How to use OpenID by Simon Willison

Simon Willison is a Computer Science student from England, currently on placement in Lawrence, Kansas. By day, he develops web applications for the Lawrence Journal-World. By night, he writes about web standards and technologies on his web development weblog.

Feed icons now standardized

Mozilla Foundation recently posted useage guidelines with accompanying FAQ for the feed icon. They've also branded two versions of the icon as being the canonical icons - one that you see here and a smaller 14x14 version that more closely resembles the original Firefox Live Bookmarks icon. Both icons are now part of the download pacakge offered here.

Yahoo! Search marketing

Yahoo today announced the Yahoo Search Marketing Commercial API Program that will provide businesses and developers free and open access to the Panama search marketing application program interfaces (APIs).

The program will give advertisers, developers, ad agencies and technology providers the ability to build upon Yahoo’s core search marketing technologies to enhance their existing business offerings or create brand new search marketing tools and applications.

Susan Decker, head of Yahoo!’s Advertiser & Publisher Group said that opening up Panama was all about gaining market share: “By providing open access to our technology, we are making a clear investment in our advertising partners, creating new opportunities for developers, and taking a key step toward achieving our vision to build the industry’s leading advertising and publishing ecosystem.”

Opening up Panama to free API access can be either of two things: inspired thinking or desperation. Given the huge lead time it took to deliver Panama in the first place this feels like a decision that is the former, after all nothing at Yahoo moves quickly enough to act from a position of desperation. Developers will likely pull apart the new program in the coming days and strictly from that viewpoint the offer will definitely be welcomed in the industry and could potentially throw down a stronger challenge in the quest to topple Google’s dominant Adwords platform.

Next steps for DIGG.com

One of the good things about digg regarding interaction design, is that they started with a very simple model, "thumbs up", " thumbs down" for rating community driven articles that people thought were interesting. This cool little feature made the site compelling and interactive enough that they had something they could build off of. The simplistic light graphic design of the site, makes the content approachable and easy to understand. They slowly engage you with small fades, and animations where it makes sense. I think that digg will need to make sure they do not clutter the site too much with various interactions as the site grows. They do have a testing lab where they test new items that may help digg users become more engaged, their next steps may be to spawn off another site for testing and make sure they don't disrupt the current digg experience.

Twitterfeed OpenID service

For all of those who have followed the twitter hype over the last few weeks and have not joined yet - this is your chance! A new OpenID enabled service called http://twitterfeed.com reads your blogs RSS-feed every 1-24 hours and posts your new entries to twitter. This way every blogpost can be a post on twitter too, helping you to keep people on track about what you think, do, like …

Jyte

Fun site!, check it out and get street credit! I just joined.

Sac Fox Fox

Flickr Image from one of my
contacts....lookin good!
Sac Fox Fox
Originally uploaded by DaddyNewt.