This is a huge endorsement for AtomPub – I’ll bet Bill is delighted (hey, I can even tell him in person at his IWTC talk in an hours time…)

If you are looking for primers then you need go no further than Simon Willison’s How To use OpenID screencast (5 mins) and Explaining OAuth.

That said, minimal OpenID implementations won’t solve all authentication headaches. Phishing is a problem so I suspect OpenID enabled sites will need to employ white list providers as Tim and Dare highlighted this a while back.
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Now we (the web community that is) need two things to happen.

1. We need the big online identity silos like Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live, Facebook and MySpace – the sites whose login page average web users trust – to step up to the plate and act as OpenID providers.
2. We need the big API sites like Google Maps/Charts/Base/…, Microsoft Live, Yahoo!/Flickr, Facebook to start working on enabling OAuth access to their APIs.

Note the overlap in the two lists above – yep, those guys own this part of the web. Which will be brave enough to move first? With final specifications in hand, no excuses, please go forth and implement and lets end this www account/data access hell we all live in.

the top 1% of searchers performs a full 13% of all searches in a given month. If you extend this to the top 20% the number of queries increase to roughly 70%

I suspect I’m in that top 1%, CTRL-K is probably the Firefox keyboard shortcut I use most of all. This does imply that search engine usage stats would swing dramatically if these power-searchers were to switch engines…

Jeff Jarvis has a very insightful write up. It also outlines how Federated Media previously approached him to help get Cisco’s name onto a Wikipedia article on their ‘human network‘ slogan. Interesting tactics. (Update: it gets worse for FM and they respond)

Jeff has always had a pretty open and comprehensive about page (for as long as I’ve been reading) but in the blogosphere nobody can hear you cheat until you are caught. A look at Federated Media’s author list is also worth a quick scan. Damn, I read a lot of feeds from that gang!

It all smells, doesn’t it? I’m expecting a mega-iPhoneGate in 3-6 months time (I was hoping not to mention that thing before next week but alas). I mean, c’mon, all that hype, for free? Hilarious!

Update 2: Mark Pilgrim has a fantastic translation of a rather ill-advised comment by a FM VP on the original Valleywag piece.

The core future media concept is the Agav – an Agent-Avatar, which “finds information, people…

I love these videos, Lawrence Lessig (a future US Secretary of Justice) declares copyright illegal, Google buys Microsoft, Google buys everyone and so on. But it has some style so it is worth watching:

The concept of the avatar has been around for centuries, long before Ultima IV – man, that was a blast. This video extrapolates the concept nicely into derivatives of digital properties that most computer users should now be familiar with, now that social networking and MMORPGs are the prevelant forms of online communication.

The evolution of the prosumer will continue. I for one like being a prosumer – or maybe it’s just that I like knowing that I’m a prosumer. I’m not sure, best be aware of these things though…