Blogging Roller

Wonderful WWW2010 keynote speech by Danah Boyd on privacy in social networks, social norms and the responsibilities of those developing the WWW.

Danah Boyd: As a community, WWW is the home of numerous standards bodies, Big Data scholars, and developers.  You have the technical and organizational chops to shape the future of code, the future of business, the direction law goes.  But you cannot just assume that social norms will magically disappear over night.  What you choose to build and how you choose to engage with Big Data matters.  What is possible is wide open, but so are the consequences of your decisions.  As you're engaging with these systems, I need you to remember what the data is that you're chewing on is.  Never forget that Big Data is soylent green. Big Data is made of people. People producing data in a context.  People producing data for a purpose.  Just because it's technically possible to do all sorts of things with that data doesn't mean that it won't have consequences for the people it's made of. And if you expose people in ways that cause harm, you will have to live with that on your conscience.

Privacy will never be encoded in zeros and ones.  It will always be a process that people are navigating.  Your challenge is to develop systems and do analyses that balance the complex ways in which people are negotiating these systems.  You are shaping the future. I challenge you to build the future you want to inhabit.

It's cool and just a little weird at the same time to see IBM's social/collab software offerings get some praise from Jeff Jarvis via the Howard Stern show and "Howard's geek guru, IBM's Jeff Schick."

Jeff Jarvis: Now as for Lotus: In their office, Jeff Schick and a colleague generously spent a few hours giving me a tour of what they can do. I’ll concede: It’s impressive. What impressed me is that IBM integrated the functions of the collaborative, social internet — email, Twitter, wikis, LinkedIn, Facebook, Facebook Connect, directories, blogs, calendars, Skype, bookmarks, tagging — in a way that I wish they would all interroperate: click on a name and get everything about them (contact, place, tags, bookmarks); pull together people in calls or calendars just by dragging them; see how people are sharing your documents; see how people are connected….

Only thing is, IBM had to essentially recreate the internet and all these functions to do that, both so they could integrate it all and so that it could operate behind corporate firewalls. We internet snobs make fun of that, but I understand why they do that. But as we talk about how our internet should operate — how open standards for identity, for example, should work — the irony is that we could look at the interlocked IBM platforms to see the promise of it. It’s closed, for a reason, but it shows what an open structure would look like if it operated on truly open standards. I wonder whether there’s an opportunity for IBM to offer these functions at a retail level.

...just noticed that Ed Brill has a post w/comments on this same topic: Have you been following the "why does Howard Stern use Notes" discussion?.

I haven't mentioned it yet here on my blog, but I've been working as the spec lead for the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) since January of this year.

I hope to blog about OSLC more later, but now I'm writing to tell you about a talk that I'll be doing with Rational Chief Architect John Wiegand at Innovate 2010 The Rational Software Conference in Early June. Here are the details:

Session: ALM-2210B: Open Services (OSLC) and Jazz: Working Together

When: Mon, 7/Jun, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Where: Dolphin - Northern Salon E4

Rational proposed the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) initiative at the Rational Software Conference in 2008 to make life better for software delivery teams by easing the way tools can be used in combination. Two years later, we are gratified to see an active and open community making this vision a reality. This presentation will explain the challenge of tool integration, how the OSLC community is addressing the challenge, and how Jazz builds atop OSLC to deliver an open lifecycle platform

For more information on OSLC, visit http://open-services.net

UPDATED: scheduled change - talk is now 3PM to 4PM.

Interested in attending Innovate 2010? You can register here.

I've been a Rockford regular for the last 5 years or so, dining with friends there every Wednesday night. Feels like the end of an era to me.

By Edward James,

The Raleigh Telegram

There was no sign on the front of the building to let people know there was even a bar located there and it’s a sure bet that many people new to Raleigh didn’t even know it was there.  Regular patrons just looked for the nondescript looking front door underneath the barber pole that led up to the Rockford.

Upstairs, bar patrons could hang out at the copper bar or eat one of the Rockford’s reasonably priced sandwiches, which were very popular at lunchtime.

The Rockford had a cult following almost among young Raleigh citizens, as evidenced by some of the notes posted on the front door.

Here's an camera-phone shot that I took from the bar one day in 2008:

Dave Koelmeyer offers a nice step-by-step guide to getting Roller up and running on OpenSolaris, Glassfish and MySQL.

Although WordPress undoubtedly has more bells and whistles, with themes and plug-ins galore, I find Roller quicker and less fussy in operation, with far more comprehensive documentation – and its scalability cannot be denied. This guide will enable you to install and run Apache Roller for the purposes of evaluation and tinkering.

We will be using OpenSolaris snv_134 x64, with Apache Roller 4.01, Glassfish v2.1, and MySQL 5.1.

Facebook's David Recordon lists the positive aspects of Facebook's recent Open Graph Protocol moves and says its good for the semantic web.

The Open Graph protocol increases the amount of semantic data on the web in a manner that isn't specific to Facebook or any single social network. While we can all disagree about where the quotes and angle-brackets should go, at the end of the day I think we all can agree that this sort of metadata is good for the web

ReadWriteWeb says Facebook's new Open Graph could be a breakthrough for the semantic web:

One of the most exciting parts of the Facebook announcement to me personally is the possible breakthrough in semanticizing the Web. We've written previously about the Semantic Web here, and it has been a personal passion of mine. What Facebook has done has a chance to make vast parts of the consumer Web including movies, books, music, events, sports, and news semantically tagged. Publishers and websites finally have a strong incentive to mark things up and get return traffic from Facebook.

Dare Obasanjo on the Open Graph protocol and the semantic web angle:

One of the things I find most exciting about this development is that sites now have significant motivation to be marked up with extremely structured data which can then be consumed by other applications. Having such rich descriptive metadata will be a boon to search engines especially those from startups since some of the big guys consider their ability to extract semantics out of HTML tag soup a competitive advantage and have thus fought the semantic web for years.

Nothing to argue with there. It makes me wonder, though, is Facebook really going to get behind semantic web tech and push things like RDF, SPARQL, etc. forward? Is Facebook really taking a semantic web or open linked data approach, or is this just tactical?

I'm not sure anybody would have noticed this but Just FYI... I'm doing some spring cleaning here at rollerweblogger.org and decided to remove a bunch of things that I no longer use including those below:

• JSPWiki at wiki - the old Roller wiki at /wiki, the new one is here
• SocialSite at /social - a demo install of Project SocialSite that I no longer use
• Planet Tool aggregation at /triangle - an aggregation of 50 or so Triangle area blogs
• Planet Tool aggregation at /rome - aggregation of Project ROME related feeds