OLDaily, by Stephen Downes

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March 19, 2013

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We’re Building A Reader
Andrew McLaughlin, Digg, March 19, 2013


Announcement from Digg's Andrew McLaughlin to the effect that Digg is building an RSS reader. "We hope to identify and rebuild the best of Google Reader’s features (including its API), but also advance them to fit the Internet of 2013, where networks and communities like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit and Hacker News offer powerful but often overwhelming signals as to what’s interesting." Sounds good. They're building on their news.me platform, so they have a base to begin with. Related: Mike Seyfang links us to Tiny Tiny RSS, a server-based app based on the PHP Magpie RSS library. Related: a Tiny Wiki and Tiny Tiny Wiki. Related: Doug Peterson thinks he's good with a set of iPad reader apps.  #indieweb

[Link] [Comment][Tags: Twitter, Project Based Learning, Google, Networks, RSS]


Who Owns a MOOC?
Ry Rivard, Inside Higher Ed, March 19, 2013


IPR follies and MOOCs. Faculty in California have a hard-won right to own their own academic material. "But before professors can have their courses put on Coursera, they are expected to sign away those rights to the university so the university can give the professors’ work to Coursera." Anyone who expects that Coursera won't pull a Google and convert open courses into a walled garden is fooling themselves.

[Link] [Comment][Tags: Push versus Pull, Google, Academia]


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Open Source Project Mimics Yahoo Pipes on Your Own Machine
Klint Finley, Wired, March 18, 2013


One of the problems with Yahoo Pipes or IFTTT is that they can turn it off whenever they feel like it - this is what happened to people using IFTTT with twitter recently. To replace these online services, Wired writes of Huginn, "a system for building agents that perform automated tasks for you online. They can read the web, watch for events, and take actions on your behalf. Huginn's Agents create and consume events, propagating events along a directed event flow graph." This is a bit of what gRSShopper does as well, though it looks to me like Huginn is much more fully developed. Huginn is built on Ruby on Rails. #indieweb

[Link] [Comment][Tags: Yahoo!, Ruby, RSS]


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Centralized Collection and Control of Personal Data
Arvind Narayanan, March 18, 2013


Presentation and paper from Air Mozilla on the subject of distributed authentication. "While the Internet was conceived as a decentralized network, the most widely used web applications today tend toward centralization. Control increasingly rests with centralized service providers..." The paper argues that decentralized authentication faces difficult hurdles and "presents recommendations for designers for working toward more achievable goals, with particular emphasis on the role of browser vendors." #indieweb

[Link] [Comment][Tags: Networks]


IndieAuth: Sign in with your domain name
IndieAuth, March 18, 2013


Here we go: "This is an IndieAuth login prompt. To use it, you'll need to:

  • Add a link on your home page to your various social profiles (Twitter, Github, etc) with the attribute rel="me"
  • Ensure your profiles link back to your home page.

Read the full setup instructions." From thwe web page: "IndieAuth is part of the Indie Web movement to take back control of your online identity. Instead of logging in to websites as 'you on Twitter' or 'you on Facebook', you should be able to log in as just 'you'. We should not be relying on Twitter or Facebook to provide our authenticated identities, we should be able to use our own domain names to log in to sites everywhere." See also RelMeAuth.  I should note that this doesn't work for me, and I'm pretty sure I've followed the instructions correctly. #indieweb

[Link] [Comment][Tags: Twitter, Books, Domain Names]


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Web Action Hero Toolbelt
Barnaby Walters, Github, March 18, 2013


As the website says, this is "a cross-browser extension which does three things:

  1. Replaces social sharing buttons with elements
  2. Activates elements
  3. Allows you to take actions on selections you’ve made (demo video)

Watch a demo video or read the transcript." #indieweb

[Link] [Comment][Tags: Video]


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Copyright 2010 Stephen Downes Contact: stephen@downes.ca

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