./emilychang eBot

With OAuth 1.0 Draft due out next week, I wanted to introduce the protocol and try to help people understand what it is and what it is trying to solve. OAuth (pronounced “Oh Auth") is mentioned is many blog posts, usually in the context of OpenID and Open Social Networks. While OAuth can play an important role in helping open up closed communities, it is not specific to social networks. The short(est) explanation of OAuth is ‘An API access delegation protocol’. Now for the longer one.

A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web
Authored by Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington
September 4, 2007

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:
Ownership of their own personal information, including:
- their own profile data
- the list of people they are connected to
- the activity stream of content they create;

Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
Feedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;

Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;

Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and

Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

See Marc Canter’s post

More at: http://opensocialweb.org/

Online encyclopedia Wikipedia has added about 20 million unique monthly visitors in the past year, making it the top online news and information destination, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. In May, Wikipedia had 46.8 million unique visitors, up 72 percent from June 2006, NetRatings said. Wikipedia also has finished on top of the news and information category every month this year—ranking ahead of Landmark Communications’ Weather Channel site by an increasing margin—topping out with a disparity of about 10 million visitors in May.

"Stream processing systems (and associated analytical components) will become a critical underpinning for much of what is talked about in terms of workstreaming, lifestreaming, attention streams, collective intelligence and so on. Discovering patterns across people, interactions, information, activities and social networks and assessing those relationships is difficult enough. It becomes even more challenging when you also want the results to be communicated in a manner that is contextual, relevant and sensitive to attention (and confidentiality) needs.”

Seven tips on how to run a successful community.

“Every year or so I write a long post or do a presentation at a conference on the subject of community. Each time I approach the subject, I take what I’ve already written and add to it with recent things I’ve learned or learned long before and only recently realized...Consider this more of a list of advanced tips.”

In his post, Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0,
Kevin Rose writes: “Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts… In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use...We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.”

"It’s ironic that the attempts to quiet the spread of the HD DVD processing key resulted in a massive movement to spread the information. Nothing quite like learning about the law of unintended consequences from experience.”

"I’m a big believer in what I call the “culture of generosity.” I think that a lot of what you see out on the Web and on the Internet and what made me love the Web in the first place is that people are building, creating, sharing things all the time. Whether that is essays they wrote, discographies of their favorite bands or a little place to hang out with friends in Second Life. The Internet is such a wonderful place because of so many millions of people contributing to it...”

"Now, Tumblr, a month-old mixed media microblogging service might kick it up a notch even higher if it catches on in kid culture. (50,000+ users already)...”

” The study, which analyzed participation behavior among 26,539 members of 66 private online communities, also found that consumers prefer fully transparent and branded communities to non-specific, non-branded ones.

The more intimate the community, the more people participate.”