It has been a long time since I was part of such a gifted group of individuals. Thank you to all my friends and I look forward to our continued efforts towards world domination, or at least the part of that undertaking that involves being able to pay the bills.

When Open Social started up I felt like I needed to go sign up for a MySpace account so that I would be ready for when the next big thing showed up. So far Open Social feels like that high school party the nerdy guy threw and two or three other nerdy guys showed up but come Monday morning it will be the joke of the high school. I turned off email alerts for MySpace because I grew tired of the offensive bot spam. I tried playing with Orkut because that was the first platform that supported Open Social. Orkut feels like the Twilight Zone. I tried Twitter for a while. It is a cool service, but I forget its there unless I am bored and the only thing handy is my phone and I want to post about my boredom. How's that for boring.

There are countless other services I have signed. Long after I am dead my name will live on in the databases of the one or two successful social websites and decay with me in the hundreds of dead companies that burned venture capital like fireworks on the Fourth of July.

I am tired of data silos. I am tired of trying to keep up with every new site that comes along. I am tired of someone else owning my place on the internet. This is my place. This blog is me. Anyone who reads this I am sure will think I am strange that I mix my personal thoughts in with my programming frustrations. I don't care. I write this for me because I own these bits and by hell they will do my bidding.

I am currently working at The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning as a Teachers Without Borders Fellow. That is a long title, but it has given me the opportunity to consider what it means to truly work without borders. I think humans thrive on borders. Borders keep people out and keep people in. For me a border is a mnemonic that brings up images of a refugee escaping the evil influence of communism by dogging bullets as they scale the Berlin wall. That's what they taught me in seventh grade. Of course they also told me about how the United States never does anything evil. Huh. Borders make me think of the giant fence the United States is building to keep out the people that do a lot of the hard work in this country. Borders make me think of the DMZ between North and South Korea.

Sadly I think we are comfortable with borders. For some reason people like it when other people are kept out or held in. It makes us feel safer. I makes us feel special. We are we and they are them.

Big companies like that. The borders they build keep people in and make them ripe for 'monetization'. Gmail and Orkut were originally invite only. Facebook required you to have a University address. These constraints no longer exist but helped establish a perimeter of coolness. These tactics are no longer needed. The border is invisible. The border is built from our friends and network. They don't own those networks per se, but they own the technology that makes it easy to manage that network. It is hard to cross the border. No guns are needed to keep people in.

What's a fed up, ranting, liberal, nut job to do?

It's time to bring the world to me and to you and to everyone else that is tired of data silos and social network with sketchy user agreements. Social networks exist in the real world without technology. Technology just makes it easier to manage the network. The next revolution is coming and it will kill the big silos. Probably.

One of the largest and oldest (in internet terms) social networks is that of the bloggers. Blogging is not the domain of super geeks. Non technical people do it. My wife does it. My parents could probably pull it off. Wordpress, Blogger and Typepad have brought this opportunity to the masses.

Blogging or writing rather is an individual activity made better through group feedback. Within the blogosphere there is a network, but so far it has been implied rather than being overt.

That is changing. Today Ma.tt posted that Andy Peatling the guy who created Buddy Press is joining Automattic to work full on Buddy Press. A few days ago Rashmi Sinha wrote an 'Open letter to Matt & Toni: Three ways for Wordpress to become more of a social network'. The DiSo project is targeting Wordpress first in an effort to create an open social network. An interview with Chris Messina about the project can be found here.

I am not at the level of any of these individuals, but going back to my space is here, on this blog, I think my social network should revolve around me right here.

So how do I pull my world to me, but at the same time connect out to larger communities while prevent my information from becoming trapped in a social silo? The answer begins with open source software which leads me to Wordpress.

We have been playing around with Wordpress, with plugins and themes and with Wordpress Multiuser. The first part of any social network exists within this platform. What you learn about me here on this blog is far richer than what you will find on my Facebook, Myspace or any other profile. My activity is here and so one of the most significant components of any social network - the profile already exists. Now, since I don't advocate unplugging from the larger Internet ecosystem what is needed are plugins that pull my data from all the places I live on the Internet. I know there are a few plugins to pull from delicious etc, but what I am envisioning is FriendFeed. A plugin that can pull my data from any and all services I use. For richer interactions the plugin will use the services specific APIs. For other systems use Atom or RSS. These services will be available to my 'friends' via an opml file. For simplicity put a 'friend request' button the the blog. A successful request will result in an exchange of opml files between my new friend and I. Now I can watch my friend's delicious, flickr and twitter accounts via my blog. The content could be fed to a public or private page for the world to see. Add commenting to each of these entries. Let the comments float between blogs so that they show up for anyone participating in the conversation. Think of the Facebook news feed, but on your blog.

Another plugin would let me manage my relationships with my friends would let me specify who shows up in my blog roles and would be exportable via FOAF. That information could be used to establish trust - ie my friends probably trust me and if I am trusted by a friend of a friend then when I post on another guy's blog I am automatically trusted and we keep the spam bots out. This method works for Twitter and I think it could work on an open network.

As you collect friends you build rings of trust. Enable your blog as an OpenID provider - why do a need an external server for this?. Why shouldn't my blog url be my OpenID url and enable provider capabilities via another plugin. Now your blog url gives you access to any website that accepts OpenID and to friends blogs. When you log into a new blog or site the relying party could then ask your blog who trusts you ie who is in your friend list.

The next step is to build communities. I realize this is kind of like building borders, but if the community software is open source then if you grow tired of the community it is easy to split off and form something new. I have had an internal debate about how to build this piece. I would love to use Ruby on Rails for this task, but I think it makes a lot of sense to use Wordpress Multiuser to build the community piece. Doing so means that new members that don't have established blogs can easily create a new one. If they decide that they are ready to start their own blog then all they need to do is take their data and move it to another Wordpress Blog. Freedom. The function of the community would be to aggregate stories from its members and then provide interesting methods for discovering those stories. It would provide a mechanism for finding others with similar interests. I think that one big complaint of many bloggers and one big problem faced by all website is finding others with similar interests and then moving into a state where some kind of relationship exists. By providing a mechanism for discovering others in the same area of interest the community would facilitate interlinking of members which benefits new and old bloggers alike as quality, meaningful links are the currency of the internet.

Again the community would be fed to my blog. My posts would be sent to each of the communities that I belong to and filtered via tag. Only send Rails posts to the Rails community and Php posts to the Php community. We wouldn't want to start a holy war. This is the eduglu that Brian Lamb has talked about many times. We tried it with a project called Ozmozr but had a hard time because we tried to feed all data into one system. Niche communities wouldn't have to deal with nearly as much data as they only harvest and keep the posts that are meaningful to the group. 90% of the rest would be thrown away. Interesting topics could be kept in a wiki. Use that same space to collaborate on group projects that involve more than one author, or create more sub-blogs - thus the WPMU install - that let users create carefully constructed content. David Wiley recently showed that courses could be created using a Wordpress blog. Authors could write books the same way. The opportunities are extraordinary. There are some very cool Mediawiki integrations with Wordpress or if you want to get drunk on Automattic love then use Bliki.

Each community will have its own home page and own place on the internet. New members would use that to discover the group. They would join the group by adding their blog or by creating a new blog on the WPMU instance.

Each user will manage most of my interaction with the group on their own blog. Links that provide my social interaction on my blog couldn't be kept in sync with an RSS reader via opml or styled to look cool and kept on my blog. I and all my friends would automatically interlink and would be able to participate in meaningful discussion.

If the community is such that walls or poking is required such functionality could simply be added via another plugin. There will be no need to really on another application framework like fbml. If you can write a Wordpress plugin you can create an application for this social network.

I think this method of social networking is subtle, but has greater long term impact. I am excited to see Buddy Press find its way to Automattic. Hopefully we will be contributing some meaningful plugins soon that implement the ideas outlined here.

The world is becoming open. Die silos. Die.

Now Tom brings us Mini Mos (chocolate) bacon bars. My stomach may never recover.

In spite of my general disdain for explaining what I do I am posting explanation anyway because today it is meaningful and interesting.

Currently, I am the Teachers Without Borders Fellow at The Center for Open and Sustainable learning which means that I got to be a part of this. Another article here, and something from CNN Money. Kudos to all the COSL people who helped put together the social networking piece when Fred came for a visit and congratulations to the team in the Middle East who has taken charge of the project, learned how to manage it and worked together in spite of the cultural differences. We were only a small part of this project but it is fun to have had the chance to participate.

When Cisco advertises 'The Human Network' these are the projects they are talking about.

We did pretty well, passed a lot of people and averaged around 20mph. There were faster groups no doubt but for my first century it was a great group to hang with.

About 10 miles after lunch with only about 20 miles to go we ran into a bit of disaster. Joe from JUB hit Dan's tire (acutally his derailler we think). You can't believe how fast that will throw a rider to the ground. It looked like something straight from the Tour De France. Mahmoud was right behind Joe and went over his bike before crashing. Dave was next then me. He swerved just in time and I followed him. It is Dave I have to thank for a quick response. We could have all ended up in a big pile.

Mahmoud came out of the mess ok. He went over the bars and busted his bike computer and the tops of his shifters. Joe was Ok as well, but when he came up most of the skin from his left shoulder was gone, he had some serious gashes on his legs, and his elbow looked like hamburger.

His helmut was busted.

If anyone needs a motivation for wearing a helmut they should see his. It probably saved him from a concussion and who knows what else. Afterwards he said he didn't even feel his head hit. Bike helmuts are that good so wear one.

His bike didn't do so well. The top tube on his fairly new carbon Trek was busted in half. Both shifters were totally destroyed. His real derailer didn't look so good and his handle bars were about 90 degrees from where they should be. Ouch!!

That experience made me think that I should perhaps consider the bike by Carl Strong. Titanium can be fixed.

I rode todays century because I wanted to ride but...

After Joe crashed a lady stopped to help us. She said her husband was riding today and that her mom has MS. Her mom has been pretty depressed about that lately, but today's event touched her and made her feel like there were a lot of people that care (about 3000 riders in fact). I think this event raises about 1.3 million dollars. That is impressive for one day. My wife's best friend's mom died from MS a few years back. It is a terrible disease and I am glad that something like this can help.

When we reached the end of the tour Joe was there. He looked fine which is good. I am still trying to get a hold of my brother. He called me from the finish so I know he made it there. With a few more miles he will be a great rider.

My legs cramped up the last 12 miles and are continuing to cramp. I need to found stronger sources of potassium.

Today was fun. A hundred miles doesn't seem so far anymore.

The plan is to add features that allow users to save off gists and maybe even generate a bibliography from that group. This process should make it easier to create the lit review part of any paper.

Also, it should help researchers who use similar tags find one another and share findings (gists). It isn't much to look at yet, but you can look forward to upcoming improvements.

I was wrong.

We have people signing up every hour or so now. That is nothing for a major web 2.0 site, but for a couple of farm boys from Idaho (now residing in Logan, UT) this is something.

The big question is what is Ozmozr? The answer is - hopefully - something new and not like software that is already available. If it was available already why build it.

Ozmozr attempts to complete the internet discover and share loop. How often do you find yourself telling friends/family about some new website that is just so funny/cool/outrageous etc. With Ozmozr you Ozmoze It (we have a bookmarklet you can get from the help page and there is a share button under most stories on the site) and in one step it is sent to groups or friends to be viewed at their leisure.

The interface is "very uneasy and noisy." We are working on that. Unfortunately, because of time we had to cut some features and other important usability items were tossed left and right. I do apologize for that. However, we have been able to put out something which I hope is better than nothing and we plan on adding new features/fixing bugs on short schedules. If you find something or what to comment post it to a blog and then ozmoze the page into the Ozmozr group. I will read your ideas. At some point we'll get better comment functionality up as well so you don't have to post to a blog.

On to the list of Ozmozr's main features/goals:

1. Find people will the same interests as you.
Many of us have blogs, use digg, flickr, last.fm etc. These services tell a lot about who we are and what we are interested in. Pump that data into a single location and you have a power mechanism via tags to find people that share your interests. Go to the user page. Then click on the tag filter tab. Not a lot there yet, but for example if you click on "Lego" you will find at least one geeky guy that likes Legos. That tag is based on things that I have Ozmozed and on tags that come in through my blog. This is still a bit buggy. We'll get it fixed.

2. Join groups and save your friends from needless IM and email spam.
We all find something we just have to share. Do you friends a favor. Ozmozr instead of IMing it. When you Ozmoze a page it can go to a group or to friends and they can view it when they feel like it. At some point (soon I hope) we'll let you send the page to your del.icio.us account when you Ozmoze it so you don't have to do both.

3. Tag based news filtering.
We still are getting this to work, but at some point in the near future you will be able to add a feed to a group and specify that only posts tagged with certain tags make it into the group. This is to support my own problem. I post all kinds of stuff to my personal blog. I don't want 90% of it say the Ruby on Rails group. So I subscribe the Ruby on Rails group to the Justinball.com blog and specify that only posts containing ruby make it to the group. Same with say a delicious or flickr feed.

4. News aggregator. We can't compete with the big news readers like bloglines and Google reader, but we do have a simple reader that lets you browse the feeds you have collected via the tags that those feeds are outputting. I don't know that anyone else is doing that just yet.

5. Microformats. Add your blog and then put something into a post that contains a date marked up with the hcalendar microformat. You'll find that it shows up in your list of events. We also parse the html from any page that is ozmozed. Microformats are very cool. We will be adding an ical parser sometime soon as well. So, eventually you will be able to subscribe to your buddy's blog. He makes a post and puts in an event. Ozmozr parses that. You then use your Google calendar to subscribe to the ical that Ozmozr outputs. Viola, the post your buddy made magically shows up on your Google calendar.

I'll add more on monday, but for now hopefully these features help clarify a part of Ozmozr's purpose.