sentaire Web2.0 Mashup

Should Knowledge Workers have E2.0 Ratings, Part 3

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:27:38 GMT

Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability - Pick Any Two

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:27:28 GMT

Under Worm Assault, Military Bans Disks, USB DrivesThe Defense Department's geeks are spooked by a rapidly spreading worm crawling across their networks. So they've suspended the use of so-called thumb drives, CDs, flash media cards, and all other removable data storage devices from their nets, to try to keep the worm from multiplying any further.The ban comes from the commander of U.S. Strategic Command, according to an internal Army e-mail. It applies to both the secret SIPR and unclassified NIPR...

Not Your Father's Data Breach

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:27:28 GMT

I am surprised this doesn't happen more often, or become public when it does happen, and I suspect it will:Corporate custodians of confidential medical data should be closely monitoring events connected to a nightmarish computer security breach in the St. Louis region.Express Scripts is one of the nation?s largest pharmacy benefits managers. The company, with headquarters in St. Louis County, handles approximately 500 million prescriptions per year for 50 million workers at 1,600 American companies. Early in October, it received...

Six Apart TypePad Connect Beta Holds Promise for All Bloggers

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 05:18:19 GMT

Today, Six Apart is launching three new features for TypePad: enhanced TypePad profiles, a new commenting system, and TypePad Connect, a no-cost combination of services that promises to make participating in and managing communities easier for bloggers on a variety of platforms - not just those offered by Six Apart.

For users familiar with the Six Apart family of products, the profiles will be a welcome step forward from the original TypeKey implementation and the new commenting features offer functionality users have come to expect from commenting systems. But it's TypePad Connect - or more appropriately the vision for what TypePad Connect could be - that makes this announcement interesting.

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So What Is It?

According to Six Apart, TypePad Connect "makes community management easier for bloggers with the ability to track, moderate and respond to comments across multiple sites and blogs from one dashboard or via email." In other words, it's your lifestream and your blog conversations - be they on your blog or someone else's - all in one spot.

At first blush, TypePad Connect may appear to be a reactionary response to services like IntenseDebate, Disqus, and Backtype - possibly even FriendFeed. Services that have all but usurped the conversations that once were the domain of individual blogs.

And maybe in some ways, it is. But there's clearly something else happening here.

If it lives up to its promise, TypePad Connect has the potential to combine both popular lifestreaming features and comment-aggregation features under one user profile. And with an open approach, they could do it in a way that allows users to begin to experience the promise of the distributed social Web.

Vision

When it comes to understanding the social Web, SixApart definitely has vision. The company sprung from the early days of blogging, launching one of the first major blogging platforms. They were the birthplace of OpenID, a single digital identity that has continued to gain support throughout the online community. Members of the company remain deeply involved in a number of efforts driving the social Web today.

This move toward a distributed social presence falls right in line with their previous efforts. Like other services with "Connect" in their names - Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect - TypePad Connect has a grand vision of moving personally relevant content outside the proprietary constructs of specific blogs - or even of Six Apart, itself - and making it useful and accessible to other services.

In other words, the same way that Facebook Connect, for example, offers other sites access to your Facebook profile information - saving you the time of establishing yet another profile on yet another service that replicates the information you already have stored elsewhere - TypePad Connect offers other blogs easy access to your profile. And in return, you get the ability to manage all of the comments you make from one spot. Your profile is no longer beholden to a blog or service, it's available to be distributed.

Embracing the concept of community that has the ability to exist and live outside the walls of a given blog or proprietary product is definitely a step in the right direction. (For that matter, it doesn't take a huge intuitive leap to see the value of having a TypePad Connect profile as the endpoint for an OpenID URL.) TypePad Connect could be another step toward the realization of a truly distributed social Web.

Current Reality

Even in its current beta iteration, the offering has some definite benefits. Things like simplified avatar management, lifestreaming of multiple services under one profile, and comment management features from a central dashboard will be appealing to many existing Six Apart customers and will likely attract new users, as well.

But as with any beta offering, there are some downsides and issues.

Ironically, one of the current issues with TypePad Connect is comment management. Even though comments are not stuck on a specific blog, comments are still stuck within TypePad Connect. Allowing users to export comments is on the roadmap, but in the beta version, all comments are currently being held on the TypePad Connect servers. That's a concern.

There's also the opposite problem: there's currently no way to import comments into TypePad Connect. That means if you're starting a blog from scratch, you'll be fine, but if you're adding TypePad Connect to an existing blog, you're going to have an old comment database and a new one. So you'll be managing two sets of comments.

That said, it's a beta. It's expected to have flaws.

Verdict

TypePad Connect definitely has a vision for a far more grand offering than the current beta. No doubt, pressure - be that pressure from users asking for the functionality or pressure from competitors like Automattic (which has begun to amalgamate the ingredients for a similar offering with Gravatar and IntenseDebate) - necessitated Six Apart moving sooner rather than later.

But when it comes right down to it, it's the vision in which I believe. I think Six Apart has a chance to provide a compelling solution for a common problem, even if they're not quite there yet. And once they begin to get closer to that vision, it could change the way we think about managing our conversations online.

Vision aside, would I implement this solution today? To be honest, I'd be hesitant to adopt TypePad Connect on an existing blog until some of the beta kinks are worked out. But if I were starting a new blog today? TypePad Connect would definitely be in the running for my centralized commenting system - even though I wouldn't be starting that blog on one of Six Apart's platforms.

If you're interested in trying it, TypePad Connect offers native support for Blogger, Movable Type 3.x and 4.x, Tumblr, TypePad, WordPress.org 2.0 and higher. It can also support any other installation with a chunk of javascript. Support for additional platforms are planned once the offering comes out of beta.

Discuss

TypePad Connect, Profiles and Comments for Everyone!

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 10:07:07 GMT

Today, the TypePad team is launching three exciting new features for everyone who blogs or reads blogs:

Profiles (a reinvention of TypeKey)
New commenting capabilities
TypePad Connect, a new beta service that is free for all bloggers and extends these features to any site.

This isn't just about providing comments and profiles for your site, but also connecting your site's community with the rest of the social web.

As we complete the migration to the next generation platform for TypePad that Ben Trott talked about earlier this year we've released many new features for TypePad bloggers (improved design screens, AutoSave, and custom URLs to mention a few). But we've also been hard at work creating TypePad powered services such as TypePad AntiSpam, Blog It and Blog Link that extend the TypePad service to any blogger across the web. Our vision is that the best way to help TypePad bloggers is to connect them with a wider community of readers, other bloggers and conversations.

Let's look at the new TypePad profiles first. Ever had a profile that got out of date? TypePad profiles take advantage of things you're already doing, to keep your profile up to date and interesting. If you connect with your Twitter account we'll automatically fill in your status. Leave a comment on a TypePad enabled site and we'll pull that in too. Update your profile picture and it will automatically change on every comment you've already made across TypePad enabled sites. TypePad profiles make it easy to connect with other commenters and conversations across blogs for readers and bloggers alike. And don't worry; we didn't forget the feeds, Microformats or OpenID either.

As a blogger, imagine the benefits to your readers if they are no longer "anonymous" but instead can choose to bring their photo and name with them from their TypePad profile. Commenters can also link back to a rich profile that contains their comment history, links to their own blogs, and even their accounts on Twitter, Flickr, Digg, or dozens of other services.

Open For Comment

We've also launched new TypePad comments in beta that integrate seamlessly with the new profiles. The new comment service has a sleek new interface and great features like threading, easy pagination, OpenID sign in, email notifications of replies and the ability to reply via email - all with TypePad AntiSpam built in - and is a great example of the changes we will be making to the core TypePad application in the coming months.

And now, we're combining all of this into the TypePad Connect beta. These new profiles and comments are not just available for TypePad bloggers but for ANY blogger or web site -- for free. TypePad Connect makes community management easier for bloggers with the ability to track, moderate and respond to comments across multiple sites and blogs from one dashboard or via email.

We've made it easy for you to integrate comments and profiles with TypePad, Movable Type, Blogger, WordPress software and Tumblr or you can just embed a small piece of JavaScript yourself. And we care about design, and know that you care about design too, so we made it easy to style TypePad Connect comments to match your design with just a bit of CSS.

TypePad Connects Everywhere

As I mentioned above, our vision is that the best way to help TypePad bloggers is to create a service that helps them connect with their readers and other bloggers, in a more open, more powerful, and more meaningful fashion and this is what TypePad Connect is all about. We've been evolving the way that TypePad works, and today TypePad is much more than the blogging service that just celebrated its fifth anniversary, it is a service for all bloggers.

This evolution and openness isn't just limited to our technology or products — our advertising program now has more than a thousand participating bloggers, and many of them use platforms other than Movable Type or TypePad. Our Blogs.com community shows "The Best of Blogs" and many of the sites featured run on platforms that aren't made by Six Apart. Even our community marketing team (which we're calling our "Genius" group right now) has a mandate to support bloggers directly, helping anyone in the community regardless of platform.

There's plenty more coming, but please try our swanky new profiles and comments today on your TypePad blog or elsewhere via TypePad Connect! Let us know what you think and what else TypePad can do to make your blog even more successful. You can learn more about TypePad Connect, comments and profiles at http://www.typepad.com/connect/ or about using these features with your TypePad blog.

Inventor of the Wiki Responds to Google Search Wiki

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 01:27:41 GMT

Google put on a full court media push tonight for a major change the company is making to its search experience. According to the Official Google Blog and a very unusual email the company sent out to press, a new feature called Google Search Wiki will launch soon.

We're not seeing it yet, but read on for an explanation of what the feature will do and a reaction to the announcement from Ward Cunningham, the man who invented the wiki.

Sponsor

The feature will allow logged-in users to change the order of search results and mark up search results pages with notes. Only their own results will be changed - unless they click a link to view all Search Wiki notes on a search's page. Very few details are out yet, nothing regarding vandalism, libel, history, messiness, collaboration or other wiki matters. Those are pretty important concerns given that this could become the biggest and most important wiki in the world.

This isn't Google Labs, this isn't a little project off to the side, apparently there's a Google Search Wiki team and they have access to the primary search results page. We expect this to be a very big deal.

Reaction from the Inventor of the Wiki

We asked Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki, what he thought about Google Search Wiki. This was his first reaction.

I think it looks pretty sharp. It's simple and powerful - it will respond well to scale. I'm surprised that they called it a wiki. When I heard they wouldn't call a wiki a wiki [Jotspot was renamed Google Sites -ed.], then I decided I wouldn't call my searches Googles. Now that they are calling a wiki a wiki, I guess I'll call my searches Googles again....or should I call them wikis?

I can't tell if they have a wiki there or not, it might just be a forum. Collectively editing thoughts is what leads to the unique wiki behavior and I didn't see that demonstrated in the video.

They are going to get a lot of data. They obviously have the ability to wield information, let's just hope that we will all benefit. I don't think it's obvious that we all will benefit - but I guess I have enough trust in the behavior of a large number of people.

Photo of Cunningham by Joi Ito

Discuss

Announcing Appopedia, a Directory of Enterprise 2.0 Application Reviews

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:53:16 GMT

The AppGap bloggers are excited to announce the launch of a new section of reviews - The AppGap: Appopedia.? The section brings together the growing number of enterprise 2.0 reviews (nearly 150 to date) that my AppGap colleagues and I have written. It has been fun interviewing vendor spokespeople, seeing demonstrations, and learning about all [...]

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Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:35:36 GMT

Take a Bow ....... By Rihanna.
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iStylr

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 08:16:33 GMT

Online CSS Template Generator
iStylr is an online application that enables you to easily create, edit and share tableless CSS designs online. It lets you im - and export almost any website and allows you to create themes on the basis of other people's designs.

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Mocklinkr

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 08:16:33 GMT

Your Mockups Hosted, Interactive and Feedback-driven
Upload your mockups to central location, give your clients on URL to view and review all of the mockups for their project.

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Are Our Technologies at War with Each Other?

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 08:16:30 GMT

Zamfir 2.0: The Enigmatic Appeal of Ocarina

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:33:57 GMT

Thanks Twilio, No One Is Safe From The RickRoll Now

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:33:55 GMT

Links for 2008-11-16 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 06:00:00 GMT

The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla - Dick Cavett Blog
My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska?s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.
The Moose Stops Here
Though the exciting Obama-McCain race is over, the cockfight among the losers has only just begun. The conservative crackup may be ugly, but as entertainment, it?s two thumbs up!

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Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:35:36 GMT

I Kissed a Girl ....... By Katy Perry.
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Links for 2008-11-12 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 06:00:00 GMT

42 Information Packed Twitter Backgrounds
including mine

I Can Haz TCG IF-MAP Support In Your Security Product, Please...

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 12:33:47 GMT

In my previous post titled "Cloud Computing: Invented By Criminals, Secured By ???" I described the need for a new security model, methodology and set of technologies in the virtualized and cloud computing realms built to deal with the dynamic and distributed nature of evolving computing:This basically means that we should distribute the sampling, detection and prevention functions across the entire networked ecosystem, not just to dedicated security appliances; each of the end nodes should communicate using a standard signaling and telemetry protocol so that common threat, vulnerability and effective disposition can be communicated up and downstream to one another and one or more management facilities.Greg Ness from Infoblox reminded me in the comments of that post of something I was very excited about when it became news at InterOp this last April: the Trusted Computing Group's (TCG) extension to the Trusted Network Connect (TNC) architecture called IF-MAP.IF-MAP is a standardized real-time publish/subscribe/search mechanism which utilizies a client/server, XML-based SOAP protocol to provide information about network security objects and events including their state and activity:IF-MAP extends the TNC architecture to support standardized, dynamic data interchange among a wide variety of networking and security components, enabling customers to implement multi-vendor systems that provide coordinated defense-in-depth. ?Today?s security systems ? such as firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, endpoint security systems, data leak protection systems, etc. ? operate as ?silos? with little or no ability to ?see? what other systems are seeing or to share their understanding of network and device behavior.? This limits their ability to support coordinated defense-in-depth.? In addition, current NAC solutions are focused mainly on controlling network access, and lack the ability to respond in real-time to post-admission changes in security posture or to provide visibility and access control enforcement for unmanaged endpoints.? By extending TNC with IF-MAP, the TCG is providing a standard-based means to address these issues and thereby enable more powerful, flexible, open network security systems.While the TNC was initially designed to support NAC solutions, extending the capabilities to any security product to subscribe to a common telemetry and information exchange/integration protocol is a fantastic idea.I'm really interested in how many vendors outside of the NAC space are including IF-MAP in their roadmaps. While IF-MAP has potential in convential non-virtualized infrastructure, I see a tremendous need for it in our move to Infrastructure 2.0 with virtualization and Cloud Computing.? Integrating, for example, IF-MAP with VM-Introspection capabilities (in VMsafe, XenAccess, etc.) would be fantastic as you could tie the control planes of the hypervisors, management infrastructure, and provisioning/governance engines with that of security and compliance in near-time.You can read more about the TCG's TNC IF-MAP specification here./Hoff?

My Apple Holiday Wish

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 01:03:34 GMT

I've been searching for a personal backup solution that doesn't suck for, well, pretty much since I got my first computer in the 80's, and I'm still looking.

A few years ago I was cleaning out old crap and ran across boxes and boxes of 800kb floppies labeled "1988 backup disk x." The trash / recycling picker uppers got those along with a pile of zip disks, various CD's, DVD's, a USB drive or two, and a couple of bare SATA drives that I was too cheap to buy housings for. Oh, and there was even a pile of tapes in some long forgotten format in there.

After a few years of manually copying stuff to multiple USB drives, last year I was completely seduced by the "it's like RAID but you don't need identical drives" beauty of the Drobo. Three failures later (including one with smoke), a nasty virtual tinnitus that comes and goes as its disks transition through a perfect cabinet-resonating frequency, incompatibility problems with Time Machine and Airport Extreme, and access speeds that are too slow to serve Final Cut, and screw it. Now it mostly just sits there powered down making a Drobo-shaped dust-free spot on my desk. It's too buzzy to listen to but too expensive to Freecycle.

Next up, Time Capsule. Still (even more) useless for Final Cut and that sort of thing, but it's doing an ok job with backups - at least of the straight Time Machine variety. There are still a few issues though...

First off, I don't really trust that single spinning platter. It will die some day. Plus, it's in my house about ten feet from where my laptop is usually parked so my eggs are all in a single fire / theft / flood basket.

Apple's Mobile Me and the Backup program that comes with it theoretically provide a solution to this issue, but unfortunately it sucks. It's slow, much slower than a local time capsule backup because it is relying on an Internet connection. Also, it effectively requires my machine to be running all the time so that it can conduct it's backups in the middle of the night when I won't be competing for bandwidth or CPU cycles.

Even worse, it fails all the time. I don't know why, but it's finicky. A brief connectivity hiccup (or whatever) and I wake up the next day to find that my multi-hour backup died. Finally, It's too small to be useful for more than a few key critical files. I have a few hundred gigabytes of data I'd like to secure and my mobile me account is limited to twenty.

So Apple, I don't usually resort to begging, but here's your chance to fix backup for me once and for all. Just update the firmware in my Time Capsule so that my fast Wi-Fi-based local backups can be incrementally streamed to either an expanded Mobile Me account or to a separate S3 account (or whatever) whenever it's sitting at home with my network connection to itself.

I can't leave my laptop connected for the days it would take to stream all those hundreds of Gig, but Time Capsule is just sitting there with my Internet connection doing nothing while I'm at work anyway, so give it something to do. This way I'll have the best of both worlds, fast reasonably secure backups to my local Wi-Fi connected Time Capsule when I'm home and don't-need-to-think-about-it remote storage that can take its time when I'm not. At the risk of way over reaching, it could even work in both directions so that if I'm on the road for an extended period, Time Machine could backup critical changes directly to Mobile Me which could then in turn incrementally stream that back to my Time Capsule.

Ok, that's it. A simple idea I think. Can I have it by Christmas?

By the way, if the thought of all those gigabytes in your Mobile Me data centers makes you blanche (and the idea of using S3 is anathema to Apple's do it all culture), how about a Time Capsule-based distributed hash overlay network? If every Time Capsule shipped with the option of turning on a separate partition representing about 1/3 of the disk, you could put a Planet Lab-like distributed file system in there. My files would be split into chunks, encrypted, and distributed around to other people's Time Capsules while some of their stuff was on mine. Sort of an inverted Bit Torrent for backups, no data center required.

That would be cool but I know you won't do it. And, from the category of "things you are even less likely to do," if you opened up the Time Capsule firmware to third parties someone else probably would.

Where Does that Leave the Organization?

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 01:03:33 GMT

It is no secret that the world of business is changing. Even prior to the Sub-Prime debacle, the world of business was going though some dramatic changes. I heard on the news that 80% of new jobs come from small business and roughly 70% of the workforce in now employed in small businesses. If you add in the unemployed (6.7% - 11%, depending on how you measure it) and government workers, that doesn't leave you much room for those of us working in large organizations. And, seeing what is happening to the Airlines and Auto companies, one has to wonder about the future of organized employment. So what?s changing? Clearly, the mechanism of production has moved away from the large organization. We see this in the enormous amounts of outsourcing and specialty firms. With Web 2.0, we see the means of production moving to the individual as describe in the book "Free Agent Nation". Whether its architecture work (Slim Devices), design work (Threadless T-Shirts), production work (iStockPhoto), or information management (Wikipedia), the crowd is an emerging force of business. With the advent of FedEx, Amazon, eBay and the Internet, the means of distribution has moved to the hands of the individual. The distinction between producer and consumer isn't as clear as it was a few years. In fact, one can argue the distinction between employee, customer, client, share holder, and consultant has blurred as well. If someone approaches me in the grocery store and ask who do you work for then I am an employee. I am a sales person when I suggest someone try U-Verse or saving money by bundling services. I am a shareholder when I demand efficiency and transparency from the leadership and I am consultant when I bring my experience to the table.

How Open Source Comments (by Programming Language)

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 01:22:12 GMT

We recently looked at the commenting practice of active working open source projects. It is quite impressive: The average comment density of open source is around 19%. (Comment density = comment lines / (comment lines + source code lines)). That is much more documentation than most people thought! However, such a rough number needs discussion. Here, [...]