BizMeds

WP - OpenID

OpenID is an open standard that lets you sign in to other sites on the Web using little more than your blog URL. This means less usernames and passwords to remember and less time spent signing up for new sites. This plugin allows verified OpenIDs to be linked to existing user accounts for use as an alternative means of authentication. Additionally, commenters may use their OpenID to assure their identity as the author of the comment and provide a framework for future OpenID-based services (reputation and trust, for example).

The developer of this plugin Alexandre Passant, PhD student in the Semantic Web and Social Software area has done a terrific job with this plugin. So for you Wordpress users this is a great tool.

Friend of a Friend (FOAF) What is this

Friend of a friend okay, so what is this you say. Well, it is about your place in the Web, and the Web’s place in our world. FOAF is a simple technology that makes it easier to share and use information about people and their activities (eg. photos, calendars, weblogs), to transfer information between Web sites, and to automatically extend, merge and re-use it online.

The  Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.

I posted an image of this interaction to better assist you in understanding just where you are in this socially connected web and better to help you understand the complexities of having your data spread throughout the web. It raises questions as to who owns your personal data. If you think that because it is yours you “retain rights of possession” you would be making a grave error. Or can you take your data with you? 

The answer to that is no you can’t some social sites eg. facebook surrounds itself in a walled garden they let you and your friends in but you cannot pack up and move to another social network. So who owns your data? Interesting stuff…

The answers are going to come I believe this year as it has become a serious debate and the focus of attention so changes will occur fast. 

OpenID

There are an estimated 93 million OpenID owners out there, a lot of them not knowing where to use their OpenID, how to use it, or even not knowing that they own an OpenID at all.

Cameron King has written an excellent guide to new users. It is easy to understand and covers all the basics, I think. Cameron runs his own blog, so check it out.

2008 - A Season of Enrichment

The Internet has grown to an adolelescent stage. The first decade we witnessed from birth through infancy a powerful rise of the Internet. Some declaring that the Internet was to be a source of freedom, others evangelizing an Internet of shared knowledge and yet others fueled by greed tried harnessing and then proprietorial this knowledge for monetary reasons.

The second decade we saw the bastions of the civilised Internet collapse, or rather implode upon themselves bringing forth life the open source applications. This change has had a profound affect on how we interact on the Internet. With the proliferation of user media. Blogs, moblogs, now video exploding on the scene has broadened our scope or rather re-defined how we harvest, store and assimilate information.

The wild and wily web has indeed gone through some growing pains akin to a wild west movie. With the speed of the nanosphere has come to my attention an increasingly complex issue that Daniel Solove author of the book titled “The Future of Reputation” that is the question of the protection of ones privacy.

Solove’s book is two fold really:

• discuss how rumors, gossip, and haming are being transformed when they take place online.
• what ought to be done about the problem.

To download a sample chapter of Solove’s book go to the above link and if you want some background on this author follow the author name link above.

All this is super interesting and brings me to where we are to day in a “season of enrichment”. The Internet this year we will see OpenData (Data silos and walled gardens are a huge loss of opportunity and more people are figuring that out every day.) coming to the forefront. With dataportability the user will have control over how you want to viewed and ultimately discussed over the Internet.

A good place to start is at the OpenID to familiarize yourself on this hot topic.