Beer And Blog – Scott Kveton On Implementing Openid On Your Blog: An Event Review

Beer And Blog – Scott Kveton On Implementing Openid On Your Blog

When: Friday, March 28, 2008, 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Where: Green Dragon Bistro & Brewpub, a place that had no sign sticking out of the building whatsoever (although it was both painted green and decorated with a dragon)—a sign which can inform prospective visitors and event participants who may have circled a block only fifty feet away from the bar for twenty full minutes and is now late to the event—but one that also boasts great atmosphere and a humbling, full-on brewery on the back, and a set of bathrooms wherein someone who had been drinking too much that evening may interpret the symbol in front of its door as an inverted exclamation mark.

What It’s About: so you’re a totally rad, cyber-savvy sleuth who had, like, two accounts each on MySpace, Facebook, Digg, del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, Ning, Stumbleupon, Netvibes, Pageflakes, My Yahoo!, iGoogle, Microsoft Live, Alltop and IconBuffet (you fully know about the fact that this one doesn’t allow more than one identity per person, but you happen to be very, very good at concealing it, so what the hell.) So, two accounts: one for your collection of Truemors and The Onion kind of news and your more reserved side of personality, and one for everything under the sky that will make your significant other jealous.

And say you had just opened an online banking account, and the password’s gotta be different because hello, it’s your/your child’s entire play/college money that’s in there. But you can’t possibly create and be asked to remember another 16-digit randomized password. Your brain know this.

So what do you do? You open an OpenID (ironically registering and generating another set of password while doing so) so now you can log in on almost all of the sites I mentioned above simply by hitting “login with OpenID” and then entering something like “brampitoyo.myopenid.com” or “brampitoyo.myvidoop.com” (where ‘MyOpenID’ and ‘Vidoop’ are the OpenID providers) in the box and clicking “allow” in the window that opens afterward. Doing this will then leave your brain with enough room to memorize that 16-digit combinations. Problem solved.

Bonus: imagine if I can shorten that URL even more—say, to “brampitoyo.com”—just by following a simple, ten-minute tutorial.

Technicality (on a scale of 1 to 5): ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: even though I didn’t understand all of the stuff that was presented (note: Scott Kveton, the presenter, was a Terminal beast who, by some kind of a divine grace, is connected to everyone that matters in the ’net,) I should had I host Link En Fuego myself. In other words, if you’re an active blogger working on WordPress, you should be able to understand it.

Interestingness (on a scale of 1 to 5): ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: Boy, is this a small town. I got to meet people who also went to the iPhone SDK event last monday, and will most likely meet again at the Startupalooza.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
Two lines are all it takes. Yeah.

Friends of DemocracyLab: An Event Review

Friends of DemocracyLab

When: Thursday, March 27, 2008, 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM

Where: East Burn, which has a bar downstairs, restaurants upstairs, patio outside, and a private meeting room so enormous, complete with two large tables and a yellow-tiled pantry, that contains within it several more private meeting rooms, and within it several more meeting rooms, and yet even more rooms within the aforementioned rooms—ad infinitum.

What it’s about: DemocracyLab, to put it simply, is a politically-centered wiki-meets-forum with a tiny bit of social networking thrown in that aims to shake down political apathy by splitting seemingly hard political issues into smaller, more understandable parts (values, positions, policies.) It’s a concept that even I had trouble of fully grasping because of its sheer complexity (even though it’s going to be dead simple to use) and mindset shift that will need to happen. Anyway, thanks to all this, and several other projects involving Oregon150 and school districts around Portland, DemocracyLab needs all the help that it can get. Bonus: Like everything else in Portland, it’s open source, community centered, and filled with some of the nicest and most brilliant individuals on earth.

Technicality (on a scale of 1 to 5): ☝ ☝ ☝ ½
Translation: accessible to everyone. DemocracyLab was trying to get as many people into the game as possible. I put three-and-a-half up there, because the event got one or two fingers up until we discussed how the site should behave, wherein everybody went crazy with suggestions and critiques. All good.

Interestingness (on a scale of 1 to 5): ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: I learned from firsthand account that night that the desire to be politically active is dismal, not only among the educated and well-off, but also among the poor and underpowered. About the only people who care about politics are politicians and lobbyists and people with special interests—and, hello, not enough regular citizens.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
With complexity comes possibilities, great ideation.

The First In A Hopefully Ongoing Series About My Learnings From Various Creative And Tech Events Around Portland

All this in a column that I would call, somewhat bluntly, the Portland Creative/Tech Event Review (PC/TER).

Here goes nothing.

Mobile Portland

When: Monday, March 24, 2008 at 6:00 PM

Where: eROI conference room, perched atop what felt like climbing up fifteen flights of grey stairs in an otherwise nondescript and very cramped hallway—this, after incidentally bumping up into one of their staff at the place that they would sometimes mutter among themselves at lunchtimes and email litmus testing parties to be the “secret entrance.”

What it’s about: iPhone SDK and the ongoing debate whether how open or closed the platform really was, or is going to be. Bonus: a two-minute iPhone simulator demo that was met with a lot of cheer and desire to see more.

Technicality (on a scale of 1 to 5): ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝ ½
Translation: if you don’t know the technicalities of Cocoa and the zen of writing in Objective C, you’d be better off going next door. Either Backspace or Ground Kontrol will do and be infinitely more entertaining.

Interestingness (on a scale of 1 to 5): ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: I’m a wannabe geek who desperately want to get in the Portland tech community even though I have to lie my heart off. Just kidding. Actually, even though I’m not a developer/coder by nature, I am very interested in the prospect of using the iPhone platform to evolve the data collection/aggregation part of Account Planning.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
Jailbroken by NerveGas, Sanctioned By O’Reilly.

UPDATE: much thanks to Jason Grigsby (@grigs) whom I met tonight at PDXWI’s Publishing Platform Wars and had let me know that he linked to this review firsthand, which then brought more attention.