Meta-tagging in plain English

"Tag Bundles" in del.icio.us are quite possibly the Right Way to do hierarchy for tags:

This feature allows you to combine several related tags into a logical grouping. So, for instance, you might combine the tags “hitter”, “pitcher”, and “fielder” into a bundle and call it “Baseball”. It doesn’t change anything about the existing tags, but does allow you to create another level of heirarchy. When looking at your bookmarks, del.icio.us will show this bundle and all the tags grouped under it as a separate section.

This is really meta-tagging but explained in plain English with a perfectly sensible immediate end user benefit. Plus bigger benefits down the line if these bundles are shared.

Tags: tags, tagging, tag bundles, del.icio.us

And the daily meetings will continue until productivity improves!

We're doing a lot of daily meetings these days.  Often they're a waste of time; sometimes they're alifesaver.  I think they're primarily insurance.  You're paying an upfront daily cost to mitigate your risks due to missed communications,forgetfulness, lack of shared understanding, and lack of commitments.

Perhaps there is an optimal strategy for daily meetings thattreats them like insurance and adjusts them according to your riskforecast.  If your project is bright red, maybe you need a one hourvideo conference every day with the full team.  If you're green, maybe it's sufficient to have an optioanl 10 minute conference call.  And something in between for the vast majority of projects.   The goal would be to minimize your expected wasted time in a rational way.

Note: We of course do our level best to ensure that engineers are pulled into daily meetings only when they absolutely need to be there!  

Tags: daily meetings

AOL Greenhouse

A long-awaited site has been unwrapped this week as well -- AOL Greenhouse. Things are happening fast and furious (there's another soft launch this week that I can't talk about yet... hopefully next week we'll make it public).

Greenhouse is particularly special because it's all about getting some sunlight onto some of the cool things that we come up with.  Also, it has a monkey.  Can't go wrong with a monkey.

At the moment, the blog aggregator seems to be hosed -- it's showing Yoel's post about 23 times. Stan?

Tags: AOL Greenhouse, innovation, pre-alpha

AIM Pages Lives!

Our AIM Pages beta is now up:  www.aimpages.com.  Kevin just blogged about it.  Check it out, have fun, let us know what you think!

Memories of IIW2006

Some quick visuals from the Internet Identity Conference (it might help to quietly hum "Memories" to yourself). The pictures are mostly Phil Windley's.

Kaliya and others reviewing the Identity Timeline at the start of the workshop:


The lunch that AOL (partially) sponsored, from DeeDee's.  Best meal of the workshop:


Dave Winer discussing OPML 2.0 and identity contact URLs with a bunch of very smart people.  I am off to the side putting on a wise expression.


This slide is a cool vision statement of how identity URLs enable an entire open ecosystem:


Yan Cheng talks about the dimensions of identity.  He convinces everybody that we're good guys.  Maybe we should adopt a Googleian corporate motto: "Do good."


Circle time!  I'm trying to learn the lyrics.  Or maybe falling off my seat.  Hard to be sure.


And last but not least, the AOL logo up on the wall:

Tags: iiw2006, photos, conferences, identity

Internet Identity Workshop 2006

I'm at IIW2006 in Mountain View today (and tomorrow as well).  I'm a highly interested observer who just wants stable identity and authentication system(s) to build useful things upon.  From my point of view, the really useful thing that's happening at this conference is the interactions between lots of really smart people who are motivated to interoperate and provide really useful identity services for real people.

We had a good discussion about interoperability with AOL's Yan Cheng talking about different dimensions of functionality which are, at least to a first approximation, orthogonal.  For example, exactly how authentication is handled is mostly orthogonal to the issues of how public identity and reputation is handled.  I do think that we need to talk about these things in the context of real world examples.  It's the minor little things that trip these simple scenarios up -- like, how do we auto-discover authentication capabilities from a user without adding even more login steps?

It seems like this space is going into a consolidation/cooperation phase, where everybody agrees to work together using a few very basic building blocks in an extensible framework.

Tags: iiw2006, identity, conferences