PTP Blog

Jon’s got a pointer to an open source version of the popular social-bookmarking, tagging, and folksonomy site del.icio.us.

What’s particularly intersesting is that if you poke around the site a bit, there’s some talk about interroperability between del.irio.us (the open source version), and other social-bookmarking sites. There’s certainly some potential here for different disciplines to establish social-bookmarking sites for that discipline - aggregating links that folks in the discipline find useful - while also maintaining interroperability with other similar sites out there.

I’m not exactly sure if/why this matters, but it’s lodged in my brain so I’m sure I’ll figure it out at some point.

As reported in lots of places AOL has changed their Terms of Service to explicity state that private communications on the AIM instant messaging service are private. This is likely in response to the outcry over the last week about their previous TOS that stated that users of the AIM service had no rights over any of their communication on the AIM service.

There are at least two important points here:

1. This could be viewed as an illustration of what is often called the “power of the blogosphere.” If I’m correct, this story broke on a few blogs and was then picked up by other bloggers and some mainstream news outlets. The outcry is likely what caused the change and clarification in AOL’s terms of service. I don’t want to go too far down the road of “bloggers as a force for justice” but if you’re looking for an example of how blogging can be used to create change, this is a fairly clear cut one.
2. This underscores the reason many techies are advocating for the use of open systems. In my previous post on this topic, I pointed to Jabber and SILC as two examples of Free/Libre Open Source Software that can take the place of propietary messaging systems like AIM, Yahoo Messenger, or the MSN Messenger service.

   If an organization is using instant messaging to coordinate it’s work, this makes clear that relying on a propietary system is probably not the best idea. Even though AOL has modified and clarified it’s terms of service, there’s nothing to stop it from making other modifications that restrict our rights in the future. Users of open systems on the other hand have much more control and protection over the disposition of their chat content. If nothing else, this experience with AOL should make organizations that rely on AOL evaluate the feasibility of using some of the open alternatives.

Hit the read the rest link for the changed text in AOL’s terms of service for the AIM service:
continue reading…

If you’re not already familiar with it,Firefox is a web browser that more and more Internet Explorer users are switching to.

If you’re wondering why you’d want to switch the Firefox, here are couple of things to consider:

Security is on the biggest reasons Windows users consider Firefox in the first place. Internet Explorer is notoriously insecure, and because Microsoft can’t seem to keep up with vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, lots of people are suggesting that a switch to Firefox may be the best way to avoid the problems with Internet Explorer.

Other features I like are built-in pop-up window blocking, tabbed browsing (multiple webpages in a single window), and built-in Google searching.

Oh - and did I mention that it’s Free? As in no cost and as in Open Source.

If you haven’t already - why not give it a try?

PHP’s a language used to write online applications - things like Drupal, the LINC Project website, and this blog are written using PHP. I don’t do much with PHP these days, but still do just enough that I often find myself heading over to the PHP website to check the documentation, so I was pretty excited to see this neat little utility for my Mac: PHP Function Index for Mac OS X - it’s a little program that enables you to access and search the php reference offline, and includes the ability to create bookmarks for frequently referenced PHP functions.

apologies if this was too geeky for you.

So maybe this shouldn’t excite me as much as it does, but from looking at the list of changes, there’s a lot here to be excited about.

If you’re not familiar Drupal, it’s a Free/Libre Open Source Software [definition] content management system with strong focus on creating online spaces that can support communication of offline or online communities.

Drupal is seeing increasing use by non-profit technology assistance providers - in fact at PTP we’re using it to support one of our training programs. Additionally, Drupal was used at the basis for DeanSpace - the campaign-website-in-a-box that was developed as part of the Howard Dean campaign.

Though the campaign is over, DeanSpace lives on under it’s new name CivicSpace. You can see the work that the form Dean coders are doing at CivicSpaceLabs.org.

This latest release candidate of Drupal seems to have a number of features that many of us felt were sorely lacking, so I’m looking forward to kicking the tires and testing it all out.