standardsForUsers.opml

BloggerCon IV, Day 1: Standards for Users
  Discussion Leader: Niall Kennedy
    bloggercon page
      baseball
      stevenson guage, railroads.
        railroads use d to compete with different guages. the stevenson standard overcame that. also the civil war
      RJ-11 (registerd jack)
      shipping containers.
        guy who ran a trucking company invented the shipping container.
      a question: how do you change the equiv of shipping or transportation?
  Guidance:
    we'll talk about how people get it.
    we'll talk about some of what you hate
    want to hear about what things we want to see standardized
    what would make your life easier
  Notes:
    Dave: let's give 5 minutes to learning how RSS works.
    ___: standards are really handy but also all of them, open to interpretation by people using and impllmenting them. Not the holy grail.
    Shannon: been on the other side. iCalendar for the ietf. still want calendaring standards that work. both users and developers come at each other with conflicting needs and resources. with calendars, it's calendars vs. schedules. there is a standard for storing data, but not for how an app will talk to a server. the ugliness has to do with things like how people handle repeated events, time zones, etc. are you trying to store data or facilitate an action? there are different activities than just storing data.
    Phillip T: people get to post stuff somewhere, and don't get to take it with them. Reviews, for example. there needs to be ways to get data out of data roach motels.
    Lisa Williams: trying to learn CSS. one sentence in a book that said that CSS leaves the hard work to a specialist class, or a cartel. this is just immoral as vendor lock-in.
    Chris Pirillo: you *could* read that (rss example). being able to read inside a spec like that, is awesome. the closer to what I understand, the happier I'm going to be.
    Matt: I don't know how they tripped all the developers into supporting IMAP. Now IMAP is the way to get your data out of Outlook. Mostly I'm just trying to get my laptop and my desktop coordinated.
    martin: what does the end user care about all these ways of doing these things.
    Doc: user-centric identity is an example of a user, or a few users, caring about a set of standards, and moving an industry that's still forming.
    Shannon: there is the level of what you... (something with OPML). With standards it's useful to think abouthow they represent an action on the part of an individual. There are distinctions to be drawn.
    ___: being able to work with a printer. just want to print a dociumentl. bizarre that every time I hooik up a new printer, I have to do a zillion things. Same with .pdf.
    Nial: Bonjour, zeroconf.
    Mark Canter: RSS and Aggregators have created an ecosystem free of patents and IP. We want standards for other ecosystems for more people to make more money.
    Scott Mace: I've been trying to synchronize calendars with my wife for more than 2 years.
    I want software to stop phoning home and update itself and report errors.
    Elisa: DOCSIS dumbed down a spec, killed innovation. This is the cable industry. If cable loses to the telcos, its because they created a standard for short term gain.
    Niall: show the base level and write to that. Browsers will do extra little things on top of the HTML standard.
    Jesse: (missed it)
      the problem with the money is that you end up with monopolies.
    Niall: XMPP is one standard, for IM. Asterisk for open standards in PBXes.
    Eric: standards as a baseline, won't you run into the java problem, where everybody has a slightly different build.
    Thomas Hawk: portablility of data.
    Mark: APIs should be about portability of data in both directions. If youi're gonna suck you gotta spit. it's about sex, life, love. what goes in goes out...
    Niall: user trust
    Dave: The point is, we don't iknow all the vendors that want to suck down all the data out of a system, selectively. Asking Mark.
    Mark: the master files of are in flickr. you suck all of it out. they're copies. you should be able to do what you like.
    Shannon: when the act of reading modifies the system.
    Eric: back when moblogging was still a word, I tried textamerica. then when I went to add titles to a picture, and all my blog was gone. So i literally lost a year's worth of pictures. when I asked for them because you must have violated the terms of use. No record, no backup. You find out you really didn't have the tacit agreement you thought you had. there needs to be a clear agreement that "we're really keeping this for you and we don't plan to delete it."
    Phillip T: Forum software is all so different. I can't save out all my posts in some. Seems like a good opportunity for a standard that's not there right now.
    Marc: we created threadsml three years ago.
    Jeremiah: I trust flickr to respect my data, but they're the mercedes. also relatives don't understand what's public and private. need SSO. somebody will figure that out.
    Niall: would you feel comfortable with all that in yoiur house?
    Marc (who woke up, dave sez): not if you live in New Orleans.
    Tom Maddox: we need standards for getting data in and out... whatever it is. preferably something that automatically creates something, no matter where it is... everything today that's digitized is at the mercy of chance.
    Jesse: do we need legislation, or some recourse, that says you have an obligation?
    martin: legislation raises the bar for entrepreneurs.
    Niall: who you trust? we hand over credit cards all the time.
    Kevin: the credit card companies assume the liability. that's why we feel okay.
    Peter: read the fine print. Can a company ... (missed that one, but it was good).
    Marc: big companies, which are uptight. and the NSA, which is also about trust. Go back to Zoomer and Flickr.
    Kevin: I;'ve been using .mac. suddenly I;m told that I've exceeded bandwidth, and then they held me hostage. so I'm moving off of that.
    Jay Rosen: Whyp are we talking about standards on the web overall at a blogging conference? why are we talking about all these general issues?
    Niall: what other areas would hyou like to see talked about? what relevance do they have to blogging?
    Thomas Hawk: Photos are extremely important to bloggers.
    Niall: who has or would move between blog providers
    : was told there is no way to move. Now have three different blogs in the world. It sucks but there it is.
    Chris Pirillo: moved form MT to blogware. Got tired of that. had tofigure a way to get out of blogware and into wordpress. So a developer created one that is part of the wordpress install. it's a PITA, but it can be done. (gives desctription of how) best thing 've found is an awesome plugin that will detect when somebody comes in from a search engine and provide the links they came from.
    Ponzi: where is the consumer reports of all that stuff. for people who don't know Matt at Wordpress? for when people say I want pictueres on my blog ...
    Jesse: the blog export-import effort. is there anything you can use to make this happen.
    Thomas: wants to get off blogger, can't figure out wordpress. there needs to be one-button export and import. go from blogger to wp to mt and so on. people who use those platforms own that data.
    Niall: why should I, as an app program, build export-import into my program, if it's hard to do?
    Tony Schnieder: it seems amazing to me that even with open apis people can't figure it out.
    Frank Paynter: I've been on many blog platfomrs and most of what I wrote was crap and I didn't want to move it anyway. it's a matter of paying attention to where you are and where you're going. I;m on WP now and I'm happy with it, and has a helpful and free community of users.
    Elisa: It's not the companies' obligation. I'd like (would pay for?) something that crawls my blogs and backs it up for me. So later if I change my blogware, I could make the change. If the spam blogs can crawl my blog and create a new blog, why can't somebody make a business of that?
    Steve Gillmor: there will be a developer who comes along. This is a matter of users' rights...
    ___: part of the data that you do own is the inbound link pointing to that info. If you pull somethingn from flickr, all those links are gone. that's an incentive...
    Eric: one thing to keep in mind: it seems to happen from time to time... when cell phones first came out, carriers actually prevente3d you from calling customers of other carriers. it always fails. as long as we see blogs or photos or whatever it is, be self-contained, and not move seamlessly across, that we will be second class citizens. opening up to competition also opens you to customers.
  Done.