated several LexUM Web 2.0 projects, including Le Code civil du Quebéc annoté, which allows users to add annotations, and the CANLEX set of APIs for CANLII, including the RefLex API, which hotlinks legal citations in a user’s document. Prof. Poulin & Pierre-Paul also discussed Lexacto, a search engine enabling practitioners to index and retrieve content on particular legal topics, whether that content is located within or outside their firm. Some of this new technology will be tested at the Supreme Court of Canada;
• Marc-André Morissette demonstrated a drop-down table of contents-based document management system for legislative materials, called LexView, with the Canadian Criminal Code as a prototype. He said that similar technology would be applied to the Nova Scotia Annotated Civil Procedure Rules and continuing legal education materials for British Columbia;
• Dr. Bruce, Elmer Masters, John Joergensen, and the Cornell LII team discussed implementation of OpenID, the possible sharing of taxonomies, and possible collaboration respecting data for updating the U.S. Code;
• In a wrap-up discussion, each participant identified the most valuable information they acquired during the meeting. John Joergensen initiated a new discussion about the need for the legal information institutes to consider new issues in light of the institutes’ maturation and acceptance as key actors in the legal information infrastructure, and underscored digital preservation as one such issue. Dr. Bruce & Prof. Poulin reflected on their careers leading legal information institutes and how their personal roles had changed as their organizations had grown and matured.
• The participants agreed to meet again next autumn, either in Ithaca or in Montreal. Everyone thanked Dr. Bruce and the Cornell LII team for their gracious hospitality.

Many thanks to Dr. Bruce & his team for their gracious hospitality and stimulating discussion.