Sperrobjekt Weblogsince 2003

Google just released two interesting projects into the wild. One is an OpenID demo store with accompanying documentation, the other an open-source module for the Apache web server.

Google's OpenID demo store

Although OpenID has seemingly been adopted by all major players on the web (aside from Facebook, maybe), I wonder how often their users log in with their OpenID. Most smaller sites are afraid of the overhead of an OpenID implentation, or simply don't know how to do it. Now, Google set up a sample store that makes heavy use of OpenID. Equally important, it's supplemented by an extraordinary documentation. As Carsten correctly states, such a documentation was needed for quite some time. It will be interesting to see if any larger online shops jump on the bandwagon an implement OpenID for their businesses.

mod_pagespeed

According to Google, page loading times become increasingly important, not only for the customer experience, but also for the ranking in Google's search index. Performance hints and tools are abundant on the web, but Google goes even beyond those recommendations and released an extension for the popular Apache web server: mod_pagespeed. I installed it on my local box, but there are lots of options, and I haven't found the time yet to fiddle with them all. It seems that you can achieve most of the optimizations by optimizing your default Apache installation. However, mod_pagespeed might make configuration a lot easier. I guess, we'll have to wait and see.

Die Petition der Initiative Pro Netzneutralität setzt für eine Gleichbehandlung aller Daten ein. Denn diese ist eine Grundvoraussetzung für freie Meinungsäußerung und den uneingeschränkten Zugang zu Informationen. In den USA haben sich jüngst Google und Verizon über das Thema unterhalten und damit für viel Unsicherheite gesorgt. Jetzt regt sich auch hierzulande Widerstand gegen die Pläne der Großkonzerne. Von den Initiatoren der Petition wird Netzneutralität wie folgt definiert:

Netzneutralität ist die Grundlage für ein Internet, wie wir es kennen. Wir sind gewohnt, dass Daten ohne Ansicht von Inhalt und Größe – abgesehen von technischen Restriktionen – diskriminierungsfrei transportiert werden. Netzneutralität besagt, dass alle Daten, seien es Emails, Websites oder Musikdateien, gleich zu behandeln sind. Dadurch wird kein Dienst bevorzugt oder benachteiligt. Netzneutralität ist die Voraussetzung für die Gleichberechtigung aller Datenpakete.

Hier kann man es Kristian Köhntopp und vielen anderen gleichtun und die Petition unterzeichnen.

Two days ago, Benjamin Nowack announced the re-release of Knowee, a distributed social web address book. Knowee started out as a project supported by the W3C Semantic Web Interest Group and will also available for download soon. This means you can install it on your own server, if you like.

Knowee is somewhat similar to NoseRub as it aggregates many of your profiles from popular social networks and applications like Twitter, Identi.ca, or Delicious. But Knowee adds a lot of semantic wizardry to all the data its bots collect over time. Among the technologies employed are FOAF, RDF, Microformats, OpenID, Google's Social Graph API, and SPARQL. The latter makes it easy to re-use the aggregated information in other applications. Without digging too deep into all these formats and APIs, let me say this seems to evolve into a very powerful tool, far more than a simple address book. For more info, read the introductory blog post, or simply take a shot at it.

That being said, I'm a little irritated about how little buzz Knowee has created so far (only 4[!] hits on Technorati?). Is everyone simply fed up with yet another social network aggregator? Or am I just a little bit too impatient? I don't know, but I know that Knowee deserves more attention even if it's still in an early stage. Especially since I'm sure that Benjamin will add more useful features soon, e.g. the integration of MyBlogLog.

My public Knowee profile can be found here.