This is going to be big and have month-old news in it; a consequence of the long southern-hemisphere posting interruption. I’ll even group ’em into paragraphs.
Anyone interested in XML in particular or life online in general will enjoy Jon Bosak’s closing keynote from last December’s XML conference. His general points about community culture rang all my bells.
Identity is heating up, big time. Looking in from outside, I hear buzz from two directions: OpenID and Liberty. Sam Ruby clearly touched the Net’s nerves with OpenID for non-SuperUsers; he certainly touched mine; what geek wouldn’t make themselves an OpenID? Then Liberty Guru Eve Maler gives us OpenID and SAML: a swirling nexus, a report from the front-lines where they’re looking for a coherent way forward. It all seems remarkably ego-free. There’s a nice clean comparison.
Pete Lacey, who has become my personal Web Services Hero, wrote Reinventing the WS Stack and It is Hard to be a Dove, which I think say most of what needs to be said. They’re both kind of long; if you only have time for one, read the second.
I haven’t been following bandwidth-cost issues, so I was astounded to read Dana Blankenhorn quoting Jimmy Wales to the effect that Wikipedia’s seeing a dramatic year-over-year drop in bandwidth costs. This is a game-changer if it’s a trend.
In the “Interesting Web technologies where I have a conflict of interest” department, Technorati launched their new tags page, which I find fascinating and keep going back to, and DabbleDB launched their Plugin API and got their first two plugins.
One of my favorite Web writers has long been Mark Pilgrim; I was glad when he returned to blogging, and upset when he devolved to link-posting. But Mark can’t restrain his own eloquence, thank goodness; check the comments this entry, which implicitly and quite properly disses the 2.1 release of WordPress. Really Matt, that is just unspeakably lame. And it seems that there are rumblings in the WordPress world, see Sequerra and Davis, and I suppose this is relevant.
In closing, I have to link to Hal Stern’s Private Tag, Public Confessional if only because it contains this sentence: It’s hard to be serious about writing COBOL programs when a guy with a 3-foot wide head walks into your inflatable office looking for the bathroom.
