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What happens if I look like a squirrel?

Alex — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 15:06:08 +0000

Robert Scoble talks with Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger about the implications of avatars and appearance in virtual worlds and the implications for cross-site identity.

The nature of online avatars makes for interesting question about how business will be conducted in the future. As a former World of Warcraft player, I feel that the reality is that the tools currently available for 3d internet presence are too primitive and severely misguided.

Citing World of Warcraft as a support for the future of SL is entirely invalid. WoW is principally a game, and most importantly based in closed-source, professionally generated content. This, combined with the serious issues regarding the published Linden Labs usage statistics opens the vision for criticism. I remain open to being convinced, but I cannot see an application domain for SL which cannot better be achieved with a web page.

Tumblr

Alex — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 13:35:27 +0000

I have signed up forTumblr. I found Jaiku a disappointment for not having rich messaging. There’s little point in the miniblogs if they don’t support links. Twitter was an equally substantial disappointment for major service interruptions.

So, Tumbler will hopefully let me do something, but I will try it out as a way to throw rich media content online. I just now have to try and fit it onto this page somehow.

Risky Sites

Alex — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 19:48:50 +0000

The Results of the McAffee SiteAdvisor Survey[via SiliconeRepublic] would seem to justify the rather onerous process of registration maintained by the IEDR.

I would argue that to some extent the Irish Domain has been protected by ‘security through obscurity’. National domains are inherently associated with a business strategy: in particular, web-based companies will not want to appear parochial by being associated with a national domain (except where they have branches, like with Komplett.

On the other hand, there are more than 70,000 Irish Domain Names – and we can estimate from McAffee that there are nearly 8,000 harmful .ies. While this seems proportionately good, it remains to be seen if there is a need to refocus the policies of th IEDR to loosen some pre-requisites (for example, those related to personal sites) while tightening others. While the current situation remains, it is hard to imagine the next big-bang web 2.0 site having a .ie suffix.

Identity

Alex — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 18:00:21 +0000

There is a growing movement towards structured identity management on the internet.
OpenID is gaining rapid acceptance as the de-facto standard for open membership.
The Higgins Trust Framework incorporates this sort of model, and it is apparent that the new Windows Vista CardSpace will do the same.

Trust is a very complex subject in computing, and as time goes on, the previous ‘Newtonian’ certainty has been supplanted by a more ‘Quantum’ approach. We still lack a substantive method for finding out who is sitting at the desk, pressing the keys. There is a complex relationship – if I trust Livejournal to be secure, reliable and reputable, it’s likely that I will be happy to accept an individual’s credentials. OpenID does not purport to solve this problem, as ‘trust requires identity first’.

Brain-teaser of the day

Alex — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 16:57:39 +0000

Java does not pass parameters by reference.
A curious technicality of the language that can lead to some very subtle errors.