Test post for Rory Cellan-Jones

Once again something cool and underground goes mainstream.

This is a guest post from esteemed presentations and speaking expert Olivia Mitchell.

People used to whisper to each other or pass hand-scribbled notes during presentations. Now these notes are going digital on Twitter or via conference-provided chat rooms.

Up until now, this back-channel has been mainly confined to the Internet industry and technology conferences. However, a survey of leadership conferences from Weber Shandwick shows that there is a significant increase in blogging and twittering at conferences.

How to Present While People are Twittering | Pistachio.

The backchannel is dead, long live whatever we will call it now. I questioned a friend the other day when he used the term "Official backchannel" and mentioned that the organisers of the conference had a projected display of the activity that was going on using a specific hashtag. I suppose the name could stick as I was never sure whether the use of the term in a social media sense was borrowing more from the diplomatic term (unofficial/underground communications) or the Psycholinguistics one (the use of a nod, 'yes' and 'uh-huh' to indicate that you are paying attention and the other person should continue to speak) but it seems now that the former use has been seized upon as useful and it has been brought into the mainstream (conferences are opening embassies in twitter, to continue with the analogy) which means that it can actively work as the latter.

As many of you will know I spent my Saturday in a concrete bunker in Bloomsbury at the Convention on modern liberty and blogged and twittered all day. While at some points we would all loved to have what we were saying to be communicated to the panels whether directly or mediated, at other times I am probably glad they couldn't see what I was saying in real time, mainly when I was insulting them. On balance the usefulness of this communication methodology being absorbed probably outweighs the disadvantage of having to refrain from suggesting someone is talking utter rubbish. I mean how cool would it have been for Henry Porter to be able to whisper in David Davis ear on Saturday that he had just misattributed Clarke's Third Law to Robert A. Heinlein.

A new web project

I started a new web project this weekend, I’m not going to say too much about what it is until I have done a bit more of it. What I will say is something about the challenge I have set myself this time around. I am going to build the site just using free online hosted tools. The site itself is not on a topic that makes this a particularly obvious choice, in fact it is on a non-web subject, it was just an idea that appealed to me, is relevant (in an oblique way) to my current role at work and above all is a new nut to crack. The site requires a certain amount of content management, also holds some date/time based data and a small smattering of geographical information.

First off was picking a platform, I looked at a couple of choices, wordpress for example got junked from the list mainly because people are looking into how to use it in interesting ways at work and I didn’t want to be tempted to just go ask them what they are doing. The next big pointer was the need to run a calendar, Google have a pretty good one which if allied with their mail app gives people an incredibly easy way to give you their data, just send you an invite. This and the fact that I already use blogger^[1] and have a grasp of its templating system, pretty much made it a shoe in to use Google stuff as the basis for the site. Another advantage is most of the tools involved have published APIs so if I do fail in my challenge and have to write some of the glue code I won’t have to throw everything away and start again.

The next task was looking at what was out there in terms of good quality mashup glue. The answer looking through the extensive library of gadgets available (the same one as for iGoogle) was that I could have 4 million different games of hangman but not a suitable way of presenting data from the Google calendar, for example. So I decided to look into the standard data display widgets and put in some appropriate layers of intelligence using yahoo pipes. which is roughly where I am now, creating data feed manipulations by playing Pipe Mania. It looks like these will be used for other things as well, such as generating some more interesting navigation than the standard blogger stuff.

Next will be adding a smattering of extra shiny, this will require looking into what is good in the way of available online hosted user interface libraries YUI will probably be the first one I look at but do you have any suggestions?

^[1]As readers of this blog may will have spotted.

The Internet is a pals' network

Not everyone on it is a pal.

As this BBC blog story illustrates that the way the Internet is organised is still based on trusting everyone; you just can't any more.

Highlighting the wrong problem.

Dizzy has had a go at OpenID pointing out the potential for man-in-the-middle attacks and phishing. This is akin to blaming tube and bus drivers for the 7/7 attacks or suggesting the roads are at fault for car accidents. The whole point of OpenID is it distributes other sites authentication, it doesn't shouldn't and can't enforce the level of security surrounding that process. Given that the model it uses is pretty much the same as that used by Paypal, Google and Worldpay for third party payment processing and Microsoft, Yahoo and many others for authentication it is a bit much to say it is the process. If you are going to have a go at something for this, I would suggest going after Mastercard secure code and verified by Visa for trying there bast to look like phishing sites.

So what is the real issue, it is the same problem that we all have everyday on the internet whether we are using OpenID or not. It is about the tremendous efforts people put into to trying to steal things from us. It is (hopefully) the death knell for simple username and password based logins over the internet and the era of two factor authentication, challenge-response, certificate validation moving away from being hidden away as a little padlock or a colour change in the address bar. Well we can but hope.

The information scrum

The client facing teams at $DAY_JOB have regular update meetings that they call scrums, making sure everyone is aware of current issues and the status of projects etc.^[1] My various friends groups don't do this, not so much because it smacks of management psuedoscience but because we don't need to. Facebook tells me when people have split up or got together, I found out that a friend's waters had broken via LJ and new cars/toys/furniture are photographed and posted to flickr. It isn't just us, Ryan Kuder used to work for Yahoo and used Twitter to detail his "downsizing" Andrew Olmsted even blogged his death. I know most important things about my friends almost instantly and a lot of intimate details about people I barely know in the really real world, or have never met, just as fast.

^[1]The technical teams don't we spend all day keeping each other up to date by shouting insults across the room, jabbering cool links and making "your mum" jokes.

Don't type angry

As mentioned yesterday the key driver for me posting here is anger. Today nothing is making me angry enough to post. Actually that isn't true, lots of things are making me angry, but they are either things I can't blog about at work, things I have already posted on or utterly trivial things that are getting my goat. Like finding a plugin for live writer that does almost exactly what I want in the way of adding a few bits of functionality but needs a little tweaking. Not a huge problem given that the source is released under the MIT licence, but it has been released as a VS2008 solution, I only have VS2005 on my machine at work and of course can't do much about that as it is not my kit. I suppose this is yet another driver to get a desktop machine up and running at home (my laptop wouldn't cope reasonable with VS2005 so I dread to think what it would do with VS2008)

See wasn't that a worthwhile rant?

As a stereotypical geek...

I do my fair share of Microsoft bashing, but I use their products when I think they are the best for the job (coincidently I am trying out Live Writer to make this post). I so far haven't had any great personal reaction to the idea of them buying Yahoo, in fact as long as they don't roger flickr senseless I don't really care. However I am genuinely happy that they along with Google, IBM, Yahoo and VeriSign have joined the OpenID Foundation. I love the idea behind OpenID, a transparent system of passing trust relationships round the internet without exposing any of your credentials; contrast it with the looks more like phishing than phishing itself approach of 3-D Secure (I know that in the not previously authorised flow for OpenID they are very similar but the fact that you can be already logged in by going to the URL you know with OpenID is the important difference). Companies like Microsoft, IBM and VeriSign have a lot of weight with serious thinking men who will look at this kind of technology and compare it with everything else they are running. Microsoft also offers a section of the young non-geek market with their messenger and hotmail accounts that this sort of concept needs to really make it.

The only real surprise with the current assault on everything open is that Sun isn't on this list.

Weekend round up

1. Electronic Voting
   Bruce Schneier points out this article in the New York Times Magazine about the failings of electronic voting machines across America. Obviously with them having a presidential election this year it is of great concern to them. For us the horror is the fact that Brown's government still don't seem convinced of the dangers of these machines.


2. Hi Def media
   With Warner having switched to releasing exclusively in blu-ray it is looking like Sony may well win a format war for once. I don't claim to be a technical expert on the differences, but my reading is that as far as the consumers are concerned both standards support about the same set of codecs and formats. On one hand blu-ray stores more but HD DVD is not region restricted. There has been much reporting based on the premise that Microsoft is only supporting HD DVD to keep the format war alive in order to precipitate the move away from physical media.


3. Georgia
   Yet another election mired with accusations of vote rigging, this time however the OSCE is suggesting they are broadly happy that the people's will is being respected.