Marcel Gagné

Hello everyone,

Over on my WFTL-LUG mailing list, Patrick Elliott-Brennan let me (and others) know that there was an update on Diaspora. It came from Mashable.com.

http://mashable.com/2010/08/26/facebook-alternative-diaspora-launches-september-15/

It's good to hear that things are on track for the community to see something by mid-September, and despite my earlier blog asking where Diaspora had disappeared to, my concerns still apply. Something wonderful will have to appear in 2.5 weeks for the excitement to continue. Being silent for so long hasn't helped keep Diaspora in the public's mind. And Facebook's security and privacy issue, while still in existence, don't appear quite as bad as they did a few months ago when Diaspora collected $200,000 in 30 days from the public. Facebook has addressed some of the worst violations, and while it's not enough to really fix things, it has been enough to win back some detractors. Notice that some of the highly publicized departures from Facebook (e.g. Leo Laporte) have quietly reactivated their accounts and returned to the Facebook fold.

What still irks me, as it did then, is that there are at least a half dozen realistic and viable Facebook alternative projects already in the FOSS world. If the money had been directed toward Elgg, for instance (http://elgg.org) we might really have something given that Elgg pretty much does it all, via Facebook. And it's Free Software. Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that there are countless alternatives in the FOSS world, but when we attacking a problem of Facebook's gigantic stature, and trying to do it quickly, starting from scratch seems kind of silly when there is more than one excellent project to work with or from.

For the record, and in no particular order, here are some interesting, existing alternatives to Facebook. Some are ready now and some not quite there.

   Elgg : elgg.org
   Pligg : pligg.com
   OneSocialWeb : onesocialweb.org (though not yet ready to go, it's interesting in that it looks to be the glue that joins other social networks)
   Appleseed Project : appleseedproject.org (the concept is also that of a distributed network)

Of the above, my money would have been on Elgg though Appleseed and OneSocialWeb are more in tune with what Diaspora proposes. Appleseed is, however, a more highly developed platform than OneSocialWeb, if only because there's something to see, download, install, and run. Don't forget that there's also Drupal (http://drupal.org) and Joomla (http://joomla.org), two excellent, open, content management systems that have modules and extenstions a plenty, making it possible to roll any kind of social network you can imagine.

Nice to hear that Diaspora haven't just vanished into thin air, but they are going to have to do some serious impressing to woo anybody from Facebook.

There has been much debate, back and forth, sideways, and every other way you can imagine, as to whether bloggers are, in fact, journalists. By definition, a journalist is someone who writes for newspapers or magazines. By that definition, I'm a journalist. Some would argue that if you write for newspapers or magazines, you probably make some amount of money, thereby befitting the title of professional. A journalist then is a professional writer, someone who makes at least some part of his or her living by writing. I still qualify.

Bloggers have been arguing for a while now that they are worthy of the title journalist, even if they aren't actually being paid by anyone to write about whatever it is they write. 

Now let me be clear about something up front. My suggestion that bloggers aren't professionals isn't to suggest that there aren't some amazing writers out there who aren't getting paid. It's not much of a stretch to suggest that there are probably fewer good writers out there making a living at it then not. Getting published and getting paid to write usually requires a fair bit of luck and some amount of talent. The latter hasn't always been a prerequisite. Just as making a fortune at what you do doesn't necessarily mean that what you do is in any way valuable; reality television anyone? Yeah, I know, reality TV generates ad revenue and revenue can be defined as value. It was a joke -- sort of. But I digress . . . Some bloggers are, indeed, excellent writers.

Aside from money, journalists enjoy other privileges such as shield laws that allow journalists to protect the identity of their sources (in most of the civilized world). Bloggers have, more than once, broken a story that can be considered 'dangerous' both literally and legally. This rather important distinction between blogger and journalist has been the subject of many court battles, battles that continue to this day.

Let's get back to making money though (yes, please). If you do something and you make money doing it, and you aren't the employee of a company, then you're a business. Well, over in Philadelphia, the purported city of brotherly love, the local government wants to compliment all bloggers, be they professionals (in the sense of making money) or not, with a backhanded compliment. And a doozy of a compliment it is Pay us a $300 license fee for your blog. After all, you're a journalist, right? A professional? A business?  Well, businesses require licenses to operate (one component of paying taxes). 

Philly, like many cash-strapped cities, and there are a lot of them, are looking to find new other sources of income. Taxing bloggers, in Philadelphia at least, seems like a pretty good idea. If this idea catches on, the bevy of bloggers we enjoy today may decrease dramatically. After all, if you publish on the Web and make no money, how money will want to pay to keep sharing their words with the world?

Your thoughts?

Unless you have been off-planet recently, you know that there are plans afoot to build a mosque in New York City, two blocks from Ground Zero. This would be no simple place of prayer but a $100 million, 13 storey structure that would be nothing short of impressive. Many Americans have, understandably, voiced their outrage. Much of it is reasoned if emotional in nature, but there are also predictable rants coming from the hard right and, of course, FOX News. Other Americans, meanwhile, have voiced tolerance and even support. U.S. President Barack Obama and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg have both made statements that it is right for Americans to allow this; that it may well be a testament to tolerance and religious freedom. A short video of Obama's speech is included below.

In Canada, we watch the developments to the south with interest because America is, after all, our closest neighbor, our ally, our biggest trading partner, and the source of many of  our favorite TV shows. We may not agree with everything that happens in the States, but that's not surprising. Rarely do members of the same family agree on everything.  Consequently, ordinary Canadians have also voiced their own opinion in support of and in opposition to this so-called "Ground Zero Mosque".

What I find fascinating in all of this is that there is also some very vocal and stern opposition to the plan coming out of Canada. It's not that it would be unusual for Canadians to have opinions on what is happening south of our border. What is fascinating to me is the source of at least some of this opposition; Canadian Muslims and the Canadian Muslim Congress. Visit their Website and you will see the following:

"Proposal for a mosque at site of 9/11 tragedy is nothing short of a 'fitna' or making mischief"

In a letter that was delivered to Imam Faisal Rauf on Tuesday, August 10, the MCC stated, “Many Muslims suspect that the idea behind the Ground Zero mosque is meant to be a deliberate provocation, to thumb our noses at the 'infidel.' We believe the proposal has been made in bad faith and, in Islamic parlance, is creating 'fitna,' meaning 'mischief-making,' an act clearly forbidden in the Qur’an.”

Raheel Raza, a board member of the Canadian Muslim Congress delivered the letter. She was later interviewed on CBC Radio's "The Current" (listen to the program here) where she spoke passionately about why building the proposed mosque is a bad idea. She also questions the real reason behind the plan and even the source of the funding, suggesting that the very source of the 9/11 attacks may in fact be helping to pay for it. Interesting questions indeed.

Later in the same segment, we get an opposing view from Globe and Mail columnist, Sheema Khan. These interviews are in the first of the two segments on that page. 

I invite you to spend the few minutes it takes to listen to this interview. It's quite fascinating.

It has been an exciting day for Oracle. First, they sued Google. Then, the killed OpenSolaris. 

They say that there's no such thing as bad press, but perhaps even Oracle's mighty databases can't handle this much excitement.

It is Friday the 13th, after all

Remember back a few months ago? The Internet was abuzz with talk about the evils of Facebook, many of which were true and several that still are. Major celebrities made public pronouncements that they were leaving Facebook. People published information on how to delete your Facebook account. Radio and television spots had experts talking about these evils and society's blind trust in all things networked. The social networking world was failing us. Our privacy had been sold out. Where oh where could we turn for a savior.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a White Knight appeared. A group calling themselves Diaspora came forward to tell us about an open, safe, secure, and infinitely cooler alternative to Facebook. Never again would people have to worry about the evils of monolithic corporations stalking us, selling our personal lives out for cash. Salvation was but a few lines of code away. But it would cost a bit.

And so the pledges started pouring in.  By June 1st, 2010, Diaspora had some 6500 people contributing $200,000 (yes, that's two hundred thousand) toward achieving the dream of a safe, distributed, and free alternative to Facebook.  Whether the world would leave Facebook en masse was entirely beside the point. It was heady. It was exciting. By mid-July, the excitement had faded and silence had taken its place. Given the urgency and excitement that drove all this, where's the buzz now?

The last blog post on the Diaspora site was at the beginning of July.

The last Twitter update from Diaspora was July 18, 2010.

The last Identi.ca post came July 2nd.

The last Facebook status update was July 12, 2010.

Where's the buzz?

I'm not trying to diss the project (nor am I suggesting anything dark and heinous is afoot), but shouldn't there be some chatter out there. Even the blogosphere is virtually mute on the subject. Why isn't Diaspora trying to engage the community? Where's the work in progress? Where are the mockups?  When Evan Prodromou released identi.ca his open, distributed, and free alternative to Twitter, he did so early and publicly. He asked for and received a lot of feedback from the community. Where's the equivalent with Diaspora? Where's the buzz? Has Facebook won this battle without a shot being fired? Will we all have forgotten about Diaspora in a few months?

I'm just asking . . . you know?

In the last couple of years, I find myself returning time and again to discussions about cloud computing, what it means, where it's going, and what the implications are for both business and end users. Meanwhile, many of you reading this have happily upgraded your Ubuntu Linux systems to release 10.04 (aka the Lucid Lynx) complete with what some argue is the best Linux desktop ever. I tend to run Kubuntu which essentially means that I'm using the KDE desktop instead of GNOME (though I do use that as well). On Tuesday, KDE released and update to its 4.4 software compilation (4.4.4) and I happily updated my own system from the Kubuntu repositories. It's a beautiful thing and with each update (and that includes GNOME by the way), I grow more and more attached to my personal desktop environment. And yet, there are those who claim it's pretty much over for the desktop as we know it.

All this flows very nicely into the discussion you are about to watch.

At this year's COSSFEST in Calgary, I took part in a lively panel discussion titled "The Death of the Desktop", essentially a free-for-all discussion on whether 'the cloud' will kill off our beloved desktop. My fellow panelists included Aaron Seigo, Brad "Renderman" Haines, Adam McDaniel, and Craig McLean. The whole thing was taped and later edited (wonderfully, I might add) to create the video you see below. Given that this was the last panel of the two day event and that they gave us beer to drink during the discussion, I should probably offer up a little disclaimer before you proceed. If you are sensitive to such things, it's entirely likely that you'll hear the occasional 'bad word'. I'm just saying. You've been warned.

Enjoy the show!

So, what do you think? We've had our say; now it's your turn. Enter your comments below.

Until next time . . .

DON'T PANIC!

Today, being the 25th of May, is also Towel Day, a mostly harmless holiday in which fans of the late great author, Douglas Adams, carry a towel to recognize the man who brought us the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and introduced us to Vogon Poetry (described in the Hitchhiker's Guide as "the third worst poetry in the universe").

Douglas Adams died on May 11, 2001. Dude! This towel's for you.

Surprise, surprise!

Canonical and Skype appear to be setting us up for the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Recent updates to the Ubuntu partner repository now shows Skype as a supported package. It's all there in that magic word, partner. Skype is now a Canonical partner. Given how often I've complained about the lack of a credible open source VoIP client under Linux, this smells an awful lot like good news. Perhaps with Skype opening up to Open Source and Canonical, the days of the Linux port of Skype being the red-headed step child may, one day soon, finally be over. I can dream . . .

To install Skype via Synaptic (under Ubuntu) or KPackageKit (under Kubuntu), you'll need to activate the Lucid partner repository. For those of you running Ubuntu, fire up Synaptic, then click Settings in the menu bar and select Repositories. Click the "Other Software" tab, the click the check box labeled "lucid partner".

Read the rest of the story here.

I'm going to start this Ubuntu-User blog entry with an apology combined with a bit of an explanation. I'm going to talk about Facebook. Yes, me too -- I'm sorry.You all know what Facebook is, of course.With nearly 3 out of ever 4 intelligent beings in the known universe having their own Facebook page, it's a social networking behemoth. Facebook is so cool and so popular, everyone has either done it, is doing it, or plans on doing it. But a cursory scan of the news will tell you that it's not all rosy for Facebook.

Everywhere you turn today, there's a news story about how evil Facebook is, specifically when it comes to their (ahem, alleged) disregard for privacy and the sanctity of their users' personal space. If you are at all curious about what you are sharing without knowing, check out Openbook. It's difficult for individuals to protect their personal information or make any kind of change to their security settings. Famous faces from the book are shouting "Enough!" and cancelling their Facebook accounts. Quitting, as it turns out, is not as easy as it sounds; Facebook makes it very difficult to delete your account. Consequently, there are sites and posts telling you what you have to do to quit Facebook, and it isn't easy, so pay attention to those guides if you want to leave. Meanwhile, be very careful about saying bad things about Facebook oryou could get banned from the site, as happened to a radio station that dared link to Leo Laporte'ssayonara Facebook show. The way Facebook is treating negative comments and bad press, you'd think they were Apple.

Kidding. Sort of. But I digress . . .

Read the rest of the story here.

Last week, I received a call from Erin Anderssen, a writer and reporter from the Globe and Mail, Canada's great national newspaper. She was directed to me by a colleague of mine who suggested that I might just be the sort of person she wanted to talk to. Specifically, she wanted tech-savvy parents so she could find out how they explain copyright violations to their children. 

My children are a little young yet (not quite 3 and not quite 6) so that discussion is a few years away. Nevertheless, as those of you who know me will not find surprising, I did have some opinions on the subject.  So for the next 20 or 30 minutes, we talked about this very issue. I probably asked Erin more questions than she asked me because I'm like that. If you ask for my opinion, I'm infinitely curious as to what your opinion on the same matter might be. I may not agree with you, but I'm still curious. So we talked . . . and on Sunday, the article was published. under the title, "Illegal downloading: How do you explain it to the kids?" 

I am sure you can appreciate that what you get from the Globe and Mail article is a handful of words from yours truly, hardly enough to make any sense of what I might actually believe when it comes to this subject. Other than, perhaps, my belief that the issue is far from cut and dry.