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Archive for the ‘Social Media & Semantic Web’ Category

A Flock of Twitters: Decentralized Semantic Microblogging

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

In my last article, Flocking To the Stream, I ended with this thought about the growing issue of social-networking fatigue:

…as the number of streams continue to increase and as the flow rate of each stream picks up, people will grow tired of having to subscribe to, having to join yet-another-stream phenomenon (YASP). Does the Web truly need additional stream providers each with their own data silos? Is there a user-centric solution to this rapidly growing, overflowing-stream issue that puts YASP to rest once and for all?

This article answers these two questions in great detail but the succinct preview version is as follows: Read more »

Flocking To the Stream

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

I recently began to go through some article backlogs on the websites of various people whose thoughts and perspectives I want to understand better. One such person with whom I’m trying to play catch up is Nova Spivack. If you don’t follow Nova then I suggest taking the time to remedy that Read more »

BuddyPress Privacy: Moving Toward a Privacy API

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

BuddyPress development is moving toward a modular, team-focused approach. In my mind, this is the biggest news that came out of the weekly BuddyPress developers’ chat Read more »

Privacy in the Facebook Era

Monday, January 11th, 2010

Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg recently stated that privacy is no longer a social norm. Is that an actual fact or a engineered fact?

Here’s why I ask. Over the past several years, whenever Facebook has made a change to its privacy policies, it has caused great uproar—not only with civil liberties advocates (as you would expect), but also with Facebook’s user base. Read more »

Introducing Twitter-disclosure Slashtags

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

It’s official. On December 1, 2009, the FTC’s new disclosure guidelines went into effect. So what does this mean for Twitter users?

It means that you must disclose any financial relationship that you have with a product, service, company, or industry that you tweet about.

To make disclosure easy on Twitter, I’m proposing a set of Twitter-disclosure slashtags. Read more »

Do You Support BuddyPress Privacy?

Saturday, January 2nd, 2010

Plugin Funding Progress

In a recent post, I asked for ideas on how WordPress ecosytem developers can earn a living doing what they love to do—coding great-quality plugins for WordPress, BuddyPress, and bbPress. This post is my attempt to try the time–honored Read more »

How Can BuddyPress Developers Earn a Living?

Saturday, January 2nd, 2010

In the WordPress ecosystem, when it comes to getting paid for time spent, it seems that theme designers are far ahead of plugin developers. GPLed–premium themes are not only an accepted part of this ecosystem, but seem to thrive. Plugin developers, on the other hand, have been shunned in the past for offering premium plugins. I won’t go into the reasons for this, but there is a sordid history, to say the least. I also do not want to reopen the war wounds from previous debates on this topic. Read more »

OAuth, BuddyPress, and Privacy

Monday, December 21st, 2009

OAuthWhen I first started kicking around the idea of coding a privacy component for BuddyPress, several people suggested looking into using the OAuth protocol to accomplish the task. Being semi-omniscient, and totally oblivious to everything else, I did not have the faintest clue on how to work with OAuth. Read more »

I’m BuddyPress-ed for Time

Monday, December 21st, 2009

Volunteerism is the heart and soul of any successful, healthy Open Source project. So, when Paul Gibbs posted the following Tweet a week ago,

Apparently I’ve made 1317 posts on the #buddypress forums. This puts me ahead of @apeatling on 1053, @johnjamesjacoby on 1257. @jeffsayre wins with 1454!
1:08 PM Dec 13th by Tweetie

it made me remember a post Read more »

BuddyPress: authentication versus authorization

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

When it comes to user access of computer-based systems, access control has two subgroupings: authentication and authorization. Authentication deals with the process of verifying that a given user is indeed who they claim to be. This is taken care of initially by the registration process and subsequently by the login script. Authorization deals with verifying and managing the access rights a given authenticated user has to certain objects. Read more »

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