CivicActions

Google is announcing Friend Connect tonight, a service advertised to "help website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors." Friend Connect employs OpenID and oAuth which is a good start, but how it puts them together is lacking vision and, disturbingly, may raise significant privacy concerns.

Listening to Market Place last night, I heard a story about online privacy, and privacy in general. Seems that Privacy International issued a report recently that marks Google as the worst internet company when it comes to privacy. Stop the presses!

Day one at the Internet Identity Workshop, or IIW2007, began with Eugene Kim - Chairman-elect of Identity Commons ("2.0", now with rounded corners), asking those attending their first IIW to stand up - over two-thirds of the 150 or so people in the room stood up. This is a great trend - the word is getting out!

This week I was the victim of Identity Theft. I don't think anybody was hurt, but a crime was definitely committed, and the criminals were not caught.

On Monday I received a welcome packet from First Data, complete with charge slips and a sticker to put on my business window. The account was in the name of a company I used to own that had at one time processed credit card transactions with a merchant account.

On Tuesday morning I called First Data. We decided that this was just a mistake and I should throw the kit out.

Phil Windley blogged about FreeYourId.com, a full service OpenId provider that gives you access to services off of a single .name URL. This starts to give a taste of what i-names can do, though it is - while clever - somewhat simplistic. When you give someone a YourId.name email address, they can then email you forever, as long as you keep the email it forwards to current.

So with all the hoopla around OpenID being embraced by Microsoft and AOL, many are asking "what does this mean?" and "what can you do with an OpenID?". One thing these announcements mean is that the OpenID standard is gaining some serious street cred. But though it has been suggested that OpenID provides a safer way to log in to sites, does this make us safer?

Alex Iskold has written a fantastic piece on The Road to the Semantic Web

"Some people think that the Semantic Web is about AI, some claim that it is more about semantics, while others say that it is about data annotation. All agree however, that we will all be wonderfully more productive and simply happier when it arrives."

What is the Semantic Web?

At first glance, the PEW report on the Future of the Internet seemed a bit juvenile. Then jumping in to it, I realized those surveyed included Internet luminaries Esther Dyson and Howard Rheingold (among others), and should be taken seriously...

From the report summary:

"A survey of internet leaders, activists, and analysts shows that a majority agree with predictions that by 2020:

* English will be a universal language of global communications, but other languages will not be displaced. Indeed, many felt other languages such as Mandarin, would grow in prominence."

Read the full PDF report.

What type of searcher are you?

Slate distinguishs the seven ways people search using the mistakenly-released AOL search logs of 650,000 members.

Or go to Valleywag to search the logs yourself. Like User 1912452, "a psychiatric counselor looking for a job in Colorado, obsessed with quick weight loss. She's turned to the book of Revelation, the zodiac, psychic schools, private investigators, and Victorian poetry. She (or a patient) dreams about being drenched in blood."

Recently, I finally saw the movie "The Corporation" [ 1]. After seeing enough movies critical of modern life to not get too depressed, the movie did leave me with a somewhat balanced combination of fear and disgust. However, I realized there must be a way to improve on things. Yes. I am an optimist [2].

When I first studied sociology I learned that social structures can take people and make them into who they are. A prisoner and a prison guard [3] were normal people created by experience is one of the best known examples of institutions creating kinds of people. In relation to the movie, a central theme was that because corporations are legally considered human beings with all the same rights as flesh and bone human beings, and because corporate laws require profit, expansion, and self preservation, corporations [and therefore people] behave in a psychotic manner.