Jonesieblog

A while back, I predicted that everyone reading my blog would have an OpenID within 12 months, and be using it regularly.  Today the first half of that came pretty close to being true in one fell swoop, as Yahoo announced that all Yahoo accounts (which includes all BT Broadband users) are being OpenID enabled.

This is a huge boost for OpenID.

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This morning I received by invitation to the beta phase of Lifestrea.ms.

Lifestrea.ms is supposed to pull together all your different online activities into one place - I’m writing this blog post from within Lifestrea.ms, and I just posted to twitter from here too.

There’s lots more to Lifestrea.ms - openID integration, cool attention stuff, rss reading and so on.  I’ll post some more once I’ve played around

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I recently installed the wp-openid plugin on this blog, to allow people to identify themselves with an OpenID in comments. One downside (pointed out by John) is that when you do this, your name above the comment will link to your OpenID URL rather than to your blog. Bummer!

So I deactivated the plugin and hunted around the Web for a solution. This post will explain the solution: how to delegate from your blog to your myopenid URL, so that in effect your blog URL becomes your OpenID URL. Once you’ve done this, you’ll be able simply to enter your blog URL in the Website field of the comment form. Neat!

OpenID delegation works like this:

1. You set up an OpenID URL at www.myopenid.com (or some other openid provider)
2. You put some fancy code into the header of your blog that points openid authentication requests to the OpenID URL you set up already
3. There is no step 3.

The fancy code should be as simple as this:

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server” />

<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://robertjones.myopenid.com/” />

but unfortunately not all OpenID implementations seem to support this - some, including the wp-openid plugin, only recognise the more sophisticated YADIS format. Setting up YADIS involves putting something like this in the header:

<meta http-equiv=“X-XRDS-Location” content=“http://www.jonesieboy.co.uk/yadis.xml” />

along with a  matching yadis.xml file on your server that looks like:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

<xrds:XRDS xmlns:xrds=“xri://$xrds” xmlns=“xri://$xrd*($v*2.0)”

xmlns:openid=“http://openid.net/xmlns/1.0″>

  <XRD>

    <Service priority=“10″>

    <Type>http://openid.net/signon/1.0</Type>

    <URI>http://www.myopenid.com/server</URI>

    <openid:Delegate>http://robertjones.myopenid.com/</openid:Delegate>

    </Service>

</XRD>

</xrds:XRDS>

If you are using Wordpress, the wp-yadis plugin takes care of the whole thing automatically. If not, you can get full details of how to set delegation up on Sam Ruby’s blog: OpenID for non-SuperUsers.

As always, this technology is way too user-unfriendly now, but over the next few months I’m sure that euqivalents to the wp-yadis plugin will come along for most blogging platforms.

I’ll post a couple of comments to this post to show the use of my myopenid URL and the use of this blog as a delegated openid.

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Having tuned in to the enormous buzz about the concept of an open, global, social graph, I’ve been pondering what the implications are for education and young people.

The reality is that some time pretty soon young people are going to be arriving in high school with well established online identities which support “single sign on” (SSO) across a wide range of web sites and services, and with portable graphs of their social connections. They already have the social graphs and identities - they just need the graphs to be liberated from the closed social networks within which they reside and for the identities to be unified to allow SSO.

Will we then provide them with a new, school-based online identity and expect them to be grateful? This will never work unless their school identity plays nicely with their real identity, by which I mean that they will be able to designate their school identity as belonging to their real identity, and will therefore be able to access their social graph from within the school identity.

Handing a young person an identity (username/password) which cannot connect to their existing identity or identities, and cannot therefore access their existing social graph will be exactly as useless to them in the future as it would be to hand them a computer with no Internet access today.

This delegation of identities is relatively easy with OpenID - I am http://robertjones.myopenid.com but I am also http://www.jonesieboy.co.uk/blog - with the latter url simply referring on to the root identity url.

It also strikes me that the doom-merchants are going to go absolutely ballistic! Imagine suggesting that young people might be putting their graphs of social connections online for all and sundry to view? The horror! Never mind the fact that almost all child abuse is perpetrated by family members or adult friends of the family [see Child maltreatment in the United Kingdom: executive summary (PDF, 67KB ], and never mind the fact that they are all doing so already in Bebo, MySpace and elsewhere. This wailing and gnashing of teeth will be a good sign that something genuinely as revolutionary as the Web is occuring.

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Scott Wilson has a superb diagram on his blog showing how institutional software and user-controlled spaces should interact in an efficient learning environment.

He also has a slide show about OpenID and education, in which he says:

Far from threatening institutional viability and control, distributed, user-owned technology offers an escape route from escalating costs, liabilities, and bureaucracy that come from a supply-driven model. Rather than spinning us out of control, they offer a way to get back under control.

Oh yes!

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