Sam Ruby presents "Teenage Mutant CyberSurfers"

This afternoon, Sam Ruby was nice enough to reprise a version of his recent talk at AOL Silicon Valley.  There's a real independent convergence between Sam's observations and predictions and the fictional world described in Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End.  Which as I understand Sam is just now reading :).

Update:  The audio is up on our podcast feed already!

AOL Pictures Beta and woohoo

In conjunction with the new Pictures Beta, there's a cool tool called woohoo which displays a an AIMPages picture gallery in a widget, embeddable anywhere.  Fun stuff...  for example:

Feeds Best Practices

The slides from my RSS/Atom Feeds Best Practices talk from lunch today are up now.  There was a good discussion afterwards and hopefully we'll put up a podcast. I'm more convinced than ever that the key to a successful presentation is: free food.

URL format change for Journals

One of the recent changes this week in Journals is an update to the format of our entry URLs.  We're essentially adding the entry date and title to the URL, for example:

.../entries/2006/07/13/rest-and-the-authorization-header/1354

So anyone who may be parsing our URLs -- be aware that the format has changed :).  We will, however, do a permanent redirect from the old URLs to the new ones.

REST and the Authorization: Header

Talking to lots of people about identity, mashups, web services, and sustainability of the mashup ecology today at Mashup Camp.  I'm wondering why LID apparently is using a new X- header for passing pointers to authentication information rather than re-using the existing extensible Authorization: header.  Both GData and Amazon Web Services  allow Authorization: as at least one option in their REST interfaces:

Authorization: GoogleLogin auth ...
Authorization: AWS ...

I know that GData uses 401 Unauthorized and WWW-Authenticate: challenge headers and I'm going to assume that AWS does too:

WWW-Authenticate: AuthSub realm="https://www.google.com/accounts/AuthSubRequest" 

So, existing services are using the RFC 2617 framework; it's working for them; why not build on top of that instead of inventing new headers?

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