After an exhausting (two panels and a talk) Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, I jumped on a red-eye last night to New York for PodCamp NYC 2. While Anil would normally be the one to attend, he's off having fun at ROFLCon instead.

I really enjoyed Web 2.0 Expo this time around, had a lot of fun on both of the panels and have heard good things about my talk on Open Platforms. Six Apart also had a booth this year which seemed to always be full of people wanting to talk to us and learn more about what we're doing!

I figure one of these days I'll write my thoughts on "data portability" as I keep getting quoted about 5% off from what I said.

Well, after being on the road for nearly a month, I'm now back in San Francisco for the next few weeks. I started out with a vacation in Belize for the third year in a row along with a bunch of friends. Didn't dive as much as previous years, but really enjoyed the trip, others learned to dive, and it was quite relaxing. From there I took a red-eye back to San Francisco to attend Collective Intelligence FooCamp down at Google Friday and Saturday. It certainly was interesting, though much more focused within academia which provided a different view than most of the events I'm at. It might be cheesy to say my favorite conversations and sessions (including one on net neutrality) were with Larry Page, but it really was true; he definitely is smart and knows what he is talking about! From there I took off to Tokyo on Monday to spend some time in the Six Apart Japan office and announce the formation of a Japanese chapter of the OpenID Foundation. I think Tokyo and London are my two favorite cities outside of the US.

From Tokyo I had a day back in San Francisco, dropped some Tokyo Bananas off at the office, and then flew down to San Diego along with Anil. Monday I spoke on a panel at Graphing Social Patterns about feeds within social networking. I then stuck around for O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference which I had never been to in the past. There were definitely interesting sessions and the conference was an energizing mix of alpha geeks (toting Asus Eee PCs) with business people enamored with new and major technological shifts. Tom Coates launched Yahoo! Fire Eagle (a location service supporting OAuth), Larry Lessig talked about political change, Nathan Eagle on interesting trends in how people relate online and data extracted from their interactions, and the list goes on with talks around mobile games, human-computer interfaces, and other interesting stuff.

Friday, Anil and I hopped over to Austin for SXSW. My flight ended up being one of the "nerd flights" as it started in San Francisco, picked a whole group of us up in San Diego, and then ended up in Austin. All in all, probably a dozen or so people on the flight that I knew. I had never been to SXSW before, so it definitely was an interesting experience. I spoke yesterday on two panels, A Critical Look at OpenID in the morning and then Portable Social Networks in the afternoon. Had a really great time on both panels and judging from reactions afterwards in person, via Twitter, and through blogs both of the panels went extremely well! I remember someone describing SXSW to me as "Most conferences the geeks try to blend into the business people, at SXSW the business people adapt to be geeks."

Just landed in Denver, have an hour before Blaine Cook and I continue on to SF, and am glad that I'll be back home for a few weeks. Will be down in Mountain View tomorrow speaking at the Emerging Communications conference, if you're around you should check it out as they've put together a great group of speakers!

This past Monday, Bret Taylor (FriendFeed), Ian Kennedy (MyBlogLog), Kevin Marks (Google) and I spoke about the role of feeds in social networking. We talked both about some of the technical aspects of RSS and Atom feeds (such as the endless re-feed problem) as well as feeds from a feature perspective such as the Facebook News Feed, Six Apart's Movable Type Action Streams, FriendFeed, MyBlogLog, etc. We also touched on some issues of data portability, ownership, and privacy.


I think we were a pretty lively panel, bantering back and forth a bit, and I really had a lot of fun. Thanks Sean Ammirati (mSpoke and ReadWriteWeb) for moderating and Yahoo Developer Networks for shooting the video!

So I'm now in Milan attending ID World 2006 International Congress through Thursday. Got in about 11am Monday, took the bus (about an hour) from the airport to the hotel, and then tried to stay awake but ended up crashing about 3pm. Woke up about 10pm and thus made the bi-weekly OpenID "marketing" call, before heading back to bed.

Got up this morning and took the metro and then bus out to the conference, about an hour from where I am staying. Milan, Italy?, doesn't seem to have reasonably priced internet though. Plan on about 10 euro an hour for access which is really annoying in a conference and hotel environment. So far have been learning about ePassports, seems the US is actually doing a better job to protect our privacy than other countries, as well as now various types of smart cards. Talking about Identity 2.0 and OpenID on Thursday which should be interesting since this is a very different audience than I've spoken to in the past.

So life has been busy. Was in Austin last Sunday/Monday for ApacheCon US. Long days last week, not a lot of sleep, and then henrylyne's birthday party last night which was a lot of fun.

Headed to Seattle tomorrow and then to Dulles/DC in the evening for the week. Speaking at the DC PHP Conference which is Thursday/Friday. Then meeting up with a friend from college on Saturday before flying back. Spent Friday in Portland wrapping up some stuff as I'm finally selling Boardnation.com.

Looks like I'll have flown 10447mi between last weekend and next. :)

So Sri Lanka was awesome, need to post pictures though keep forgetting. Really enjoyed being a part of the first ApacheCon Asia and hope to participate in it again next year.

This week I'm at the Digital Identity World conference, speaking tomorrow on a panel along with brad and others on URL based identity.  At the Identity Open Space today, currently in a session on OSIS.

In a few weeks I'll be at the ApacheCon US Hackathon for two days in Austin, though won't be able to stay for the actual conference.

The week after that I'm speaking at the 2006 DC PHP Conference about digital identity more in general than just OpenID.

First week in November I'm then presenting the paper OpenID 2.0: A Platform for User-Centric Identity Management along with Drummond Reed at the ACM CCS2006 Workshop on Digital Identity Management.

So busy, busy, busy.  Flights are looking like:

Was on a panel at OSCON today along with Danese Cooper (moderating), Mitchell Baker, Geir Magnusson, Tim O'Reilly, and Susan Wu.

This year has seen several high-profile acquisitions of FOSS codebases involving some very wealthy companies, including IBM (Gluecode), Oracle (Zend & SleepyCat), and RedHat (JBoss), and of course Web 2.0 companies bought FOSS too, such as SixApart (LiveJournal) and Yahoo! (Flickr, del.icio.us). At the same time some of the largest FOSS communities, including Kernel.org, Apache, and Mozilla, have found themselves contemplating changes in response to the pressures of success. Can open source be conquered by buy-out? What does it mean to buy a FOSS community? How do we keep the "free" and "open" in FOSS?

Junior summarized a lot of it, including a rough quote from me when Danese asked me what I think Open Source hackers should do after being acquired.  I've modified the quote a little below to more represent what I said:

Don't lose the hacker mentality.  Continue doing cool stuff, and continue innovating.  Don't give up, if you really believe you need to represent something, take the chances and take the risk.  Preserve the ideals.  It's not just about cultures meshing, it's about the ideals too.  If you don't represent your ideals in the corporate culture, you're doing a disservice to the Open Source movement and the community you have developed.

My basic point was that no matter if the cultures match perfectly in an acquisition, it has to be more than that in order for it to truly be a successful acquisition.

Off to Ireland in a few hours, will be there for a week for ApacheCon with jtrevino and his wife, then London for a few days. :)

In Boston, slept six hours on flights yesterday, got to my hotel at 1am, now to wake up.

So I guess its all finalized, signed the paper yesterday, and am no longer an employee of Six Apart. Been almost three years since I started working for Brad as a senior in high school. Been a really interesting few years, learned a good deal, met a lot of awesome people, and had a great time. Decided it is however time to move on for an opportunity where I'll be able to learn a good deal of new stuff and I'm overdue for a change of pace.

Taking next week off, attending the Internet Identity Workshop next Monday through Wednesday. Then figure two days of chillaxin' before I start at VeriSign the following Monday. The job is in Mountain View on working for their Advanced Products and Research Group within their Information Services group that handles .com/.net registration, real time publishing, digital brand management services, and intelligent supply chain. Is a small group, paired with a strategy team, that thinks 1-3 years in the future and is described as the feeling of a startup with the resources of a 5000+ person company. Works only on prototypes and I'll get to do a wide variety of things. Also get about 25% travel for business development, partnerships, and implementations. A bit of sys admin work is also thrown in the mix for their "labs" network. Should allow me to learn about all sorts of different things, have fun, and see what it is like working for a large company. So I'm excited!

Went to technopatra's party last night at her place with Joey and Henry. Had a good time, and then Joey and I went over to Berkeley to meet up with Artur and Mischa and join a Werewolf game. Good games and I managed to stay in until the end in both games that I played, lost the first time as a villager though one the second as a Werewolf with Mischa. Got home, slept, and now a BBQ this afternoon!