November 2007 Archives

Like many folks (optimist; pessimist) I'm excited, with a little trepidation, about Verizon's announcement that they're opening up their wireless network for devices and applications other than the ones they provide - that's a huge change of attitude for a network that historically has tried to maintain very strict controls over what capabilities are enabled.

Susan Crawford has a great example of the effect this news had in the communications law class she teaches. It provides a great example of the way wireless Internet access in classrooms can enhance the learning experience:

So this morning my communications law class was earnestly discussing the 700 MHz auction rules when, suddenly, one of the students lifted his head from his screen and said, “Verizon just announced they’re opening everything up!”
(I’m always a fan of internet access in the classroom, and this gives me a good story to use with other teachers. “See, it’s useful, not just a distraction.”)
We immediately started discussing why Verizon is doing what it’s doing. And the context was clear, because it was the subject of the class: it’s the auction.

You should now be able to use OpenId to leave comments on my blog. Woohoo!

When I post a new entry, whether through the web interface or ecto, it shows up fine in the main blog entries page, but when you click on the "permalink" link for the entry, it shows a page that says:

CODE(0x973dad8)

CODE(0x973dad8)
CODE(0x973dad8)

When I republish the entry it works fine. What's up with that?

I'm not sure what I did that fixed it, but the monthly archives seem to be displaying ok now. Let me just say for the record that upgrading a blog from MT3 to MT4 is not a simple process, though I like the features in MT4.

I'm in the process of changing the look of the blog to use Movable Type 4 templates - I've picked the Minimalist White style that comes with MT4. Most things seem to be working now, but the monthly archive listings still look awful. I apologize for any incovenience - I'm sure I'll get it figured out at some point.

Trying to post with Ecto. If you see this, it works.

Technorati Tags: movabletype, blogging, upgrades

So I just tried upgrading this blog to Movable Type 4.01. If you're seeing this post, the upgrade is successful.

Today, in and amongst meetings, phone calls, and emails, I managed to (with a little help from Adam Graffunder) set up my own OpenID identity running on my staff web account. Why OpenID? Well, more and more web sites and services are accepting OpenID as an authentication method. Here's a new article about it called How will OpenID change your site?

How did I do it?

I used phpMyID.

The process basically went like this:

I created a new directory on my web site (staff.washington.edu/oren) called myid. I uploaded the two php files from phpMyID into that directory (MyID.config.php and MyID.php) and followed the installation instructions in the README document.

When I then tried to log in, I got a 'Missing expected authorization header' error. No problem - the troubleshooting section of the document explains how to deal with that by using an included .htaccess file - on our server uncommenting the first option set in the file worked (if you're confused, let me know and I'll send you a copy of what worked for me).

I then added these two lines to the head section of my index.html file:

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://staff.washington.edu/oren/myid/MyID.config.php">
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://staff.washington.edu/oren/myid/MyID.config.php">

And then I was able to log into Basecamp by telling it to use the OpenID server at http://staff.washington.edu/oren/

Cool!

What would be even cooler? Well, phpMyID requires me to pick a new user name and password for its purposes. When I use the OpenID I then get prompted to enter that name and password, using HTTP Digest authentication. I'm sure somebody who knows their way around in this space could figure out how to make it use Shibboleth or Pubcookie and my UW NetID instead. But that's for someone more sophisticated than I - like Mr. Gettes, or Nathan, or Zephyr :)

Technorati Tags: authentication, openid

Tim O'Reilly, in a commentary on a post about Open Social by Mark Cuban gets in far more eloquent way what I was saying about Open Social the other day.

Tim says:

While I like the direction of Google OpenSocial, not only may Google be too late, as Mark argues, I don't think they go far enough. A framework and a set of Google Gadgets for building "social applications" misses the point. We don't want to build more applications that look like Facebook applications. It isn't about a social UI. It's about deeper re-use of social data to enliven any application. Some of those applications may have a minimal UI, like Google's breakthrough search app. OpenSocial doesn't give us any of that. Ajax widgets are a halfway house, an attempt to sandbox the kinds of applications that can be created. And that will be the downfall of OpenSocial. If all you can build are Facebook-like applications, Facebook wins.

We all want what Mark describes: a definitive place under our own control where we can describe who we are and what we care about so that applications can use that data to provide us with smarter services. We don't really care whether that repository is at Facebook or Google or any other site, or perhaps even if it's an aggregation of data from many places, but we do want it to become more useful to us. Not just more useful to the holder of our profile, but to every site we touch on the internet. Whichever company gets there first, to a truly open, user-empowering, internet-turbocharging social network platform, is going to be the net's next big winner.

The more I think about it, particularly in higher ed, the more I think there's a place for an open profile platform, where people can store their professional data (and the social data that goes with that) and control what parts of it they want to make visible to which people and which applications, and for open ways of accessing that information can be used to embed "socialness" into applications.

Technorati Tags: facebook, google, open-social, profiles, social-software

Is there something in the air today?

xxx is . Yes she is. 21m ago
yyy is getting more abnormal all the time. 49m ago
zzz is thinking of crawling under a desk. 50m ago

Technorati Tags: facebook

I was really excited to see the announcement about Google releasing the Open Social API, which provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network's friends and update feeds.

Google's page about it is at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/ and Marc Andreesen has a good writeup of the release on his blog at http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/11/report-from-the.html.

After I watched the video, though, I realized that Open Social doesn't do what I was thinking about - which was to allow me to easily build a new web site that would reach into the social networks on the many sites supporting Open Social (like Ning, MySpace, LinkedIn, Orkut, etc.) to achieve functionality that leverages the social connections people have established in those spaces.

Instead, what Open Social is about is being able to write a single web application that can be embedded into each of those social networks' own sites without having to be rewritten. That's cool too, but not as cool as what I had hoped for.

Technorati Tags: google, social-software