Intro
What's this about?
Intro
Glad you asked. I put together a preview of this slideshow.These are my favorite slides from the major three sections here:
It works for movies, and this presentation is kind of like a movie, a personal movie, just for you.
Intro
Communities:
Communities are groups of people united for some reason. I'm going to talk about why they matter on the internet ...
Intro
Identity systems:
How people say "I'm a person" in communities on the internet. The current silo-based system has problems. The solutions are happening. As I speak.
Intro
Information Formats:
Codified ways information "objects" (such as events, people, and publications) are described. These formats getting more specific and more universal.
[This is good]
I used the word objects there — that's totally a geek thing to say.
Intro
But first, a step back.
Intro
A bit about where I'm coming from.
(I'm a bit nervous, and it's much easier to talk about yourself than it is this abstract stuff)
Intro
I work
I've been a newspaper reporter, but got disillusioned with that real fast and turned to web design, which led me to web development, but I got bored helping people sell more stuff so I went back to the newsroom as a web developer.
Intro
I believe
I believe the internet is important because it provides a framework to make many previously difficult actions easier. This creates plenty of new possibilities.
Intro
When certain actions are more easily attained,
Intro
People will perform them more often
Community
We start with...
Community
Community.
Community
A community is a group of people.
Community
An online community is a group of people online.
Community
Online communities are playing a larger role in people's day-to-day lives:
Community
"Large numbers of Internet users hold such strong views about their online communities that they compare the value of their online world to their real-world communities,"
According to the sixth annual survey of the impact of the Internet conducted by the USC-Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future.
http://www.digitalcenter.org/pdf/2007-Digital-Future-Report-Press-Release-112906.pdf
Community
Online communities matter because...
Community
Groups of people matter.
Community
Why do groups of people matter?
Community
Here's one reason:
Groups can do more than an individual can.
Community
"Participation in online communities leads to social activism. Almost two-thirds of online community members who participate in social causes through the Internet (64.9 percent) say they are involved in causes that were new to them when they began participating on the Internet."
According to the sixth annual survey of the impact of the Internet conducted by the USC-Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future.
http://www.digitalcenter.org/pdf/2007-Digital-Future-Report-Press-Release-112906.pdf
Community
We could say groups have a wider capacity for action.
Community
And action is important because...
...it's what people do.
Community
How does this work online?
Community
Online it's much easier to build a community
Community
Why?
Community
Community's easier online because:
- You don't have to talk with other people to find out if they share your interests. (group-membership self-selection)
- There aren't meeting locations and times. (low physical / geographic overhead)
- Actions are easily rewarded on the internet -- even small ones.
- "Clicking" and "typing" aren't as challenging as "talking".
Community
There are plenty of communities out on the internet now that would have been impractical to build without the internet:
Community
AnnoyingCoworker.com
Community
VampireFreaks.com, a site for teen goth aficionados, has more than 1 million members.
Community
TheDollPalace.com, a community for cartoon doll afficionados (2.5 million members)
Community
So if it's easier to build communities online, and more communities are forming, well, what does that mean?
Community
It means there are communities creating information about:
- The community's world: Information about the topic(s) that concern the community
- The community's members: Who is a member of the community, how do they describe themselves, what is known about them?
Community
The member information — and how that information is described — is most interesting here
(it's the category of information that could be consistent from community to community).
Community
The more online communities out there, the more members will repeat the same information to different places, the more usernames and passwords people have to remember.
Community
This is a problem for members and for the people behind the communities:
- Maintenance: Maintaining one identity across multiple communities is a chore.
- Extensibility: These days, more sites are trying to associate information from one community with another. That's impossible to do well.
Community
Several attempts have been made to fix this.
Microsoft's Passport (now called Live ID) is the most notable. It was never adopted far beyond Microsoft's corporate sphere.
Community
"This" is referred to as Single Sign-On (SSO), and there's a solution on the horizon.
Identity
Identity Systems
Identity
In the past 12 months, OpenID emerged from a pack of open-source online identity systems
Identity
OpenID is "an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity."
Translation: Instead of establishing an identity with each site you join, you establish one identity. Each site you join accesses that identity to verify you're you.
— OpenID.net
http://openid.net/
Identity
Right now, 90 million OpenIDs exist
It's been adopted by AOL and Microsoft.
— OpenID.net
http://openid.net/pres/2007_Web2Expo_Implementing_OpenID.pdf
Identity
Does that mean people will use it?
Who knows. But the number of places people can use it is increasing:
Identity
— OpenID.net
http://openid.net/pres/2007_Web2Expo_Implementing_OpenID.pdf
Identity
One of the major ideas behind OpenID and the other online identity movements is the lack of ownership. It does have a board. OpenID is not incorporated.
"Nobody should own this. Nobody's planning on making any money from this. The goal is to release every part of this under the most liberal licenses possible, so there's no money or licensing or registering required to play."
— OpenID.net
http://openid.net/pres/2007_Web2Expo_Implementing_OpenID.pdf
Identity
These are the corporations represented on the OpenID foundation/board:
- Verisign
- Six Apart
- NetMesh
- JanRain
- Sxip
- Cordance
— OpenID.net
http://openid.net/pres/2007_Web2Expo_Implementing_OpenID.pdf
Identity
So what does this OpenID thing mean?
- The "identity dance" necessary to join an online community isn't as cumbersome, and the identity maintenance required after decreases
- With a "root" to a person's online identity it's easier to harness information about and from that person
Information Formats
And when you combine that harnessing with standardized formats for commonly-used information ... you get the third part of this talk: Information Formats.
Information
OpenID fits in with how the internet information model has evolved:
- Linking Page to Page: In the 1990s search engines connected people with web pages. Links on web pages established relationships between web pages.
- Linking Person to Person: In 2002 Friendster made popular the idea that the internet could connect people with other people. The community described relationships among people, their friends, and the people that knew their friends. (MySpace then built on that model more successfully.)
- Linking human information: Currently, microformats are paving the way toward global means of describing information. These are some of the things microformats describe:
- People
- Events
- Publications
- Locations
- Lists and outlines
- Reviews
- Classifieds listing
Information
"Microformats are designed to make the data you already publish for humans available to machines. It allows applications as simple as cut-and-paste or as complex as a seach engine to use your data effectively."
— Microformats.org
http://microformats.org/wiki/faq
Information
Microformats don't look any different to the human eye. This page has 14 instances and three types of microformats in it.
Information
The microformats here don't do anything special for the page itself.
Information
What they do is make it possible for computers to aggregate and organize that information — and then use it elsewhere.
Information
That means in the future, you could perform searches such as:
- A person search for someone in Colorado who has met or is friends with [[Insert Name Here]]
- A person / places / event search for people who said they planned on attending the Ramones reunion tour show last Friday night at the Gothic theater
- A publications search for political blogs about immigration that have authors who live in California or Arizona
- A person search for people who know people who write political blogs about immigration who live in California or Arizona
- A person search for people who are romantically involved with people who said they planned on attending the Ramones reunion tour show last Friday night at the Gothic theater
Information
But will people publish this information?
Information
They already are:
These are the big-name sites publishing calendar information in microformats:
Information
"The beauty of many of these services is that while users generate content—for example, reviews—there is no need for these users to know anything about the underlying formats. The tools do the work of translating the content into the appropriate microformat."
The Big Picture on Microformats, Digital Web Magazine
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/the_big_picture_on_microformats/
Information
So why can't we use / search this information yet?
Because:
- It's not tied to an identity system that extends beyond single-site silos
- Microformat search platforms don't really exist yet. ( Technorati has one, but it can only handle as much information as exists )
Conclusion
Want to get this online?
