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.
Identity in the Age of Cloud Computing
JD Lasica has just published a report Identity in the Age of Cloud Computing, based on an Aspen Institute meeting in mid-2008. It is one of three such Aspen Institute reports he has written, and all are available as free ebooks.
First, here’s my own take on cloud computing in the future. I can see that within a very few years (maybe now for some of us), many of us will not know (or care to know) where our data reside. Instead, we’ll be using our home computers as netbooks, connecting to our databases, friend-networks, profiles and documents, and we really won’t care where the data live. Today we see this happening with the rise of Google Docs (documents), gmail (Yahoo and Hotmail too, of course for years), and I see more and more people content to “just Google” to find answers to questions and no longer needing to have all of the books sitting on bookshelves at home. [Read more…]
Can’t keep my hands off that laptop’s screen!
I am finding myself increasingly tempted to swipe my fingers across the screen of my new Macbook Pro![1]
I already use a touch screen iPhone all day long, so I’m used to swiping and tapping a lot.
And the touchpad “gestures” on the Macbook Pro[2] allow me to work essentially the same way I work on the iPhone (tap instead of click; and two-finger tap instead of “right click”; and two-finger drag to scroll things in a window; and so forth). In fact, I have almost entirely stopped using the mouse (with scrollwheel) that I used to use on my previous computer in favor of gestures on the touchpad of the Macbook.
I couldn’t believe how intuitive they were. Each gesture totally makes sense in terms of what it does, finger positions, and direction of swipe. Kudos to Apple on this. It almost makes it worth the entire price of the upgrade just to get this one feature.
Punchline: But when I run my greasy fingers across the glossy Macbook screen it sure smudges things up. LOL Can’t wait for a full-size “tablet Macintosh” to come along!
[1] I haven’t blogged about this new computer (which is only 2 weeks old) but my five-year-old Mac Powerbook just got too slow to be usable, given the load of software that I run on it, so having a computer that is roughly 5x faster is a real joy. I was beefing up the old Powerbook over and over again (doubled the RAM, tripled the disk size, got a new keyboard, and so forth) but it still couldn’t run fast enough most of the time and the CPU was clocking 100% useage at all times when I had my hands on it. So it eventually had to be replaced.
[2] And the other thing I like about the new Macbook Pro is the unibody aluminum construction. My old Powerbook flexes considerably when I carry it in one hand, and this new single-piece-of-aluminum construction does not flex at all, making it very much more solid! This is different from any other laptop computer I’ve ever owned.
Demand-publishing using online services
New from Dalai Lama Foundation Press: The most popular program of The Dalai Lama Foundation has been its study guides. Originally written by a group which met over a two-year period in Los Altos (California), the English-language study guide for His Holiness’s book Ethics for the New Millennium has been downloaded from the Foundation’s web site tens of thousands of times. The download, a PDF, can be read on screen or printed. Ethics for the New Millennium can be purchased separately, from your local bookseller or from one of many online sources. The guide has been translated into Portuguese, Spanish and Chinese. A Russian and a Japanese version of Ethics for the New Millennium are also available from the Foundation. [Read more…]
Where are your Twitter followers?
Robert Scoble just posed this question, “Someone just asked me if there’s a good way to get a holistic look at Twitter or friendfeed followers. I don’t know of any. Do you?”
He was talking about their geographical locations. Among the answers, one person pointed at a Yahoo Pipes application that puts pins (each corresponding to one follower) onto a world map. I‘ve written about Yahoo Pipes before — it’s a web service that lets you “visually” create an algorithm that reads RSS feeds and manipulates them. Pipes can filter, put together, count, limit and obviously do a lot more. I have created a Pipes application that filters several RSS feeds and then makes them available for insertion on a blog.
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