Not So Relevant

The End

Carsten Pötter — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 18:14:36 +0000

I will keep this short: For the time being, this will be the last post on Not So Relevant. There are various reasons for stopping this blog. Over the last couple of weeks I tried to write them down several times but it did sound stupid each time.

So thanks a lot for stopping by, reading the articles - maybe you even found some useful information -, and some of you were even adventurous enough to subscribe to the feed. Much appreciated! The domain is paid for the next four years already, if I remember correctly, so the articles will still be up on the net for quite some time.

Bye.

P.S. Spread OpenID needs a new editor!

Spread OpenID Launched Today

My Comments, Your Comments

Carsten Pötter — Tue, 27 May 2008 22:12:08 +0000

Everyone loves social media services and everyone loves data portability. Or at least, it seems so. My feed reader is chock full of articles on those topics (well, that simply means I read the wrong blogs or at least I have a very narrow view on what’s going on in technology these days, right?). The latest darlings of the early adopters and social media evangelists are FriendFeed and Disqus.

Fragmented Comments

If you don’t know already, FriendFeed is not only a lifestreaming service but users can comment on friends’ blog posts, Flickr photos, and other shared items in their lifestream. There is also a WordPress plugin available which shows comments from FriendFeed to the related posts on your blog. Disqus is a blog commenting system which aggregates all comments made by one user in a single place. While blog owners can run Disqus on their own blogs, comments are not part of the blog system, e.g. WordPress or Movable Type, anymore. So both systems allow people to comment on blog articles while the discussion doesn’t necessarily has to take place on the respected blogs.

So essentially comments can be spread over various and often disparate networks and services. Blog posts can be digged, stumbled upon, and mixxed. Other blog authors can send pingbacks and trackbacks and all those systems offer the opportunity to leave comments. If this happens to you as a blog author you have problems keeping track of the discussion which originated from your blog.

Who Owns the Comments?

So how does this relate to data portability? Well, over the last few days a discussion has emerged about who actually owns comments. If you comment on my blog, do I own the comment or do you own it? It’s my blog, but your ideas, thoughts, and words. Currently I am free to edit or even delete comments. And if I decide to delete an article all comments made on the article will be deleted as well. And if I discontinue the blog all comments will also disappear.

So are FriendFeed, Disqus and similar services a solution to preserve comments? Should they be portable from my blog to any system and service that can make use of them? My first thought was “Sure, I write the comment, I own it”. I still think it should be that way but does it make sense? Are comments worth anything if the original post is deleted? Hardly. Who could ever understand what you were referring to? Also if every commenter could edit or delete their comments at will (because they own them) conversations could become pointless. Commenter B refers to commenter A, but later commenter A deletes their comment. Bye, bye discussion.

While I am an advocate of data portability, the question of ownership of comments shows that not everything we wish and hope for will really work in reality. I really like FriendFeed a lot (more than I initially thought I would) and haven’t made a final decison on Disqus yet. Also I don’t have any problems if comments appear on various services but I don’t think it makes sense that comments are owned by commenters.

What’s your stance on this? Do you know any other scenarios where data portability doesn’t make sense?

New Look

Carsten Pötter — Mon, 26 May 2008 06:44:57 +0000

Eventually I updated my WordPress installation over the weekend. I am always hesitant updating it because I usually do something stupid and it ends in a mess. Yeah right, I’m an expert in technology. But it was about time for the update. I was still running version 2.1.2 and the growing number of reports about WordPress blogs being hacked made me quite nervous, to say the least. However, in the end updating was a breeze.

People visiting the blog will notice a new theme (the old one is not compatible with WordPress 2.5.1). It’s very clean and the sidebar is clearly separated from the content. I made some minor changes to it like adding xFolk, hAtom, and hCard microformats to the loop and changing colors of headings and links. It’s also possible to comment with OpenID now. So if you have one, use it please. OpenID comments are whitelisted - until spammers use it, of course.

Unfortunately special characters like German umlauts got messed up but I only corrected them on the last few articles. If you notice any other glitches, please report them. Thanks!

No Competition in the German Tech Blogosphere Anymore

Carsten Pötter — Sun, 25 May 2008 17:04:58 +0000

Since last week there is one less excellent German tech blog to read: Martin Weigert of zweinull.cc is writing for netzwertig.com now and is quitting his own blog. zweinull.cc was one of the very few serious tech blogs in this country which was started only 14 months ago and quickly gained popularity and acceptance among the more tech savvy crowd. It’s probably fair to describe it as a German Read/Write Web, i.e. tech news without copying press releases and a healthy dose of opinion. It was certainly a must read blog and will be missed.

Some people might argue that Martin is writing for another blog - netzwertig.com - now and nothing will change. That’s good, isn’t it? Well, I am not sure. netzwertig.com just launched one month ago. It belongs to Swiss blog network Blogwerk and is run by Andreas Göldi, Marcel Weiß, and Markus Spath. The three guys are well-known in the German speaking blogosphere because of their own blogs. They are certainly three respected voices. Andreas Göldi ran Beobachtungen zur Medienkonvergenz, writing about the convergence of media and (internet) technology. His blog was also part of Blogwerk. Marcel Weiß is still running neunetz.com, a blog similar to zweinull.de but with stronger opinion. While the aforementioned guys are probably fairly unknown to readers abroad, Markus Spath should also be known in the English speaking blogosphere. Besides running his own blogs live.hackr and Museum of Modern Betas, he was also writing for the German edition of Blognation.

Now Martin is joining them and suddenly netzwertig.com is THE tech blog here. While some smaller blogs cover similar topics - Thomas Frütel’s Webmaster Blog comes to mind - there is no real competition to it anymore. Marcel has reduced his posting frequence on neunetz.com already and Markus’ blogs are focused slightly different. Don’t get me wrong (it’s my week of negativity anyway), I like netzwertig.com a lot so far but I am wondering if it’s really healthy for the blogosphere here. It will be more difficult for smaller blogs to gain similar acceptance because netzwertig.com has all the attention and admittedly the competence.

This Week’s Bookmarks

Carsten Pötter — Sun, 25 May 2008 06:59:42 +0000

A quick summary of some sites and articles I have enjoyed reading this week.

The OpenID mobile experience, part II | FactoryCity

Great suggestions on how OpenID authentication could work for mobile sites. Also worth reading is the comment by Allen Tom.

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Some Thoughts on Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect and MySpace Data Availability

Dare Obasanjo on data portability and social networking interoperability

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

Good Laugh This Morning

Carsten Pötter — Sat, 24 May 2008 06:59:44 +0000

Allen Stern on Center Networks:

Ancient civilizations used the sun to determine what time it is, Apple fanboys use their iPhone. Me, I use Twitter to tell what time it is! That’s right, with their daily outages from nearly exactly 6-7pm Eastern, if it’s down and the sun is up, it’s 6pm.

Apple’s Next Products

No Clue on Technology

Carsten Pötter — Fri, 23 May 2008 17:52:48 +0000

Anyone who has been reading this blog for a while now knows that one of the main topics here is OpenID. Actually it has become a focal point of the blog. I got interested in identity management and OpenID when doing a vanity search on Google almost two years ago. Realizing that there was more than one Carsten Pötter listed in search engine results and that I don’t want to be associated with at least some of them - you don’t want to see your name on an anti-Semitic site, do you? - I tried to aggregate online profiles in one place, building a brand. Also blogging certainly helped being listed more prominently in search results later. One of the first tools I used for aggregation was ClaimID and from there it’s just a small step to OpenID. I was hooked.

OpenID was emerging back then. It was and still is interesting to watch developments being made, see it grow, and gain momentum. I think I have learned a few things about the technology, though I am not a developer. I can’t code and while I am subscribed to the OpenID mailing list, some discussions there are over my head. I don’t have the background to follow them and simply don’t have enough time to gain some deeper knowledge. The only contribution to OpenID I can offer is an end user perspective, blogging and talking about it.

However some people have the false impression I was some kind of expert. That happened more than once already. I am certainly no expert. I am not even sure if everything I write about OpenID is technically correct. But I think information (especially) on new technologies has to be correct. How can people be convinced to adopt a technology if they can’t be sure the information given to them is correct? I can’t offer this guarantee.

So does it still make sense to write about OpenID (the same applies for other technologies like microformats as well)? Currently I am undecided. Today I have seen a post on Mashable associating FriendFeed with the semantic web. It’s nonsense, of course. But am I immune to such articles? I guess, not.

Maybe this is the most stupid article ever written on a blog but I will probably maintain a low profile on OpenID for a couple of weeks. In two weeks there will be a barcamp on identity in Bremen. I registered for it already but I won’t go, I guess. It doesn’t make much sense.

Sharing Your Favorite Articles

Carsten Pötter — Thu, 22 May 2008 10:39:20 +0000

If you have an account on FriendFeed and follow a few people there you could easily get the impression that Google Reader was a must have tool for early adopters and geeks. Its sharing feature - made popular by Robert “I reported first on the China earthquake” Scoble - is used intensely by users. I even know people who chose Google Reader as their favorite feed reader only because of that feature. Maybe they think it’s the only feed reader offering shared items. Well, tools like RSSMeme and ReadBurner as well as lifestreaming applications like Plaxo Pulse and MyBlogLog that support Google Reader out-of-the-box make people certainly think that way. However other feed readers also support sharing of items. I know and work(ed) with Bloglines, Google Reader, and FeedDemon. So let’s see how sharing items works with those readers.

Web based feed reader Bloglines is providing a really easy and intuitive way to share items. First, make sure to make your shared articles - your Bloglines blog - publicly available and give it a more original name than I have for this example.

So next time you see an interesting article in Bloglines just click the Clip/Blog This button at the end of the article and it will be displayed on your fancy Bloglines blog.

It looks really good, doesn’t it? Unfortunately only the headlines of articles are shown, though. Of course, there is also a RSS feed available for it.

I guess, most of you are familiar with Google Reader by now. Sharing articles is as simple as in Bloglines and just like in Bloglines you just have to click the Share or Share with note button below articles. Besides providing a RSS feed Google Reader also provides a well designed page for your shared articles.

I don’t have to write much about FeedDemon’s sharing features because I have covered that in a separate article earlier this month already. Unlike Bloglines and Google Reader there is no separate page available to display articles to non-feed subscribers. I am not really sure if that’s a disadvantage because most people will consume shared items by subscribing to the feed, I guess.

FeedDemon has a feature both Bloglines and Google Reader lack: You don’t have to be a subscriber to a feed to share an article. Simply drag the link from the location bar of your browser to the shared clippings folder in FeedDemon and you’re done. Great feature!

Conclusion

All three feed readers provide great features to share articles. If you want an extra page to display articles to readers, Bloglines and Google Reader are your readers of choice. If you don’t need that FeedDemon is probably the better choice because you can also share articles from blogs and sites you’re not subscribed to.

Other feed readers probably provide similar features. If you know some leave a comment, please.

This Week’s Bookmarks

Carsten Pötter — Sun, 18 May 2008 06:59:33 +0000

A quick summary of some sites and articles I have enjoyed reading this week.

Washingtonpost.com wants identities of readers who post comments | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

‘But this isn’t a solution. Brady believes that in the next five years people will be required to identify themselves in some way at many sites. “I don’t know whether we do it with a credit card number, a driver’s license or passport, but I think making people responsible would raise the level of discourse.”‘

25 reasons you should use Disqus - Digging in a Habari sandpit

Disqus looks quite interesting. Maybe I should try it as well.

Thoughts on DataPortability | FactoryCity

Chris Messina’s thoughts on the DataPortability group, the stack of technologies associated with it, and much more. Long but worth reading.

DiSo Project Figures Messina and Norris Join Vidoop - ReadWriteWeb

“Chris Messina and Will Norris, two leading community figures working on distributed social networking, identity and data portability, are joining the staff of OpenID provider Vidoop, the company will announce soon. Messina and Norris have been working on a project called DiSo, an umbrella group working to bring open source distributed social networking technologies to market. They will continue the same work, now as a part of Vidoop. The company provides user login functionality to both consumer and enterprise web publishers, using an innovative system based on image recognition to replace passwords.”

Scott Kveton · Solutions: more than technology

“One of the most interesting projects to me as of late has been DiSo. DiSo is short for Distributed Social Networking and is the work of several developers working out in the open, developing real solutions for real users. The mantra of the DiSo team has been one that I can relate to coming from the open source world; lead with code. This touches me right where my Open Source roots come from and I love it.”

Identity, OpenID and ‘Cognitive Load’ - Own Your Identity

“If we really want to see OpenID adoption take off, we should look less at throwing up a multiplicity of buttons to ease the flow and look more at how we can build the links between authentication, brand and communications.”

Demand OpenID!

Which sites should support OpenID? Vote for them.

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

New Music

Carsten Pötter — Thu, 15 May 2008 23:53:59 +0000

Shook Magazine

Back from the office I was pleasantly surprised finding the second edition of Shook magazine in my mailbox. It’s a London based music magazine covering a wide range of topics, basically urban and black music. It has it all, from a short feature on Dutch d&b and dubstep producer Martyn to a long piece on Erykah Badu’s new album. The guys are even praising Angelo Badalamenti. Haven’t read the whole magazine yet, but it’s worth every penny so far. Get it. [via New Urban Music Blog]

New CDs

Also some new CDs arrived today. Well, actually they are not really new but some indie and post punk gems dating back from 1992 to 2006.

Drive Like Jehu - s/t
Jawbox - My Scrapbook of Fatal Accidents
June of 44 - Four Great Points
Les Savy Fav - The Cat and the Cobra
Hot Snakes - Audit in Progress
These Arms Are Snakes - Easter

Completely different to the content of Shook but equally enjoyable.