Nate Angellraised by wolves, accidental open-source evangelist

Chris Messina just posted a long, thoughtful and informative blog on the rise and fall of his erstwhile employer, local Portland identity provider .

For those of us in the Portland tech community who welcomed Vidoop, saw our friends and colleagues go to work for them, and—in my case at least—starting using their OpenID provider service myVidoop—the whole series of events is mostly sad. I truly liked everyone I met from Vidoop and really appreciated their work and contributions to our community, like their hosting of the CyborgCamp 2009 pre-party.

I strongly agree with Chris that the fall of Vidoop can not be read as a failure of OpenID or other open web technologies, standards, or practices.

Something odd happened to me today. I ran into a complete stranger on the Internet.

I signed into chat, and almost immediately had the conversation below with someone I didn't know, going by the handle "toweringcoho". I was at a largish gathering and had bonjour turned on as usual, so assumed it was someone in the room—even though I didn't bother to look to see what chat connection toweringcoho was using.

A quick Google search suggested that "toweringcoho" is the name of one of a series of IM bots that randomly connect to otherwise unconnected chat users.

And that's how I met Sunil Khiatani from Hong Kong. It took a while for both of us to figure out that we were NOT talking to robots, and a bit longer to introduce ourselves. In the end, we had a worthy conversation, got to know each other a bit, and went on our ways.

I'm not sure if these IM bots are supposed to be malicious, but I liked what happened. It was like going on a kind of unintentional dérive in text only.

Experiencing three days of purposefully and accidentally thought-provoking speakers at Portland's recent Inverge and Cre8Con conferences leaves me feeling, well, thoughtful and provoked. Some of the presentations were predictable, some were compelling, but nearly all of them generated further reflection on what is and what will be.

Kudos to walkah et al for their work on the Drupal OpenID module and getting OpenID into core for Drupal 6!

By default, OpenID in Drupal 5 and 6 defaults to present regular Drupal authentication first, giving the user the option to toggle to authenticate via OpenID.

I just installed my first Drupal 6.0 version (RC4), which took a total of about 3.5 minutes. You can visit the resulting (minimalist) site at:

test.mediapede.org

O how I want to Flock in the morning. O how I want to Flock in the eve.

But I can't because Flock can't authenticate me to my OpenID, Drupal blog.

Flockstars take notice: OpenID critical mass is growing. Take a look at OpenID support in these flocky sites and at least let us know what you all are thinking about integrating OpenID support in Flock (very partial list):

Recently returned from the Open Source Content Management Systems (OSCMS 2007) gathering held at the Yahoo! campus in Sunnyvale, CA.

I'm now keeping a recipe cataloging the technologies and configuration that drive this xolotl.org site.

Continue to check the recipe as the site evolves.

Once the site reaches a certain maturity, I'm thinking to build a Drupal install profile to make it easier for others to duplicate this installation.

LAMP Platform

• Ubuntu
• Apache
• MySQL
• PHP

Drupal Content Management System

• Drupal

With some work, I've now enabled OpenID user authentication. It would have been a lot easier if I weren't running Drupal 5 (for which a core OpenID module is not yet ready) or using a shared host (which meant I don't control PHP at the system level).