Chris Messina writes about the social web, open standards, startups, and his work on early Twitter hashtags and OpenID.
HN links his proposal for Twitter tag channels as the origin of hashtags, plus posts on Ma.gnolia, Flock, and Vidoop.
Disclaimer: I know some of the BritRuby organisers personally. I haven't spoken to them in months though, so I think I can say all this without fear of being branded either an "insider" or too biased.
I have been one of the most vocal critics of gender and racial bias in the programming community in the UK in the last few years. I have wrung my hands at the misogyny, the "jokes", the lack of diversity and I have spoken to as many people as I could about "what we can do to fix this".
BritRuby did not - and would not - fall into this category had it proceeded with its planned line-up. There was no evidence of racial or gender bias in the line-up, because the line-up reflected the community.
Are there too many fat white guys in the community? Speaking as one, yes. But conferences aren't how we fix that.
To explain why that's a legitimate call, we need to look at a bit of history. First, let's go back to one of the most vocal pieces of hand-wringing - almost a milepost for critics of gender and racial diversity in conference line-ups - Chris Messina's arguments about the 2006 FOWA line-up: http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2006/09/15/the-future-of-white-boy-clubs/
This piece was so controversial and so widely read at the time, that when I talked about "the fat white boy club problem" for several years later, many knew what I was talking about. As a fat white boy myself, I realised there was a germ of truth in this, but I felt Messina had tackled the problem in the wrong way.
The…
My programming (development) resources include sources that are as much a evolution of the Internet itself. There's news:, pre Web, then web 1/1.5 and finally web2.0.
You may notice the sites are not always exclusively about "programming". Why? Well I find that a lot of the best stuff occurs at the edges of programming/development in lots of different areas. This wide scanning of sources is an attempt to avoid the narrow focus of any one "technology" and to see how "stuff" is being applied. Ultimately I'm just as interested in building stuff than just merely playing with cogs & gears. The cross-over of technology and technique is at the edges. Exactly where new stuff & ideas emerge.
a) Newsgroups
The real source of Internet news, plain-old news-groups. Rowdy, without pictures but the source of infinite detail. I don't scan them as much in news-mode but still flick through them:
- news:comp.lang.* (perl python core language)
- news:comp.unix.admin
- news:lucky.openbsd.misc (obsd chatter)
- news:linux.kernel
- news:rec.games.programmer (where all the good programming used to be discussed)
- http://groups.google.com/group/webpy
- http://groups.google.com/group/django-users
b) Web1/1.5: sites & blogs
Every day I log onto these sites & scan them.
- http://scripting.com
- http://radar.oreilly.com
- hackernews via my summary http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/hackerid/
- http://techmeme.com (broad brush)
Then if I get bored I go and take a look at the…
This sounds a lot like what Vidoop tried to do. Their initial idea was to replace passwords with an authentication mechanism based on selecting a number of pictures that fit into user-chosen categories. A person would select 3-5 images from a grid of 12 with each image belonging to a distinct category. Those who picked the images, in the correct order, corresponding to their chosen categories (selected on sign up to the service) along with their username was deemed authenticated. As far as I know they hoped to make money by selling ads within the categories, so if one of the categories displayed was "pets" you might see ads for petfood for example. They moved into doing captchas at some point too.
Anyway, it seemed like a promising idea, but they folded last year. Good write up from a former employee here: http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2009/06/05/the-fall-of-vidoop/
The reliably thoughtful Chris Messina just posted on the benefits and costs of OpenID, partly in response to a decision by linkmarking site http://Ma.gnolia.com to stop accepting traditional address and password registrations in favor of OpenID only. http://FactoryJoe.com/blog/2008/03/30/magnolia-moves-to-openid-only-sign-ups/
In the cat and mouse game between site owners and spammers, data on recent Ma.gnolia registrations showed an overwhelming number of spammers have begun using automated tools to proxy Captcha and create traditional address and password logins. For now, OpenID encumbers them by requiring presumably more valuable credentials.
As well there are a good deal of precidence of Apple doing this:
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/Konfabulator_Inventors_Not_Flattered_by_Apple_Rip-off/
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2006/08/08/apples-research-rip-off-department/
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/01/apple-tablet-ebook/
http://gizmodo.com/5046463/apple-admits-british-man-invented-ipod-in-1979-uses-him-to-win-patent-lawsuit
The amount of links are intended to provide evidence of what I'm talking about — and yes, there's a lot of them.
The only link that I think adds an additional structuring of my overall point about the web and the iPhone is a post I wrote in 2007:
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2007/10/17/did-the-web-fail-the-iphone/
You can skip the rest if you've been paying attention.