Web Defence
Berners-Lee: The Web is critical to the digital revolution, prosperity, liberty. It needs defending; http://eicker.at/TheWeb
Berners-Lee: The Web is critical to the digital revolution, prosperity, liberty. It needs defending; http://eicker.at/TheWeb
Get social engagement metrics for any web site over the last 30 days with PostRank Analytics Tour; http://j.mp/5uaqCF
Vibber, CTO of Wikimedia (Mediawiki), announced that he is leaving to StatusNet (Laconica); http://j.mp/3ORLjI
Vibber: “I’d like to share some exciting news with you all… After four awesome years working for the Wikimedia Foundation full-time, next month I’m going to be starting a new position at StatusNet, leading development on the open-source microblogging system which powers identi.ca and other sites. – I’ve been contributing to StatusNet (formerly Laconica) as a user, bug reporter, and patch submitter since 2008, and I’m really excited at the opportunity to get more involved in the project at this key time as we gear up for a 1.0 release, hosted services, and support offerings. … This does unfortunately mean that I’ll have less time for MediaWiki as I’ll be leaving my position as Wikimedia CTO sooner than originally anticipated, but that doesn’t mean I’m leaving the Wikimedia community or MediaWiki development! … Erik Moeller will be the primary point of contact for WMF tech management issues starting October 12, until the new CTO is hired. I’ll support the hiring process as much as I can, and we’re hoping to have a candidate in the door by the end of the year.”
StatusNet: “I have no doubt that Brion will be missed at his previous position. He has been a truly impressive technology leader for Wikimedia, guiding its Free and Open Source software, and Open Content works, from relative obscurity to some of the most important sites on the Web today. He has helped scale Wikipedia.org over many orders of magnitude of traffic in a few years, and also built the features that have let the Wikimedia community develop and grow during that time too. In the meanwhile, he has led the MediaWiki project to become the most important wiki engine, and one of the most important pieces of Web software, available today. … I think I speak for the rest of the StatusNet team in welcoming Brion. His work at StatusNet will be mostly architecture and development of the core StatusNet microblogging software, as well as ancillary services to support the status.net platform. He’ll be crucial to the release of StatusNet 1.0 and the launch of the status.net public signup in the next few months. I also hope that his natural skills as a mentor and leader will help build our Open Source developer and user community.”
http://Nambu.com, creating the best possible social messaging experience, is a neat Twitter client; http://tr.im/imDr
http://Status.net is going to be a hosted, commercialised service for Laconica communities; http://tr.im/i1NA
http://Bleeper.de ist “die wohl größte Laconica-Installation außerhalb von Nordamerika”; http://tr.im/fsiv
http://Identi.ca, Laconi.ca based micro-blogging service, underwent a massive (visual) upgrade, added new features.
http://Twingly.com, a blog search engine, adds Microblog Search to its services; http://cli.gs/VqBthH
BH: “I got hold of Martin Källström, CEO at Twingly, and asked him a few questions about the microblog search. – Why did you decide to have a dedicated search engine for microblogs? Couldn’t the standard Twingly search engine just cover it just as well? – ‘Behind the scenes it is actually the same search engine. We have the possibility to mix results, but for now we’re waiting for a really good application of that search interface. Sometimes it is better to keep things as simple as possible. Of course you could debate that having one single search box is simpler, but this way we will be able to optimize each search result page for the circumstances.'”
One more, finally: http://Twitterfeed.com now pushes http://Wir-sprechen-Online.com to http://Identi.ca/Eicker
http://Twitterfeed.com supports http://Identi.ca and other Laconica-compatible sites; http://is.gd/ecnM
Gerrit Eicker 18:34 on 20. November 2010 Permalink |
Berners-Lee: “The Web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles and because thousands of individuals, universities and companies have worked, both independently and together as part of the World Wide Web Consortium, to expand its capabilities based on those principles. – The Web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. … Why should you care? Because the Web is yours. It is a public resource on which you, your business, your community and your government depend. The Web is also vital to democracy, a communications channel that makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation. … The primary design principle underlying the Web’s usefulness and growth is universality. … Decentralization is another important design feature. … Decentralization has made widespread innovation possible and will continue to do so in the future. … Social-networking sites present a different kind of problem. … Each site is a silo, walled off from the others. Yes, your site’s pages are on the Web, but your data are not. … Open Standards Drive Innovation – Allowing any site to link to any other site is necessary but not sufficient for a robust Web. The basic Web technologies that individuals and companies need to develop powerful services must be available for free, with no royalties. … Keeping the web universal and keeping its standards open help people invent new services. But a third principle – the separation of layers – partitions the design of the Web from that of the Internet. … Electronic Human Rights … A neutral communications medium is the basis of a fair, competitive market economy, of democracy, and of science. Debate has risen again in the past year about whether government legislation is needed to protect net neutrality. It is. Although the Internet and Web generally thrive on lack of regulation, some basic values have to be legally preserved. … Free speech should be protected, too. … As long as the web’s basic principles are upheld, its ongoing evolution is not in the hands of any one person or organization – neither mine nor anyone else’s. If we can preserve the principles, the Web promises some fantastic future capabilities. … For example, the latest version of HTML, called HTML5, is not just a markup language but a computing platform that will make Web apps even more powerful than they are now. … A great example of future promise, which leverages the strengths of all the principles, is linked data. … Linked data raise certain issues that we will have to confront. For example, new data-integration capabilities could pose privacy challenges that are hardly addressed by today’s privacy laws. … Now is an exciting time. Web developers, companies, governments and citizens should work together openly and cooperatively, as we have done thus far, to preserve the Web’s fundamental principles, as well as those of the Internet, ensuring that the technological protocols and social conventions we set up respect basic human values. The goal of the Web is to serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine.”
Ingram, GigaOM: “Not everyone agrees, however, that Google or Facebook are actually monopolies in any kind of legal sense, although they are definitely dominant players. And while Google is clearly a web giant, Yahoo and AOL were once web giants too, and they are shadows of their former selves now, displaced by completely new players. Even Facebook, which is now seen as one of the companies to be afraid of, is threatened in many ways by Twitter – a startup that barely even existed a few years ago and is now reportedly valued at close to $3 billion. … That said, it’s worth being reminded that large players often see it as being in their interests to restrict the freedom of their users, and that – as Berners-Lee warns in his Scientific American piece – this can chip away at the web’s core principles, which he says revolve around ‘a profound concept: that any person could share information with anyone else, anywhere.’ … More critical to free speech than any other medium? That’s a strong claim – but there’s certainly an argument to be made that the web fits that definition.“