Feeds Best Practices

The slides from my RSS/Atom Feeds Best Practices talk from lunch today are up now.  There was a good discussion afterwards and hopefully we'll put up a podcast. I'm more convinced than ever that the key to a successful presentation is: free food.

URL format change for Journals

One of the recent changes this week in Journals is an update to the format of our entry URLs.  We're essentially adding the entry date and title to the URL, for example:

.../entries/2006/07/13/rest-and-the-authorization-header/1354

So anyone who may be parsing our URLs -- be aware that the format has changed :).  We will, however, do a permanent redirect from the old URLs to the new ones.

REST and the Authorization: Header

Talking to lots of people about identity, mashups, web services, and sustainability of the mashup ecology today at Mashup Camp.  I'm wondering why LID apparently is using a new X- header for passing pointers to authentication information rather than re-using the existing extensible Authorization: header.  Both GData and Amazon Web Services  allow Authorization: as at least one option in their REST interfaces:

Authorization: GoogleLogin auth ...
Authorization: AWS ...

I know that GData uses 401 Unauthorized and WWW-Authenticate: challenge headers and I'm going to assume that AWS does too:

WWW-Authenticate: AuthSub realm="https://www.google.com/accounts/AuthSubRequest" 

So, existing services are using the RFC 2617 framework; it's working for them; why not build on top of that instead of inventing new headers?

Mashup Camp: Identity and Access Control in Mashups

Some notes I just took for the AccessControl session (my first session of the camp).  Here's a shot of the campers organizing the schedule an hour ago:

Yet Another Post on Feed Licensing

Back in April, I blogged about copyright and licensing standards for feeds.  People were happy with most of it, with one big exception:  Nobody can agree on what to do with feeds lacking an explicit license.  People clearly felt I was nuts to suggest that the implicit permissions involved in this situation could be captured in any flavor of Creative Commons license.  Obviously the owner holds copyright, and obviously fair use applies in the US, and unfortunately nobody can specify what that means in a way that software can understand.

So, here's my new summary, which is shorter but more complicated:

• Support and promote feed standards for embedded licenses.
• Allow fair use for unlicensed feed content.
  

You'll need to consult your legal department on what fair use is in each case, and figure out how to deal with international jurisdictions too.

All of which makes embedding licenses in feeds even more important.

Tags: Feed Copyright, Creative Commons, RSS, Atom, syndication

User Centric Identity

I just gave a talk at AOL about user centric, distributed identity, titled "Identity 2.Open" just to draw the punters. This came out of various thoughts I've had regarding opnness and authentication, and from the recent Internet Identity Workshop 2006(a).  Fair warning: There may be a podcast up sometime soon, in which anyone who cares to do so can listen to me butcher explanations about identity, security, and game theory.

This was also my first foray into the S5 slide show system. I gave up on PowerPoint when it refused to accept .PNG images.  I mean, come on guys, it's only been about 10 years since PNG was introduced.  Sheesh.  S5 works great, though I would love to see a few more generic themes that I could snag and use without working on visual designs.

Tags: iiw2006, conferences, identity

Searching Structured Data Using Microformats

In the well-of-course-he-did department, Tantek just announced the beta of Technorati's Microformats Search.  Hopefully this will help accelerate deployment of structured data on the public web.  Their beta main page adds on some special sections if a keyword search gets results containing microformats:

1. events results for San Francisco - View 32 events
   
   Barcamp San Francisco - 2 minutes ago
   BarCamp San Francisco - 5 minutes ago
   Supernova 2006 workshop: Decentralizing Data - 5 minutes ago
2. contacts results for San Francisco - View 16 contacts
   
   Amber - 1 hour ago
   Matisse Enzer - 1 hour ago
   Kevin Marks - 5 hours ago
3. reviews results for San Francisco - View 5 reviews
   
   Review of: Delfina Restaurant - 2 days ago
   His&nbspBand&nbspAnd&nbspThe&nbspStreet&nbspChoir by Va... - 5 days ago
   Climate change is a hot topic right now. The Economist has ... - 12 days ago

And you can do domain-specific searches as well, for example for events matching "San Francisco".  So far you can't do much with the data except jump to the source page.  The obvious thing is to support an add to contacts or add to calendar option.

There's a companion service, pingerati.net, to enable real time indexing; it's also a ping hub.  The idea here is that if you want to get updates about structured data from around the web, you can register with pingerati and get their feed of pings as well, without needing to go around and convince everyone to ping your service.  For example, evdb will get auto-notified if you ping pingerati.net.  Naturally, any existing Technorati feed update pings also get fed in.

Being a hub is nice.

Tags: microformats, search, pingerati, hCard, hCalendar, hReview, ping, hub