Pro Tip: Fastest way to quintuple the number of people you know? Sync your contacts. — Merlin Mann

Hello. I'm not Bruce Schneier, who you should follow if you're at all interested in security and identity. Rather I'm just a random guy with a blog. Someone with a presence on, a personal investment in, and who likes to garden this precious space we call The Web.

The metaphor of The Web comes from linking. Without links there'd be no Web and certainly no Google, whose business was established by finding, following and ranking the relationship between places on the Web.

I like hyperlinks and at the bottom of my blog I use them, in combination with the XFN Microformat to point at other places I might be found around The Web:

<a href="http://lanyrd.com/people/psd" rel="me">Lanyrd</a>

This example uses the rel attribute, but by and large most of Microformats are commonly used class names, making them a little like colours on a Web page agents can see. There are a number of browser extensions and bookmarklets to reveal names, addresses, and relationships encoded on a page, for example chrome, operator and rel-lint.

I'm not alone in using XFN, and chances are you've signed-up to a Website an linked back to your blog. Google's Social Graph Search provides on an index of XFN and FOAF links found across the Web, used by such sites to embellish a profile, such as Kevin Marks's page on huffduffer:

Graphs can be fun and including your relationship with others opens the door to exploration, such as calculating your Erdős–Bacon number, mine being ∞. Visualising graphs is very tricky, with the best approaches being to arrange nodes in circle as with friend wheel, or to tease the web into clusters as with linkedin maps:

My linking to lots of sites from my blog, and back to my blog from lots of sites seemed like a good strategy for building a strong presence for me on The Web. Unfortunately over time several of the sites I linked to have died or redirect somewhere unexpected, and my blog posts are often reposted up by spam-farms, including the XFN links. Which may explain why several friends have reported Google profiles displaying my Flickr account as being theirs, the social graph search for my blog currently returning nothing of use, and my huffduffer “elswhere” section being empty. The API search does, however, still seem to have some useful, though duplicated results. Something, somewhere at some point went bang.

So for now my linkedin, Twitter and Facebook graphs are more compelling to look at. That's not to say social graphs in the open aren't as cultured or useful, just that they're harder to tame than those grown inside a walled garden.

The question is why I would want a “strong identity”, and it's one I can't easily answer. Most anyone with a presence on The Web has at some point had a bad experience with someone out there. I like to think building a good reputation and a strong digital identity can help should you encounter real trouble, but like my broken social graph that could be a tower of sand and digital natives with stronger identities than mine have had cause to abandon and even remove their claims, leaving the rest us to suffer a form of digital bereavement.

Back from the lovely Århus where I was lucky enough to be invited by Ian Robinson to speak at the renowned GOTO (née JAOO) conference.

When developing the abstract, we settled on a guide to the Identity landscape, pointing out some of the landmarks, equipping the audience to deal with unforeseen perils of this dangerously confusing and rapidly changing territory through interesting examples of common pitfalls.

In the event I realised I was in trouble after sitting though a parade of consummate in-depth and hilarious talks by the likes of Jake Archibald, Brian LeRoux, Mike Lee, and of course Ian himself. This conference was full of entertaining speakers who backed up their quips with hard evidence and solid research. Merely pointing at Web sites, waving hands and bewailing “here be disquieting dragons” really wasn't going to cut it. So I was comparatively unhappy with my performance, and the feedback from a stoically Scandinavian and somewhat phlegmatic audience was split between Green (great!) and Yellow (Hmmm) with quite a few Red (get orf!) ratings.

Maybe I can make amends by writing the talk down and putting it up, here.

But .. it's a long read, in danger of withering on the draft, so I'll post it in three parts:

1. Part One: Who am I?
2. Part Two: Who are you?
3. Part Three: Who is anybody?

What should we have for supper?

Counting votes is simple if you ask a straight yes/no question, a binary poll:

Should we have Curry?

• Yes — Paul, Jed yum!
• No — Lucy meh, Phoebe and Zoë yuck!

Should we have Risotto?

• Yes — Lucy
• No — Paul, Zoë, Phoebe whatever, Jed yuck!

Should we have Pasta?

Nobody hates pasta and we're all getting bored, so pasta it is.

That's a bit time consuming, and we didn't even get to vote on Sausages, which are Phoebe's favourite, so why don't we vote for all of the options at once in a preference poll?

First Past The Post

• Curry — Jed, Paul
• Risotto — Lucy
• Pasta — Zoë
• Sausages — Phoebe

It's a win for curry, but that's not fair, is it? Well that's how the current first past the post voting system works. You have to vote tactically, that is Lucy, Phoebe and Zoë need to co-ordinate or work out how to ensure we don't get Conservatives, I mean Curry. Tricky.

Surely there's a better way? Well there is. We should take our first, second and third choices into account and have an instant runoff, as used by all the major parties when electing their leaders.

Instant Runoff

• Paul — Curry, Sausages, Pasta
• Lucy — Risotto, Sausages, Pasta
• Zoë — Sausages, Risotto, Pasta
• Jed — Curry, Pasta
• Phoebe — Sausages, Risotto, Pasta

To count the votes we take rounds, eliminating the candidate with the fewest votes until there is a majority:

1. Count of first place rankings. No clear winner.
2. Pasta is nobody's first choice and is eliminated.
3. Risotto has the fewest first choices, and is eliminated
4. Sausages are the clear winner.

Sausages happen to be Phoebe's favourite, so she was convinced. We then had a fun discussion on consensus meaning the thing we all hate the least. Being able to lie down in the road is important so Phoebe doesn't get curry, but would complicate things, greatly.

Maybe we should try proportional representation and have a Sausage and Pasta coalition, but that does risk a Curry Risotto, bleugh!

Anyway, I'm obviously voting yes to AV on Thursday the 5th of May and really fancy a curry.

[A]ndrewback.net — a simple artist's portfolio site I recently put up for my pal Andrew Back.

[B]log.mirror — a locally hosted mirror of blog.whatfettle.com, which I'm moving from the WordPress to a more minimalist home-made blogging engine.

[C]onfusedofcalcutta.com — the blog of my friend and mentor J.P. Rangaswami.

[D]ocs.tiddlyspace.com — the documentation Wiki for TiddlySpace, a service we're putting together at Osmosoft.

[E]n.wikipedia.org — well, d'uh!

[F]lickr.com — my best friend on the Web, stuck in an relationship I'm pretty sure isn't good for them.

[G]ithub.com — Fluxx for coding. Are they evil, yet?

[H]uffduffer — an endearingly useful site for collecting found sound recordings, I spend a lot of time view-sourcing and geeking out over Jeremy Keith's lovely markup.

[I]gnitelondon.net — for I-Spy The Web

www.[J]perla.com — a post by Joseph Perla read some time ago. I guess J isn't part of my daily routine.

[K]indle.amazon.com/most_popular — evidence for all crowds being wise, except for wise crowds, or popular not equating to interesting.

[L]anyrd.com — the lovely conferencing site put up by Simon Willison and Natalie Downe, where I get to be jealous of all the fun my friends are having.

[M]etacrap-preso.tiddlyspace.com — a zooming presentation I made of Cory Doctorow's Metacrap essay.

[N]ode.js — that innovative smooshing of JavaScript with co-operative scheduling which makes me insanely grumpy, only because I should have thought of it first.

[O]shug.org — the monthly Open Source Hardware meetup which I co-organise with Andrew.

[P]sd.tumblr.com — where I clip artwork to hopefully inspire some doodling.

[Q]uora.com — rather embarrassed by that one, given it's certainly not somewhere I hang out. Guess there are too few q's in my history.

Top Gun - Memo[R]able Quotes — crikey! What can I say? That isn't pretty!

[S]peakers.osmosoft.com — the Web page we use to control the speakers above people's desks in our office, via Andrew's switcheroo.

[T]iddlywiki-com.tiddlyspace.com — the Wiki where we garden the content for tiddlywiki.com.

www.[U]kuug.org — organisers of the fantastic OpenTech single day conference to which I submitted an Open Source Hardware talk.

[V]is.stanford.edu — I remain a wannabe data visualization guy.

www.[W]3.org — as I'm supposedly BT's Advisory Committee representative.

[X]mlsummerschool.com — where I've been known to wave my hands around.

[Y]outube.com — where I ritually mark videos I watch and like as a “favourite”, but which it turns out Google want to keep it to themselves, hidden behind a hash-bang. Guess I need to extract them, and put them under my own control, or they'll be lost like my old Tweets.

Art Finder A-[Z] — where I looked in vain for Athanasius Kircher. I was excited by the sound of somewhere to collect art I like, but whilst Art Finder looks lovely it left me feeling more like a visitor to an exclusive gallery, deigned to look at the precious, copyrighted things, before being funnelled towards the gift shop. I'm hopeful they'll fix that, knowing who is behind it, but for now I'll stick with Tumblr.

So a fun exercise, for me at least. I wonder how long we'll have an address bar for, given how little respect for The Web this current crop of browser vendors seem to have.

Herein, my talk for last night's Ignite London #4, a really well organised global event with a parade of great speakers, each presenting for 5 minutes against a deck of 20 slides which transition automatically every 15 seconds.

In the event I was quite nervous, and felt my talk could have benefited from more rehearsal. Below is how I would have liked to have delivered it.

I intended to talk about I-Spy books, a publishing phenomena from 1948, and why it has such a disproportionally small footprint on today's Web, but in preparing these slides I found myself reverting to type. This talk is about The Web.

Standing before you, I would like to think I exemplify that old adage that growing old is mandatory, however growing up is optional. I'm fine with being seen as child-like because it's the childish motivations of curiosity, collecting and sharing which fuel The Web.

My abiding childhood memory is of being bored. Bored beyond the estimation and comprehension of my own children, growing up surrounded by a ubiquitous variety of consoles, hand-held games, iPods, and on-demand television. Nowhere was this boredom more apparent than on a long train journey. Luckily my mum would often buy an I-Spy book, giving me a a pocketable compendium of interesting things to look out for along the way.

I-Spy books were very affordable, they were 6d for nearly 20 years, before decimalisation and the subsequent hyper-inflation. In 1970, 6d would buy three packets of crisps. The current editions are £2.50 or about five packets of crisps. Judging by their size, pocket sizes have also increased over the years.

Here's a typical 1950's I-Spy book. Every page crammed with detail, beautifully presented even though it looks as if it was made on an office typewriter. The owner is given a list of items to find and record the date and their location in a table.

I learnt a lot from these clear explanations, but always felt the point system unfair, especially growing up as I did in a small provincial town in north east England. The nearest set of traffic lights were six miles away and the chances of having a ‘red letter day’ and seeing a full eclipse of the sun [70 points] during the 1970s practically zero. Interesting things are very unevenly distributed.

Having collected enough points, the completed book was signed by a trusted party, a parent or teacher, and sent to Big Chief I-Spy, at The Wigwam by The Water, a retired headmaster in an office off Fleet Street. Cheating was highly frowned upon. The original Big Chief I-Spy, Charles Warrell retired in 1956, but lived on until 1995 when he died at the age of 106.

In a time before computers and calculators, I-Spy books served as training for the anticipated world of work, a place populated by paper technology: logarithm tables, memoranda of understanding, log books, round-robbins, slide-rules and volvelles.

Being enlisted as a member of a club was how to get on in this world. It's fun to be in the know, to be that geocacher hiding secrets in an Altoids tid magnetically attached to the back of a notice board, passed by muggle-commuters or part of the rarified gang of early twitters or one of the Quora elite, basking in your own undiscovered corner of The Web before being discovered by the great unwashed bringing their Social Media Smallpox.

But every good story has its dark side, and you can imagine my feeling on discovering I-Spy was once owned by The Daily Mail was akin to discovering Beck is a Scientologist. News Chronicle, a newspaper founded by the Cadbury family, and who fought Franco was diametrically opposed to their new right-wing owners.

The same concerns face us now on The Web: the possibility of Microsoft buying Flickr before we realised the deletionistic Yahoo! were more than capable of ‘sunsetting’ our delicious data by themselves, tossing our memories along with our trust to join geocities in that great 404 in the sky, or learning the BBC Website is now managed by day-zeroist vandals who want to render thousands of URIs unresolvable, or worse possibly resolve to something completely different, removing our contributions to community endeavours, tearing apart millions of our inbound links, the very fabric of The Web only to make a few disks spin faster and give them more cash to make more episodes of Cash in the Attic.

Luckily the days of The Mail didn't last long, and the books of the 70's continued to be quite lovely, continuing to appear to have been produced in a small reprographics shop, cut and pasted on a photocopier.

The books from the 90s, with David Bellamy are worth collecting, pocketable, affordable versions of Thorburn's Birds or The Concise British Flora and Fauna.

I was quite excited hearing I-Spy are now published by Michelin, given how much I love their Green Travel Guides which exude quality typography and applied semiotics

However true to form, modern I-Spy books are made using office tools of the age, these smell of Microsoft Office, word-art and colour schemes only an enterprise could love. At least we're spared Comic Sans.

They're printed on awful glossy paper, making them smudge, the certificate has a serial number, I guess as pretend DRM, so much for the code of honour, and instead of Big Chief, we have a corporate logo, the Michelin Man. Sigh.

So what should an I-Spy of today look like? Well there's the obvious SMS game of Yellow Arrow or mobile games of noticin.gs and fousrsquare but really there are dozens of places engaging our compunction to collect data. I know people who build the likes of dopplr.com and Lanyrd are cool, with the best of intentions, but these sites are nothing without our data, and yet it's clearly no longer our data thanks to unclear licensing and barriers to exit. They're commercial entities with no immunity from The Daily Mail effect.

My own, modest I-Spy like offering is a hand-drawn map of Britain, a collection of geeky points of interest. It's released under a Creative Commons License, has been copied many times making it safe for me or indeed anyone else to build upon in the future.

So my plea is to engage your inner I-Spy, create interesting collections, but be careful where you put them and beware of The Daily Mail!

Back at home we had some fun making our own versions, Jed recreating Die Hard and Phoebe devising a virtual pet:

All good fun but the unconstrained nature of these makes books them hard construct, fold, unfold and refold.

So I wondered about a version more easily to mass-produce and came up with a "Plot Unfolder", a 3x3 printed double-sided on A4.

My own, rather random plot unfolder "Finding Nero" was made by doodling, scanning, converting to SVG and uploading images to TiddlySpace:

The HTML printable page works well in Safari, Chrome and Opera, but needs more work before it'll degrade gracefully in browsers lacking support for CSS transforms and image/svg+xml from an <img> element. This, sadly, includes Firefox 3.6. In the meantime I've cooked up a [PDF] for the hard of browsing.

Just before our fun and games with REST cards at the XML Summer School it became apparent that a quick reference guide for HTTP headers and status codes would be useful. So I knife-and-forked RFC 2616 into httpPocketBook.tiddlyspace.com, printed a few copies out, and projected the page whilst we waved our hands about.

As mentioned previously, the CSS3 print stylesheet doesn't work on crufty old browsers, so here's an A4 PDF which most printing applications should be able to scale to non-standard paper sizes.

In case you're interested, putting the PDF into one of the TiddlyWeb bags which underpin this space was a cinch:

$ curl -X PUT \ 
 -umyUsername:myPassword \
 --data-binary @httppocketbook.pdf \
 -H 'Content-type: application/pdf' \

http://httppocketbook.tiddlyspace.com/bags/httppocketbook_public/tiddlers/httppocketbook.pdf

Which I think hints at how TiddlySpace can be used as a nice RESTful data store.

As with all my efforts, this is published under a Creative Commons License, but I don't really demand attribution.

A couple of years ago Brian Suda, who is a constant source of inspiration, visited Osmosoft and enthused about the papernet in particular pocketmod, a fabulous old idea, full of potential, but trapped inside a Flash application. Luckily he also inspired Natbat who came up with a neat stylesheet for making dinky pocket books using just HTML and CSS. From there it was a simple matter to put Natalie's stylesheet into a TiddlyWiki and TiddlyPocketBook.com was born.

The advantage of putting this into a TiddlyWiki is you can edit the page using either wikitext or HTML, and save changes locally:

The CSS Stylesheet works well in modern browsers, i.e Firefox 3.5 and Safari:

Unfortunately with the current version of Chrome on the Mac, the Stylesheet works fine in the browser but it has a strange glitch when it actually comes to printing:

Once printed out, making a pocketbook is a matter of scoring the single-sided printed paper, a single cut and some careful folding. I've had good results gluing the books back-to-back using spray-mount:

Alternatively you can fold the page down the middle for a concertina booklet:

An easy way to make your own pocketbook is to signup to TiddlySpace.com, visit http://pocketbook.tiddlyspace.com and from the user menu [top right] create a new space, "mypocketbook" remembering to check "Include the current space in the new space". When you visit http://mypocketbook.tiddlyspace.com there will be a pocketbook waiting for you to add content. Have fun!

which we connected with ribbon to paper-prototype HTTP message flows:

People seemed to like the cards, adopting them as labels:

All was going well until someone slipped "204 - No Content" into my badge holder. This made me grumpy, because everybody knows I'm 418.

I had fun spray-mounting them onto card, and even without calendering, cutting round corners gave them a pretty nice playing card feel. I might turn them into fridge magnets. Maybe you'd like to, given they're under a Creative Commons License! Anyway, it's early days, and I'm still not exactly sure where this experiment is going. Jeremy Ruston wondered about tessellation, or even if they could be made to perform work, a bit like Napier's Bones? Watch this space.

Back from the XML Summer School where for the third year running I muddled my way through my overview of SOA (v) REST. It's an old novelty record, which really I've lost the energy to perform well. Although the story of any sufficiently hyped technology always ends in parody, I made the point that Web services are beyond kicking the pail, and my talking about it has become akin to cracking jokes about an ex-girlfriend. Only she's in a persistent vegetive state. At worst it offends friends keeping her memory alive. At best it just makes me feel like that guy.

However, if there is a serious point to be made, it is this: influential custodians of The Enterprise are still at risk of placing faith in some random WS-* technology they perceive to be useful just because there's an official looking specification or some vendor has claimed to support it. A reflex reaction of "run away" or to question how many active Open Source projects use it is rarely convincing enough for an Enterprisey Architect. They may also serve, those who stand and powerpoint, but the importance of running code trumping roadmaps may be lost on those whose stock in trade is boxes and lines. So as an exercise intended to provoke thoughtful conversation amongst consenting technologists, I offer a parlor game WS-Bluff. Feel free to try it out for yourselves; it's important to laugh though the machine is still beeping.