Tag: This Blog

Rebuilding reputation – search and connections

I’m about the shut down my old blog address and move exclusively to this one, so I thought I would write a little about my experiences.

Walla CragI’ve not been updating the other one for a while now, the traffic has mostly moved over because of the joy of RSS and Twitter.

What hasn’t moved over are a few search terms where I was quite prominent. These were relating to my posts on Windows Live Writer Dictionary, Windows Server Single Instance Storage and most significantly all of the thinking about Brain Strength.

The posts on Windows Live Writer Dictionary are largely obsolete, and the information on Single Instance Storage in Windows is very old now.

There are still a bucket load of internal links to fix, but I’ll get around to that in time.

It’s certainly not a seamless exercise, but it’s quite nice to go through it and know that my data is mostly portable.

Please make me one of these: Universal profile

Jimmy and Grandad 2.0I have identities all over the Internet, and internally; blog, flickr, linkedin, facebook, etc. each one of them have some form of a personal profile where I get to talk about who I am and what I do.

There are lots of very clever people working on the problem of how I get to these things without having to authenticate everywhere. But I want more than that, I want to be able to have a single place where I have my profile information.

Why should I need to tell each of these systems the same information? If I change my job it should be updated within the relevant systems.

The emerging identity federation model probably has a lot to tell us in this area. People started from the premise that identities should be stored in one place and every other system should trust that one place. This didn’t work, because there wasn’t trust between all of the systems. The same will be true for profiles. I don’t want everyone to see all of the profile, I only want the people to see the parts of my profile that are relevant to the access that they have and the system that they are using.

Technologies like Facebook Connect go someway towards resolving this problem, but I’m not sure that they have really learnt the lessons from the identity people.

I want to be in control of what goes where, but I don’t want to have to maintain the same stuff everywhere.

I’m sure that I’m not alone in thinking that this is a problem, and as the famous quote goes: “"The future is already here – it’s just unevenly distributed." – William Gibson. So I’m also sure that I have missed some form of amazing development in this area that has the potential to make my winging sound like the ramblings of an idiot.

Anyone else think that this is a problem we need to get resolved?

Welcome to grahamchastney.com

Jimmy and Grandad 2.0Hopefully many of you will be seeing this as I’ve moved over the feeds that used to work against my old hosted location.

I’ve decided that it’s time that I stopped hiding behind the funny “oak grove” thing and came out as the real me. I wasn’t really hiding, and wasn’t doing that good of a job of it anyway.

There’s still plenty to do, but all of the old content is here, including Jimmy and Granddad.

Let me know what you thing.