Category: Technology

Event In a Suitcase and Running Remote S5 Presentations

EventInaSuitcaseContinuing the tradition of the “Event in a…” meme, we came up with the notion of “Event in a Suitcase” at the most recent Mash Pit.

The idea is pretty simple: make it easy to walk into a room and make a presentation.

Well, among the five of us, we came to the conclusion that there’s nothing really that makes it easy. There are tools, both hardware and software, that make it possible, and writing them down was a good place to start from. But there really isn’t an open source or free workflow that gets us where we want to be… where everything is affordable and fits in a literal suitcase.

So anyway, we documented our work and could use more help. If you’ve got ideas, tools, solutions, workflows or whatever, add them!

·   ·   ·

So, one of the cool hacks that we brainstormed and that Kevin Marks was actually able to implement before the day was out involved Eric Meyer’s public domain slideshow format S5. Essentially he made it possible for people watching an S5 presentation, like Tantek’s excellent Building Blocks for Independent, to see the slides change as the presenter changes them.

Of course bringing this awesome hack together with a Gizmo call-in means that people can at least watch and listen remotely as presentation happens — and participate in IRC. So voila, it’s like NetMeeting, but open source! Anyway, Kevin’s code is in Twisted and now that I’ve blogged this, hopefully he’ll be incented to clean it up and publish it!

ClaimID makes the OpenID connection

ClaimID gets OpenID

I have to say that it’s things like this that really make me shiver with excitement…

I mean, it’s pretty simple, but it’s also pretty important.

What’s the big deal? Well, for one thing, it’s yet another site adopting OpenID, a decentralized identity system. And, as more and more sites adopt this system (which should remain transparent to end-users if they don’t want an OpenID), we near ever-closer to a lightweight, single sign-on solution.

To be sure, OpenID isn’t a panacea. It’s not intended to be one. The primary attractiveness of OpenID is its simplicity: it’s decoupled the issue of trust from identity and simply offers a way of staking your identity to a given URL. In a sense, if you can trust the credentials of Website X, then you (as a web service provider) can trust accounts created on that domain as well. The benefit for the account holder is that they don’t have to re-register on Website Y.

Note that this is a web-centric solution and doesn’t carry well into the real world where people don’t identify themselves by URLs (hmm, what if instead of a social security number, we were assigned a URL at birth? whoa.).

The other thing that’s great about this announcement is that it’s the work of Scott Kveton’s new startup, JanRain. I brought Scott and Terrell Russell together some time ago, so it’s awesome to see the fruits of this connection already — and that Scott’s going off to do this kind of work full-time.

What I want to see? Well, the proliferation of OpenID across all the various sites that I use. The cost is minimal since the libraries are being developed on all kinds of platforms — and it should integrate fairly well with existing login schemes. Then I want to see either Ma.gnolia or ClaimID add support for XFN (they already support hCards and ClaimID allows for custom rel values). Then, of course, we need to be able to string together (loosely coupled, mind you) my contact list and my group membership list so that I can import and export them wherever I go (obviously this should be done with microformats). Once we’ve got that situation fleshed out, and I’ve claimed my sites with either MicroID or (preferrably) rel=me, I’ll have a pretty portable social network to carry around the web!

Yahoo! Local goes Cuckoo for CoCo Puffs!

Andy Baio announces support in Yahoo! Local for microformats

The title means nothing, but today at Supernova, Andy Baio announced that Yahoo! Local has added support across the board for hCard, hCalendar and hReview, following Flickr, Upcoming and Yahoo! Tech (blurry video 1, video 2 — turn it up!).

I can’t exactly say what adding 10s of millions of microformatted bits of data will do for the web, but it certainly makes the rush to develop UI around this new opportunity all the greater…

Oh, and bonus: when I was at Flock, I wanted to see ground-level integration of microformats in the browser. Imagine having Lucene indexing all the microformatted content that you come across on the web (whether you know it or not) and then having that data separated out for use in extensions, in filling out forms, in generating new cross-sections and views of your ‘history’. And Rohit gave me another side of that idea: being able to autofill forms anywhere by creating an index of microformat classes-to-input value pairs for specific websites… Yeah, the client/browser part is going to be key to making all this work have obvious value for folks on the web. Can’t wait to see how this moves forward.

MashPit by day, Microformats by night

Mash Pit (color)Today I’ll be hosting the third Mash Pit in San Francisco at the Wharton West, downtown at 101 Howard Street, Suite 500. Things kick off at 10am and go until 5pm (not 6pm, necessitated by the facilities and the fact that we’ll be hungry!).

What can you expect? Well, it’s pretty simple. The goal of the day is work on mashups — particularly ones that work on solving “human problems” — like making it easier to find wifi cafes in the city or autotag your photos based on your Upcoming or EVDB account (which, by the way, is really about making it easier to help folks find your photos later).

Tara and I came up with the agenda this morning. We’ve got a bit of experience now, so we’ll see how it goes!

And of course, after this is all over, tonight is the Microformats 1-year Anniversary Party at 111 Minna. We’re pretty excited about how far this little fledgling community project has come in the last year and want to celebrate! It gets going around 8pm — and, if you can’t be there, you can always order a shirt!

Ah! And before I forget, a big thanks to Tara, Tantek, the Supernova folks (especially Kevin and Jeanne!), and Mozes for helping make Mash Pit possible!

For the rest of the month

iCal icon…there will be nothing but events. I kid you not.

  • June 20, 2006 – 10:00 – 18:00 – MashPit San Francisco III – at Wharton West, 101 Howard Street, Suite 500, San Francisco, CA
  • June 20, 2006 – 20:00 – Microformats 1-year Anniversary Party – at 111 Minna Street, San Francisco, CA
  • June 21 – 23, 2006 – Supernova 2006 – at The Palace Hotel, 2 New Montgomery Street, San Francisco, CA
  • June 23 – 24, 2006 – BloggerCon IV – at CNET, 235 2nd Street, San Francisco, CA
  • June 23, 2006 – 19:00 – 24:00 – BarCampSanFrancisco Kick-off Party – at Microsoft Offices, One Market Street 2nd Floor, San Francisco, CA
  • June 23 – 25, 2006 – BarCampSanFrancisco – at Microsoft Offices, One Market Street 2nd Floor, San Francisco, CA
  • June 29 – July 01, 2006 – Gnomedex 6.0 – at Bell Harbor International Conference Center, 2211 Alaskan Way, Seattle, WA

(And yes, you can add these events to your calendar easily.)

Oh, and cool sidenote, Senator John Edwards will be keynoting Gnomedex. Guess if you can’t get the inventor of the internets, you can at least get a running mate.

Flock 0.7 in the wild

Flock BadgeFlock has released its first public beta after many moons of rough ride’em development. Out of the box, things look pretty smokin’, but I still think Flock has a ways to go before becoming the next generation browser (and of course, I’m only consistently hard on the things I care most about).

With a brand new (Drupal-based!) website from Facebook UI designer and design rockstar Bryan Veloso, the Flock project is starting to look like something, and they’ve certainly brought it along considerably since I left in March. Whether they will really pioneer novel interfaces and inspire new thinking on how the browser can better democratize the more compelling social aspects of the web remains to be seen. As they say, Rome wasn’t build in a day; then again, by Rome 0.7, I wonder if a broader foundation would have needed to have been built for Rome 1.0 to become as great and powerful as it did. Time will tell, won’t it? Time will tell…

All in all, congrats to the team — I remain eager to see what’ll come next.

Patent the baby, trademark the bathwater

Feed icon registered trademark?

If you take anything away from the second trademark brouhaha in as many weeks, it’s this quote from Mozilla Chief Lizard wrangler, Mitchell Baker:

I believe the Free and Open Source Software world is due for a long discussion of trademarks, how we use them, what their value is and so on. Ultimately I’d like to see some Creative Commons type options available for trademark- type purposes. (Creative Commons licenses are all copyright licenses, and do not purport to address the trademark – like issues of providing clarity to consumers about what consumers are getting.) We haven’t had this discussion yet.

So obviously, this points to the discussion I’ve been waging towards the establishment of something akin to the Community Mark idea. It’s not that trademark should necessarily go away; instead it’s about providing a choice when traditional trademark law simply does not make sense and only stands to incense and divide communities — which, ironically, such laws were intended to protect.

I don’t think the question in this case really revolves around the question of the meaning of icons so much as the enforcement and consistent use of symbols that come to mean something to a given community. For what Mitchell is really proposing is something more like reverse trademark, where you compel someone to use your mark in a certain way in order to produce consistency. Let’s face it, by restricting the use of the mark or icon, you’re actually moving away from your goal, which in this case is to establish a symbol, to be used in common, to identify a particular interface interaction.

It doesn’t seem like trademark is the appropriate means to the end in this case… and I’m very happy that Mitchell has proposed that the best solution is likely her option #3, “to try a less formal process with more authority resided in community norms and [see] how that works.” This is, I believe, the only true option that stands a chance of gaining widespread adoption as well as heading off the kind of scorn and antipathy that members of the open source community simply don’t need.

Scott Kveton moves to JanRain

Scott Kveton leaves the OSLMy good buddy Scott Kveton has announced that he’ll be leaving the OSL to become the CEO of JanRain, Inc., a Portland-based developer of identity management software systems.

This is significant for a couple reasons, not the least of which is the end of Scott’s great leadership at the OSL, leading to the rise of the premiere host of open source projects such as Mozilla, Gentoo and Drupal.

Besides the legacy he’s leaving behind, the work he’s doing next promises to be extremely interesting, and I wouldn’t expect anything less. Considering that Verisign has built its own OpenID server and that there are more and more OpenID-based identity solutions cropping up, it’s safe to suggest that you keep your eyes on this one. With Kveton stepping onto the field, OpenID proponents have a new ally who’s sure to make rapid advances on the question of open identity (and no, his blog post title is not ironic).