BarCampBlock and the open web

Does it get any better than this?! I swear its palpable this opening of the web that’s happening. I can see and hear the cracks forming in all of those walled gardens, their users busting through the seams and finding new ways to engage, share and participate in conversations across the Internet. If ever there was a breakin’-down-the-walls kind of event, it would be BarCamp. I’m really looking forward to this year’s version (the 3rd annual and original BarCamp) which has been coined BarCampBlock because they are taking over an entire Palo Alto city block.

I’ve been operating under a few assumptions (I know, my mother said never to assume … ass out of u and me and all that) about the current direction of the open web which have helped me to direct my energies … I’ll present them in the form of three questions:

1. Who am I?: Fill in profile information. My email. First name and last. Date of birth. Mother’s maiden name. Filling out forms and signing up for new sites. All of it gets tiresome. Wash, rinse, repeat.
2. What’s mine?: What’s the content that I’ve created and how can I get to it in a “standard”, easily-consumable way? How do I get what’s mine (tied to who I am) to other sites?
3. Who do I know?: Oh yeah … social network fatigue. I swear I need to start a self-help group on this. “Yes, you have friends. No, they aren’t on this site. Sorry.” I know who my friends are; give me the means to define them once-and-for-all and let me take it with me to every site I go to. You shouldn’t have to go to social networking sites, social networking should be a feature of every site.

We’re close to answers for all of these. The key to the open web is the development of standards that solve the above problems. We’ve OpenID and microformats (see #1 and #2) now all we need is something to bring those together to solve #3. I know that’s what I want to try to get done this weekend at BarCampBlock. Fortunately, we’ve got some very cool things happening with OAuth (think of it as the Flickr API for the Internet) and portable social networking.

Why are we seeing these technologies emerge now? I think Firefox helped pave the way by wrestling the Internet towards support for open standards. The emergence of a vocabulary for defining collaboration that started with ‘diff’, ‘email’ and ‘patch’ way-back-when the Internet started and how that has matured to allow anyone to collaborate. Finally, its the maturation of the underlying components that make up the Internet. HTTP, HTML (and its derivites), the ubiquity of decent technologies for managing/aggregating data, etc.

The open web is quickly becoming a reality. Its more than just free software and great browsers. Data wants to be free and open standards are the way to making that happen. What’s this all going to enable in the coming years? Services; I know who you are, what’s yours and your relationships … now I want recommendations, I want suggestions, I want meaning and I need services to make sense of all of this data. Distill it down to something that makes sense, that’s something I’ll pay for.

I hope you can make it out for BarCampBlock this weekend … its going to be one to remember.