Just a guy in Vermont trying to connect all the dots...
Author's posts
Oct 06
INET Trinidad and Tobago To Cover IPv6, DNSSEC, IXPs and more
This Wednesday and Thursday the INET Trinidad and Tobago event will bring a great amount of technical presentations to the Caribbean region. Starting on October 8, 2014, some of the presentations covering IPv6 and DNSSEC include:
- IPv6: What Is It? Why Is It Needed?
- IPv6 Deployment: Business Cases and Development Options (in the Caribbean)
- Securing the DNS and Internet Routes
The event continues on Thursday, October 9, with a range of sessions related to Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), cybersecurity and trends in the overall industry. It looks like a great event and the excellent news is that you can watch it all live at:
http://new.livestream.com/internetsociety/inet-trinidad-and-tobago
Note that Trinidad and Tobago use Atlantic Standard Time (AST) which is UTC-4 and right now the same as US Eastern Daylight Time.
Our colleague Shernon Osepa has more information about the INET Trinidid and Tobago event in a post on our Internet Technology Matters (ITM) blog earlier today.
Oct 06
FIR #776 – 10/06/14 – For Immediate Release
Oct 05
Reflections On Ello – October 5, 2014
First, as I wrote, we have to remember that Ello is not Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc., and we have to just go in with an open mind.
The Ello platform is very definitely still a "beta" with a long list of features that they want to add, but over the past bit there have been some changes of interest:
- The Ello team has now release "muting" and "blocking" so that you can control a bit more of the experience you have on Ello.
- Kevin Marks had some good commentary about how this issue is hard - and how it is also important to the IndieWeb and other activities.
- Cmd+Return on my Mac (Ctrl+Enter on a PC) has now become my favorite keystroke because it lets me rapidly submit comments or posts without using the mouse.
- You can press "f" and "n" to toggle between your "friends" and "noise" lists.
- There are several other quick keys that let you shift between different views.
- The mobile interface works well once you understand that you can swipe left and right to do more.
- Writing with markdown and emoji is fun!
I love the display of photos in Ello, but there's one bit of brokenness that does bother me:
- There are issues posting "portrait" photos from a smartphone, although there is a workaround to make them square first.
I asked the question of why should Ello have to have a mobile app and wondered about how Ello behaved different from other apps... and I learned a bit more about why (and what you can do)
Clay Shirky had two great posts about Ello being a conversational versus annotative medium:
He also had two other good articles and threads:- How he does NOT want a 'reshare' link and why Ello to him is more like LiveJournal and USENET
- How challenging it is to find comments you have left on Ello
Oh, and there's now a parody social network... Owdy! :-)
Please do join me on Ello if you are interested in the continuing experiments... and please feel free to share your own tips and insights!
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
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Oct 03
Join Me On VUC Today At Noon US EDT To Talk IPv6, IoT, WebRTC and more…
Today at 12 noon US Eastern (in about 3.5 hours), I'll be part of a panel on the VoIP Users Conference (VUC) talking about IPv6, WebRTC, the Internet of Things (IoT) and much, much more... you should be able to watch it live at live.vuc.me or embedded here:
VUC host Randy Resnick had a scheduled guest be unable to attend and so he asked a group of us to come on for what he is calling a "VUC Vision" session. I will be on there, as will, I believe, Tim Panton and a number of others. I expect the discussion should range over good variety of topics. It should be a good time... you're welcome to join in the discussion.
It's probably best to also join the IRC backchannel where links are shared, questions are answered and other comments occur. You also can visit the Google+ event page for the VUC session today where there may be additional links and info.
If you won't be at your computer, you can also call in via:
- sip:200901@login.zipdx.com
- +1 (646) 475-2098
- Skype:vuc.me
The session will of course be recorded so you can listen/watch later.
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
- following me on Twitter;
- adding me to a circle on Google+;
- following me on Ello;
- following me on App.net;
- subscribing to my email newsletter; or
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Oct 02
CEA Webinar Archive: Making Content Available On IPv6 and Ensuring the Optimal Customer Experience
How can you make your content available over IPv6 and ensure the optimal customer experience? That was the topic of a excellent recent webinar from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) on September 16, 2014, featuring these panelists:
- John Jason Brzozowski, Comcast (and CEA IPv6 Working Group chair)
- Leslie Daigle, TCE
- Vint Cerf, Google
- Jason Fesler, Yahoo!
The session is now available for your listening and viewing at:
https://consumerelectronics.adobeconnect.com/_a89885078/p2d42e4ygya/
The abstract for the session is:
While some mainstream content providers have enabled their content to be available over both IPv4 and IPv6, a large population of the same continues to be available only over IPv4. Join this webinar to learn why making your content available over IPv6 is critical to the IPv6 transition and more importantly to ensure an optimal customer experience. As part of this webinar, manufacturers, service providers and retailers in the consumer electronics industry will learn why support for IPv6 is important as the steps required to ensure popular consumer electronics are enabled to support and actively using the same.
It was great to hear Leslie Daigle again (given that she used to be involved here) and she started out the session providing statistics about IPv6 and speaking about the impressive growth we’ve seen over the past few years.
Vint Cerf spoke next and first talked about Google’s strong commitment to IPv6 and then discussed what is happening with Nest thermometers (owned by Google) and the new “Thread” protocol being advanced by a group of companies as a method of enabling the “Internet of Things (IoT)”. Thread is based on IPv6 using the 6LoWPAN technology and provides a powerful way to interconnect devices and services. (I’ll note that earlier this week there was apparently a gathering at Google’s California campus where many people involved with Thread met and provided an update on the project.)
Jason Fesler then spoke about the business case for deploying IPv6 for content providers. His number one reason was that companies need to “ensure the best possible user experience for our customers.” He noted that it is not a matter so much of what IPv6 brings us, but rather what is the future of IPv4. He talked about the challenges of carrier-grade NAT (CGN) and how it limits the ability of a content provider to optimize content for an individual user. He also spoke of the dangers of CGN in potentially blocking an entire network due to a single bad actor. Jason then discussed how Yahoo! is preparing to make its web sites and content available to IPv6-only networks, as they do expect to see more of such networks in the years ahead.
After the presentations there was a lengthy Q&A session and more ongoing discussion.
This CEA Webinar was the second in a series of webinars about IPv6. The first was last month and focused on IPv6 and broadband. My colleague Phil Roberts wrote about that session (and participated in it) and provided the link to the archive of that session.
It’s great to see these sessions coming from the CEA and we look forward to future webinars!
If you want to get started making your content available over IPv6, please visit our Start Here page to find resources available to help you. In particular, the IPv6 information for website owners and content providers may be of great help.
Sep 30
Just testing that status updates do appear as they are expected to do.
Just testing that status updates do appear as they are expected to do.
Sep 30
R.I.P. Orkut, The First "Social Network" Many Of Us Used
Orkut was quietly launched in late January 2004 ... ten years ago ... and I can dive back into Advogato where I used to write in those days and see that:
- I got an invite on Feb 1, 2004, and wasn't really sure what it was all about.
- On Feb 2, 2004, I wrote that there were a ton of rants against Orkut. (Gee, sounds familiar given the current rants against Ello.)
- On Feb 5, I set up a "community" on Orkut related to DocBook.
And... then that's pretty much all I seem to have written about Orkut... outside of a post in 2008 about Orkut planning to use OpenSocial (remember OpenSocial?).
And that's somewhat symptomatic of what happened to Orkut... other sites and social networks emerged that captured more of our attention. As the Wikipedia article about Orkut notes, the site became for a while a huge community for users in Brazil and also India... so huge in Brazil, in fact, that the site wound up ultimately being managed by Google's office in Brazil (and this is undoubtedly why the "community archive" appears in Portuguese).
But for many of us outside those regions, we moved on. Some to Friendster and MySpace... then to Twitter in 2006... Facebook... and tens of other social networks that are now lost to history... (ReadWrite has a nice timeline about the rise and fall of Orkut, including how Facebook overtook Orkut in Brazil in 2012.)
When Google announced back in June that Orkut would be shutting down today, it had been so many years that I couldn't even easily find my account on Orkut. With all of Google's various "accounts", there were a bunch of "Dan York" accounts... and my Orkut account wasn't among them. Obviously I'd missed that point in time when Orkut users were supposed to link their Orkut accounts to their Google accounts.
Still, it's worth pausing for a moment to remember Orkut. It was the first time that many of us dealt with "friends" and "fans". It's instructive to read this rant from danah boyd, venting my contempt for orkut... the whole "social networking" thing was so brand new in those days. Friendster was around, and a few others, but not many. Danny Sullivan's piece from that time is a good read, too.
And sadly, we never really got the "protocol for networking the social networks" that David Weinberger thought might arise (although there have been many attempts (recent example, the "IndieWeb", although that is more about linking publishing sites than true "social networks", but there is a 'social' aspect to it)).
R.I.P., Orkut ... you had a good run... and you helped introduce many of us to the concepts that would become simply part and parcel of the "social" world in which we live today.
UPDATE 1 Oct 2014 - Interesting infographic about the history of Orkut: Bye bye Orkut – A Look back into the History of Orkut
You can hear an audio commentary on this topic on SoundCloud:
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
- following me on Twitter;
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Sep 30
TDYR #175 – R.I.P, Orkut
Sep 30
TDYR 175 – R.I.P Orkut
TDYR 175 - R.I.P Orkut
As many of us experiment with Ello, the latest social network to attract interest, I pause for a moment to remember Orkut, the first "social network" site that many of us experimented with way back in 2004 ... and that was finally shut down by Google today...
(also experimenting with posting an audio file via Known out to SoundCloud and other sites)
Sep 30
Watching ‘Known’ Grow… via Github
But the cool part about Known is that like most open source projects it has an open issue tracker... in this case Known uses Github. The overall Github account is https://github.com/idno ("idno" was the original name of the project before they changed it to "Known") and you can find repositories there for the main Known source code (/idno) as well as various plugins that work with Known, themes and other materials.
But it is the "issues" that I find most interesting. If you go to:
https://github.com/idno/idno/issues
You'll see all the currently open issues along with the ensuing discussion. Perhaps more interestingly you can see the closed issues at:
https://github.com/idno/idno/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclosed
to see all the great work the Known development team has been doing.
Being a Github user, I have "watched" the idno repository and chosen to receive email notifications when there are new issues or new posts about issues.
The result has been a fascinating glimpse into the development process of the team... and it's just been fun to watch how they continue to build more functionality into the platform. Great to see!
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
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