It's been eating me since reading Stowe's Slammed By Context posting, and well before actually, how little focus there is in technology circles on the global social scale. We have all this neat Web 2.0 buzz, but does any of it really help break down the divides between cultures and enable people to understand each other? Sure, some, but you sure have to stretch to see the benefit.

What about the kids? All of our technology for the youth is primarily around making them smarter (in school, and more entertained outside of it), perhaps we're missing the opportunity to help them be more understanding. So I came up with one simple web site/service that feels like it could go a long way in helping our youth connect with and understand the perspective of others and the size of our great global society.

A myspace for school-kids, structured, private, and managed by the teachers and school administrators themselves. The intent is explicit, have a simple interview that will build a profile for any kid, and as part of a class assignment, every child must search and find a friend in another country or from another culture, and report to the class what they learned about the other kid's life. Access would only be inside schools, and only first names and interests/activities related questions asked. With enough international participation every kid would perhaps grow in even the slightest way to understand how different life can be elsewhere, from a perspective they can relate to.

It's pretty easy to shoot down and point out potential problems, and I don't have the resources to build it or even hardly an ounce of expertise on what works in school, but I'm trying to imagine how technology can help ease the stresses in our world and will continue to do so.

This is going to be big, this is the birth of a new word, happening right now. Edglings first coined quite casually by Stowe, with a disconnected definition by Jay as The People Formerly Known as the Audience, pointed out to me by stpeter.

I hope Doc gets as excited as I am, having a single unique word to give definition to the people living at the edge, is profound. I really hope to see this word gain momentum, the more power that moves to the edge the healthier our information world becomes (my opinion).

To be an edgling is to share and participate with your peers through open technology.

Something special to make up for lost blogtime, herein begins a diatribe about my own opins based on problems I've seen technology startups/teams have.

Critical Technology Underpinnings, essential for any startup:

Scalability, always bank on success, if you don't then why are you starting anyway? When you do hit digg, you want to be ready, because scaling something that wasn't designed to be from the get-go is like getting grandma drunk (it just ain't gunna be pretty or end well).

Agility, be prepared to change fast, and frequently. It's always better to make mistakes faster and recover/adapt than try to do something right the first time. The less code, the easier to change it, having lots of frameworks and models will simply get in your way, not facilitate growth and modularization (contrary to what your OO-hugging programmer will preach). Coders like to code, they're not going to tell you this :)

Culture, what you choose from day 1 will both attract unique kinds of talent, and force you to seek talent in different ways, and lock you in for the long haul. Technology is rife with attitude, every camp has different flavours, be sure to select a camp that matches your mentality and goals (holding a seance to seek such compatibility isn't so far fetched!).

Now let's get down to my personal nitty gritty.

If you have anything MS, you're probably already close minded enough that I'm not sure why you even read this far or got here, but skeedaddle, good by, shoo.

Java... come on folks, startup? Java? Absolutely incompatible, if someone makes the combo work it's by sheer luck. Java will rot an entire endeavor. It fails every single point above in day-to-day use, even though at face value (and often preached by those seeming to be smart about technology) it looks happy, it's like doing bad bad drugs that destroy your sense of reality. JAVA == COBAL (and I apologize for degrading the cobal folks)

Courage, have some! You don't have to do it like everyone else, you're in a statup already, take a few risks. Resist and fight every single experience with past solutions or industry standards. Web/App/DB/Tiers/Appliances/Caches/LoadBalancers, blech, consider it all a last resort, force yourself and the team to think outside the box a little bit, open a few new doors.

Change is GOOD, welcome it, use it to your advantage. Don't be afraid to start over. The idea is more important than the infrastructure and history.

Process is the OPPOSITE of Innovation, know this know this know this, and deeply respect it.

That's enough for now...

Warm weather comes again to the midwest, and how energizing it is!

MicroID has been tremendous, incredible discussions and a lot of traction, I'm really looking forward to the implications in the future as more apps start to support it and hopefully it may help evolve online reputation systems.

On a personal note, my wife Lis and I are taking our first "real" vacation in 10 years of marriage for a full week next week. The geek in me is wondering how I'll survive being disconnected for that long, everything will be different when I come back :)

Unrelated, I've picked up this (bad) habit for just registering domain names when I find neat-sounding available ones (because they're so rare!). Last week I snagged fibbery and while I have no time to do anything really fun with it, I love the idea of a new breed of simple poetry, so if it takes off, maybe I'll make a nice little social/wiki portal-ish site out of it... as if I have time.

The last little mention is that it was my birthday last week, yay for being older. Had a really good time going out with a bunch of friends and family, it's moments like those...

Oh, I had this really weird UI alternative idea for something that kinda sorta resembles a web chat system. What happened to all my time I used to spend toying with ideas? Perhaps there never was any!

MicroID - Small Decentralized Verifiable Identity

One of the best ways to lay claim to your food as a kid is to lick it, make sure that your sibling or peers know it's yours. Well, MicroIDs are a bit like that in the digital world, you can stamp a MicroID on your content, sites, and individual pages. A hosted service or member site can include MicroIDs on every participants profile, comments, content, ratings, microformats, or anything. Then these can be independently verified and even aggregated into third party services (anonymously and without any loss of privacy to boot).

It's a very very simple solution from a computing, protocol, and technology perspective, it's almost too simple since many geeks almost immediately dismiss it without understanding the beauty of it's function. The most exciting aspect is that it empowers end users with absolute control while fully protecting their rights and privacy. It's also the model of decentralized systems, allowing anyone to participate and enabling services to crawl and index and provide a fully anonymous utility. All of this is critical for anything relating to Identity on the net.

As far as Identity systems go, MicroID is not a system nor can you compare it to any of them. MicroID is just a utility that any of them can employ, it's simply a mechanism for safely attributing ownership using any (URI based) communication identifier.

Right now I'm just looking to get a wider audience to provide some feedback on it, anyone you think might be interested please pass it along. I simply hope to see this become something useful for anyone to utilize.