It’s nice and all getting updates from the leader of the opposition. But Twitter is meant to be about conversation – with that nifty little reply feature. So far we’re just getting a one way conversation here – as far as I can tell Ms Zille does not reply to questions, at all.

This came out of me asking who the other faces on the DA’s election posters are (I think the same people are on the website…) and getting no response – but a quick search along with her profile suggests that it’s just what happens.

My browsing of the news each day consists of a visit to the Mail & Guardian, The Times and the BBC. Later in the day I generally visit the New York Times, Time.com and the Wall Street Journal. I also occasionally drop by IOL and News24.

Perhaps I’m complaining too much – but I do feel that the international sites have better content and also importantly don’t rehash the same background information each time they do a follow up story. Guess I just have to live with it.

From Andréia on Flickr, licensed by CC Attribution 2.0 Generic

The New York Timses has a great summary of the mess that is the Australian internet censorship proposal.What interested me most is the following:

But ethics professor Clive Hamilton, in a column on the popular Australian Web site Crikey.com, scoffed at what he called ”Net libertarians,” who believe freedom of speech is more important than limiting what children can access online.

”The Internet has dramatically changed what children can see,” said the professor at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, noting that ”a few extra clicks of a mouse” could open sites with photos or videos of extreme or violent sex. ”Opponents of ISP filters simply refuse to acknowledge or trivialize the extent of the social problem.”

So I went to find the said article – and here it is. He makes an interesting point about double standards – but not a particularly good one. Centralised control of internet content is different from the rating of movies shown in a cinema. That’s all there really is to it – and this Internet Libertarian desperately hopes that nothing like this ever comes near our shores.

The problem is quite simple: it’s just way too difficult to find new content. Put bluntly – everything is a bit of a mess and it’s hard to find new content you actually want to read.

Where’s the popularity contest?
Unless I can’t find the link (which would be a problem in itself ) – there is no way to view recently popular blog posts. While I’m not a complete fan of Amatomu’s layout, which does show popular posts – consider the blogs section of Afrigator. All we see are recent posts in that category – which isn’t very useful.

Take a look at the Afrigator homepage:

The primary content on the page – latest search results and latest blog posts – are not very useful. I don’t really care what other people are searching for; sure it might be interesting – but that should be side bar content. There is the top blogs list – which is good – but I still want posts.

Technorati overs a good example of what I’m thinking about (not that they are perfect…):

I haven’t tried to break down that page – because practically every block contains ‘rising posts’ in that section.

Sorting the news
I’m sure I’ve made my point about popular posts clear by now – so then there is my other pet annoyance: news. Afrigator does a great job of letting us know what is going on – but it clearly isn’t a Google News (there are no headline stories etc.). This is fine – but it leaves one wondering what the point is. The news section would be 100 times more useful if duplicate stories from different sources were grouped together and blog posts about those stories were shown.

If this was to happen I would visit Afrigator far more often than I already do – I’m always wondering what bloggers are saying about what is in the news, just right now you’re lucky if you can find out..

Of course it’s not all so bad – Afrigator is doing some great work and despite my complaints I still find great content through the site. They have an excellant collection of blogs and I look forward to seeing what they do with it over time.

Just one last thing: I don’t like the auto-refresh on the home page.

Yet I can see how this will fit perfectly into one of my ongoing projects – and so I’ll use it, because it will make life easier for my users and drive traffic. But as I compromise I’ll say here that I will never force users to use a third party sign in provider and that when using one third party provider I will support OpenID. Principled Compromise? Should I not care? It’s good enough for me.

I don’t have much time for writing at the moment – but this is annoying me enough to make brief mention of it. Two weeks ago Yahoo became an OpenID provider. Today we hear that Google is doing something similar with Gmail accounts.

I’ll get to the main problem with the Google implementation just now – but the first glaring problem is that these two companies are still only providers and not relaying parties. I can’t use my Google OpenID to log into Yahoo services and the same vice versa – which defeats the point.

However there is one comment which does make a good point – that this helps to solve the chicken and egg problem. So sure we now have the egg (lots of OpenID providers) and smaller players now have incentive to become relaying parties – which is a good thing; but I just see little incentive for Google and Yahoo to become relaying parties in the future.

Then there is the problem with the Google way of doing things. The way I read this is that Google has gone and built its own way of doing things on top of OpenID – and kept the same name. I can’t go to any OpenID relaying party with my Gmail address right now and login – only websites which have implemented the Google API will work. This again defeats the point of a single login system – if every webmail provider works in the same way a developer is going to have to cater for each of them individually.

The only thing I can think of at this point is that Google is using non-standard technology – as I have read about plans to extend OpenID to email address and not just URLs. However quickly reading over everything makes it seem as if this is not the case – we’ve seen Google in the past make it clear when it is pioneering some new standard – and so I assume that we just have another case of grabbing some nice press.

I wouldn’t say that the idea itself is at all a new one; the perfect example of this is the blogosphere. Each person hosts their own blog and adds information to it and then can interact with everybody else’s blogs through trackbacks and comments – the point is that each person controls their own blog and the data which comes with it.

Basically I’m wondering why we all can’t put our own social network profile on our own server or home computer (or hosted provider in the way Blogger and wordpress.com work) and then interact with everybody else’s. No longer would Facebook or any other evil corporation know everything about you – and as this would most likely be an open source project innovation would be amazing.

It’s an idea which has fascinated me for a good while now – and I’m clearly not the only one. Software along these concepts is already being developed; the closest to my own idea as far as I can see is Noserub and Appleseed. So obviously I have been trying these two solutions out – but they just don’t seem right for what I have in mind.

To begin with Noserub is more of an aggregator – you tell it about all the different services you use and it creates a newsfeed for you along with a few other interesting features. As far as I can tell it seems very like FriendFeed – but then again I’m ashamed to say that I still don’t see the point of FriendFeed unless I know a lot more people using it. But it still holds potential considering the developers claim that Noserub is a protocol (and my experience has been based off their first implementation) – so perhaps I need to look into it a bit more. But for now I’m not convinced.

When I first came across Appleseed I thought that I had found what I was looking for – the developer has all the right ideas. The one clear problem with this though is that it’s designed for multiple users on each server, albeit a small amount of users on each server – where each server communicates with that other. While this in itself is not wrong I am convinced that an individual component is vital – especially in promoting adoption. But I’ll reserve further judgement until after I’ve had a chance to try Appleseed out.

Of course all of this does assume one thing – that users want to have a single online identity on a single network. Not that I am saying that the use of any solution is mutually exclusive – but rather that when we are designing something to accommodate individuals and their preferences (by nature of being decentralised and open source) we have to aim to allow for everything. So at the moment someone might have a Facebook account, a Linkedin account and a variety of other accounts spanning some blogs and Twitter. Essentially what this person is doing is keeping different categories of themselves separate from each other close/real life friends stay separate from business contacts who in turn stay separate from interactions with the web at large.

You can argue about whether it is correct for someone to put their online existence into such categories – but the truth is that it happens in real life (you have your private and public life) and the web needs to adapt to that – and I can’t help but get the feeling that distributing one’s self between a couple of walled-garden social networks is not the solution.

So what does a decentralised or distributed social network have to do to accommodate different online identities (I don’t like saying that a normal person has different online identities – but I’ll use it for want of a better word)? My own solution would be to get rid of the idea that everybody is everybody else’s friend. Rather we have friends, associates, colleague and so on. Facebook has made a step in this direction with it’s ‘Friend lists’ feature – allowing me to show certain things to certain friends. But let’s rather drop the pretences – I’ll add you as a friend if I’m going to invite you to my house to watch rugby but I’ll add you as a colleague if I work with you.

Naturally we would need to accommodate overlaps – and posibly even make them intelligent. For example I might have my friends and my ‘online/anonymous contacts’ (not sure what to call that group yet). Now I don’t want to concern my normal friends with my twitter updates but I don’t want to block them from it either. So I should be able to say that all my ‘online/anonymous contacts’ can see what I post to twitter (or mind you a decentralised system intergrated into the whole platform – the idea of a decentralised twitter has been making the rounds) but also any of my normal friends on twitter can also see them.

All of this would need some nifty authentication both on the user side and between servers – but that does raise an interesting question. Would we allow each user to host their profile? In other words to view another person’s profile would I visit a webpage on his server? I immediately have pictures of badly designed MySpace pages and have to conclude no. Social networking should be about infromation, not making it as pretty as possible. So each server should provide the other (on the basis of the permissions between contacts) with some kind of xml output of everything about it’s own user – which can then parse it and display it in a format acceptable to the viewer. If it’s done right then a platform like the Facebook’s could still be intergrated into this.

The eventual aim should be that the user shouldn’t notice that he/she is using a decentralised system – but should still be able to reap all of the benefits. Pretty big task.

Seeing Matthew Buckland’s post about decisions being made about their redesign of the Mail & Guardian website reminded me how interesting the whole process has been to follow – between his posts and Vincent Maher’s I’ve gotten an idea of wher they are going – and am really looking forward to seeing the final result.

Both the Mail & Guardian and The Times have began to use the web really well (particularly interesting is The Time’s new Multimedia Section). While I think that both can make a lot more progress in intergrating everything and sometimes not detracting from the actual news – it all looks like it’s going pretty well.

• Formatting needs to improve, as has been said by others
• Inserting images while offline is needed
• I want to be able to email a document as an attachment while offline (so it gets sent when I’m next online)
• Some kind of integration with the host file system would be really cool, but I’m not so sure how this would work
• Wouldn’t an open source version which you could install on your own home server be the best thing in the world?