Mashup Camp: Identity and Access Control in Mashups

Some notes I just took for the AccessControl session (my first session of the camp).  Here's a shot of the campers organizing the schedule an hour ago:

Yet Another Post on Feed Licensing

Back in April, I blogged about copyright and licensing standards for feeds.  People were happy with most of it, with one big exception:  Nobody can agree on what to do with feeds lacking an explicit license.  People clearly felt I was nuts to suggest that the implicit permissions involved in this situation could be captured in any flavor of Creative Commons license.  Obviously the owner holds copyright, and obviously fair use applies in the US, and unfortunately nobody can specify what that means in a way that software can understand.

So, here's my new summary, which is shorter but more complicated:

• Support and promote feed standards for embedded licenses.
• Allow fair use for unlicensed feed content.
  

You'll need to consult your legal department on what fair use is in each case, and figure out how to deal with international jurisdictions too.

All of which makes embedding licenses in feeds even more important.

Tags: Feed Copyright, Creative Commons, RSS, Atom, syndication

User Centric Identity

I just gave a talk at AOL about user centric, distributed identity, titled "Identity 2.Open" just to draw the punters. This came out of various thoughts I've had regarding opnness and authentication, and from the recent Internet Identity Workshop 2006(a).  Fair warning: There may be a podcast up sometime soon, in which anyone who cares to do so can listen to me butcher explanations about identity, security, and game theory.

This was also my first foray into the S5 slide show system. I gave up on PowerPoint when it refused to accept .PNG images.  I mean, come on guys, it's only been about 10 years since PNG was introduced.  Sheesh.  S5 works great, though I would love to see a few more generic themes that I could snag and use without working on visual designs.

Tags: iiw2006, conferences, identity

Searching Structured Data Using Microformats

In the well-of-course-he-did department, Tantek just announced the beta of Technorati's Microformats Search. Hopefully this will help accelerate deployment of structured data onthe public web.  Their beta main page adds on some special sections ifa keyword search gets results containing microformats:

1. events results for San Francisco - View 32 events
   
   Barcamp San Francisco - 2 minutes ago
   BarCamp San Francisco - 5 minutes ago
   Supernova 2006 workshop: Decentralizing Data - 5 minutes ago
2. contacts results for San Francisco - View 16 contacts
   
   Amber - 1 hour ago
   Matisse Enzer - 1 hour ago
   Kevin Marks - 5 hours ago
3. reviews results for San Francisco - View 5 reviews
   
   Review of: Delfina Restaurant - 2 days ago
   His&nbspBand&nbspAnd&nbspThe&nbspStreet&nbspChoir by Va... - 5 days ago
   Climate change is a hot topic right now. The Economist has ... - 12 days ago

And you can do domain-specific searches as well, for example for events matching "San Francisco". So far you can't do much with the data except jump to the source page. The obvious thing is to support an add to contacts or add to calendaroption.

There's a companion service, pingerati.net,to enable real time indexing; it's also a ping hub.  The idea here isthat if you want to get updates about structured data from around theweb, you can register with pingerati and get their feed of pings aswell, without needing to go around and convince everyone to ping yourservice.  For example, evdb will get auto-notified if you pingpingerati.net.  Naturally, any existing Technorati feed update pings also get fed in.

Being a hub is nice.

Tags: microformats, search, pingerati, hCard, hCalendar, hReview, ping, hub

Meta-tagging in plain English

"Tag Bundles" in del.icio.us are quite possibly the Right Way to do hierarchy for tags:

This feature allows you to combine several related tags into a logical grouping. So, for instance, you might combine the tags “hitter”, “pitcher”, and “fielder” into a bundle and call it “Baseball”. It doesn’t change anything about the existing tags, but does allow you to create another level of heirarchy. When looking at your bookmarks, del.icio.us will show this bundle and all the tags grouped under it as a separate section.

This is really meta-tagging but explained in plain English with a perfectly sensible immediate end user benefit. Plus bigger benefits down the line if these bundles are shared.

Tags: tags, tagging, tag bundles, del.icio.us

And the daily meetings will continue until productivity improves!

We're doing a lot of daily meetings these days.  Often they're a waste of time; sometimes they're alifesaver.  I think they're primarily insurance.  You're paying an upfront daily cost to mitigate your risks due to missed communications,forgetfulness, lack of shared understanding, and lack of commitments.

Perhaps there is an optimal strategy for daily meetings thattreats them like insurance and adjusts them according to your riskforecast.  If your project is bright red, maybe you need a one hourvideo conference every day with the full team.  If you're green, maybe it's sufficient to have an optioanl 10 minute conference call.  And something in between for the vast majority of projects.   The goal would be to minimize your expected wasted time in a rational way.

Note: We of course do our level best to ensure that engineers are pulled into daily meetings only when they absolutely need to be there!  

Tags: daily meetings

AOL Greenhouse

A long-awaited site has been unwrapped this week as well -- AOL Greenhouse. Things are happening fast and furious (there's another soft launch this week that I can't talk about yet... hopefully next week we'll make it public).

Greenhouse is particularly special because it's all about getting some sunlight onto some of the cool things that we come up with.  Also, it has a monkey.  Can't go wrong with a monkey.

At the moment, the blog aggregator seems to be hosed -- it's showing Yoel's post about 23 times. Stan?

Tags: AOL Greenhouse, innovation, pre-alpha