Scott Kveton

Through snow, sleet, hail, rain and of course a fair mix of sun yesterday’s Startupalooza was a fantastic success. Organized by Todd Kenefsky with a whole host of volunteers and the rest of the Legion of Tech pitching in as well it was a great event and I got a chance to put a lot of faces with (mostly Twitter) names.

Highlights for me included:

• Hearing the Jive Software story (complete with embarrassing photos)
• Meeting Matt King and Jason Glaspey (the Unthirsty guys)
• Seeing @ahockley totally decked out with a lot of photo gear I wish I had
• Buying drinks/food for folks at the Side Door afterwords thinking the bill was huge only to have it be $360
• Realizing that Garage Games is actually a ginormous endeavor
• Getting to meet the Toonlet guys
• Realizing that gamers and people with connections to NYC seem to do well in Portland

And, as is the case at any event in Portland, there were the seedlings hatched for new events. One was an impromptu idea that Paul Biggs (aka @techpaulogy) had called #drunkgeeking. Say you’re married, with an SO, etc and they have gotten tired of your inebriated ramblings about technology. Wouldn’t it make sense to find a couple of other nerds you could get your drink on with and then talk about geeky topics? Instead of trying to organize it on a regular basis, why not just use Twitter + the hashtag #drunkgeeking to coordinate on-the-fly events. For example, you could couple this with Unthirsty and find a good happy hour, Tweet “#drunkgeeking in 15 minutes at the Side Door” and see what happens. I love it and am looking forward to it after Paul gets done with his three day pantless bender. :-)

While at Startupalooza, Matt King demoed a new application he’s working on for a few folks that were there. Its in the Alpha stage but he wanted to get the take of some folks that could take a hard look while drilling down into the actual details of the application. This could be really handy for folks if we formalized it. Pick someone’s office, an afternoon and choose 2 or 3 applications to critique. To participate you have to have something you’d want looked at in the coming weeks/months. You’d want high quality participation and it would be great to have a mix of devs, designers and (*gasp*) even a marketer or two … :-)

All in all I was amazed at the vibrance of the Portland startup scene … clearly there is something here, clearly we’re just starting to pick up the pace here … I can’t imagine anywhere else on earth I’d rather be working and living.

I did the Beer and Blog tonight on how to OpenID enable your blog. Thanks to Justin Kistner for inviting me and thanks to everybody for showing up to hear me talk about OpenID (again and again and again) … ha!

The gist of tonight was to show folks how easy it is to OpenID enable their blogs. With most folks using Wordpress these days, I did a basic install of Wordpress 2.5 RC1 with the wpopenid plugin that Will Norris has built. From a couple of zip files to a full-fledged blog its about 5 minutes total work if you know what you’re doing.

If you want to use your own domain as an OpenID, check out Sam Ruby’s post about OpenID delegation to learn more. (Note: see here if you want to do delegation with myVidoop – yes, shameless plug).

Now, some folks don’t necessarily want to use Wordpress. No problem, there are plenty of other OpenID enabled blog platforms and content management systems. Here are a few more (feel free to leave comments if I missed anything):

• Moveable Type 4.0 – This is a great alternative to Wordpress and Six Apart has really started to put some extra work into making this a great platform for your blog.
• Drupal – Drupal is one of the premier content management systems out there and starting with Drupal 6.0, OpenID (both consumer and producer) is built-in by default. This is a CMS that has really started to mature into a fantastic piece of software with an amazing community.
• MediaWiki – MediaWiki is the defacto leader in wiki applications out there. With the OpenID extension you can make it even easier to create and manage your own wiki with ease.
• Joomla – Another CMS, Joomla with its OpenID extension allows full-integration.
• dotnetnuke – As hard as it is for some folks to believe, people actually build some cool applications on .NET. One of those (and that has native OpenID support), is dotnetnuke which is a content management system for Windows.
• Roll your own – You might want to roll your own applications. If so, check out OpenID Enabled which is a great resource for specific OpenID libraries.

These are just a few of the many applications, frameworks and libraries that are available for OpenID-ifying your sites. Now, Go forth and implement OpenID today!

Marshallk talked about it and David Recordon did as well and Kevin Fox wrote about it yesterday but I thought I’d mention something about it as well.

Yesterday, Ma.gnolia deployed new login infrastructure that is 100% OpenID only. You don’t create a Ma.gnolia account anymore, you come with your OpenID, Facebook account or some other means of login.

Why is this a big deal? Well, it turns out spammers like to create accounts for bogus link love on Ma.gnolia. This stinks for Larry and his crew but also for the community that has grown up around this great site. By pushing this off to other sites, now the Ma.gnolia folks can focus on what makes their site great; not stopping spammers.

This is a really interesting trend and I think something is going to bubble out of this; reputation. We need to be able to take advantage of the fact that a) I have lots of accounts and b) I can link them to one OpenID to prove that this-is-likely-a-real-person.

Props to Larry and his team … well done guys.

One of the most lively discussions at SG FooCamp was the Data Portability talk. Chris Saad was the host and a bevy of folks (Chris Messina, daveman692, Eran Hammer-Lahav, jsmarr, Tantek, Adactio, John Panzer, Eran Sandler and many others) were there talking about how to turn all of the Data Portability energy and excitement into something tangible. One of the ideas was for Chris Saad to turn DataPortability.org into the place for the discussion about how all of these technologies can work together and hopefully relate the conversations happening in each of the communities.

I know Chris has done a few of these videos already:

• http://seesmic.com/v/Co8lFpDaMz
• http://seesmic.com/v/fN4utUYa6C
• http://seesmic.com/v/laUHx3ie9j
• http://seesmic.com/v/qcdpwCUX4l
• http://seesmic.com/v/sb8qjEF57p
• http://seesmic.com/v/Dk76sdlGMk

This is a great start and I want to do my part. I like the ideas, momentum and people that have come around the Data Portability Workgroup, so this weekend at SXSW 2008 I’m going to actually do something instead of just listening quietly on the mailing lists … :-)

Myself (look for me in some sort of Portland/Bacon themed t-shirt) and fellow Vidoop partner-in-crime Luke Sontag will be prowling walking the expo floor, taking in sessions, attending pre/post events, raiding BarCamp Austin III and everywhere in between seeking out your thoughts on Data Portability, the Open Web, portable social networking, DiSo, whatever. These topics mean a lot of things to a lot of people and most importantly to those of us in each of our communities (OpenID, OAuth, microformats, etc). The goal is to simply document thoughts from people in the space (and not just the “leaders” either) and make it accessible to everyone wanting to participate in the conversation. Hopefully this will increase awareness and help people come together more effectively on the problems at hand.

A few of the questions I’d like to pose:

• What has the impact of the Open Web been for you, your work or the applications that you use?
• What does Data Portability mean for the work that you’re doing today? For the applications that you use?
• Is portable/distributed social networking/DiSo possible and what are some steps to move it in the right direction today? Where should we be by 2009?
• Every web site seems to have a life streaming component now, does it matter? Is it relevant? What are your thoughts on life/action streaming?
• OpenID and OAuth both have the concept of an end-point that does interesting things for the user. What are some possibilities for this end-point with relation to the work you’re doing? The applications you’re using?
• Google announced the beta of Google Health and its inevitable that more and more of our data will be ending up on-line. Is this a good thing? How can you better manage and protect this data?

These will be short, bite-sized interviews (hopefully under 5 minutes or so) and we’ll get them on-line as quickly as our crack video team can get them up. I’ve already lined up a few really great people to chat with so far and am looking for more. Would you like to weigh in on the questions above? Do you have other questions you’d like to ask? Comment below and I’ll either work the question in or find you at SXSW. See you all in Austin!