Of course OpenID has been around for some time now. OpenID support has been made a mandatory priority in Firefox 3 and Microsoft is working on implementing OpenID 2.0 in Windows Vista. But this is an interesting new development – it is now possible to use a WordPress blog URL as an OpenID. It wouldn’t really work for the Spoken Word blog since we all contribute to that, but for a personal blog it makes a lot of sense.

‘OpenID is a new standard that hopes to alleviate some of the pain, and we’ve just made it available to everyone who has a WordPress.com blog. This means you can sign in to a growing number of sites using your existing WordPress.com account.’

Read More at the WordPress Blog

China, The United States, The United Kingdom and the rest of the world simply watch the horrific situation in Zimbabwe unfold from a distance. They seem to do little but release statements of condemnation or increase sanctions. The political world remains silent but the army of bloggers within Zimbabwe are constantly fighting against President Mugabe’s actions by posting their comments, experiences and stories from within the Southern African country.

These African bloggers illustrate the power that a blog can have and the power that an individual can wield against a nation that has a government run press and media and has banned international news organisations such as the BBC from entering the country.

Some of the Zimbabwean blogs include:

The Zimbabwean Pundit

The Kubatana Blog

The Radical Soldier of Zimbabwe

These blogs offer an interesting insight into Zimbabwe and illustrate the importance that new media is playing in our web 2.0 world.

Photo: Courtesy of Sokwanele – Zimbabwe

David Donald has been invited to share his expertise with Northwestern graduate students at the Medill School of Journalism, Sciences Po in Paris.

Sciences Po is an undergraduate and graduate education doctoral school and research centre in Paris with a library and documentation and publishing services.

David will talk with the students about various new media issues including blogging, audio, video, and interactive web applications for journalism. He will concentrate on teaching students how to use blog applications for the first time and outline the digital audio and video work done on the Spoken Word project which will be extremely useful for journalists interested in furthering their knowledge of web based broadcasting.

Photo(c): Courtesy of ‘That Ambitious Girl’

The second international conference on open repositories is being held as I type between the 23rd and 26th January in San Antonio, Texas. The conference aims to encourage discussion and promotion of it’s goal of achieving repository interoperability . The conference is sponsored by many global organisations including Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett Packard, which illustrates the importance and scale of the event.

The Spoken Word did have plans to attend the conference but unfortunately these plans were never realised. However, it is my intention to keep up to date with the developments at the conference, including discussion surrounding Fedora, by trawling through various blogs and message boards and to report them here, on the Spoken Word Blog.

The WordPress team announced the immediate availability of the next major relese of their popular blogging and content management system last night. This site is run partly on WordPress, and other parts of the site have been extensively re-written to take advantage of the WordPress theme system.

We’ll be upgrading very soon, and this should offer some tangible benefits for users: Faster page loading times, more complete feeds and more. It looks like 2.1 also solves some minor problems for us too!

 You can download the new release at WordPress.org. Read on for more information on the release.

(more…)

An interesting discussion is going on at this blog over what constitutes, and what should constitute, the standard way of ‘tagging’. It criticises the usual suspect in this area, del.icio.us, which forces users to use contiguous tags by using ‘space’ as its tag delimiter. Most other sites employing tagging, such as Flickr, Technorati and also the WordPress tagging system Ultimate Tag Warrior, allow the use of some other delimiter (commas or speech marks mostly).

Read the rest of this entry for a more in-depth discussion of this issue.

(more…)

he founder of online encyclopaedia Wikipedia is launching a service offering free tools for people who want to build community websites.

Jimmy Wales has said his company Wikia.com will offer software, storage and network access and that website creators can keep advertising revenue. Wikipedia is built and edited by users and is free for anyone to use.

Today, Tuesday 17th October 2006, thousands of people across Britain are expected to contribute to a project aiming to create an online archive of a day in the life of the country. The event is organised by the National Trust and the blogs will be stored by the British Library and at other locations.

Full story from BBC News

You can particpate in the making of social history by going to the History Matters web site, although as I write the server appears to have died under the strain of several hundred thousand eager bloggers.

For obvious reasons we need answers on this if it is raised?

“This was the first serious hurdle to the adoptance of RSS that I’ve seen (if you’ve seen others, please leave them in the comments) and one that will really worry a shed load of IT managers and CIOs. “

(Via Blogging Me Blogging You » Blog Archive » RSS – Really Suspect Security?.)

Hi all. OPML continues to be of interest? Did anyone see this on scobleizer What’s it all about?

May 7, 2006
I‚ve shared my OPML, will you?

I’ve already shared my OPML with Dave Winer’s new service. Opens tomorrow. TechCrunch has the details. If you can’t wait, my current feed list is on NewsGator (it’s a Web service so you’ll always see the latest list here). Two weeks ago I deleted all my feeds. I’m already back up to 99 feeds. Will be adding more over the next week. I’ve raised the bar to get added to my list, though. I want to increase the geekiness factor of what I’m reading and get away from the more marketing and business oriented blogs. Why? Cause I want to focus on people building software, since that’s what I’m interested in most.

How do you pick feeds to subscribe to? How do you clean them out?

Update: Dave Winer says “it’s an instant hit” and gives more details.
Filed under: Uncategorized, RSS @ 7:18 pm #

John Tropea has a interesting page view of his feeds at Share Your OPML – A commons for sharing outlines, feeds, and taxonomy.…