Internet Alchemy

I’ve not seen this before: MicroID - Small Decentralized Verifiable Identity. It’s like a generalisation of those “claim your site” tokens that some services ask you to embed in your HTML (e.g. Technorati) but because they’re standard they can be reused by lots of different services.

Congratulations to Garlik who raised 6 million pounds for their RDF-powered identity analysis system.

I love this photo that fellow Talisian, Jingye took:

More here…

Here’s the conclusion of a thought-provoking article on patterns:Design patterns of 1972

Patterns are signs of weakness in programming languages.

When we identify and document one, that should not be the end of the story. Rather, we should have the long-term goal of trying to understand how to improve the language so that the pattern becomes invisible or unnecessary.

The premise of the post, that patterns compensate for language deficiencies, is quite compelling and certainly worth thinking more about.

(via the excellent lesscode which seems to have sprung to life again)

So Google decided to make all public calendars searcheable - great idea, except people are used to the default behaviour of offline personal calendars that keep your data inaccessible. It turns out that people like to keep information like usernames and passwords in their event reminders. Even though Google informed them of the implications of making their calendars public with an in-your-face dialog box, the pre-existing paradigm of closed, inaccessible data is still firmly entrenched in people’s minds.

What’s this all about? I put a book in my basket at Amazon.co.uk, then realised that I wasn’t logged in. After logging in and visiting my basket I was told:

Please note that the price of Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days has increased from £11.87 to £16.19 since you placed it in your Shopping Cart. Items in your cart will always reflect the most recent price displayed on their product detail pages.

A £5 increase in 30 seconds? Something’s not right about that methinks. It makes me wonder if Amazon are adjusting prices based on their knowledge of my purchase history. I seem to recall them doing this before and getting slapped down since this kind of practice is illegal in many places. Slashdot has a story on it from 2000, Amazon Refunding The Overcharge Experiment, in which Amazon claim it was an “experiment”. Hmmm. I wonder what prices other people are seeing for that item?

(BTW, it’s very telling that slashdot’s URLs work fine, but the cnet.com article linked in their item has vanished)