General

My first BarCamp ever was ending a few hours ago and I have to say it was amazing. Two days of talking, exchanging ideas, learning, and hey, even having fun. Including the opening party on Friday it’s been three days actually.

I didn’t know what to expect before: just coders talking about the latest tricks in programming or mostly business guys trying to pitch their projects? Well, not at all. A great mix of people from very different ways of (online) life and a friendly atmosphere throughout the two days. I guess this wasn’t my last BarCamp. Too bad I didn’t meet Falk Lüke who I’d like to talk to, though.

Big ups to Franz Patzig, Robert Basic, and everyone else involved in organising this event. Well done!

Kaliya Hamlin of Identity Woman has made her Web 2.0 Expo talk available as a PDF. The title is Why Identity Matters for Web 2.0 and it is outlining what identity originally meant, how it is translating into the realm of Web 2.0 services, and eventually is dealing with OpenID (including some history) as part of online identity.

It is remarkable that she is emphasising that Web 2.0 is just going to work if users trust it because just too often this tends to get lost among the buzz:

These new identity tools to be trusted must protect privacy, reputation and be secure. These are the challenges that must be solved collaboratively by the larger web 2.0 community.
Web 2.0 is only going to work if people trust the web enough to use it.

While I have focused quite a lot on OpenID, online identity, and profile aggregation recently, I think many users of the internet probably have a difficult time coping with it all. Why should they aggregate all their various identites on a certain site? Many are hesitant to join a social network at all. This “new” web seems to be exciting but also dangerous to them. Many newspaper (and other media) reports foster the picture of child molesters being on MySpace, people being rude on blogs,…

Not the early adopters need to be convinced, rather your parents and your friends. So companies should be more open on how they deal with privacy, with user data. Often this data is the most valuable property they own but usually links to the Terms of Service and privacy statements are almost hidden at the bottom of the site. I think they should be more visible, maybe even provide a summary of the legal stuff which is intelligible to all.

Admittedly I have quoted Kaliya a little bit out of context and there is much more to think about the topic, so go and read her PDF completely.

This caught my attention on Twitter last night. It’s very similar to the number of feeds I am subscribed to: 293. I need a better way to manage my feeds, especially cutting down the number to 50 subscriptions without missing too much relevant information.

Anyone with a great idea?

P.S. Sorry for using your message as a peg, Marcel.

I have removed the MyBlogLog widget from the sidebar today and will also delete the account. While it is nice to see who is visiting the blog I think it doesn’t serve the purpose I had hoped for. No new contacts have resulted from it and even the number of visitors coming from MyBlogLog can be neglected.

At first it was a pleasant surprise that many users wanted to be my contacts. I didn’t take a closer look at their blogs; I was even flattered a little bit. However all their blogs were dealing with SEO, marketing and whatnot. Call me naive but it was (and still is) very disappointing, particularly because I think MBL has a lot of potential to be a real community of like-minded bloggers; a place where ideas can be shared, support given, and much more.

Maybe MBL is working that way for someone. Would be grand. Anyway, you won’t see my face on your blog anymore and I won’t see yours here.