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Is Firefox/Google Spying on Your News Feeds? :: LegRoom.net :: Kick back and relax.
Is this more worrying news about Google’s approach to privacy?

Over the past couple of days I’ve made yet more changes to the site (I know, I like tinkering ).

Most importantly, I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.0.5, which fixes a few bugs.

One other change is that I’ve redirected the RSS feed to FeedBurner. This seems to be working okay (I’ve done it using the Feed Replacement Plugin, which should appear seamless to anyone already subscribed to the feed). I have noticed a problem with Google Reader, which I’ve started playing with tonight, in that if I attempt to subscribe to the feed using the FeedBurner URI the title is missing. The feed also seems to be missing the last post that I made (so I guess I’m not sure if this will appear) - however checking it, seems to indicate that is entirely the fault of Google (ie, FeedBurner itself sees the post and another RSS reader does) Anyone else seen problems?

I’ve added some other plugins (complete list here) and hopefully tidied things up a bit. Finally, I’ve added some “interesting” stats!

Addendum: Technorati seems to be indexing the site again as well. Oh frabjous day

Some intimate details on the Google YouTube Deal - Blog Maverick
Very interesting. As pointed out, a certain amount of truth rings through and if that’s the case, then it’s a sad indictment of big business in general and Google in particular.

Ping Identity Blog: Topologies of Federation

Good post from Andre Durand showing models of federation deployment. I’ve said before how we’re finally seeing more interest in federation on this side of the Atlantic and having these cases published can only help with that. One of the problems is that whilst we’re starting from a position way behind our colleagues in the US, we’re trying to jump in at about the same level - leading to gaps in industry awareness on the part of most people and, in a sense, attempting to run before we walk.

Of the organisations I’ve spoken to about federation, most are looking to begin with simple “point to point” deployments and expand in future, in other words, the scale is not yet present. No doubt the rate of change will be increasing, particularly as more information spreads (posts such as this will help) and the people looking at deploying solutions will be exploring more advanced options, and providing yet more challenges in future

A few weeks ago I posted a rant about modern crappy pop music. As part of that rant I mentioned the names of a few artistes. As it happened, I managed to misspell the name of one of them, which has inadvertently led to an increase in traffic to this site, primarily from people Googling “Nellie Furtado“. What I didn’t understand was why so many people were visiting here, rather than getting to a proper site about the singer, until I realised that I’d misspelled the name and obviously many other people were too.

What’s intriguing is that, sometime over the past few days, the Google search (as I’ve linked to it) seems to return a vastly different set of results - including some of the more likely results for “Nelly Furtado” (and in the process knocking Here, Now to the second page from 4th place as it was!). I’ve no complaints about losing ranking for the search result and I can do without getting traffic from those searches (apart from thinking that more people might actually be reading this!), but I do wonder how much Google is potentially playing around with all search results.

Is this something that happens with some misspelled queries, or most? Is it a recent thing (this is the first time I’ve seen it). Can someone ask them to add common variations of a phrase to the results for the main phrase? All interesting stuff, but a sign that Google is making more changes to the raw results and thus, in my eyes, losing more credibility.

Give your résumé a face lift » LifeClever
Not that I’m looking for tips…

People - not products - are most important to security | The Register
Yet more confirmation of this point. Security is a process of which people comprise the most important part.

security cameras Leading #1 source for Security Cameras.

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: The quality of peer production

Nicholas Carr presents a good analysis of peer production (a summary from this paper) and why, in theory, quality should be high in such scenarios - based primarily on the anecdotal “evidence” of open source software. There follows some good examples of where problems exist in peer-produced work - notably Wikipedia (from my own point of view, although mentions are also made of Project Gutenberg and Gracenote).

One thing that the article almost touches on, and I think is relevant in this discussion is that there would seem to be a “marginal effect” happening with the edits made (I’ll focus on the wiki…). That is, where an article is important, or an error glaring, then an edit is more likely to be made - the cost of not editing will work out greater than the cost of doing so, at the periphery of either importance or flagrancy the cost of making an edit (spotting the error, finding the correct information, submitting the change &c.), of course, “cost” (in this sense) is not used in the traditional sense and may not necessarily be borne solely by the individual who makes the effort to change an entry, but there is still a cost involved to society as a whole if the change is not made. The problem, as is rightly pointed out by Deguid, is that the people who would benefit most from an edit being made are likely to bear the most cost actually making the edit (for a start, they’re unlikely to spot the error!). Conversely the people with least to gain from the edit (in terms of future reference) are the most likely to be able to make the edit (although there’s obviously less chance they’ll be viewing the entry in the first place).

The problem that needs to be addressed in “peer production” is, at heart, a basic economic one. People need to be incentivised to act, and at the moment there’s a gap between the need and the ability to do something about it. What needs to happen is that gap be bridged.

dale olds’ virtualsoul » Identity Implies Relationship

One of the most interesting things for me in working with notions of “identity” is how much overlap there is with other disciplines - especially philosophy. A few months ago there was a good discussion of how reputation fits into an identity system (I posted these on the topic -1, 2, 3 and 4) and Dale Olds’ comments are, I think, an extension of this. At heart of this is the question of what is identity. As Dale points out the lexicon is there to guide, but many of the terms used can have a different meaning in every day life and that just causes confusion (even within the Identity Gang itself!).

An identity can be seen as a set of attributes. What’s important here is that those attributes may, or may not be, publicly available (or published to put it another way). Whether any individual attribute is published in any context is completely independent of other contexts (in fact, I can see scenarios where the same attribute could be published with different values to different contexts). Expanding on what Dale says about identification being the act of distinguishing one object from another, leads us to the interesting thought that it’s the measurement of the attributes that creates an identity - in a digital sense my identity is created when I provide a username, email address, password etc. and an instance session of that identity is created when I use a combination of those attributes to identity and authenticate myself to a system. There’s an almost quantum effect going on and this is where the philosophy comes in…

To complicate matters is the fact that I can have multiple identity instances at once - a mixture of digital and “real”. Each of those instances is determined by the attributes that are published to a receiving party - without that party, the instance can never exist. I reveal a certain set of attributes to you, the reader, by writing this and yet other sets are revealed by interactions with other people - a phone conversation with my girlfriend gives one set, but a conversation in the same medium with a recruitment agent will reveal others. Much of this in the real world is subconscious, but in a digital world we can, in theory, have more control over how we show ourselves. The underlying base identity (with the master set of attributes) is the same in each case.

Each identity instance may be transient, or there may be some permanence, or at least some continuity between the times when that instance is invoked (a session). Sometimes I want to make sure that I can continue a conversation and establish a reputation - it serves me no good to present a new set of attributes to someone in that case, other times I can be sure that an instance of an identity presented will be temporary (a conversation on a plane, for instance) and I may never need that set of attributes again. Something to add to the confusion here is that all the time, as sentient beings, we’re aware of ourselves - we can observe and measure our own attributes, which then allows us to create identities based on those. However, as most of us are painfully aware, those attributes change over time - where I once had an identity with attributes of youthful and carefree, I may now be stressed, unhappy and ageing (as it happens, I’m not. I’ll leave comments about delusion and not noticing change in ourselves to psychologists!). The upshot of this is that although I may have a reputation attached to an external identity the underlying identity might not actually be the same! Bringing in a bit more philosophy and physics would suggest that we’re not the same person at any two moments in time since the atoms that comprise our bodies are themselves different!

As Dale points out, the whole point of an identity is to enable external relationships (which may involve reputation), whether digital, professional, financial or romantic. The challenge is to make sure that systems reflect our existing, natural experiences of identity - we have to be able to present ourselves in different ways for different audiences and make sure that we can keep a consistent identity to each over time - as well as using the language of such experiences in a familiar way so that everyone can participate in the discussion.

Vittorio Bertocci: WS-Trust - Under the Hood
An indepth look. Very interesting and useful.