Scott Kveton

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.

What a week its been. This past weekend was SG FooCamp ‘08 (more on that below), on Tuesday I got a new job and then yesterday we made the long-awaited announcement around Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo! joining the OpenID Foundation board. Add to that trying to get a house ready to sell, moving, finding new office space in Portland and speaking at Ignite Portland 2 this has easily been the craziest (and most fun) week I’ve had in years. I really wish I’d had time to write this post earlier in the week.

What I really want to talk about here is about where we’re at now that the dust has settled from SG FooCamp ‘08. When David and I cooked up this event we had one thing in mind and it quickly morphed into something else. The outcome from my perspective was an entirely positive one. Lots of amazing people got to make some really great connections, people hacked on code, discussions (heated and otherwise) were heartfelt and engaging all weekend long.

That said, I’ve certainly taken my fair share of abuse for organizing the event. It was invite-only and for that I’m more than willing to take some heat. David and I chose the invite list and the reality was, there was a finite amount of room (we somehow crammed 105 people in over the weekend and a good chunk of those slept in tents in 30F+ weather). Okay, so where does that leave us?

In my travels this past week, in blog posts I’ve read, in people I’ve seen (even at Ignite Portland) it was clear that everyone wished they could be at SG FooCamp ‘08. People want an open discussion about these things. Me too. And even more so now that we had this event last weekend. Social graph/data portability/distributed social networking/etc … this is as much of a technical problem as it is a policy and best practices one. The weekend showed to me the passion that a small group could have around this space. What if we expanded the scope significantly?

We already have the Internet Identity Workshop as well as the Data Sharing Summit. Both of these are open-space style events and both are really well attended and organized. I think there is room for something combined or even expanded in scope.

I can foresee two tracks to an event like this. One would cover the hacking pieces. How can we use XMPP? What does Google’s Social Graph API reveal? What are the hard problems devs are dealing with? The other track would cover the policy and best practices components. How do we put users in control of their data? What should be the rules/best practices around scrapping? Who owns my data? Yes, I’m suggesting that we bring together a cross-section of people to discuss this. This could/should even be an extension of the DataPortability work going on. Its not a contest and its not about size, but I could easily see 1000 people coming to an event like this and I can only imagine the intensity and camaraderie being 10x what we had at SG FooCamp ‘08.

Okay, so … who’s going to do it? I was really hoping to hear word of a another Data Sharing Summit from Marc and Kaliya. I think its a great basis for this event and I’d love to help make it a reality. The sooner the better in my opinion. People are hungry to discuss this and with the maturation of technologies like OpenID, OAuth and microformats we have the building blocks we need to make it happen. I’m ready to roll up my sleeves, anybody else?