Skip to main content

AOL's Overton Window += Ficlets

Image
By
Kevin Lawver is the Shadow

Kevin Lawver is giving a talk about the genesis of Ficlets.com. He's the dark shadow next to the slide.  It's very interesting to hearhow the team was able to experiment and push this small project out ina matter of weeks.

It strikes me that Ficlets may well increase the Overton Windowof what's reasonable to seriously consider at AOL.  The agile process,tools such as Rails, OpenID, and Creative Commons have now beenlaunched, which moves discussions from "will it work?" and "can we getit approved?" to "will it work for this project?".  Which I think is amovement in AOL's internal window of acceptable discourse and givesother people air cover.

Comments

  1. uidezignMarch 30, 2007 at 6:20 PM

    Agreed, the very fact that it happened is powerfulin it of itself. It give tacit permission to what was once unthinkable or unimaginable. ;)

    http://monkeynotions.com/blog

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Personal Web Discovery (aka Webfinger)

By
There's a particular discovery problem for open and distributed protocols such as OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, Activity Streams, and OpenSocial.  It seems like a trivial problem, but it's one of the stumbling blocks that slows mass adoption.  We need to fix it.  So first, I'm going to name it:

The Personal Web Discovery Problem:  Given a person, how do I find out what services that person uses?
This does sound trivial, doesn't it?  And it is easy as long as you're service-centric; if you're building on top of social network X, there is no discovery problem, or at least only a trivial one that can be solved with proprietary APIs.  But what if you want to build on top of X,Y, and Z?  Well, you write code to make the user log in to each one so you can call those proprietary APIs... which means the user has to tell you their identity (and probably password) on each one... and the user has already clicked the Back button because this is complicated and annoying.

…
13 comments
Read more

The problem with creation date metadata in PDF documents

By
Last night Rachel Maddow talked about an apparently fake NSA document "leaked" to her organization.  There's a lot of info there, I suggest you listen to the whole thing:

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/maddow-to-news-orgs-heads-up-for-hoaxes-985491523709

There's a lot to unpack there but it looks like somebody tried to fool MSNBC into running with a fake accusation based on faked NSA documents, apparently based on cloning the document the Intercept published back on 6/5/2017, which to all appearances was itself a real NSA document in PDF form.

I think the main thrust of this story is chilling and really important to get straight -- some person or persons unknown is sending forged PDFs to news organization(s), apparently trying to get them to run stories based on forged documents.  And I completely agree with Maddow that she was right to send up a "signal flare" to all the news organizations to look out for forgeries.  Really, really, really import…
Post a Comment
Read more
By
Twister is interesting.  It's a decentralized "microblogging" system based on putting together existing protocols:  Bitcoin, distributed hash tables, and Bittorrent.  The most interesting part for me is using Bitcoin for user registration and spam control.  Federated systems handle this with federated trust, which is at least conceptually simple.  The Twister/Bitcoin mechanism looks intriguing though I don't know enough about Bitcoin to really comment.  Need to read further.
Post a Comment
Read more