Blogging Roller

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?.

Crammed into one post...

After a month of blog neglect, my automatic Latest Links from my Delicious.com account started to pile up. Back in the glory days of this blog, I blogged about things instead just saving links or tweeting about them. I realized that, by adding some commentary/opinion for each, I could turn a month's worth of links into a month's worth of blog posts and thus gain total absolution for my sin of going a full month without a post. So that's what I did.  [Read More]

<img src="http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/resource/oneswayrel.png" title="oneway rel cartoon" align="right" alt="oneway" /> We want Project SocialSite to have a Flexible Relationship model that a site operator can tweak to suit the unique requirements of the site's community. We've settled on a model based on relationship types and named levels. In this post, I'll review this new model that we have designed. [Read More]

Next year there will be two CommunityOne events in the US of A; one in New York City on March 18 and the other, coinciding with JavaOne week in June 1 in San Francisco. Here's the call for papers link. The call closes on December 11.

via <a href= "http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/entry/jspwiki_and_xwiki_evaluations">Jim Grisanzio: Chris Phelan has done evaluations of <a href= "http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=64619&tstart=0">JSPWiki and XWiki for use on the OpenSolaris.org site. Based on his 32 requirements, XWiki came out on top.

On balance, XWiki wins by virtue of having better support for management, searching, page taxonomies, virtual servers, content export and language translation/localization support.

JSPWiki has slightly better support for identifying orphaned pages and accesskey support (XWiki 1.4 will have support for access keys).

Confluence was not considered because requirement #0 is "the software must be free and open source," which seems like a reasonable request when selecting software for an open source community site.

As promised, here's some more information about the talk I and my co-speaker Jamey Wood are giving tomorrow at CommunityOne (2:35 PM in Moscone Hall E 135).

Below is the official title and blurb.

Perhaps a better title would have been, "make your webapps social with Project SocialSite" but we didn't have permission to talk about our project until very recently. Now, we're ready to talk about the Project SocialSite widgets and web services and how you can use them to add Social Networking features to your existing Java, PHP and Ruby webapps. We're not ready to talk about product plans, features or schedules but we are ready to demonstrate our work in Netbeans, MediaWiki, Portal, Roller and possibly some other apps as the JavaOne week progresses.

Here are the slides: socialsite-j1-2008.pdf (1MB PDF file)

And here's an outline of the talk:

Look for Project SocialSite in the CommunityOne demo area and at the Sun booth in the JavaOne pavillion all week.

Fred Stutzman: Most of us are not internet celebrities, but the social software we use assumes we are (or want to be). It's time to rethink this, to build closets and spaces for whispering into social software.

As usual, great insights from Fred. Read the whole thing.

Here's a concept that I've been using to help me both in my blog writing and to filter all the incoming feeds, tweets, photo sharing and social bookmarking items that come in via my feed reader: my A list. It's not made up of famous folks and big blog names like Scoble or Winer or Arrington. My A list is made up of people that I know or work with and that I believe are following me in some way, reading my blog, subscribing to my tweets or working with me on a project. I've got a folder in my feed reader and my A list is always the one I read first. Sometimes I don't get much farther than than before hitting the mark all read button. And when I do blog, that folder helps remind my of who I'm writing for. "A" stands for audience.

From the Graphing Social Patterns 2008 conference, a sweet OpenSocial presentation with a nice overview of the emerging standard, status of the Apache Shindig project, details of the Hi5 implementation, some cute pictures of my buddy Pat Chanezon's kids and some very fine art (I think Pat forgot to credit the artist).

I mentioned the Social Software for Glassfish (SSG) EA2 release before the winter break, but I never got around to posting any details. Since then some documentation has appeared, Manveen Kaur blogged it, The Aquarium too and now screen-cast master Arun Gupta has created an excellent Social Software for Glassfish screencast that walks you through the features in this very early access release. Now I don't have to say nearly as much.

First, some social software links.

• BuddyPress — Creating a Social Network based on Wordpress MU
  "There is talk of BuddyPress and DiSo essentially being the same thing. DiSo, from what I’ve read so far, is all about distributing your user-generated content first using Wordpress as the central tool. BuddyPress is more about turning Wordpress (MU in fact) itself into its own niche social network."
• Elgg: the open source social networking platform
  "Elgg is an open-source social networking platform. It offers blogging, networking, community, collecting of news using feeds aggregation and file sharing features. Everything can be shared among users with access controls and everything can be cataloged by tags as well"
• Cisco's Social Networking Strategy Comes Into Focus - ReadWriteWeb
  CISCO's Entertainment Operating System (EOS) is a "platform that will be used to deliver video and other multimedia content to online community properties" with "social networking and content recommendation"
• BadMagicNumber: Shipping software
  "Custom vertical social network, with feed integration" - based on Java, ROME and PostgreSQL
• The Blog Squad: your music. your friends. your life.
  "Social music network" with blogs powered by Roller
• IBM demos ‘On Demand Workplace’
  "Employees have their own profiles based on content and function. Personalization is also allowed via imported Google Gadgets and RSS feeds" with screen shots
• Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
  "The most-hyped site right now, Facebook, is the 'Iron Chef' of the Internet."
• Micro Persuasion: Reader Integrates Google's Stealth Social Net: The Address Book
  "Google Reader became the latest Google service to leverage the Gmail contact database and become more social."

And second, some feel-good PHP, Rails and Linux links.

• Michael Kimsal: Continued sad state of PHP development
  "with every release also comes fears of tiny, sometimes undocumented, changes that break existing code, and often for no solid reason"
• ZSFA -- Rails Is A Ghetto (2007-12-31)
  "If anyone had known Rails was that unstable they would have laughed in his face. Think about it further, this means that the creator of Rails in his flagship products could not keep them running for longer than 4 minutes on average."
• Linux defector says RHEL zero, Sun Solaris hero
  "Solaris ultimately has a lower acquisition cost because it includes features that users are likely to purchase separately in a Linux environment."

I'm supposed to be on vacation today and I'm doing my best, but I just wanted to point out that something interesting has quietly appeared in the Glassfish Update Center. Why so quiet? Well, it's an EA2 release and the emphasis is definitely on the E. I'll post some more details later, perhaps after winter break. I've still got shopping to do now and I'm supposed to be on vacation.

Interested? If you haven't done so already grab yourself a copy of the new Glassfish V2 UR1 release. Run the updatetool and install the latest EA2 release of Social Software for GlassFish.

See also: Something fishy.

Anne Zelenka, Gigaom: Could open-source blogging platform WordPress serve as your next social networking profile? Chris Messina, co-founder of Citizen Agency, thinks so. He’s started a project called DiSo, for distributed social networking, that aims to “build a social network with its skin inside out.” DiSo will first look to WordPress as its foundation.

This could be the next step towards the unified social graph that some technologists wish for. WordPress suits the purpose because it provides a person-centric way of coming online, offers an extensible architecture, and already has some features — such as an OpenID and a blogroll plugin — that can be pressed into social networking service. And its users represent exactly the sort of audience that might appreciate the permanent, relatively public identity that DiSo aims to offer.

Interesting. I think that blogs should be the corner-stone of social networking and I'd much rather have my blog be my social network profile rather than some page inside somebody else's container. Then again, as a blog server developer I'm pretty biased.

• snellspace.com: Sync!
  "Within the course of implementing several Atompub servers, the issue of “feed synchronization” has come up repeatedly"
• Paul Fremantle's Blog: A new kind of (SOA) Registry
  "as we looked at the REST space, we kept noticing how close the [AtomPub] is to our needs"


• OpenSocial - Berlin Web 2.0 Expo
  Google API evangelist Pat Chanezon's OpenSocial presentation
• opensocket - Run OpenSocial Gadgets in Facebook
  An OpenSocial container written as a Facebook application.
• Ruby on Rails: OpenSocial container plugin 0.0.1
  "This is a very early version, but it is under very active development "


• IBM's Carol Jones on Web 2.0 Research and Collaborative Software
  Redmonk video discussion of Lotus Connections, Dogear, internal/private vs. external bookmarking
• Wayne Horkan's weblog eclectic: Weblog language translator
  With Roller specific functionality. Based on JavaScript and Google translation API
• ZDNet.com: Social nets and identity fragmentation
  FaberNovel Consulting has mapped out some trends in social networking and digital identity"
• Postgres at Hi5: June 2007 user group preso
  How unique features of PostgreSQL helped Hi5 scale (PDF presentation)
• Scaling Java and PostgreSQL with Hyperic
  Another perspective on PostgreSQL scalability at Hi5 (PDF presentation)
• Skrentablog: Scaling Facebook, Hi5 with memcached
  "discussion of high volume [sites] using memcached as a critical scaling tool"

I'm always happy to see Roller used in new sites, projects and products. Here's an interesting new example that I've been meaning to blog for a while now. Phillip Rhodes is working on building what he calls OpenQabal a "social software operating system." The project integrates a set of social software applications, including Roller and JavaBB, via Single Sign-On (SSO), a common look-and-feel and Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC). He explains it all in an lengthy and informative blog post on the project's JRoller.com blog.

I'd never heard of SIOC before. Here's the executive summary:

Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities SIOC or is a framework aimed at connecting online community sites and internet-based discussions. Currently, online communities (boards, blogs, etc.) are like islands - they contain valuable information but are not well connected. SIOC allows us to interlink these sites, and enables the extraction of richer information from various discussion services.

Sounds like it could be pretty darn useful. But then again, I spent a little time exploring the list of SIOC enabled sites with the SIOC Firefox plugin and didn't really find any examples of interlinked communities or conversations. Am I missing something?

Apache member Brian McAllister, who works for Ning, has proposed a new project for Apache called Shindig. Here's an excerpt from the proposal:

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create social applications that use a social network's friends and update feeds. A social application, in this context, is an application run by a third party provider and embedded in a web page, or web application, which consumes services provided by the container and by the application host. This is very similar to Portal/Portlet technology, but is based on client-side compositing, rather than server. More information can be found about OpenSocial at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial.

Shindig is an implementation of an emerging set of APIs for client-side composited web applications. The Apache Software Foundation has proven to have developed a strong system and set of mores for building community-centric, open standards based systems with a wide variety of participants. A robust, community-developed implementation of these APIs will encourage compatibility between service providers, ensure an excellent implementation is available to everyone, and enable faster and easier application development for users.

. . .

Ning, Inc. intends to donate code based on their implementation of OpenSocial. The backend systems will be replaced with more generic equivalents in order to not bind the implementation to specifics of the Ning platform.

Brian is pretty excited about OpenSocial as a light-weight client-side alternative to Portal/Portlet technology, not just for social apps but for webapps of all kind. He'd like to see both Apache Roller and Apache JSPWIki (incubating) become OpenSocial containers, despite the fact that neither product stores the social graph of user/friend relationships. Blogs and wikis are already great platforms for web development, OpenSocial could make them even stronger. Very interesting stuff.

I hadn't planned on talking OpenSocial during my session tomorrow, but I might have to add a slide or two to illustrate the possibilities.

Some reading on Facebook and enterprise social software from my del.icio.us bookmarks collection:

• Tim Bray: The Intimate Internet
  Bray on Facebook: "Twitter hits that 80/20 point, bringing me that news without all the Facebook bullshit and lame groups and dorky apps and stupid ads and data lock-in. "
  
• Fred Stutzman: The Directionality of Social Network Platforms
  Stutzman on Facebook: "the ecosystem needs more than fluff, especially if we're going to start talking about the "social operating system."
• Phil Windley: What's wrong with Facebook
  Windley on Facebook: "social Webs will require similar attention to the structure that emerges from social activity, not nagging people about it";
• Doc Searls: Too much face(book) time
  Searls on Facebook: "If you're waiting for me to respond to a poke or an invitation, or a burp or any of that other stuff, don't hold your breath."
• Read/Write Web: Big Vendors Scrap for Enterprise 2.0 Supremacy
  "The [products] remain complex and broad in scope - which in many respects goes against the grain of simple and easy-to-use web 2.0 products."
• Personal InfoCloud: The State of Enterprise Social Software
  "Nearly all of the enterprise software product companies are claiming understanding of Web 2.0, but none execute well on it"

I'm back from ConvergeSouth 2007 now and caching up on email, blogs, etc. I enjoyed day two as much as day one. Here are my notes, quotes and paraphrased thoughts from two of my favorites sessions on Saturday, Social Networking and Corporate Wikis. [Read More]

I'm in Greensboro today, a couple of hours away from home, attending ConvergeSouth 2007 -- "the annual tech users' conference in Greensboro, North Carolina. A combination of a blogger-con and a creativity center." Here's a summary of notes and quotes I scribbled in my notebook on day #1. [Read More]

Local multi-media and social software whiz kid Brian Russell is hanging out his shingle as an consultant. Best of luck, Brian. If you're looking to grow an online community or upgrade your organization to Web 2.0, check out his resume and portfolio.