Independent Advocate for the Rights and Dignity of our Digital Selves
I just found out about this Firefox extension by Ted Rheingold of Dogster Fame called who is that person.
I posted my first Firefox extension. It’s called ‘Whois This Person’ and it’s a simple little right-click menu item which will query any name you’ve highlighted against LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Technorati, GoogleNews, Yahoo Person Search, TailRank as well as some family and address sites. It’s not gonna change the world, but it may save some seconds here and there.
This is the message that I got today when I logged into a new collaborative atlas site Platial.
Thank you, we have sent you an email to confirm you are you. After you confirm who you are, you may log in.
All sending you an e-mail and clicking on a link does is prove that you own that e-mail address.
User-centric services have for UUID’s (universally Unique identifier) linked to real people. I had a conversation with one of the lead technical people on this project and they are in a bit of a bind without being able to access third party identity servers. They don’t want to ask people for their login to Yahoo, MSN, Flickr etc. but services like Mobido do this and (young) people give them to use.
There now doubt in my mind there is a market need for these services.
Technorati Tags: identity, geolocation, UUID
Ed Batista posted this link to a GAP ad that was not widely distributed. The staff and customers destroy the store. It is quite entertaining.
The GAP Identity today:
The Gap has become the transparent background music of fashion–the aesthetic you never see because it’s everywhere (and thus effortless to imitate, undercut or adapt.) I like expansive, dramatic gestures–even when they fail, you have a lot more fun making the attempt–and I’d love to see The Gap destroy its increasingly-meaningless brand in order to save it–but I’m hard-pressed trying to think of a big retailer that’s pulled off a similar trick.
Ed reflects on the evolution of GAP’s identity:
At 38, I’m old enough to remember The Gap’s two-stage transformation, first from off-brand denim outlet to cooler-than-Levi’s, and then on to world domination via sort-of-preppy, sort-of-hip GeneriClothes. But a fundamental problem they face now is that the market’s fragmented out from under them, and fewer people want to wear GeneriClothes these days–we’re all pursuing our individual style muses.
“Google could easily become the poster child for a national public movement to regulate data collection,” says Jeff Chester, head of the Center for Digital Democracy, a privacy advocate.
Unbeknownst to many users, privacy advocates like Chester say, Google’s technology gives it enormous power to collect data on the interests and online habits of millions of Web surfers.
Google stores every user’s searches in its growing database and index of websites, maps, photographs and other documents. Its free e-mail program, Gmail, stores all user messages — including deleted ones — forever.
Type someone’s name or phone number into Google’s search box and you’ll likely turn up a home address, allowing you to see an aerial photo of their house from the Google Earth satellite photo service, started last year.
Daniel Brandt in San Antonio, creator of the Google-Watch.org website, worries that law enforcement authorities or repressive foreign governments could demand access to Google’s database to examine users’ surfing habits.
“Google will become bigger and bigger, and they will be a massive problem in terms of Internet privacy,” Brandt says.
The Senate Judiciary Committee last month passed a data privacy bill that goes to the full Senate. The bill, whose sponsors include Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., would regulate data brokers, force more security and increase penalties for identity theft.
A breach of Google’s database could be a catalyst for more lawmaker attention. “That would be the Tylenol scare to end all Tylenol scares at Google,” Battelle says.
This news just out.
Yahoo Bought Delicious.
Now I am not sure how I feel about this. Now they own two of the major tagging sites.
These are my tags on my photos and my bookmarks. How can we get out of pattern giant identity silos buying up other services? I want an integrated Identity on the web that I manage weaving together tools and services that are useful to me not just handy cause they are in one of the mega silos.
Hopefully they will avoid the major faux-pas that happened with Flickr where they asked users to to enter a yahoo ID instead of their existing Flickr account.
The guys at Bryght (they are really bright) are organizing an Open CMS Summit in February. It is a great idea. (They have on their list of things to talk about ‘identity and authentication – in fact it is on the top of their list. RIGHT ON)
I would like to ad and expand on the list. These communities coming together are diverse and have a range of needs. It is not just ‘developers’ coming together to code together.
Face time amongst this diverse groups needs to be used to
Technorati Tags: Bryght, Drupal, identity, nptech, Opensource, usability
Ever since OSCON I have been waiting for his talk The Semasiology of Open Source (Part 2) to be posted. R0ml is one of those presentation as performance art guys I have mentioned in my blog before. This is a three part presentation it seems happening over three years. Part 1 is here.
Here is the blurb from IT Conversations it is VERY Philisophical.
Computer source code has words and sentence structure like actual prose or even poetry. Writing code for the computer is like writing an essay. It should be written for other people to read, understand and modify. These are some of the thoughts behind literate programming proposed by Donald Knuth. This is also one of the ideas behind Open Source.
“Open Source” is a phrase like “Object Oriented” – weird at first, but when it became popular, the meaning began to depend on the context of the speaker or listener. “Object Oriented” meant that PERL, C++, Java, Smalltalk, Basic and the newest version of Cobol are all “Object Oriented” – for some specific definition of “Object Oriented”. Similar is the case of the phrase “Open Source”.
In Part 1, Lefkowitz talked about the shift of the meaning of “Open Source” away from any reference to the actual “source code,” and more towards other phases of the software development life cycle. In Part II, he returns to the consideration of the relationship between “open source” and the actual “source code,” and reflects upon both the way forward and the road behind, drawing inspiration from Charlemagne, King Louis XIV, Donald Knuth, and others.
From Marc Canter
Doc and I are doing a panel on the ‘OpenWeb’ so I hope folks come or at least tune-in via webcast or IRC. But the AO conference WILL be propogated by VCs and rich people – and I prefer hanging out with normal people the best.
That’s why I love Gnomedex. I sure hope there’s another one – soon – like at the end of September.
I found this in my list of saved but not posted blog posts. Seems like Marc’s wish is going to come true – BAR Camp is this weekend. I just found out about it from Eugene Kim’s blog (he has been posting some great stuff this past week about wikimania and collaboration patterns). Likely I will go down with Mary and share the demo of i-names sso working on wordpress that I did at DrupalCon in Porland two weeks ago.
There was a great panel on Women in Open Source at OSCON. It raised some very interesting issues including the open question of why there is 10x fewer women in Open Source then in the regular tech industry (as programmers and technical roles). Worth thinking about more and I hope that O’Reilly and others can continue the inquiry within its events.
Ok in the treasure trove of yet to be posted posts is this gem from OSCON. R0ml gave an amazing (part II) of his talk that he did not complete last year. He will likely give part three the conclusion next year. The audience will be eagerly anticipating it. Here is the summary as best I can (his words are in italics). I must preface this by saying that words in text form are a poor representation of this man’s work as he takes presentation very seriously as a form of performance art.
He began with … as I was saying
Semasiology is the science of the meanings or sense development of words; the explanation of the words.
I wonder if we can collectively do a Semasiology of Identity perhaps that is a topic we can invite R0ml to consider with us since Optaros is considering and ‘identity’ practice.
He returns to a quote from the princess Bride where the guy says Inconceivable ‘I do not think it means what you think it means’
Summarizes last year’s talkwhere he made the point that the source of open source was not ‘code’ but instead was the requirements.
PART II – Really it was all about the CODE
Programs must be written for poeple to read, and only incidentially for machines to execute.
APL progammling language by Kenneth Iverson it was ‘easy to read’ and designed for Notation an a Tool of Thought.
(check out what it really looks like – totally not ‘easy to read’)
Why read?
70-80% of all “software development is maintenance
70-80% of all maintenance is reading old code and understanding
49-64% of the cost of CODE
WEB originates from this work Literate Programming by Donald Knuth. It is a method of composing programs. He felt the time was ripe for significantly better documentation of program and saw them as Works of Literature. He was an essayist whose main concern is with exposition and excellence of style.
With Literate Programming there are two steps
Tangle (create the code)
Weave (create the documentation)
Hence the aphorism: Given one Literate eyeball, most bugs are shallow.
This language and its associated programs have come to be known as the WEB system.
He said: I chose the name WEB partly becasue iftwas one of the fe three-letter words of the Engligh lanauge not applied to computers
We can also invite some other words to describe the programming process from this set of words.
SPIN (create requirements) …a ask in spining a yarn
Knit (create the test cases)
Fashion (generate the models)
We might wonder how good our spinning, knitting and fashioning are going in the identity space. Hopefully the IIW in October can help with all three.
Warning this next section has a lot of free association
Steven Roger Fischer wrote A History of Reading
How many people are computer literate?
The census bureau says there are 600,000 programmers in the US.
If you include other professions that also would read code as part of their job you reach about 1.9 million which is less then one percent. It is about 16 million people world wide which is 1/6th of one percent world wide.
Where does reading come from? All early reading involved simple code recognition very task oriented.
Sumarian writing developed
Enheduanna was the first poet in 2285 BC. and was the daughter of Kin Sargon.
Ada Byron – first programmer Countess of Lovelase is the daughter of a poet.
In Sumaria at the time this poem was written only 1% of population knows how to read in the Great City of UR.
Around 500BC.. Athenians 5% could read.
This was the Dark Ages 500 AD at it was asserted that what writing made presnet to reader pictures make present ot the illiterate.
That is the GUI…(Graphical USer interface)
Words were written down for Public Performance:
scripta manet verba volat
script remains verbal is volitle
writing is eternal, talk is ephemeral
This phrase did not mean this
To ‘read’ was to transmit, not to receive. Things written were written as memory aids.
To read was to speak…because of not for orators…
So this phrase really meant:
Writing reposes, speaking soars
Writing isn’t any good unless you read it out loud. Existance of the book meant that the speaker could be anybody.
GPL3 – GPL is a copyright.
Copyright protects against unauthorisze copying derivation, distribution or publicly performance.
What does it mean to publically perform software?
It means to ‘run the code’
The purpose of the code is to be performed.
GPL defines source code’s preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.
Refrain
Voices of the Absent
The spanish theologian – Isidor of Seville (560-636 BC) – praised silent reading, too, for being without effort, reflecting on the which has been read rednering their in.
In 1999 St Isidore was named the patron saint of programmers
Why?
He wrote a treatise – Etymologiae (source) or Origines as sometimes called.
He compiled it – all existing knowledge and literature.
Authorship does not matter the collection of knowledge matters.
What happen next? In the early middle ages changes our understanding of authorship changed. Integrity of the Authors Source Code
Something changed meaning of word to read… it was now possible to read in silence…
789 Admonitio Generalis no standards improve aimed specifically at educaiton reading and writing.
Carolingian Minuscurle brought some standards in.
Alcuin of York 798-804
Words are separated use a blank space.
What 0 did for math the space di for reading.
Irish scribes created the fullstop, comma, semicolon
Standards emerged for heights (m) ascenders (b) decenders (g)
Reading went form public act to private act – reader is no longer shared the text with others.
Reading and writing was collaborative and became individual.
Reusable Software is collaborative.
will it become individual?
Readable software needs typography.
If you write scripts they will need maintenance.
If you write readable code they will soar.
Writing reposes, speaking soars
scripta manet verba volat
Programming is literature.
Reading is not performance.
Two gods of literature the reader and writer.
Rewriting of what the author has originally authored.
Moving away from respect to original author when writing became a silent and private act.
Intellectual Property is invented in 1251
So we flip back to authorship…
In antiquity we gave credit to original author because failure to respect honored ancestor.
Post renaissance -> more about legal requirement.
Couple hundred years 40-50% will read can read CODE.
When this happens will the collaborative nature dissipate?
Power of collaboration is essence of what it is about now but it may become a private act.
Symbolic manipulation skill.
Extent to writing skill – literary skill.
We have done this before.
Speaking venacular of that people are talking.
Semiotic agreement about core set of concepts.
Be liberal in what you understand.
Be strict in what in what you are trying to say.
Poetry is obfuscated.
Poetry is set in LINE.
The white space is significant.
Prose it is not.
Come to OSCON for Part III next year.
There is and Identity Workshop Birds of a Feather meeting at the Open Source Convention next week on Wednesday August 3rd from 7:30pm to 8:30pm.
Kaliya's the shit. Be there or be square.Enlighten yourself through her