Born On The Web

Dear mister Telenet,

I really like that you’ve put hotspots all over the Belgium. Especially in the train stations this is really useful, but I was wondering: Shouldn’t it be nice to have access when you’re in the train on the rails?

So if the train stops in a railway station you just have the time to send and receive your mails. Now it only seems the station building is covered.

Thank you and do carry on wifi-ing the country,

Jesse

When I first heard of openID, I taught, great that’s going to come in handy. But when you think about it the possibilities are much more than just a way to skip the register page. It makes your network of trusted people (friends) much usable in every web applications. I’m going to show you what the real power of openID is, using my wordpress blog as an example.

This is an example how a new technology like openID can have huge online social consequences. I like that! :)

But cut the crap let’s get our hands dirty:

1. the problem

Well everyone has a lot of comment spam, the longer you blog, the more spam you get. Askimet catches lots of spam, still this remains a huge problem.

2. the solution

Social Whitelisting (idea from Tom Coates):
I trust most of my blog readers, because I know them and they hate comment spam as much as I do. I want them to be able to moderate comments on this blog. If they see a spam comment, they should be able to delete it. So now my readers can sign in to my blog with their openID. I get an email, I check if I know this person and if I trust him. If yes, I give him the rights to moderate comments. It’s as simple as that. So if you like to test it out, simply login and I’ll give you the rights to moderate my comments. Just to give you something extra, you will also be able to edit my published posts, jep, I make a lot of spelling mistakes ;-) AND make drafts.

3. How ?

I used 2 wordpress plugins:

1. openID plugin
2. role manager plugin

It still needs some tweaking. The role manager plugin is acting a bit strange. But I’ll figure it out.

4. Next steps

This is great and it works, but still I need to approve every new member manually. I want to be able to have a list of people who I trust, not only to moderate my blog but also to view my private photos at flickr for example. How can I do this? Well I can make a list of people who I always trust by making a group on jyte, people in my group will always be given the correct rights.
This is a plugin I plan to write, when somebody signs in on my blog with an openID, I check if he’s part of my network of trusted people (with jytes API) and give him the permissions he needs to moderate comments.

With jyte you get the possibility to decentralize your friends list. Make your friends list cross-platform and give them the permissions they need to make your life a bit easier.
It’s one step closer to a decentralised social network and that, my friends, is the real power behind openID.

Resources:

• six cool things you can build with openID
• social whitelisting with openID
• Simon Willison’s talk on FOWA

I’m listening a lot to pandora lately. So why not share my stations: (feed readers -> click)

Presentation on slideshare.

A bit late maybe, but here is the presentation I gave together with Gunter Boutsen of Fishtank.

Quote by miss rogue from citizen agency. They travel around speaking on conferences, but also have customers, how do you handle this?

Question:

How do you guys get any work done with all of the things you are involved in?

Answer:

I wasn’t aware there was a difference between the two…I realized long ago that cutting back on the latter, rendered the former banal. The mojo comes from the being part of the community one serves. If a company prefers an agency that brainstorms in boardrooms and comes up with ideas, they should hire them.

There is nothing better then being challenged by presentations, conferences and like-minded people to keep you sharp. If you are regularly updated with fresh knowledge and insides the work goes much faster and almost automatically.

in leuven. very cool to sniff around.

Great ! (via)