ext337

Oct 5, 06:19 pm: [Web 2.0] Open Source Infrastructure

Presenter:

Session description:

Open APIs and standards are quickly becoming the infrastructure of Web 2.0. But these standards are moving beyond the scope of just large players like Yahoo! or Amazon. Open standards are now the differentiating factor for leadership, allowing small startups to contribute significant functionality to a growing world of interconnected applications and services. This vision of a mesh-like Web 2.0 is driving their energy and business models.

This workshop will review many of the leading standards and present those leaders in an interactive format so that new standards, functionality and potential can be discussed in an open manner. Panelists will present their technical standards, while also discussing the ramifications of what happens when these standards go viral and trickle down the pyramid to the mainstream. More specifically:

The world of micro-content will be discussed both from a “microformats” worldview, as well as a “structured blogging” perspective.

Open Media will be a general theme, and tagging will be discussed as well as how tagging fits in and drives ALL of these standards.

Advanced services such as pinging and aggregating will be discussed as well as new eco-systems (such as Events or Reviews) and what happens when trends are combined together—like social networking and blogging (a la Y! 360 or GoingOn.)

Finally, discussions will be geared towards whether or not non-profit organizations are the right vehicle for organizing and establishing standards (as opposed to a free and open marketplace) and what is the future of open source infrastructure and what audience participants can do to contribute to this open movement.

Session Notes:

• Canter: do we need an open source infrastructure for web 2.0? if we don’t have that are we just switching our alliance from companies like Microsoft to companies like Google? Both proprietary and able to claim ownership.
• Dear: events are still hard to find. eventful is working to solve that problem; making it easy to share events in multiple ways; looked at what has worked in the blog world and what has made blogs discoverable and take those lessons; indexing and searching information, for example; built a ping server for events; looks like it’s a way to aggregate events without having to use one specific system; way to save unstructured events
• Canter: requires that people to sign on to a specific event standard so that the type of ping server described above would work
• Mullenweg: Ping-o-matic helps to collaborate and provides a free way into dealing with various ping servers and providing services to companies like Technorati; a ping is a way to indicate something has been updated so that the information can be indexed. A ping server helps to manage that information flow. Things other than blog posts can trigger pings but that’s nascent at this point; still decisions to be made about the fields that describe a ping (title, content, etc)
• Schneider: Yahoo! is working to provide access to their tools via APIs; opens up the platform and gives people a way to remix the tools and to participate
• Canter: when do you decide to work with others and when do you decide to buy something (flickr, upcoming.org)?
• Schneider: RSS is an example of embracing something instead of owning it. Yahoo! spits out more RSS feeds than anyone wants to count.

(lost some track of the session)

• Microformats should solve a very specific problem
• Microformats.org couldn’t have been done without the open source tools that exist.
• Microformats are an example of one type of infrastructure
• general discussion that an agreement on formats allows people to use a variety of services on a variety of different platforms—mix-and-match—so that you can pull together all of your participation
• what’s the benefit of this structured data? How does it help the end user? That’s the question that people need to be talking about at next year’s Web 2.0
• discussion of how you create a nonprofit to manage these standards and the services that maintain them
• MusicBrainz

Other notes:

• seanbonner
• tantek’s thoughts

tagged: web2con, conference, nptech, net2, floss