Chris Sessums has written about the educational WordPress Multi-User hosting provider Edublogs’ switch to inline context ads. These turn words within each blog post into ads, without the original author’s knowledge or permission. This is annoying in the wild, but takes on another meaning entirely when the blogging service is marketed for students and teachers:

For example one student mentioned the word “energy” in her blog entry and I found a pop-up link directing me to Exxon/Mobile. Hmmm? I thought and I read on. This same student also mentioned “college” in her entry wherein a hyperlink associated with the University of Phoenix popped up. I found this rather odd, since the student was currently enrolled here at the University of Florida.

The rest of Chris’s post is understandably angry. Links in blog posts are part of the flow of the text; they provide context. The link above allows you to read Chris’s blog so you know I’m not misrepresenting him. The following sentence in isolation:

I hope the criminals in our society receive the sentences that they deserve.

Is different to this one:

I hope the criminals in our society receive the sentences that they deserve.

By auto-linking words to sites for money, a new thrust or subtext can be added to the post. In other words, with this kind of advertising - even when it’s been marked out in the user agreement and everyone knows it’s there - advertisers are buying a little bit of your intention. (Users may not always understand the full scope of what they’re agreeing to, as they don’t see the ads themselves.)

Print publications often have very separate advertising and editorial departments, for similar reasons. Ads on pages should be clearly marked out as being such, and they should never, ever, ever infringe on the actual content itself. This on any site is bad; on a site for use in education is clearly immoral.

As a footnote, one of the user forum posts Chris highlights says this:

Content Links in the middle of my posts which include unauthorized advertisements is unacceptable. One of the reasons I moved my blog to Edublogs was to avoid ads in my blog, and this is even worse than Adsense found off to the side which people can easily ignore.

There is a very simple consumer protection maxim that it’s worth remembering for any product: if it seems too good to be true, it is. Everyone needs to make money; if you’re using a commercial product with no clear business model, ask yourself how they’re going to claw back their investment - it’s not always going to be in the ways you’d like.

OpenID is becoming the open single logon standard, and all kinds of websites and web-based software are using it to allow people to use a single username and identity across all their services.

A while back, Yahoo! did some research on OpenID usability (PDF link) that a lot of people took to indicate that OpenID was too confusing. It was conducted with a test group of just nine Yahoo! staff, so recently Chris Messina decided to research awareness using a survey conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk. In effect, he paid 301 people two cents each to answer some questions about OpenID.

Neither survey was hugely scientific, but Chris’s results were summarised as follows:

Combining some of the results, we found that:

• of those who know what OpenID is, 14.81% use it.
• of those who have merely heard of it, 6.9% use it.

Given there are over half a billion OpenID accounts in the wild, including some of the highest profile sites out there (Myspace! Yahoo!), it could be argued that this is bad news for the standard.

I disagree. One of the most important parts of a technical standard is the ability for end users to use it seamlessly, without having to worry about what it is or how it works. When you loaded this website, did you stop to think about the DNS, TCP/IP and HTTP protocols that made it happen? When you send an email, do you care about the structure of how it’s routed and the protocols servers use to pass it from source to destination? Very few people would answer ‘yes’.

Similarly, I’d bet that a lot more people know what a ‘feed’ is, or recognise the orange RSS icon, than know what RSS is. (Even then, feed subscribers are likely to only be around 11% of total web users.) It doesn’t matter; they don’t need to know how it works. The sign of good technology is that it just does. The linked post talks about promoting awareness of RSS in order to increase uptake, but in truth, the tools need to get easier to use.

Therefore, OpenID awareness in end users is neither here nor there. It’s very unlikely that an average end user will ever know what their OpenID is. Far more likely, sites will have custom login boxes that invite users to authenticate using IDs from supporting sites and providers that they’ll recognise, the way some are already beginning to do with things AIM accounts. In an ideal world, these login boxes will adapt based on your cookies and IP address (using a combination of serverside scripting, some clever JS and CSS) and suggest the logins that are actually active in your browser. Visiting Google Docs from your university network? Maybe one day it’ll prompt you for your university username - or even log you straight in, using OpenID on the back-end. This sounds like magic, but wouldn’t be massively hard to build, and could simplify users’ web experience instead of muddying the waters by adding another layer of complexity.

The purpose of social media is to augment your real life: connect with people, discover new links and resources through them and potentially discuss and collaborate on ideas. It’s sometimes easy to forget that the Internet is just people connected by wires, uplinks, frequencies and protocols. They aren’t so much behind terminals any more, but connected through all kinds of devices that are increasingly pervasive wherever we are: laptops, netbooks, cellphones, portable media devices, GPS boxes and more. Going online used to be a destination in itself; these days, for many of us, it’s something that happens without us thinking about it. Phones in particular are designed for connecting as much as conversing.

Software is being dragged kicking and screaming into this multi-platform reality. In some areas, the feature bloated, platform-locked ways of old are still very much in force; oddly, these tend to be in the enterprise sector, where mobile collaboration could be hugely beneficial. In any given company on any given day, there are likely to be people at their desks, working from home, on their way to a client meeting, attending a conference, and so on. Being able to keep in touch and share information in these situations is important. But try using Sharepoint from your Blackberry, I dare you. Even Basecamp has trouble with this, although I wouldn’t accuse it of feature bloat.

Google, on the other hand, is great at this. All of their major products have versions that can be easily read on each of the types of device I listed above, and are key examples of how web software can work brilliantly away from your desk. They also make them accessible to enterprise customers. More manufacturers will follow suit, particularly given the popularity of the iPhone and the more useful browser in the new Blackberry models. The popularity of services like Twitter, which arguably works better on a mobile, can only help.

We’re working on a service called Teamwire that will be as useful for companies and organisations out in the field as at their desks. (The idea grew out of an idea for Curverider itself, which is often a very distributed team.) There will be others; already, services like Yammer are edging in the right direction.

In all cases, it’s got to be about simplicity from the user’s perspective (always the most important), and standards compliance from a technical standpoint. You can’t navigate endless menus and interstitial screens if you’re on the move; you have to convey information or view a resource in seconds. Similarly, the bling that looks awesome in Safari might not look amazing in Opera Mini on my Nokia. That economy of use translates very well to efficiency within an office, too: the simpler software is, the shallower its learning curve and the more time you can spend actually doing your job. It’s not great news for IT departments, which will be gnashing their teeth up and down the land, but it’s great for people who want to feel the benefits of software without the technical pain.

Barack Obama is the next President of the United States, and received the largest share of the vote by any Democratic candidate in 44 years. That’s an impressive statistic, and one that Wired put down in part to his Internet strategy:

[...] Obama’s rise to the presidency will be studied for years to come as the textbook example of a new kind of electioneering driven by people and technology, says Ralph Benko, a principal of the political consulting firm Capital City Partners, in Washington, D.C.

“It was a peer-to-peer, bottom-up, open-source kind of ethos that infused this campaign,” says Benko. “Clearly, there was a vision to this.”

Certainly, Obama was the first candidate to have really “got” the Internet, but there was something different about this campaign: the Internet got Barack Obama. Sure, he released video statements on the web, had a Twitter account, engaged ordinary people through personal publishing and raised a phenomenal amount of money by asking for individual donations. These things alone are historic. But it’s what ordinary people and unrelated organizations went and did next that may have tipped the election.

Social media is viral by nature. You share something with your friends, who (if they enjoy it or find it of use) pass it along to their friends, and so on, creating an exponential network effect. Great content spreads quickly, but with the added benefit that it always comes via a source you trust, so you’re probably more likely to pay attention to it. That’s why it’s so attractive to marketers, and why the Obama campaign chose to harness it.

However, there’s another side to the coin. You lose control of your message; all you can do is set the ball rolling in the right direction, keep putting out your own content, and hope for the best. The campaign did this intelligently; the photo to the top right of this post is one of 50,435 and counting made available under a Creative Commons license from the Barack Obama Flickr account. The Creative Commons license allows anyone to share or adapt the photos as long as attribution is listed and the work isn’t for commercial gain.

In this case, due to a combination of factors (not least the fact that George W Bush is the least popular President since Nixon after Watergate), it snowballed. Obama didn’t campaign negatively, but there was plenty of negative press about the incumbent, John McCain and Sarah Palin flying around, in large part due to the efforts of bloggers and political organizations who put their materials out on the web.

One of the most effective videos was this one, which took the characters and actual cast of Budweiser’s Wassup ads and updated them for the Bush era. It’s unrelated to the Obama campaign, but has been viewed almost 4.5 million times at the time of writing:

In effect, Obama could take the high ground, knowing that information about the Republican administration and the candidates would surface. That’s one of the most powerful aspects of the web, the network effect ensuring that important information found its way into the hands of voters. (Not to mention allowing me to see the US TV coverage, and therefore make a more informed decision as an absentee voter.) As time goes on, the web becomes more ubiquitous and social functionality finds its way into all kinds of software, it’s going to be much harder for information to be suppressed. That’s one of the things that keeps me passionate about this field; I can see the very real benefits for real people.

And the meme continues. My favourite post-election site so far is Ze Frank’s from 52 to 48 with love, which echoes the Obama campaign’s unity theme.

Photo by Barack Obama, under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic CC license.

Attribute Exchange is a lovely idea. It happens like this: when you log in, the application you’re logging into asks the application that holds your account whether it knows about certain pieces of arbitrary data about you. Things like your website address, Twitter account, and so on. The smart thing is that, like OpenDD and some other formats, it doesn’t mandate the data an application can ask for. If your account holds your favourite kind of bread, the application you’re logging into can ask for it. This kind of generalised profile transmission is one of the things that will eventually form the foundation of the open web.

OpenID is also a great idea. When you want to log into an application, you tell it about where you keep your main account, and through behind-the-scenes magic (and a security check with your account holder), you’re logged in. It’s lightweight, simple, and has implications not just for the commercial web (where end users don’t currently see the need), but also loosely bound intranet solutions and situations where you want several locally stored web-based applications to use the same login.

So Attribute Exchange is great, and OpenID is great.

The problem for me is that, combined, they’re significantly less flexible than they would be as two separate entities that happened to work well together. For very legitimate reasons, an application provider may have to use BBauth, Shibboleth or some other standard to authenticate accounts across web-based applications. Perhaps some of these standards also has a way to move attributes across from one application to another. Nonetheless, if there was a single standard attribute exchange standard that you could use no matter how you authenticated, the barrier to entry would be much lower, and the standard of generally available code libraries to perform the task would be much higher. (The more eyeballs, the better the code, or so the theory goes.)

When Brad Fitzpatrick announced it, though, it was purely a specification for logging in, originally named Yet Another Distributed Identity System, and he’s been semi-publicly skeptical about the extensions. I think this makes sense. I also agree that OpenID will come into its own when you add an attribute exchange (and service discovery) layer over the top, but there’s no need for this to be rolled directly into the one authentication standard. Just because two ideas make sense when they’re joined together, you don’t have to glue them together into a single specification.

I’d like to advocate a policy of “small pieces, loosely joined” when it comes to open data formats. If each format does one thing really well, we can use them in lots of different combinations without fear of breaking something. More freedom for the programmer means more application possibilities and a better market.

By far the most popular photo on my Flickr photo stream is this one:

It’s a picture of my sister in Cornwall, where she was a warden on Looe Island for a summer. It’s had somewhere in the region of 6300 views, accounting for over a sixth of the views on my Flickr account (which has 1800 photos) overall. Perhaps naturally, being a slightly overprotective brother, I thought, “the Internet is full of ratbags; clearly this is popular because it’s a woman in a swimsuit”. In fact, I came this close to deleting it entirely, but at the last minute I thought I’d better double-check.

I’m glad I did: thanks to the title I gave it, it’s on the second page of image search results for “megalodon” on Yahoo! Search. Bizarre, but far less icky.

Having access to visitor metrics is a useful thing. I now know, for example, that one site I run is inexplicably huge in China; I’ve also got a much better idea of Elgg’s main user hubs (something that we’ve previously had to guess at). Although I’m not keen on precise geolocation, or my details being kept in an identifiable way, it’s useful as a site owner to determine what I should be concentrating on, and the rough locations of the people who find the things I do interesting.

As has been reported by everyone and his dog in the tech echo chamber, Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey have swapped roles at Twitter. I really like the Twitter guys; I’ve met Ev and Biz in different contexts, and they’re both extremely open and generous with their time. Although I’ve never met Jack, I bet he fits into the mould. (Biz, of course, is on Elgg’s super awesome advisory board.)

The title of this post comes from the Twitter Song. My head isn’t so far stuck up the prosterior of Web 2.0 that I’ve lost perspective. Nonetheless, I’m a Twitter addict; I have business contacts, friends, relatives and celebrity idols on my friends list. More importantly, I think that they crystalised a new form of communication, which was originally birthed when someone at a mobile phone company decided that SMS could be for more than system messages.

The iPhone is misnamed; it’s not a phone. If you were to measure activity on an iPhone, I think you’d find that actual call activity was a tiny percentage. Instead, it represents a sea change: mobile communications is moving from a last-century landline metaphor to a fully-connected smorgasbord of data-heavy protocols. It’s by no means alone (my Blackberry has a similar purpose), but is the most visible.

What’s cool about Twitter, and the other services that are beginning to catch on to this model, is that it recognises that when you’re on the move, you don’t have time for a lot of information. Posting an update, or reading your friends list, is effortless; you can check and put your device back in your pocket in 15 seconds flat. They’re designed to be part of your life on the move, rather than a destination in themselves.

We’re keen on mobile communication with Elgg too, and have deliberately built the architecture both to allow fully mobile interfaces to be placed over the top, and to allow for API-based service applications for particular tasks. With the 1.1 release, those hooks will be more explicit and fully formed, and we’ll be rolling out some pretty exciting mobile-only features in the future. Stay tuned.

Last Thursday I found myself in Brighton, which is a revelation - a concentrated community of tech entrepreneurs who get to live by the sea, drink at awesome cafés and have the kind of social values I love. As well as some consultancy at the University of Brighton, we were there for an Elgg Meet, where cool people like Tom Kiss, Steve Purkiss and the crew behind the Brighton Gallery hung out and talked social media with us over a couple of beers.

As a result, I’m heading back in a couple of weeks, spending a healthy portion of my monthly salary on a cheesy novelty hotel room for a couple of nights so I can be there over the Hallowe’en weekend. Tom’s annual Crawl of the Dead takes place on the Friday night - it sounds like it’ll be better than ever, so I’m toying with finding myself some zombie makeup and joining them. Before then, I’ll be hanging out at the Werks, an awesome coworking space that resembles Chris Messina’s Citizen Space in San Francisco.

Right now, I’m in Edinburgh, which is a very different sort of place. I moved away from here four years ago, and it’s interesting to see how it’s changed; in particular, the computer science students are no longer forced to do their work in the basement of the maths and physics block, next to the boiler room. The new Infomatics Forum looks like a piece of science fiction utopia has landed where a grotty old pay-and-display car park used to be, and I’ve been told that they plan on having lots of events and programmes to develop a thriving tech community here. Having left in part because there weren’t those opportunities, I’m going to keep a very close eye on it.

As I said in my previous post, if you’re in Edinburgh on Saturday October 18 and are in any way curious about Elgg, I’ll be at an Elgg Meet at the Peartree from 3-5pm. Please join us! I’ll be shamelessly wearing a heavily-branded Elgg T-shirt, so you should be able to spot me.

A couple of years ago, I was heavily involved in the e-learning world, and spent a lot of time advocating the use of Elgg (naturally) and similar social media tools to that community. Two worrying trends became apparent: the use of mass-media hosted networks like Facebook and Flickr to host class-related information - something I still think is a terrible idea, for a whole set of reasons that would be resolved if people started reading EULAs - and the use of online technologies as a replacement for face-to-face interaction.

I said it then, and I’ll say it again: if I thought people were going to use it as a replacement for real-world interaction, I’d stop developing it tomorrow. (Well, okay, it’s a much larger company now, and things have changed accordingly: I’d bring it to the board.)

When Facebook launched, they were the first social tool to make this explicit: it’s a utility for connecting you to the people you already know. In that sense, it works very well - if the people you already know are already there. The Facebook Platform was a kind of diversion from this core purpose, so it’s been very interesting seeing them downplay those widgets and distill it back into a river of activity. Even then, I’ve noticed a lot of my less techie friends revert to text messages and phone calls. The Facebook honeymoon is definitely over.

I spent the last couple of days in Brighton, and it similarly interesting to see the smart, tech-orientated community there use Twitter as a kind of social glue. It’s a very different to my use case as a kind of mini-blog; there, because of the density and proximity of the community, it becomes an incredibly efficient way to keep in contact and organise ways to meet up face-to-face.

On top of which, there’s a huge amount of ambiguity inherent to online communication, particularly via email. Emoticons don’t cut it; we’ve evolved, both socially and biologically, to read tiny cues that really only occur when you’re in the same room with someone. It’s very difficult to incorporate that into a website. Which, to be clear, doesn’t mean that the web isn’t useful, and I’m of course passionate about the benefits that social media can provide to society. It’s just that these tools must be considered as part of a balanced diet of different kind of interaction.

Speaking of face-to-face, there’s going to be an Elgg Meet this Saturday, October 18, at the Peartree in Edinburgh, from 3-5pm. Come and say hello! I’ll be branded up with an Elgg T-shirt, so you can’t miss me.

Worldmapper’s statistically adjusted maps provide some food for thought. Check out worldwide personal computer ownership, as of 2002, or Internet users from the same year (they’re very similar).

I spend a lot of my time thinking about how Internet technology can promote information flow, and through it efficiency and transparency, in peoples’ lives. When you’re allowing people to publish their opinions and experiences, and then share them in the kind of social mesh that the web is becoming, I think it’s also important to remember to somehow include the people who aren’t part of the mesh, and whose circumstances mean that they can’t possibly participate. The danger is that people who aren’t active in the network will lose out, and be underrepresented in important ways.

This clearly doesn’t matter much in the consumer web, but I believe that the principles proved in the social web will take greater hold in software, and through that to society as a whole. We are becoming more democratic; we have more access to information. Anyone can publish an idea, a news report, a photograph or any other piece of transmittable media, which can then propagate to anyone else. The roots are in web technology, but the effect is clearly felt way beyond the tech sphere; we’re fast getting used to this privilege, but for most of history freedom of expression has been a radical idea.

Ideally, the result of this freedom through technology is a real-life social mesh, more closely-bound on a global level than people have ever been in the past. Through the free flow of information comes transparency, and through that, again, democracy. But this ideal can only work, in my opinion, if everyone feels the benefit. Part of the point of democracy, surely, is that everyone can take part.

So how can we extend the network? And should it even be an issue, given that around 2.6 billion people don’t have access to basic sanitation?

It’s a fact that cellphone penetration massively outstrips computers in the developing world, which is one reason why a lot of very large computing names are beginning to focus on handsets (and why the free, open source Android software that Google is peddling has nothing to do with competing with the iPhone). That means that cellphone networks also have a great deal more reach than other forms of network in those areas, and it’s therefore significant that the next generation of ultra mobile PCs - for example the next Eee PC - have connectivity through the cellphone network built-in. The result, I hope, will be a sea change in Internet demographics; from that, I hope many things will follow.

These are my interests. I want to bring the technologies that have been proven on consumer websites and in the tech sphere to places where they can benefit people, and make the offline world a better place. I’m under no delusions that I’m going to have any effect myself, but as the technical head of an open source social networking engine, and as someone who just has a personal interest, I can try and do my bit.

This blog is going to be for the sorts of thoughts - like this post - which don’t lend themselves well to a company-sponsored space. It’s often going to be rambly, and will probably raise more questions than answers. Still, you’ve got this far, which hopefully means I won’t be shouting into the void. Thanks for reading; please let me know what you think.