Craig Newmark, founder of Craig’s list is one of the dozen Traveling Geeks on their way to London and Cambridge to find out what’s happening in social media and technology during July 2009. Craig is particularly interested in how online services are changing the way government (in the broadest sense of the word) works. See what Craig is looking forward to doing in London!
Archives for June 2009
Backstage Pass- JD Lasica
JD Lasica must have superpowers to do, and see, and interview all of the people that he does in any given month! Interested in all aspects of online social media, his new site socialbrite.org is tag-lined Social Tools for Social Change. If the word tools brings up an image of shovels or software for you, forget it! This site really has quite a range. It’s way more than just profiling online tools and sites.
SocialBrite also focuses on people to organizations, showing you how to apply those online tools to support the social activities that’ll help you build your organization for social good. JD has assembled a team of a half dozen experts who will help grow this site. Hey geeks, add SocialBrite to your RSS feed reader now!
Also see:
[1] Socialbrite.org
[2] Netsquared.org
[3] JD Lasica also on socialmedia.biz
Join us July 5th, in London, for a tweetup
For my friends in the UK, if you life or work in London you might like to join the 12 Traveling Geeks (includes me) who will be at a tweet-up at Juju in London on Sunday evening July 5th (2009).
A tweetup (like “meetup”) is a face-to-face meeting of people who previously only knew each other through Twitter. For some of the well-known geeks, like Robert Scoble, who has over 95,000 followers on Twitter, this could be a big thing – Robert might be able to fill the room just with his own followers who happen to be in London that night.
Where I stand right now, at 165 followers, maybe a couple of you will know someone who’d like to meet the geeks – reserve a place in advance online.
Twitter “verified accounts” coming soon
Good to see this … Twitter will be offering “verified” accounts soon.
We’re starting with well-known accounts that have had problems with impersonation or identity confusion. (For example, well-known artists, athletes, actors, public officials, and public agencies). We may verify more accounts in the future, but because of the cost and time required, we’re only testing this feature with a small set of folks for the time being. As the test progresses we may be able to expand this test to more accounts over the next several months.
We ran into a problem with an account purporting to be the office of the Dalai Lama [OHHDL] in 2008. The account looked like it might be real, but turned out to be someone impersonating the office. But it wasn’t exposed until more than 10,000 people had started following the Twitter account.
This move on Twitter’s part will be welcome.
Use OpenID on your WordPress blog!
I like OpenID[1] although I think it’s more complex than most people can handle — and that’s a big hurdle. OpenID gives visitors to your blog or web site a chance to log in (create an account on your site) using their login information from a participating OpenID web site (like gmail). In other words, they don’t have to create a separate account at your blog – they just reuse their Yahoo (or gmail or other[2]) account. In theory this should make it easier to remember account names and passwords because you just use one account to log in at many sites.Ever since OpenID was announced (2005) I’ve loved the idea. There are OpenID providers, and then there are other sites that allow users to utilize OpenID for the creation of accounts.