Re: outreach (wasRe: RDFa Logo)

On 27/1/09 16:16, Danny Ayers wrote:
> 2009/1/27 Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org <mailto:danbri@danbri.org>>
>
>
>     On 27/1/09 13:41, Toby Inkster wrote:
>
>         It strikes me that RDFa should have some sort of logo.
>
>         Here is my idea:
>         http://buzzword.org.uk/2009/rdfa-logo/rdfadoc.medium.png
> lovely!
>
> sorry to be curmudgeonly danbri, but why favour identi.ca
> <http://identi.ca> over twitter? The people are mostly there... (c.f.
> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/50_semantic_web_pros_to_follow_on_twitter.php
> ). The answer is to join 'em up, no?

Laconi.ca and the OMB spec it implements is just such an attempt.

http://openmicroblogging.org/

> gwibber does this, though I personally find IM-style UIs a bit in your face

Laconi.ca is open source. Very open source: see 
http://laconi.ca/trac/wiki/License "It is a flavor of the GNU General 
Public License dedicated to web services. The mayor difference to the 
GPL is the clause "if you make modifications to the Laconica source code 
on your server, you *MUST MAKE AVAILABLE* the modified version of the 
source code to your users under the same license"."

Laconi.ca has a commitment to use and further various open standards, 
including those we care about. There is XMPP code in there, as well as 
OMB (which also uses OAuth). It is an attempt to "do things right". And 
yes, it is based on the idea of federated / linked rather than 
monolithic services.

For example, in my replies page http://identi.ca/danbri/replies , you'll 
see a reply from @ciarang. I didn't notice at the time, but this 
exchange happened through OMB; his post was made through another 
installation. http://micro.ciarang.com/notice/46264

I guess his account on that service was following @danbri on 
http://identi.ca/

Let's see if I can subscribe to him.

Ok, I'm already openid-logged in to my identi.ca account. I'm at 
http://micro.ciarang.com/ciarang ...

Theory: I put my URI http://identi.ca/danbri into a box, press some 
buttons, and I'm subscribed.

Practice: I jump thru those hopes, already to find my identi.ca account 
was already subscribed (which makes sense but micro.ciarang.com didn't 
know that or present that fact to me)

So I try again, with another micro.ciarang.com user, I get further thru 
the oauth-based process, but eventually hit some PHP errors. Ah well.

This is a good project and deserves our support. The new groups facility 
(!rdfa etc) is really interesting when you think that all that groups 
data (including homepage/topic URIs for groups) could be available in RDF.

Twitter is great too, and deserves much credit for finding and exploring 
this niche between IM and blogging. But right now, they're not pushing 
on the federation / standards side, while the Laconi.ca project is 
making great progress and in a way friendly to the work we're doing 
here. I'm not anti-twitter, just anti-lock-in.


Identi.ca is the showcase installation of Laconi.ca. It can be 
configured to auto-post to Twitter. Twitter originally showed interest 
in the OMB spec, though I understand that trail has gone cold lately. 
Currently you need to give your twitter password to identi.ca for your 
posts to be sent on to twitter, however this will likely change once 
Twitter finish their OAuth implementation. There are also desktop tools 
eg. Twhirl that allow support for both services.

Laconi.ca also implements the Twitter API, so switching should be easy.

I wrote a bit more about this back when the project launched, see 
http://danbri.org/words/2008/07/10/367

Does this explain?

cheers,

Dan


ps. to bring this back on topic, can anyone suggest a patch to 
http://identi.ca/group/rdfa that makes it xhtml+rdfa, using eg. foaf for 
marking up group membership, but also keeps in some compatibility with 
the microformat markup currently used?

--
http://danbri.org/

Received on Tuesday, 27 January 2009 15:42:00 UTC