Updates from March, 2010

  • i died, sort of.

    sull 5:58 PM on March 3, 2010 Permalink | Short Url | Tweet | Reply | Comments RSS

    Category: macroblog |


    I cannot help but to reflect on the incident that took place on February 22nd, 2010. I was in my 8th 10-minute mile when i blacked out. My first blackout, in fact. This blackout has put the issue of afterlife front and center. The simple observation that if we can blackout… where you literally BLACK out into nothingness….. no thoughts, dreams, visions, memories, lights or anything resembling anything familiar other than a deep void…. Then how can death be something else? Something more?

    I have had powerful self-induced experiences in my life. But this natural blackout… which comes down to a lack of oxygen to the brain… this direct effect that amounted to me losing a gap of my life, even if only a short gap…. it seems to have had the deepest impact even compared to extremely powerful chemical reactions that my brain has experienced in the past. To lose time and have no memories makes me feel violated. No control. Vulnerable. Powerless. And the persistent thought that when its over, its over. Shutting off a light. Circuit closed.

    Now going into this, I was not a believer in anything in particular about what happens after we die. I am not religious at all. I don’t even put much time into thinking about Atheism or Agnostic tendencies. I dont need those labels either. Based on my time here and willingness to experiment over the years, I’ve tended to think that their is a vast pool of energy and that it is possible to become a part of that pool when we die. But that too can be the same as what we perceive as a dark and lonely nothingness. If we don’t carry with us any bit of our consciousness and memories and emotions, then energy or not… it does not seem to be anything to get excited about.

    Being at peace with such realizations is our best chance. Being fulfilled with your life, everyday.

    So, I am 35 and though something serious happened to me, it appears I am mostly healthy. I will be seeing additional doctors to continue observation and testing. Whether or not what happened to me is classified up there with more life threatening health issues, the experience as a whole is still something that forces me to reflect about the stuff that confuses, amazes and haunts us all until our end.

     

  • inspiration to blog

    sull 12:37 AM on February 24, 2010 Permalink | Short Url | Tweet | Reply | Comments RSS

    Category: macroblog |


    Blogging is hard to do well and consistently. You really do have to love it. You start off by talking to an unknown audience. Maybe you write for your own benefit or maybe you really want to engage the blogosphere and social web.
    Obviously, you have to like to write and usually… to stay on top of the topics that you want to write about.

    This and many more points are what makes blogging difficult to commit to. With that said, it’s also OK to take breaks and come back with fresh ideas.

    This post is essentially me logging in upgrade WordPress and several plugins and deal with spam comments etcetera.
    So I might as well post something, right? The question is…. what will I post next?

     

  • The Open Web is on Twitter’s Tail

    sull 1:16 PM on September 25, 2009 Permalink | Short Url | Tweet | Reply | Comments RSS

    Category: macroblog |


    Twitter has been a great phenomena these past few years. I’ve been able to enjoy a different mode of communication with old and new net friends. I’ve had fun experimenting with their API. I’ve enjoyed the discourse that has been ignited and fueled by Twitter’s successes and failures. And it’s been interesting to watch the evolution of it’s popularity… as it trickled into MSM as a simpler way for news television hosts/audiences to interact and broaden the conversation a bit. And seeing how eventually twitter entered into the lives of people who only a short while before would never have bothered using such a service. And we cannot ignore the convenience of the emerging Mobile Web, especially since the iPhone was released in 2007, which has been in direct parallel to Twitter’s own growth. A Perfect Storm.

    We all know the technical struggles that Twitter continues to go through in trying to maintain a huge centralized messaging service used by millions of people and many 3rd party services that plugin to it’s API. But since gaining mass attention around the world, they are an undeniable global force in social networking. And they have enough money to rapidly fail, repair and improve. Twitter may eventually be too big to fail. Or at least fail totally and quickly. Sound familiar? That’s the recipe at this point. Unless The Open Web also continues to evolve and upgrade itself to modern day requirements and accessibility.

    Twitter is not going away. At least not for years to come if they do at all. After all, we still have Friendster out there. I’ve made the snarky comment that twitter could be the next Friendster. That happens when competition catches on and catches up and the playing field balances. Except in this case, the competition is the Interwebs itself. RSS, Atom, Wave, and still old dinosaurs like SMTP. Injecting Real-Time into the Open Web has huge potential influence on some business plans…. like Twitter’s plan to be “The Pulse of the Planet” with a user-base in the billions.

    I think back to AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe in the 1990’s. Email used to be contained inside those silos. Eventually, CompuServe was first I believe to host a relay server so that users could send and receive email across the Internet to non @compuserve.com addresses. I remember how big that was for me as I was able to communicate with my girlfriend’s .edu address using my CompuServe account. On the other hand, The Internet’s evolution did not help CompuServe survive. Note this quote:

    “The wall we eventually hit was the opening of the Internet to general public use,” Lambert said. “When that happened, our own private network had diminished value. We no longer had a captive audience.”

    Twitter is open. But they are centralized. Email is a distributed decentralized system. It would never work for the masses if it were centralized for technical and legal reasons. Twitter is currently a micro-messaging platform and serve a different use case. But both are messaging utilities. Email is far from perfect but Email has no single point of failure or single company responsible for running it. Email has no terms of service. Email is not a company. Twitter will be to micromessaging/microblogging as Google/Yahoo/Microsoft and every ISP is to Email. They are all providing Email services. Now we need MicroMessaging Service Providers on top of Open Protocols. This might not help Twitter just as the evolving open Internet did not help CompuServe, Prodigy and AOL at the time. But this is only in relation to it’s current incarnation. Twitter will have to evolve. In fact, it will start to resemble Facebook more over time. They need to reinvent to survive. Because the Open Web is relentless. The Real-Time Web is upon us and we don’t need to rely on any particular company to leverage it. Facebook seems to know this. And they have less to worry about. They have an enormous user base and a complete service offering. Twitter has very little to offer beyond it’s current mass appeal. And we all know how fast that trend can change. Friendster had it. Myspace had it. Twitter is enjoying it and may be blinded by it. Or not. They should be smart enough to grok this.

    So looking forward, we’ll have our Real-Time RSS and other forms of Twitter clones. The blogosphere itself is getting rejuvenated. Meanwhile, Twitter has to deal with building anti-spam technology, security exploits, targeted attacks, infrastructure, legal issues and finding a path to profitability for all of its investors… a list that keeps on growing. And to all the companies thinking of signing deals with Twitter to run your microblogging business…. I would sit back and wait and watch how fast the Open Web catches up…. and you’ll see that you don’t need Twitter. You just need the Web. It’s getting better and faster and smarter. Save your money for data analysis, content re-purposing, archiving and analytic services

    It looks like Twitter has raised another $100m. I think on the surface, it’s a mistake. On the other hand, the investment itself is strategic. Twitter spends money slowly. The investment almost works more to secure a valuation than it does to accelerate towards an exit strategy where investors profit. And in order to even scratch the surface of bringing in a revenue stream, they need to do things that users/developers won’t love. Ads. Restrictions. Throttling. Fees. Once it is seen that Twitter no longer offers a unique service and only really ignited a shift on the web towards microblogging and link sharing… users will start to migrate away. Or at least use other services in conjunction (cross-posting). This won’t happen overnight, but unless Twitter becomes something much more than what it is today….then it will just be a long slow demise. You might see some investors get impatient and get their money back as they abandon Twitter. You might see big mistakes along the way. It’s happened before. Twitter would not be unique in it’s failures. And the most notable concern for Twitter is it’s competition. Facebook, Google and even Microsoft and Yahoo are not going to make this easy. Not to mention the next phenomena in Internet startups. Some think that maybe it will be FourSquare and others to steal the limelight away from twitter. And if Twitter’s early adopters leave, they will be left with less valuable users in my opinion. Celebrities will even grow tired of it and move on. Nothing is secured.

    The Open Web is on Twitter’s Tail…. And that’s not all they have to worry about.

     

  • Stocks and Flows and The Real-Time Web

    sull 2:22 AM on September 18, 2009 Permalink | Short Url | Tweet | Reply | Comments RSS

    Category: macroblog | Tags: filters, ,


    Their was a 3-part blog post back in 2004 that always stuck with me as I have observed the evolution of the Internet. And I’ve found myself often referring to the term “Stock and Flow” when discussing the real-time web. This just came up again in a comment that I wrote (but not yet submitted) on Chris Messina’s blog post entitled “What can dogs tell us about the real-time web?” – http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2009/09/16/what-can-dogs-tell-us-about-the-real-time-web/ –

    So let me officially refer to this insightful article authored by Common Craft’s Lee Lefever.

    Common Craft Blog
    Introduction to Stocks and Flows in Online Communication (parts 1, 2, 3)
    By Lee Lefever

    http://www.commoncraft.com/archives/000593.html

    http://www.commoncraft.com/archives/000599.html

    http://www.commoncraft.com/archives/000601.html

    Probably the most interesting aspect to the discussion of the real-time web is not speed of human consumption but rather speed of machine consumption. Correction. This is not necessarily true. People are filters too. Very good filters! In fact, I once started a blog called SpreadTheMedia.org in 06 and the core idea was “Spreading Human Filtered Content”. I valued the human touch that would bubble up content for others to consume. What I meant to point out was the difference between the speed of consumption and the speed of filtration. Machines equipped with smart algorithmic tech will do much of the real-time filtering…. Google, Bing and the other usual suspects as well as new entries to the market. These engines will need to do anti-spam, relevancy, source ranking etc. And in mere seconds so that the intended consumers can get their filtered data.

    Rapid Failure, Rapid Intelligence
    In a recent post here – http://vocal.ly/p4l – I touched on this stuff a bit.
    The notion of rapid failure came to mind as a way to compare how content and content sources need to go through some checks and balances and if their is a rapid failure log recorded, then the filter becomes more efficient and therefor more intelligent. It was not a perfect analogy but the point is clear… Nobody wants to get spam, worms, hoaxes, rumors or any inaccurate data. Nobody wants to spend time fact-checking. The system should handle this for us. And when it does, it will have a nice ripple effect on the infosphere. This doesn’t come without some issues that will breed skepticism and controversy, however.

    Trust Analytics
    It’s going to be important to rely on the intelligence of the real-time data crunching machines as well as people who act as filters themselves. But in both cases, their will be flaws and corruption contaminating results. It is probably inevitable that their will be stocks formed from the flows that are biased info repositories that will cater to certain minded folks. Many people are set in their ways and like to believe what they want to believe. What i’m getting at here is…. Their will always be layers of filtration and many networks of real-time streams. No different than TV, really. Some will watch Fox, some will watch CNN. I see that i’ve narrowed this down to news gathering. Suppose that makes good sense though. “News” makes up much of the real-time stream. Even if accompanied by a comment, it’s mostly a link and a headline.
    So how do look at this filtering point? How does it not become any different than the faulty filters we have already in place on current mediums like TV, Radio? I am reminded of the recent US Presidential Elections and the CPD that make the Debates nearly impossible to qualify for if you are a 3rd party candidate. To me, that is a filter that does us no good. Or the fact that the MSM also does not give fair airtime to candidates unless they are the front-runners, thus maintaining the front-runners status for the duration of the elections. That is a filter that does us no good. Or how about subtle changes to bills that are not reported on so that they can slip through without an outcry? These are just a few examples of bad filters that exist in the world.

    Will the web’s real-time filters be an improvement? How many filters will there be? How will we look at these filters? How will they compare to traditional streams of content? Will the Flows be more important than the Stocks or vise versa? At the end of the day, does the landscape change at all? Does The Real-Time Web bring us more noise or can it bring us more signal?

    It will be interesting to watch this play out.

    And to clarify, The Real-Time Web will be more of an umbrella term as it bleeds into more things. The popularity of Microblogging (Twitter) brought Real-Time content to the forefront, even though twitter isn’t really any more real-time than email or RSS set to poll the server every minute. But it’s the micro chunk data that caught on and the illusion of real-time that got people talking more about it.

    Twitter as a service is people powered. People often post links to new pages on the web… news articles, blog posts etc. These people are probably first alerted of this new content via RSS or Email. Someone inevitably is first to re-post content to twitter alerting their followers and anyone who re-posts… the gossip propagates quickly. This is what some will refer to as Real-Time Web. And that’s acceptable.

    Other’s will point out that Real-Time Web is how content from one service immediately flows to other services. A great example is Twitter data instantly hitting Friendfeed.com. Twitter does have a data “Firehose” that they let some partners tap into. Usually the technology involved in capturing the data is called long-polling or http streaming. So Twitter is involved with Real-Time technology but it only truly is exposed via the Firehose, not the consumer side where people are using twitter clients to monitor their streams (thats just like email or rss readers).

    The Real-Time Web is also effectively now related to RSS and Atom feeds with the advent of rssCloud and PuSHb. Now we can be notified faster when sites with Real-Time RSS feeds are updated. How Stocks and Flows will apply to this will be seen in the next breed of RSS Readers where you can organize your subscriptions more intelligently using filters and groupings etc. These types of features already exist but will become more important with Real-Time Feeds.

    I’ll stop this here since i’m sure this is getting a bit unfocused. Check out Common Craft articles and Chris Messina’s Dog analogy!

     

  • Dark Clouds Wanted

    sull 2:40 PM on September 8, 2009 Permalink | Short Url | Tweet | Reply | Comments RSS

    Category: macroblog | Tags:


    Posts like this one are important now that rssCloud has gained some spotlight time.

    http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3555/theres-reason-rsscloud-failed-catch

    This is good because it fleshes out important issues and realities. I personally think that Aggregators that live in the cloud (ie. Google Reader, Brizzly, LazyFeed) are the first to benefit from real-time protocols since they do not have the firewall related issues that a local desktop application may have in communicating with cloud hubs on certain ports.

    Cloud-based RSS Readers are fine with me. I have not used a desktop app for RSS in a long time. But regardless, it’s important as it relates to the crop of twitter clients that may end up supporting real-time RSS and most twitter users use these apps as opposed to web apps.

    I have more info and thoughts to share but short on time today. Will continue this soon and I hope more posts like the one I have referenced bubble up soon.

     

  • A Good Day for RSS and the Open Web

    sull 1:40 AM on September 8, 2009 Permalink | Short Url | Tweet | Reply | Comments RSS

    Category: macroblog | Tags: open web, push-button web, , ,


    Today, rssCloud was enabled on millions of WordPress.com blogs. And now aggregators and pingable hubs will follow to add support. This is perfect because now their is no risk that rssCloud will be ignored and forgotten except for a select group of adopters. I knew that Dave Winer would carry this project and forge it ahead. I’m glad that it won’t be overshadowed by the other cool protocol backed by Google (PubSubHubBub). Likewise, I want other protocols to get proper attention and adoption moving forward (OpenMicroBlogging, Fethr/Gossip etc.).

    No wars here. It’s all good. If the Open Web benefits, then everyone wins. Well, except for those who want to control the Massive Rapid Data moving in the cloud. That is to say… they won’t benefit unless they choose to benefit. And they can and they should. And they will?

    I’m glad that i’ve supported rssCloud since earlier this summer (http://nudg.es) when Dave Winer started to reboot the concept, especially after PubSubHubBub came about. It inspired me to take a close historical look at the origins of RSS and related technologies. I’ve used RSS since it’s inception and more so back in 2004 when I helped to launch ourmedia.org which had deep emphasis on RSS for video and audio blogs and making use of the enclosure element (podcasting). We early adopted the new Media RSS spec that was lead by Yahoo to provide more enhanced feeds. And the videoblogging movement really latched onto the concept of RSS and I was at the heart of those pioneering days. So RSS is very familiar and very awesome. I love it.

    In the past year+ I have been very interested in the topic of Scaling Twitter. It was the result of Twitter’s technical problems that Open MicroBlogging became a focus of technologists/developers/students. An OpenMicroBlogging protocol was introduced and a twitter clone built on that protocol was launched (identi.ca/status.net). Other proposed protocols and ideas started sprouting as students and professionals weighed in.

    Point being… The incredible growth of Twitter put much needed focus back on balancing data control. By that I mean…. Not putting all our eggs in one basket. Not having centralized services at the heart of the web. Not getting drunk on the hype of these new social net brands and their features. Getting back to basics, and back to our blogs. Dusting off some old tech and upgrading the de-centralized web. Speeding up RSS with rssCloud is an important step in this direction.

    It’s great that we have our Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, and Apple. But the Open Web needs to evolve too and cannot be mostly dismissed by a small group of Tech Giants who re-invent the wheel, disgard standards and limit their open data policies. Their services are ours to leverage, not to sell our souls to. Obviously, this speaks more to content creators than it does to those who are primarily content consumers. But it benefits everyone. Because at any point, someone can decide to become a more serious content creator, setup a website and a blog and off you go. To have a strong and stable Open Web to go to that competes and coexists with any proprietary offerings with terms & conditions is critical.

    So what’s so important about The Real-Time Web? That’s another blog post. But the quick reply is… If you like getting Email in timely manner, then you will like The Real-Time Web.

    Here are some of today’s blog posts on the news of rssCloud + WordPress.com integration:

    http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/09/07/teaseTeaseTease.html

    http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/09/07/anyWordpressBlogCanBeCloud.html

    http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/09/07/rss-in-the-clouds/

    http://staynalive.com/articles/2009/09/07/dave-winer-to-bring-realtime-rss-to-millions-via-wordpress-com/

    http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wordpress_just_made_millions_of_blogs_real-time_wi.php

    http://blog.lazyfeed.com/2009/09/lazyfeed-will-integrate-rsscloud-and.html

    http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/07/wordpress-enables-rsscloud-in-post-feeds/

    http://mashable.com/2009/09/07/rsscloud/

    Oh and maybe you’de be curious to know how I found out about todays news?
    I actually had hopped into the FIRST rssCLoud enabled aggregator/publisher that was not properly mentioned in any of the above posts :( The service I speak of is at http://MyStatusCloud.com and is being developed by Jeremy Felt (@jeremyfelt). His blog is at http://www.educer.org/2009/09/07/its-all-happening/.
    He has been in 5th gear playing around with the concept of rssCloud and I think he has done a great job implementing it. Take a look and try it out yourself!

     

  • RSS, Twitter, People, Power And The Negligent Tech Bloggers

    sull 2:00 PM on September 4, 2009 Permalink | Short Url | Tweet | Reply | Comments RSS

    Category: macroblog, sull comments | Tags: ,


    Further comments in response to this and other recent posts:

    http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/09/rss-isnt-dead-just-ask-executives.php#comments

    Their are a few ways to frame and respond to the tabloid-like headline “RSS is Dead”.

    One is to directly compare RSS with Twitter. This is a mistake unless you clearly point out that what you are actually comparing is Reader/Aggregator software, the differences between a centralized and de-centralized messaging/headline/link sharing system and the mechanisms of efficient delivery of this data to subscribers or general content consumers.

    The more accurate approach is to compare software that consumes content…. whether that be content from social networks like Twitter or Facebook or from Blogs and Websites or even for media like video and audio (poscasts). RSS is NOT software. Google Reader is. My Twitter stream is NOT software. Tweetie is. Whether a desktop application or a website wrapper… a UI for managing data/content and how efficient that software… which methods it uses…. is the real debate. Push/Streaming and Pull/Polling and App2App Notification protocols are at the heart of the issue.

    One of the benefits of a centralized system like twitter is its built-in ability to provide more immediacy to users once new content is posted and available in their stream. The storage, delivery and notification system is cohesive. Obviously, the synaptics of the platform are going to be more coalescent and efficient in data handling. Though the Open Web (which includes search engines like google and bing) will better compete now that an entity like twitter has brought this issue of massive rapid micro-messaging (and link sharing) to the forefront.

    You also have an enormous amount of people participating, doing the work of an army of ants…. propagating headlines, links and short messages. Mixed in with that you have your soundbyte culture and truly authentic interesting conversations.

    The blogosphere also is involved in this activity with trackbacks/pingbacks/comments/blogrolls/bookmarks and of course the blog posts themselves that can contain several links within the article. In a way, links are the currency of the web. But the difference is the barrier to entry. Even though setting up a blog is easy today, it’s also about the avoiding… the void. joining a built-in community of people, for many, is more fun than being the lone blogger out there on the wild web. So, several blogging services have focused on this to make it more appealing. And their is a bit of momentum returning to blogging. But still, everyday people DO like the AOLesque Facebook and the Twitter phenomena snuck up on everyone as a cultural realization that bursts of messages are useful, easy and fun.

    Twitter started out as a mostly mobile-centric app for self-status updates but has evolved into emulating RSS headline and links, albeit the proper headlines are too often replaced with useless comments. Not to mention the link itself is almost always hidden by a short url so you go in blind. That and a total lack of associated metadata… In a way it becomes the Poor Man’s RSS. But it’s faster. You give up some signal, and you get fast noise. If you are well trained, lucky, bored or just OCD about info consumption…. then you can pick out the gems. How often does it truly matter to a normal user if they hear about something before others? It’s a rare situation. And if it’s your business to know the news and monitor the pulse of the internet, then you you likely have a formula that crosses many tools, services and methods to help you achieve an advantage for “breaking stories”. More power to you.

    If you were to compare just the data alone, RSS is no worse as it provides headlines and links… and can be better because it also provides rich metadata and even the entire contents of a content item. RSS is data/content. Twitter is data/content bundled with a social wrapper controlled by a single company. It should be getting more clear now why you cannot simply compare the two without more in depth analysis and explanation… We can do without the glossy tabloid style headlines. We have enough of that everywhere else. It would be great if tech can stay clear of such antics and worry less about page views and tech gossip and grow up.

    The de-centralized open web syndication can and will keep up with the speed of twitter because the underlying tech does not care whether data is from a twitter stream (which generates RSS itself) or if that data is in a blog or if that data only exists as an RSS document. It DOES NOT MATTER. Most Twitter clients pull in content by polling the twitter API. That is not different than Email or RSS Readers. But its not efficient. So Push Email and Push RSS/Atom and Push anything else is preferred from a technical perspective and exciting from a users perspective. Excitement does not equate to a need. But it’s an advancement, one that was accelerated due to the popularity of Twitter and it’s delivery speed. And advancements in consumer tech are good.

    Yes, real-time data is not new. But the notion to have this effect for anyone on the Internet is powerful. But Twitter alone is not the story. Twitter was a spark to shift focus on consumer services that can offer massive rapid content sharing. It’s wrong for Twitter to think that they can always be at the core of this future. They can be part of it… maybe a large part… but the Open Web will balance this and that is where RSS/Atom comes back into focus. And that should matter more to some tech writers who gloss over the big picture and use trite headlines and concepts to lead into a rash article. But hey, they open the door for others to clean the mess by blogging more in-depth perspectives.

    So as we soon see more demonstrations of faster RSS…. at least as fast as you’de expect your Email to arrive… The uniquity that Twitter held will continue to dissipate. It will be just another big social network. People may tire of it. People may evolve as most of this becomes normal and ask themselves – why am i using this service when i can do the same thing on my own website or via email or some other cooler service that has better features etc etc. That’s right. Features. At some point, Twitter will need to care about features to stay relavent because everything else is quickly becoming normalized. Choosing between Twitter and Facebook will seem strange. Especially as the content is cross-posted, which is another issue that is ongoing.

    It’s also good to keep in mind other emerging technologies like Google Wave and how that may impact our connected digital culture.
    I have not been too impressed with Wave so far but I admittedly have not give it a fair chance yet. I see its potential.

    And since I have mentioned Email a few times here…. It’s also good to think about the future of email. We already have Push Email on mobile devices which in and of itself is as fast as a centralized Twitter. But email is de-centralized. So what happens when we put together Mailing Lists with Push Email? I think we’ll find out ;)

     

  • RSS isn’t Dead… My comment

    sull 6:21 PM on September 3, 2009 Permalink | Short Url | Tweet | Reply | Comments RSS

    Category: links, macroblog, sull comments | Tags:


    RSS isn’t Dead Just Ask Executives – ReadWriteEnterprise.

    I don’t know if those who have proclaimed that RSS is… you know.. the D word… actually believe it to the core or if they just wanted to push buttons with tongue in cheek.
    Or if they just irresponsibly use “RSS” as an umbrella term for labeling the opposition to the more, faster, smarter, better hype that is going on related to real-time web/push-button web etc. It’s like so many other things where people feel the need to have a black&white issue to pound on. The notion that something must fall for something else to rise.
    Childish, really.

    Here are some perspectives…

    Many people were not ready for adding RSS Readers to live along-side with their “Email”. With the exception of joining mailing lists, a typical person does nto concern themselves with the idea of subscribing in order to get content. And despite the ease in which this subscribing process is done (auto-discovery, orange buttons, copy/paste a url, pre-populating feeds, one-click subscribe options in the software etc etc), these few extra steps and the fact that their is another interface for managing an “inbox” deterred many from full adopting content syndication via RSS. Email software that incorporated an RSS Reader (ie. Apple’s mail.app) helps but it’s still added complexity.
    Many people just find it simpler to rely on a few webpages (which prob use RSS).

    But RSS is more than this idea of Reader software.

    RSS made it easy to let one website add content from another website. So it’s usefulness was not solely for consumption by individual users but also to spread content across the web.

    RSS is used by search engines for improved content discovery and therefor, improved SEO. The new breed of search engines heavily use RSS feeds to parse rich multimedia content and output to a users search results. That was some of the motivation behind new namespaces such as “Media RSS” driven by Yahoo! in 2004. And anyone adept in Search Engine Optimization knows that submitting a Media RSS feed to search engines is a standard and crucial step. After all, it’s well-formed machine-readable content.

    Media RSS also bleeds into the world of audio and video syndication/agregation (commonly referred to as podcasting). Take a look at the data inside my blip.tv RSS feed: http://sull.blip.tv/rss

    That’s some rich metadata.

    Does twitter offer that? No and it was never intended to. But twitter will evolve and its feasible that it will eventually resemble RSS more as it becomes realized that metadata and machine-readable formats are fundamental requirements that add value.

    RSS is also commonly used to run multimedia presentation software such as Flash audio and video players. Adobe’s own AMP (Adobe Media Player) uses RSS and other XML flavors to load playlists, social connections, advertising, branding and UI elements. Their are other examples of RSS being in the mix for these types of uses as well.

    RSS is often used as part of web application APIs. One service can make use of another service’s RSS feed and include the content and important links or widgets into it’s interface. These web service mashups thrive and are part of the web culture today. RSS is not the only format used but it is a common and simple format to allow for easy cross-domain content sharing.

    RSS is also used for alerts, notifications, data backups, filesharing and short messaging.

    RSS is so pervasive that many people don’t see it or know its part of whatever it is that they are looking at. And that’s the way it should be for most people.

    So where is the failure, exactly? Mostly, you could blame software for aggregating RSS feeds. It was setup to mimic email. That made sense since you did not want to create an nusual experience for people to consume this content. The email experience is the most common of all. But that also allows for the vulnerability of feeling overwhelmed with “unread items” and managing all the content. So, more “view modes” are important…. especially the “river of news” mode that let’s you casually skim headlines. There are other designs that work too. Inevitably, a user has unique preferences and they should be allowed to easily create those view modes that work for them.

    Google Reader has evolved a lot this year. Though I still think it’s a clunky bloated confusing experience… it is at least more interesting to me. I can see it continuing to evolve to the point where it becomes more inline as a direct competitor to Facebook. But they need a new UI or like I said, multiple view modes.

    Even with Google Reader’s shortcomings and attributing those to the whole RSS is …. you know… the D word…. it’s foolish, it’s rhetoric. it’s getting drunk on the real-time buzz which is like… the new drug of choice.

    So enough of this. If their is a concern about the image of RSS (very few of us geeks would really care), then just post intelligent articles mentioning RSS where applicable so people learn an understand it more. I don’t think we need to grab hold of the drama headlining of this is dead that is dead this is the future and that is old news etc etc.
    Stuff like RSS is not Fashion. It’s cold hard tech.
    This debate is a fabrication based on personalities who happen to have reach and some could argue… influence.

    Once a Faster RSS is demonstrated (rssCloud, pubsubhubbub etc), everthing else will be moot, anyway.

     

  • Pondering The RealTime Web and Rapid Intelligence – Collecting Thoughts

    sull 3:32 AM on September 3, 2009 Permalink | Short Url | Tweet | Reply | Comments RSS

    Category: macroblog, sull comments | Tags: , , rapid intelligence,


    Reading this:

    http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_real-time_web_a_primer_part_2.php

    In particular, this paragraph:

    For those prone to theorize, there are many fascinating questions to ponder. For example, the uncertainty principles states that the position and velocity of an atomic particle becomes less certain as that of another becomes more certain. If the analogy holds true, then does the veracity or truthfulness of news become less certain as the velocity of interest becomes more measurable. Likewise, what effects will the integration of the real-time stream have on the outcome of events, and how can conditions be influenced to ensure specific outcomes.

    I recalled a few somewhat related comments I had made on friendfeed some time ago. So i’m collecting those and posting them here (again). This is helpful to me at least. And hopefully interesting to a few out there for good measure :)

    Tom Foremski
    The Problem With The Real-Time Web – No Google Juice

    http://ff.im/5Fu7S

    http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2009/07/the_problem_wit.php

    My comments:

    tom’s post points out the obvious. “You’ve got to do both. If you abandon your static web presence for your real-time activities you will find it harder to build your overall social media capital”. of course a single micro-message is not *typically* going to have any weight as it’s often just a pointer to the real content value. the largest percentage of the so-called real-time messaging going on today are links with a bit of context and/or opinion. it’s a medium to connect more people with more content. this broadcast medium itself is secondary as it pertains to actual content. so yeah, their is a lack of google juice but it’s not nec a problem. unless we are talking about aesthetically pleasing tweets of the poetic variety ;)

    i also think real-time is a feature of the larger evolving digital infosphere. in a way, realtime is like rapid failure…. meaning… the speed and volume of the data flow to analyze and grade and filter and stock… the greater the value realtime offers to intelligent systems (ie. google). slower data flow translates to a slower realization of what content is not only generally good but also what is accurate, what is Legitimately trending and what is Actually being requested by millions of user search queries. Realtime Find is more important than Realtime Search.

    The other day, @bitlynow gave me a link about someone who died. my first thought was… hey it’s bitly, they are good at what they are doing so i gave the tweet artificial value by reposting it only to realize moments later that the link and story were part of a hoax and possibly part of a worm. perfect example of why faster realtime data flow and analysis are critical to avoiding bad data from propagating.

     

  • Echo won’t kill comments — they’re already dead

    sull 3:06 AM on September 3, 2009 Permalink | Short Url | Tweet | Reply | Comments RSS

    Category: links, macroblog | Tags: aggregation, , echo, jskit, social,


    A comment I had posted on:

    Echo won’t kill comments — they’re already dead.

    echo does not present a problem that cannot be logcially and easily handled.

    echo should work in tandem with traditional comment option. the UI could handle this in different ways such as a few tabs beneath the post, using a sidebar or even a popup.

    echo should not replace your own comment system.

    every blogger should want to have control over comments. this is not very different than the topic of owning control of your short tracker urls and using your own domain etc. comments are important enough to control in the same way.

    in addition to trackbacks/pingbacks, echo can co-exist. just dont disable your own comment system, even if moderated.

     

  • feedburner was an appropriate name

    sull 6:08 PM on September 2, 2009 Permalink | Short Url | Tweet | Reply | Comments RSS

    Category: macroblog | Tags: feedburner, rant,


    Just reading this news on Dick Costolo To Become Twitter COO…

    Oh, RSS Is Definitely Dead Now: Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo To Become Twitter COO.

    wanted to point out how i never liked feedburner and encouraged people to manage and own their own feeds themselves. in a nutshell…. feedburner could have and should have been replaced with a few really good tutorials on how to make RSS or edit existing RSS (ie on wordpress). feedburner took advantage of the lazy blogger and attempted to monetize the fuck out of it with a fallover of simply controlling one of the most ubiquitous and pervasive components of the web.
    feedburner BURNED RSS and those who were too lazy to own it themselves.

    in essence, this is similar to twitter. twitter is for the lazy blogger as well. and now the plethora of mainstream users who never likely would have blogged or maintain a website for free expression etc… yeah twitter is all that noise. not that there’s anything wrong with that ;)

     

  • How to Fix URL Shorteners – My Take « tweete.rs blog

    sull 1:12 PM on August 31, 2009 Permalink | Short Url | Tweet | Reply | Comments RSS

    Category: macroblog | Tags:


    This is areply I posted on the following blog post:

    How to Fix URL Shorteners – My Take « tweete.rs blog.

    Good thoughts.

    The idea of mapping the short tracker domain to an about page or redirect to the users preferred url is a good suggestion for providing some form of identity on the urls that are being generated.

    A subdomain, as you point out, would work for this. However, adding a clear subdomain that actually is immediately identifiable without becoming too long (defeating the purpose of a short url) could become a challenge. And you basically get into name squatting, spoofing and impersonation issues just like everywhere else. Though that could be moot since its a universal problem.
    The subdomain does allow for a good technical separation of ownership.

    A more casual approach without subdomains could be to just append a short url with an ID for example – http://my.su/Ru6_sull where ’sull’ is my id and http://my.su/sull or http://sull.my.su could be my about page on the service or itself a redirect to my preferred url that identifies me such as my sull.tel domain ;) This casual approach could work in conjunction with your subdomain idea and allow for preserving a domain’s vanity appeal without interrupting it with a subdomain. for example, if i had the domain jmp.to, i might not want to have to add an ID subdomain to it (sull.jmp.to/Ru6). It just messes up the vanity appeal. so instead, jmp.to/Ru6_sull means the link is by sull and a user could check me out at sull.jmp.to.

    As for your other points, they are important and as you noted they are being considered by the likes of Brian Hendrickson’s rp.ly, adjix and tr.im as well as any self-hosted DIY system. I’ve pointed to Yourls.org a few times in other blog comments (i have not used it myself) and at least a half a dozen Wordpress plugins and many more tutorials and scripts floating around.

    I personally lean towards suggesting DIY solutions in this space. But a good mix is the next best solution. I plan to test out rp.ly etc and compare to my own software/techniques. I like the adjix experimentation with s3. My software also depends on static files with XML (ie. RSS) feeds for exportability and mirroring (and could involve importing to s3 account without giving shared access to the buckets).

    Though I don’t agree with some of the methods involved in the adjix recipe (ie. meta-refresh, requiring subdomain/CNAME etc.) I do love the experimentation and willingness to delve into helping Dave Winer and others with the issue of data ownership and branding.

    These are good community efforts and yourself, Joe Moreno, Brian Hendrickson, Eric Woodward, Dave Winer, Marshall Kirkpatrick and others are all socially available participants. In a way, that’s the best part of this whole silly url shortening debate.

     

  • Fragmented Flat File RSS Construction

    sull 2:00 AM on August 28, 2009 Permalink | Short Url | Tweet | Reply | Comments RSS

    Category: macroblog | Tags: commentAPI, flat file, RESTLog,


    A month ago I thought I was being clever in how I was generating RSS feeds for my email centric rssCloud experiment called “nudges”. Simply, every post creates a static xml file that is an item element and which becomes a part of an RSS feed. I immediately enjoyed this simple approach to generating RSS. It was lightweight, easy to code and added flexibility while remaining sturdy and not prone to full data corruption by a single point of failure (a single file). Additionally, I had in mind ways to distribute the data to other feeds that could attach the item to itself across networks. Since the focus is on short micro-messages, this approach seemed to make sense to me and one of my rules as a developer is to not add sql database dependencies until it actually becomes logical to do so. Often, that means you can have fully functioning applications that do not need or use databases beyond a file system with static flat files.

    I had then googled to see what else took similar approaches to generating RSS or other XML. I came across one little script that a student had written. Found some references regarding XSL that had similar methodologies. But overall barely anything. Until just now which is the spark for this blog post.

    In my research on the commentAPI namespace and how I might want to re-purpose that for rssCloud @replies, I was hanging around bitworking.org. I’ve been there before and I have been familiar with commentAPI of course (it is silently pervasive) but what struck me was Joe Gregorio’s experiments with commentAPI which seem to be in line with what I want to do with rssCloud…. but also I was taken back by his blogging platform called RESTlog which is what bitworking.org runs on. This is what it sais in regards to RSS construction:

    How does the server side work?
    Items are stored in individual files with their name being their ID number. They are stored as xml files. Specifically they are stored as ‘item’ elements from RSS 2.0.

    Why? Well first note that this file is conveniently formatted so that it can be easily placed inside an RSS file directly as an item which will speed up the rebuilding of the index.rss file each time an item is modified. Also having each item in its own file makes the system more robust, if one of the files becomes corrupt I have lost as most one item not all of them. I ran into this problem when working on Pamphlet, my as yet unpublished weblogging tool. The items in Pamphlet are kept in monthly archives which has the weakness of potentially losing a whole months worth of posts if a single file gets corrupted. Luckily I keep good backups.

    The HTML main page ‘index.html’ and the RSS file ‘index.rss’ are served up statically. That is, they are static files that are only updated by the server side script when items are added or changed. Each item has it’s own permalink and that permalink is served up dynamically through the RESTLog.cgi script, but this only uses a crude string substitution templating mechanism.

    This work occurred back in 2001/2002. Here is the RESTLog Spec

    Now I can discount this for being antiquated methods that have no place in today’s space. But that is never smart or accurate. In fact, the more I look back, the more I feel that we are not nec in a clean and clear time for technology and innovation. We see a lot of end results that appear innovative or mass adoption of services that in return make us assume that their is innovation… but I feel like their is a lot of bloat and black magic out there. It’s not nec a bad thing as it relates to a learning and experimentation phase on the Interwebs. Messes are inevitable. Meanwhile, their is a strong fortitude to push semantics and standards to the forefront of the most important and influential discourse happening today. A balance is needed between cool results and solid practices.

    So back to this little gem. Well, Joe Gregorio is today celebrating 2 years at Google, Inc. So it’s safe to assume that a solid mind was behind RESTLog. And for now, i’ll take the idea of Fragmented Flat File RSS Construction and move forward with it :)

     

  • conversations in the cloud

    sull 4:08 PM on August 25, 2009 Permalink | Short Url | Tweet | Reply | Comments RSS

    Category: macroblog | Tags: replies, , textInput


    One of the issues of a loosely interconnected network of micro-messages is how to handle conversation threads (aka @replies).

    On Twitter, it is easy since that is a centralized service. It started as an ad hoc @ symbol in front of usernames which is how it is often done elsewhere such as IRC. Twitter formalized the functionality and enhanced it with inReplyTo so if a reply link is clicked (as opposed to just arbitrarily typing @username) the thread can be properly constructed so others can view it in context. In other discussion systems like Blogs and Forums, it’s obviously baked into the software. Not so in the decentralized rssCloud network.

    Let me also point out that their will be variations to what is published and how it is published with support for rssCloud. The initial focus for me and I think others is on microblogging. These posts can technically be created from any software (like Wordpress, Drupal, TypePad etc) or from any other system that generates an RSS feed (ie. any twitter clone or open microblogging software such as laconica etc) which all can contain a reference to an rssCloud hub. That means, it is feasible that a comment system will already exist on a permalink page for each post. This can be considered the answer to my question. But I want to look at this from a more raw perspective. One that does not yet involve such aforementioned publishing software with comment systems and permalinks. I want to focus solely on the RSS feed as the only source of content. In fact, this is how my prototype currently works at http://nudg.es. It is an email based RSS feed generator with support for rssCloud. I want to think about how two such feeds can reference each other’s items with comment text.

    So let’s setup a scenario. Two people have their rssCloud feeds loaded with several short messages. It would be nice to rely on using just the web to view a nice direct output of the feed using XSLT (see nudg.es feeds in Firefox) but being unreliable across all browsers, let’s assume the feed is being viewed in a specialized application such as Google Reader or some other RSS aggregator software. I see a post that I want to reply to in the rssCloud feed. Let’s say the feed url is http://myrsscloudfeeds.org/johnsmith/mobile. It’s a short message with a photo attached (enclosure) sent from John Smith’s phone. I like the picture and want to comment on it from my RSS aggregator. How do i do it? How do I associate my short message reply to John’s short message?

    So to reiterate, all we have is a feed inside something like Google Reader being read by someone who wants to reply to one of the feed items. How do we get it done? One curious thought I have had involves the RSS channel sub-element called “textInput”. Here are reference links:

    http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html#lttextinputgtSubelementOfLtchannelgt

    http://www.w3schools.com/rss/rss_tag_textinput.asp

    As it states, it is basically support for a simple form submission. Dave Winer noted at the time of writing (~2001) the following:

    The purpose of the element is something of a mystery. You can use it to specify a search engine box. Or to allow a reader to provide feedback. Most aggregators ignore it.

    Can this be used for handling conversations across the rssCloud network? Possibly. Let’s delve into it’s potential for a minute.

    First we need to keep in mind that this is a CHANNEL sub-element so it’s not associated with each ITEM. Originally, I thought that killed the idea of using this for decentralized @replies but then i felt that…. if a new breed of RSS aggregators need to sprout in order to properly support stuff like rssCloud, then it’s ok to expect these aggregators to support anything that is deemed useful and certainly stuff that is part of the RSS 2.0 spec. So if an aggregator, such as Dave’s own River2, can support the “mysterious” textInput element then things could get interesting. Here is what I am thinking…..

    An rssCloud feed can define a base form handler url in the channel textInput element. The form handler would likely be a self-hosted open source script but could also use a cloud service where the script is hosted (another discussion). The form could/should be aware of the feed info and could/should possibly also be aware of the subscriber info (ie. rss url, username etc). Again, this depends on how smart the agregator software is (ie. Google Reader, River2, Web UI etc). Since this is a base url, the script would need some required data passed to it so that it knows what feed/item this comment/reply is referring to. The form handler url would need to be appended with parameters such as the item guid or some other means to identify the item that is being replied to. So, the aggregator would take the base url specified in the feed’s textInput link element and use that as part of a “reply” feature that would likely be exposed in the UI as a “reply” hyperlink next to each feed item. The link would be appended with the item guid + feed channel link, author, managingEditor or other combination of feed data to make sure it is a unique global identifier.

    If the subscriber wants to add a comment but does not have their own rssCloud feed/blog then they can login to twitter or facebook or some other preferred centralized service to post the reply. If the subscriber has their own rssCloud feed then they can opt to post the reply to their feed and have it be associated to another feed’s item. It can possibly use the RSS “comments” element to point back to the feed item. How exactly that url would be handled and formatted needs to be discussed but let’s focus on one thing at a time.

    Their are other details and of course plenty of discourse to be had around these approaches. But the key is to not have to rely on a centralized service for cross-feed conversations and to also not mandate that certain blogging/CMS software be used in order to achieve this commenting system.
    The only software that should be used is a simple form handler script that adheres to RSS standards and facilitates the reply posts accordingly. This could be a role for the rssCloud hubs with the option of self-hosting the form handler app (maybe as a failover/fallback etc.).

    What other ideas do people have on this topic?
    Please punch holes as I know this has only touched on the surface.

    Thanks.

    Sull

     

  • Web Host Provided One-Click Software Install – Url Shortener

    sull 11:10 AM on August 24, 2009 Permalink | Short Url | Tweet | Reply | Comments RSS

    Category: macroblog | Tags: , dreamhost,


    I mentioned in a comment somewhere that it would be smart of your web host, such as Dreamhost, to include url shortener/tracker app to their list of “one-click install” apps. They could build their own or consider the software from http://yourls.org. You pick which domain to run the app on and that’s it, you have a self-hosted url shortener with built-in backups and statistics. They could even integrate an Amazon s3 or other data backup features.

    dreamhost1clickinstall

     

  • Email is Pervasive

    sull 11:00 AM on August 18, 2009 Permalink | Short Url | Tweet | Reply | Comments RSS

    Category: macroblog |


    Typepad released a new microblogging theme with features that match the offering of Posterous. Here is Wordpress.com page describing the same thing – http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/05/12/post-by-email/ and a Wordpress Plugin – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/postie/. Their is also basic native support in WP for posting by email.

    Though the ability to post to your blog and automatically out to social services like twitter and facebook is definately crucial, what is more interesting to me is its support for publishing via email. This is not a new feature but i’m using this as an opportunity to talk about publishing by email. I touched on this in a recent post – http://vocal.ly/p1g – but I have also been experimenting.

    nudg.es is a prototype service that uses email to post micro-messages into an rssCloud compatible RSS feed. I posted a quick screencast demonstrating the service and speed in which the content is posted to the RSS feed.

    http://nudg.es/feeds/sull@vastmachine.com/attachments/nudges_quickie_demo1.mov

    A sample RSS feed generated from my cheap verizon mobile phone can be found here:

    http://nudg.es/feeds/feed.php?user=sull@vastmachine.com

    If you are viewing this in Firefox and possibly a few other browsers, you will see the feed (which is just XML) appear as a normal web page with a list of short messages and media attachments. This is because I am using XSLT – http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt – which allows me to customize the style of the feed to feel like a normal web page. XSLT could be better supported by modern browsers but that’s a topic for another day.

    With the efforts around rssCloud and pubsubhubbub for real-time RSS and ATOM feeds, email itself becomes a fast publishing option. And email is pervasive.

     

  • ok, i have to admit that i have enjoyed …

    sull 11:08 PM on August 17, 2009 Permalink | Short Url | Tweet | Reply | Comments RSS

    Category: macroblog | Tags:


    ok, i have to admit that i have enjoyed using wordpress these past few days. especially with this P2 theme installed. i also like my decision to add two categories to separate short and long posts. twitter integration is working well but needs some tweaking.

     

  • wonder what it would be like if i opened…

    sull 2:41 PM on August 17, 2009 Permalink | Short Url | Tweet | Reply | Comments RSS

    Category: macroblog | Tags: ideas, , ,


    wonder what it would be like if i opened up this domain, vocal.ly, for others to use as a way to share links with commentary. in other words, if you want to share a link, you would use a vocally bookmarklet or just login to this wordpress mu site and write a short post with the link you want to share. the post would get published to your twitter, @vocally and obviously posted on this site. the link that gets posted to twitter etc would be a vocal.ly short url instead and people would read your comments and see the full url that they can follow and/or leave a comment on the vocal.ly post.

    not a replacement for rapid url sharing but does nudge people to have a threaded discussion off of twitter while being safer since you know the link will hit the vocal.ly multi-user wordpress blog where you can see the long url and participate in discussions.

    http://a.tinythread.com is a little side project of Delicious founder Joshua Schachter and has had some decent momentum as a simple place to have discussions initiated by a tweet. well i suppose this is the same idea :) except it would use Wordpress and have a built-in short url. Could also include a secondary short url for the url that is referenced in the post. Like vocal.ly/go/qwe for remote url and vocal.ly/rty for the local post.

    this sounds like it would be best if it were a wordpress plugin for WPMU.

    something to think about at least.

     

  • more thoughts on digital global identity

    sull 12:57 PM on August 16, 2009 Permalink | Short Url | Tweet | Reply | Comments RSS

    Category: macroblog |


    I’ve been interested in digital identity but have not engaged the topic too much. Truth is, as much as I like openID, I never felt that it would quickly have mainstream adoption. It has been implemented by many giants who in turn are able to offer the openID authentication option to it’s users. But in most cases, that’s where the adoption began and stopped. So if my mom is confronted with “login with openID?” it means nothing to her. People like this will just use multiple accounts with the same username and password. Not good but it’s the poor man’s openID… or rather the lazy man’s openID.
    It’s also the concept of openID that is a hurdle. Even if it is much simpler to signup and use. Lastly, it’s the issue of getting people to want openID (or other forms of a unified global identity).

    The trend with most cloud services is to use your email address as your username. This is a good trend and saves people from having to remember half of their credentials across different websites. Your email address is your unique ID. No conflicts. No usernames that need to be “joesmith68″ on one service and “joesmith1968″ on another etc. Most people rely on one email address and that is often via google, yahoo, microsoft and few other players. Anti-spam has been greatly improved over the past decade. So, a natural solution is to make your email address your global identity. The problem is, you cannot attach metadata to your email address so all you are sharing is the email address, not any other associated contact, personal or business information. But now Google plans to support a new effort that brings back the concept of an old Internet protocol called “Finger” in the form of Webfinger. The proposed protocol would require a consortium of supporters and implementers. It would have gone nowhere fast if Google did not announce that it was supporting the project. The google engineers that head the project are also involved in the pubsubhubbub protocol.

    The importance of email is being re-realized by the giants. It’s not that they forgot. How can you? Everyone uses email. It is the glue, it is the pulse. It is the fallback distributed protocol that we all depend on. It is not perfect but nothing is. It is not as vulnerable to being destroyed by spam now that advances have been made and deployed to block and filter out spam from either reaching your account or at least from reaching your “inbox”. Myspace has recently put a lot of focus on their vanity email service. Facebook is also working on big improvements to offer its millions of users better email functionality. Likewise, publishing content via email is on the rise as it is easy and accessible from mobile devices like your phones. Email is pervasive.

    I know that I am fairly late into the discussion of the telnic .tel tld service. But better late than never.
    Last night, I listened to a podcast that was nearly a year old and read a thorough blog post from last december. Together, it was a great summary of what telnic is and the concerns that have been brought up in response to the company’s public launch earlier year. It’s looking like your global identifier will come down to using a domain such as .tel and DNS records or using an email address in conjunction with the Webfinger protocol (also involving the use of DNS and XRD). I’ve written about webfinger and telnic earlier this week (http://vocal.ly/21) so i don’t want to reiterate. But excuse me as i also use this blog as an output for processing thoughts and coming to loose dynamic conclusions ;)
    Putting aside for a moment which is a better choice, a domain or an email address… What if it does not matter and both are used? Undoubtedly feasible. No reason that more than one global identity cannot exist. The services and software that handle your global ID just need to decipher whether the ID is type domain or type email. A user can link to their email address from a .tel (or any domains DNS) and can link to their .tel from their email records (using webfinger). It might make sense for telnic to provide a suggested use for specifying your supplemental “email identity” and vise versa. It may also be logical to specify which ID you consider to be your primary and secondary ID so services can logically prioritize and weight their lookups.

    I’m concluding that services need to offer Digital Global Identity Packages that provide users with choices.

     

  • webfinger gains google support, but is telnic a better option?

    sull 12:44 AM on August 15, 2009 Permalink | Short Url | Tweet | Reply | Comments RSS

    Category: macroblog | Tags: foaf, identity, openid, , webfinger


    http://groups.google.com/group/webfinger/browse_thread/thread/4b367d78ef81c61d?hl=en&pli=1

    http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/14/google-points-at-webfinger-your-gmail-address-could-soon-be-your-id/

    i was just looking at webfinger the other day as it was mentioned on one of the threads on scripting.com about ids/usernames for rsscloud. i have interest in this topic right now and was leaning toward an email centric id and was studying the EAUT protocol – http://eaut.org -
    webfinger made me actually lookup and read about the original finger protocol. yes, i am old enough to have used it as a kid (i am 34). it’s fun to remember those early days. so exciting, raw and simple. so the webfinger site was a bit quiet until the new talk today. this all shows how momentum behind ideas largely depends on who you are, where you work and who you know. will webfinger be the right focus? maybe. could be. or maybe something called called dottel (.tel – http://telnic.com).

    after reading about EAUT, webfinger and even RWHOIS, i switched modes and got excited about the technology behind the .tel tld offering. i registered http://sull.tel. i also secured rsscloud.tel to test using it as an id infrastructure by utilizing folders/subdomains (ie. dave.rsscloud.tel). telnic is developer friendly with a variety of open source software and APIs so new services can be built with the hopes of more adoption of a .tel domain being your permanent and official digital identity that is accessible from not only the web but from mobile devices, CLI and any other number of ways of interfacing with DNS in new innovative ways. a .tel domain is not about a website. the domain does come with a web proxy service that outputs a simple template for displaying your contact info and links but the domain does not require the web, a web server or any additional service in order to run and be accessible to others. It uses direct DNS storage to organize types of text strings which server various purposes for profile building. technically, a .tel domain can be used as a replacement for a phone number (using soft phones and eventually more ways such as regular phone software that handles outoging calls.) the .tel domain lets you store many many records, has encrypted privacy features for controlling who can access certain info and allows you to create directories (subfolders/subdomains) so you can organize your info or even to provide a directory service.

    i’m curious about issues regarding spam and abuse. granted, gmail and other email services do a much better job today filtering spam away from your inbox. yet, do i want to make aan email address my main digital id? would people end up using an email soley as a JID and not an actual receiving address? will that cause confusion? should you use a 3rd party domain or a domain that you own and control? would a simple .tel domain be a smarter choice? afterall, .tel was designed to be your digital identity system. email was designed to be a way to send and receive messages.

    the problem might be the overlap of the fact that it is common to use your email address to login to web services (a form of digital id) and a more public usage where you are basically announcing that your email address is used to access your profile/identity record(s). the latter case may lead to the preference of using alt email addresses that may not be used for sending/receiving messages or if so, it may provide a forwarding option. regardless, therse issues bring a certain amount of complexity to the idea of email as id. i’m not convinced either way. like i said, i was just recently in favor of email centric ids (for rsscloud and in general). i seem to have more difficulty finding holes in the telnic service than with email as id. once i got past the marketing style and business endeavor of telnic, i was able to really appreciate the use of DNS technology to make this happen in a distributed manner where their is no single company involved nor a single point of failure. a .tel domain is essentially a very reliable and federated id.

    the coming months are going to be very interesting as this issue accelerates.

    sull

     

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