Sperrobjekt Weblog

Mit Dennis Winter von den Rheinschafen diskutieren wir nun über OpenID und ZF. Gleich mal ein paar Probleme: OpenID 2.0 wird nur in Draft 11 unterstützt, noch nicht die Final; kein Attribute Exchange z.B. Manche entscheiden sich dafür lieber für die PHP4-Library von JanRain. Vorteile: Storage-Möglichkeiten für Daten in der DB zwischen einzelnen Requests, SREG-Unterstützung. Lebhafte Diskussion im Anschluss Aber eigentlich sind wir uns einig, dass Zend_OpenId die Lösung für PHP5 und OpenId ist, sobald es endlich die Version 2.0 voll unterstützt.

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.

While the number of sites that support OpenID steadily increased in 2007, and users can choose among many providers, much remains to be done in terms of awareness and evangelism. Enter Spread OpenID, a campaign initiated by Carsten Pötter and Thomas Huhn. They set up a weblog, explain the technical terms behind OpenID, and maintain a comparison of OpenID providers. Since I know Carsten and his motivation from several blogger meetings, I wish Spread OpenID all the best. OpenID has its pros and cons, but Spread OpenID will certainly help to prove that, ultimately, it's a good thing.

Garvin posted the news to the official Serendipity blog: Thanks to rrichards you can now log in to your S9Y blog with your OpenID. Which is a great thing, especially for people who actually use OpenID (like me). Testers are still needed for this plugin, but I installed without any problems. So don't expect any trouble