walkah: yahoo

It's official!. ReadWriteWeb picked up on it early last week, when OpenID link tags appeared on flickr profile pages. Rampant speculation ensued, but the wraps are off. "Yahoo! Support Triples Number of OpenID Accounts to 368 million". Full details at http://openid.yahoo.com/ .

In my usual you-heard-it-here-first-fashion, I'd like to be the last to announce the upcoming OSCMS Summit 2007 happening March 22-23rd in Sunnyvale, CA. This is actually the 2nd (annual?) event. While the conference last year was a success, it was *very* heavily Drupal-based. I'm actually hoping to see a bit more involvement from the other communities this year, and it's looking like that may well happen.

I'd also like to point out a couple of events that you should attend. The first is a session I have proposed on OpenID called: OpenID : In Drupal core and your CMS too. While I'll mostly be covering the implementation for Drupal, I think it has significant relevance for all content management systems. Now that Microsoft and AOL are behind OpenID, the project is definitely gaining momentum, but the more content management systems that support OpenID the better for the long term success of the protocol as a dominant force in the Identity 2.0 space. So, vote for the session, and come on out :)

The other event is actually not part of the conference itself, but Dries and I are teaming up with the Lullabots and Civicspace to present what should be a very informative session on Drupal Performance and Scalability. It's not a free event, but highly worth it for anyone running a large Drupal installation, and all the proceeds will go back to the Drupal project.

Get yourself signed up and see you there!

I read this morning over on bopuc's blog that Flickr is patenting "interestingness". I realize this was probably yahoo's lawyers' idea... but I have to say it sucks. -1 Yahoo.

Why does it suck? Well, in general I don't believe in patents - I don't think they serve the intended purpose of "protecting" the idea and have several negative side effects. However, this particular patent hits a bit closer to home for me. I have been closely involved in the Terminus 1525 project since its inception. In it's latest revision, Terminus 1525 introduced "terminosity" as a method for better finding good artwork on the site that we felt was otherwise getting lost in the noise. It was one of the main features of the new explore tool.

Now, it's perhaps premature... it's not like Yahoo! has served terminus1525 with cease and desist orders or anything and, realistically, they're not likely to. But in a web2.0 world where we need to get better at filtering through all the "stuff" (call it media) that we've gotten good at getting out there, I don't see a whole lot of good coming from this one.