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A short announcement and a huge step for the OpenID movement. Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! have joined the board of OpenID Foundation. This certainly will expand the use of OpenID. That`s great! I am really happy what happend with OpenID. A year before I wrote an article “Online Identity, what is the choice?”, where I had some doubts that this good technology would be interpreted by the giants in different ways and they would not join behind OpenID. I am glad the future is so bright.

Today yahoo claimed that they accept OpenID. This is a big step for the OpenID movement. I would say it is a big step for yahoo, too. Now they are back in the game and will compete with google and microsoft as they will support OpenID.

Yahoo!’s OpenID service will be available in public beta on January 30th. Till than you can keep close look to http://openid.yahoo.com

Interesting game produced for facebook. It was fun to play it. You can see my result on the picture.

And here you can play the game for yourself:

http://www.travelpod.com/traveler-iq

Google just launched their new interface for the Docs & Spreadsheets. At first sight it looks like it would be easier to work with it. But then I was disappointed. One of the functions that I use really a lot is three clicks away in the new interface. I am talking about the preview button of the docs. I usually write down things connected with IT and network stuff. So I create one document but after that I have to check it again and again. In the old interface to preview a document was two clicks away. I really hoped that in the new one it would be only one.

When you pay less for hosting it is almost always a shared hosting plan. This means that your site and others, sometimes hundreds, are located on one server. Most of the services for reverse IP domain check are paid. However the http://www.myipneighbors.com/ is free and you can check who are your neighbors.

The identity is an important part of ourselves. That`s why it is a favorite topic in science-fiction. The Online Identity is not like the identity in real life. In reality we have faces, we have finger tips, we can be at one place at a time and other things that can identify us. That`s why it is harder to hide who are you in reality. On the other hand, online you can share knowledge, joy and love with people all over the world and still be hidden.

There are a few ways of online identification today, but more interesting is what`s coming on in the near future. Nowadays we have to make a lot of accounts for services we want to use or just to try. Most of you probably have experienced that on some places if you want to leave a comment you should register first. Due to this big mess with so many accounts most of the users prefer to use the same information (ex. passwords). Then what happens when he decides his account is no more secured, he goes and change his password all over the places he has registered? Now you see what is just one of the problems of nowadays online identification systems.

What should we expect for the future? Most of the biggest companies (Microsoft, Google, Yahoo) have already thought about the topic and have their decisions. The good thing is that the Open Source community has ideas, too. (more…)

A month ago a Sony advertisement campaign in Bulgaria just started. It`s all about artlikenoother.com and how Sony used Splatter (http://stamen.com/projects/splatter), available under a liberal Creative Commons license. As nowhere on the website is mentioned that they are using Splatter, I wrote a mail to “info(at)stamen.com” and “cic.bulgaria(at)eu.sony.com” asking them is it true. Still that question is opened.

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Recently there was a buzz about Wikiasari. Techcrunch wrote an article “Wikia To Launch Search Engine” and provided a screenshot, too. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, says:

`Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term `Tampa hotels`, for example, and you will not get any useful results. Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: `this page is good, this page sucks.` Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way. But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.

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EPIC (Evolving Personalized Information Construct) is the single source of information in the future where everyone contributes in some way. By the year 2014 the democratic web society has evolved to its almost final step. Where everyone is able to contribute and consume media.

EPIC 2014 is a short film describing the near future of the global network and internet. The story is told in fascinating way and really make you believe in it. It doesn’t take part, but just predicting facts. In the near future it forecast the end of the news agencies. The news will be gathered from machines which obey on the people driven engine. In fact the news will be customized per user.

In one of the interviews “Change Media” of Richard Edelman (President & CEO of Edelman Advertising agency) he describes the new era in media distribution. Television is the fourth most preferred activity to teens behind surfing the web, talking to friends and going to cinema, wasn’t so five years ago. It was the most. He describes how newspapers are becoming more and more read in their online versions.

Now, you tell me. Do you believe in the near future you saw, or you have your own version?