February 25, 2007

OpenID and Trust

Simon Willison wrote up six cool things you can build with OpenID and reiterated some of his very good ideas about a simple trust network.

A site-to-site trust network should use degrees of trust rather than simply asserting membership in a "white" or "black" list. Perhaps a set of common violations of trust - from spamming to griefing - and common traits of a trustworthy user - from contributing to helping new members - could be agreed-upon. Individual web sites would then publish data about any violations made by OpenID users.

It would be up to violation aggregators to determine if each user's behavior represents an isolated incident or an ongoing pattern. Sites would also be accumulating a reputation of their own for trustworthy reporting.

Eventually, though, I believe that all of this IDing and trusting is going to evolve into a reputation-based currency :)

February 21, 2007

Antibodies Against Bemes

Tom Hayes has unleashed a truly nasty meta-meme, a self-serving and nonsensical misappropriation of the meme concept.

The only thing left to do is to make fun of him.

It isn't difficult, either, for Mr. Hayes has supplied us with plenty of useful flotsam. After all, who would write that a meme is "linear" and "moves in a jet stream" (as opposed to a "splatter pattern"), that a meme is unmotivated and accidental in nature? And what of this implication that memes are low energy, undersexed even? Anyone with a meme in a jar on their desk knows that a meme is ready to go absolutely wild - nonlinear even - the moment they let it out.

Only the silliest of marketing people would write this sort of slander against a noble and widely respected concept, then turn around and attribute all of the internet phenomena - from limecat to numa numa - to a re-branded term of his own invention.

While giving Mr. Hayes credit for brilliant hucksterism is in order, this beme enterprise is a dangerous sort of circular logic and must be stopped. I call upon lowly and elite beamerz alike to please start making fun of Tom Hayes.

February 8, 2007

Pipes

Yahoo just blew my mind... with Pipes.

This web app applies the Quartz Composer UI gestalt to the problem of combining feeds and filters usefully. The initial data sources include Yahoo Search, flickr photos, RSS URLs, and even Google Base.

In a couple of minutes, I was able to pipe articles from We Make Money Not Art and Machine Project rss feeds to a replace function, generating a vaguely random we make flickr photo feed.

I also made a very foolish way to seek alpha through flickr.