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Not very many Rochesterians have hit it big at Google or in Silicon Valley and have their own Wikipedia entry, so the few who do, stand out. In many ways, they seem like ordinary folks with ordinary schedules and ordinary tribulations, but just got lucky. They can also have an amazing talent for programming and new enterprise. In this 4000 word interview, read about one of them: Paul Buchheit.

If something is wrong with the copy, you can probably blame me. Even experienced eyes sometimes miss things read too many times. One footnote to the interview, in editing the transcript, i changed none of the dialog or wording, using only paragraphs and punctuation to render the sequence of words readable and comprehensible

A big warm thanks go to Rajesh for inviting me to contribute questions for the interview, and for turning me onto FriendFeed.

I would have been curious what distribution across demographics and psychographics uses social calendars. Merely replacing paper with computers without adopting innovations offered by the technology kinda misses the point. Most electronic and online calendars let users collaborate to set up meetings, but few people now share their calendars so software agents can suggest dates and schedule meetings. Instead, they propose dates via e mail through multiple round robins of okay and not okay. That gains hardly any productivity and maybe even hurts it. I suspect most people would prefer their computer work for them than to work for their computer.

Digg began ostensibly as alternative to Slashdot. Its founders found Slashdot too closed, dominated by articles an elite group of editors found interesting. Though Digg used algorithms and not a cabal of anointed editors, many users complained a defacto cabal of frequent users did dominate the front page. In response, January 2008 Digg modified their algorithm to select for diversity and independence. Though it may in effect be more fair, i find it dominated by pubescent boys and articles they find interesting. Though i use it, i prefer Ma.gnolia, Faves, Reddit, and other recommenders.

A protocol, implementation, exemplar and inspiration for a decentralized social network, NoseRub uses already available standards such as OpenID, FOAF, and RSS to support truly decentralized social networks. Several sites, such as sister site Identoo, already implement it. Based in Bonn and Köln, Germany, but under an MIT license, and hosted at Google Code, it’s free and opensource.

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Tags: social networks, social media,

An experimental palette sharing site for graphic designers, based on Shockwave Flash and Adobe Air, here create harmonious color themes online and publish them as resources for others. Explore, create and share color palettes. For sharing swatches, it’s the neatest thing i’ve seen since the Pantone color Matching System. Now, go calibrate your monitor!

Saved By: John Lam | View Details | Give Thanks

Tags: graphic design, color, palettes, tool, tags, …

Barnraiser builds opensource OpenID servers and a collaboration package which uses OpenID, which install on Apache with PHP5 and MySql. Though many people already have OpenID identities at America Online, Yahoo, and Live.com, this gives organizations ability to create user identities on their own server, free from commercial sites, large identity providers, and even smaller providers.

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Tags: OpenID, social media, …

While writers write for their intended readers, an impressive array of software processes blogs. From ping distribution to trackback, from reply management to aggregation and resyndication, posts zip across the Internet to be found by all kinds of search tools and interested readers. This makes blogs different from other web pages, bulletin boards, and content management systems. In addition, readers can subscribe to and follow blogs using handy desktop feed readers such as FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and browser-based feed readers such as Google Reader; they need not take time nor hassle to open another browser page to read the latest entries. See this Wired interactive graphic to see how cyberspace groks blogs.

Yahoo now supports OpenID 2. With http://flickr.com/photos/UserName Flickr users can also use their Flickr identity!

“Why OpenID? Are you tired of creating a new account on every web site you use? Do you avoid new web sites because they come with yet another username and password? Do you paste stickies with password hints all over your computer monitor?

“OpenID, an open technology standard that solves all of these problems, lets you use your many accounts and now Yahoo! accounts to sign into hundreds of web sites! And this list grows every day!

“Once you enable your Yahoo! account for OpenID access, you can simply tell any OpenID enabled web site that you are a Yahoo! user. You will be sent to Yahoo! to verify your Yahoo! ID and password and then signed in to the web site. It’s that easy.”

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tags OpenID, identity, social media, social computing, Flickr, Yahoo!

“We are not really a foundation [like the Gates Foundation]. It’s a bit of a 501(c)3, a bit of a C corp, and a bit of an academic environment. I can play more of the keys on the keyboard. A 501(c)3 can’t lobby. A 501(c)3 can’t invest in a company or build an industry. [From Google we get] 1% of the equity, 1% of the profits, and 1% of the people go into Google.org. The most important asset isn’t money, it’s people. One percent of the people means 60 or 70 of the smartest people in the world trying to solve some of the biggest problems in the world.” —Larry Brilliant, Google.org, in Wired

Tagged social enterprise, venture philanthropy, entrepreneurialism, technology, challenges, creativity, genius, Google

I’ve used Plazes on and off for maybe a year. I can see their reluctance to call themselves a calendar, a market segment filled with competitors and existing notions of what calendars can and should do. Instead they focus their platform around places. Recent feature updates there, though, refocus the site around activity, not place, and thus as a calendar, but only partially. Collaborative calendars such as Eventful and collaboratively-filtered event listings such as Last.fm do a better job.

Dropping support for semantics such as activity finish seems like a bad idea. Rather than pioneer a new format for now old and time-tested expressions, why not support existing calendar standards? Plazes now provides beta iCalendar feeds for past activity tracking. Extended full compatibility support for iCalendar and its XML equivalent hCalendar, with time-tested notions of time, place, activity and activity end, with roots in vCalendar, then makes Plazes and its database more useful, flexible, and valuable. Why must Plazes reinvent the calendar?