Hi everyone, just to let you know we are in the process of switching over to the new site + blog. There will be a number of changes including the feed, so there may be a little disruption over the next 24 hours. Don't forget to email me al at folknology if issue persists.

This page and the old permalinks are being frozen in time (hopefully) as we speak. The new home page is simply http://www.folknology.com/ . The feed is being cached via feedburner so you should not need to 'adjust your set' although the feed contents itself may change (we are trying an atom feed).

Hopefully the next thing you will hear from Folknology will be the new Blog/Feed posts..

regards
Al

When you add 'Security' to RSS it isn't really simple syndication anymore. This is one of the issues that we are dealing with here at Folknology. In order to deliver what our customer desire we need to be able to provide RSS's functionality and simplicity with clients desire for security, particularly around financial information.

We have been working on this for some time and still do not have satisfactory solutions, thus we have recently started to reach out to other developers in this area to ask what they are doing.

In simple english RSS appears to have been developed without consideration for security, not that this happened on purpose of course rather it was designed from a public content perspective. The trouble is we and others n are now wishing to use it in a way in which it was never intended and are hitting speed bumps and even roadblocks.

Here are the main issues that trip us up:

1) Securing transmission of the transfered information
2) Authentication and identity
3) Caching of feeds both locally and via aggregators/routers
4) Traces and shadows of information left by caching and viewing

All of these are tricky because there are few standards implemented around RSS that cover them.

Niall has recently brought attention to this and other threads have been following on from it :

• Authenticated and private feeds
• Carnage4Life
• Computer Zen

I think Dave Winer has also picked up on this, as will others I hope, as this is a problem that needs co-operation to solve. We may have to consider encrypting items within the XML to completely resolve this. Either way let me know by email if you are experiencing or anticipate issues around secure feeds. (use - al at folknology.com).

Something we have been working on here at Folknology is how to improve small business's integration with the web. We will shortly be presenting a new version of this blog and web site that helps explain our take and services in this area. As you will also be aware (If you have checked in here before) we are also involved in building a new small business tool 'Live Tally' which will be released as a separate entity in the next few months.

In this regard our radar picked up the Intuit/Google announcements, unfortunately the biggest buz around this seems to center on the TechCrunch coverage. Unfortunately the TC coverage focuses in on the bundling of Google Desktop and the paranoia surrounding that. Fortunately some bloggers (like Dennis and Rex) do get the significance of this move investigate it for what it could be. I think it's a good move by Intuit and some thing we have been working on for a while. Intuit also have an advantage having snapped up setup recently to help the product/service integration. I am left wondering if any other services have stepped up to the mark to do anything similar to 'Setup' but in a more general and open API fashion, if you hear anything let me know (by email for now, al at folknology).

Update
What is not clear in the announcement or anywhere else I can find is what they mean by inventory integration. I understand that to mean more than just listing products but also dealing with stock and availability etc.. The information I have seen seems to indicate only 'product listings' although they seem to be construing this as an inventory function, I think Dennis is also querying this ambiguity.

This is just a quick catch up post as I know I haven't been posting a lot recently.

First I (and the family) had a great vacation down in French Catalan, superb I recommend the region you have it all : sunshine, wind, beaches, mountains and great places of interest like Barcelona only a short car ride away.

Having been thoroughly rested, fed and watered I am now back up to speed, heres whats happening in my life at the mo:

1) Decided to be more Nomadic, check out some good advice from Om on his new Web Worker Daily blog.
Anyone in the Guilford or Reading (UK) areas that would like to SWAT, let me know (via email please, as comments are currently off)!

2) I had to turn of comments due to unprecedented spamming by bots, I tried to fix it but decided to just turn them off for now see post below.

3) This blog runs of an early experimental piece of blogging software we produced here at Folknology, We are just polishing our second generation version of this project and will be moving Folknology over onto shortly. Thus we may have a few teething issue over the next few weeks, so please bear with us.

4) We are moving our infrastructure from self managed to using web services. The first part of this is move is to Google Apps which has been completed except for this site. We are using GMail (god I have waited for that) and Gcal so far and it is all working rather well. It has also saved a great deal of time on email SPAM.

5) We are still testing LiveTally and hope to roll out a beta later this month. We are also looking for developers in the Guildford/Reading area.

Thats it for now more soon I promise ..

Steve Gillmor has been alluding to the death of the link for months now, despite the resistance he has met in the infosphere he continues to predict it's demise. Today he elaborates on the idea at the end of he's post "A Hamburger Today", prior to his planned deliveries at Gnomdex later this week. His brief but revealing view of the future without links instead provides gesture based dynamic or intelligent linking inserted by the service you consume. In my post here that would mean your RSS reader would automatically provide dynamic links to Steve's info router when you hover over "A Hamburger Today". Don't worry if this doesn't work yet you are just looking at it to early and the reader just hasn't realised that links are dead yet.

This of course solves a great deal of the link spam issues, as the link itself is only visible to the participant and only has relevance to that participant. In this future PageRank is of course meaningless (we always new it was going this way anyhow, due to gaming). I guess then that we will all end up with personal gesture/attention based search services probably based around GestureRank?

I for one welcome the our new relevance overlord (GestureRank) A.K.A me.. The Link is dead long live the Link.

Technorati Tags: GestureRank, SteveGillmor, LinkIsDead

Checkout the amazing BumpTop it will blow your mind, I want my Mac to support this!!

Technorati Tags: BumpTop

Anyone know what Jorssis is? found incoming bookmark links from there ?