Category: Technology

News from the Net Squared

From the Net Squared news machine:

Next Tuesday, April 11th, Zack Rosen of CivicSpace, Adam Frey of WikiSpaces, and Tara Hunt, of Riya.com & Horsepigcow, will gather at Varnish for Net Tuesday San Francisco. The focus is community engagement & community tools, so come, engage your NetSquared community.

On that same day, NetSquared community members will gather at the Stag’s Head Pub in Houston, TX for their second NetSquared meetup.

The next day, April 12th, NetSquared builders in Washington, DC will re-convene at Buffalo Billiards

Soon, Net Tuesday will be coming to LA. Tell your SoCal friends to join the Net Tuesday LA group

Don’t live in one of these locations? Answer the Net2Builders Call to Action & Host a Meetup in Your Town!

WTF

Now here’s something you don’t see everyday. Scoble reports that Microsoft has opened Port 25… apparently an open source software lab. Marketing shenanigans or the real deal? You decide!
…

Apparently the result of Scoble’s influence on Microsoft’s culturepor the slumbering giant is final waking up. Jim Allchin wasn’t kidding about “hearing us” (the open source community that is) as evidenced by Bill Hiff‘s explanation of this new site:

So why is it called Port 25? Some background on port numbers first. SMTP is short for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and is the protocol for sending email messages between servers or from a mail client to a mail server. On a server, the port for SMTP is 25. When you open a port on a server, such as to allow for SMTP traffic, it is commonly referred to as ‘listening’ on the port. Port 25, therefore, is a metaphor for how we are opening the communication lines to for a discussion around Open Source Software and Microsoft. Cute, huh?

It’s like an open source feedback loop for Microsoft? Fer rizzle? Shucks man, that’s so… neat!

So …if Microsoft can open up, why can’t our government go more open source? Why are there leaks? When was the last time an open source project dealt with a leak? Exactly.

Now imagine if the government published something like this on whitehouse.gov:

What will you find here? This will be the place we not only blog, but also where we put analysis from our OSS labs and also where we discuss and show other parts of [the government] that we think are just plain cool or interesting. I think what you’ll see here over time is how a bunch of open source guys inside [the government] think, as well as people and technologies inside [DC] that we think other folks like us would find interesting as well.

So, there will be much more to discuss, debate and learn from together – but for now, port 25 is open.

It’s kind of like bringing in a bunch of minority party folks together to create a “work tank” of sorts (thanks Lane) to keep the majority party in check, seeing as how there’s no one in government doing that now.

Powazek said it best

User Generated Content

Derek makes a great point. Of course, this point has been made before, only now we have an alternative phraseology (that no doubt will be corrupted all the same at some point): “authentic media“.

I dig it, but perhaps we could go a step further and make it totally off limits, calling it “amateur content”, in the nothing-is-worth-doing-unless-you-love-it kind of way.

Think about it this way: friends don’t let friends monetize friends. You’ve gotta be an amatuer to do it for something other than the benjamins. I mean, who wants to create “professional” content? Exactly.

Still, let’s use “authentic media” for now and see how it goes. And we can all be happy amateurs creating authentic media together.

Code search engine Krugle looks promising

Code search engine Krugle seems to be nearing its initial release and based on a screencast they put out a few weeks ago, it looks like it’s going to be a tremendous resource for developers.

Ironic though — and perhaps a vehicle for an academic attitudinal adjustment — Krugle may give rise to a level of productive and efficient code reuse that could hardly be attained before. Which is to say that the need to write original code anymore will certainly become… deprecated. Man, is copyright so obsolete or what?

Mashpit Dallas II & Mashpit San Francisco II

Mash Pit (color)Brian Oberkirch has announced Mashpit Dallas II taking place… today! He writes:

Several Dallas Barcampers are getting back together to kick off what (I hope) becomes a routine thang: a jam session of folks interested in social media. Tomorrow night we can talk a bit about what we each want to get out of such a working group. But, in the spirit of factoryjoe’s Mashpits , I also have an idea we can all work on.

Tim Williamson is the founder of The Idea Village, an entreprenuer bootstrapping/launching pad in New Orleans. The devastation all these months later isn’t just physical — ‘our social networks are destroyed,’ he says.

He did a triage grant program. Now wants to move it to the next level, making Idea Village the place people can go to get or contribute information & expertise so badly needed in the community. Idea Village, 2.0.

Our mission, should we choose to accept, is to whiteboard up some ideas for how the Idea Village can leverage social media to aggregate, plus up, and spread info around NOLA.

Tell anyone who might be interested. RSVP at the Upcoming page. We can order in some Gloria’s.

Don’t forget, we’ve got out own Mashpit II coming up on April 15 in South San Francisco at France Telecom’s offices. We’re looking for 30-40 folks who want to hack, smash and build cool stuff — and no, you don’t have to be a developer to contribute! Trust me, we need designers, thinkers, idea people, marketers and folks of all stripes to make these projects as good as possible. After all, they’re only as good as what goes into them.

So if you’re looking for something fun to do on tax day, definitely sign up. I hear there might be work on that nifty Mapendar idea…

I need a Mapendar!

Mapendar sketch

Ok, here’s an idea for some ingenuitive masher.

I’m a visual person. I suck at planning when I can’t visualize the what and where of what I’ll be doing (or what I’ve done). In that single respect, thank Ford for Web 2.0 making things a degree more designerly!

Anyway, here’s what I want.

Take Google or Yahoo Maps. Take my Upcoming feed (or just grab a microformatted event listing like the one on Tantek’s site). And sure, grab a list of free or open wifi hotspots from Plazes. For bonus points, cross-reference the data with my Trazes and Dodgeball checkins to let me know when and if I or my friends have been there. Oh, and yeah, grab stuff from my Flickr stream and hey, Riya? could you like do some searching for photos from the events that I didn’t attend but was watching on Upcoming? Yeah, tanx. And heck, let me throw random things at it like my PiC’s feed or listing of upcoming Barcamps.

Oh, and Flock? Could you like toss in my browser history sorted by geolocation and where I published various blog posts from? Sweet.

Now, I want to see this stuff all pulled in together and tossed on a map. I want 30boxes without the 28, 29, 30 or 31 boxes. I want a big effin’ map (I know Jeremy Kieth can help). And I want to see time represented like sheet music (credit goes to Greg Elin for that idea).

Oh, and please note, this is not a business. It’s an interface.

…Alright, fine, it’s a big old Attention Aggregator — except that it can look into the future and tell me where to be, when. Which makes this what?, an Intention Aggregator? Anh, whatever. It’s a Mapendar and I want one!

Blogger Doom 3

Blogger Doom 3

Okay okay, calm down, kids. We can work this all out.
RoSco, like the rest of us, is human and clearly has moments that inspire the need to get some aggression out. Instead of pissing off one’s readers, why don’t we set up a weekly scrimage for bloggers to to it out on each… in 3D?

Hey, the idea’s not original, but I’d be down for some good-old-fashioned blog’em up fun!

Who’s with me? Anyone?

[Original image courtesy of About.com]

MicroID – Identity in a shade of microformat

Doc points to microformat-compliant MicroID (“Small Decentralized Verifiable Identity”) by Jabber founder Jeremie Miller:

…a new Identity layer to the web and Microformats that allows anyone to simply claim verifiable ownership over their own pages and content hosted anywhere. The technology is radically simple and capable of empowering new and unique meta services with only minor effort.

I read over the description, but I still don’t quite get it.

A simpler solution (for web authors at least) is reciprocity using XFN. Essentially if I have access to two websites, I can link between them using the rel="me" microformat — very similar to what Technorati does with its claiming snippet.

So one rel="me" link implies an unconfirmed relationship, two or more confirms, for the purpose of building an exploratory network (non-authoritative), a relationship. Add in an

and you can start building an ad hoc profile that will result with a profile like the one I’m building on ClaimID.

So the way I see it, MicroID allows me to lay ownership to any piece of arbitrary content on the web, provided I can set the class of the object. In cases where that’s not possible, I’m not sure MicroID will work.

With the rel="me" solution, you can claim URLs that you can create links with rel values. Neither is perfect but both are decent uses of microformats for faking identity.

Update: change MicroID from a “.com” to a “.org” . Thanks Kevin!