The web’s governing body wants to make it easier for researchers to find the data they’re seeking using web-based tools.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a whole department, the Semantic Web group, dedicated to integrating data from different sources under a set of common formats. On Tuesday, the group adopted a set of standardized organizational tags that anyone publishing data on the web should start using.

The model, called the Simple Knowledge Organization System, or SKOS, is a set of schema for categorizing data by topic in a way that’s human-readable. But it’s also machine readable, making the process of researching the same topic within different data stores using search and other common tools much easier.

Here’s what SKOS is, from the W3C’s Overview:

The Simple Knowledge Organization System is a common data model for knowledge organization systems such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading systems and taxonomies. Using SKOS, a knowledge organization system can be expressed as machine-readable data. It can then be exchanged between computer applications and published in a machine-readable format in the Web.

A practical example, via the W3C Semantic Web group’s statement, released Tuesday:

A useful starting point for understanding the role of SKOS is the set of subject headings published by the US Library of Congress (LOC) for categorizing books, videos, and other library resources. These headings can be used to broaden or narrow queries for discovering resources. For instance, one can narrow a query about books on “Chinese literature” to “Chinese drama,” or further still to “Chinese children’s plays.”

Library of Congress subject headings have evolved within a community of practice over a period of decades. By now publishing these subject headings in SKOS, the Library of Congress has made them available to the linked data community, which benefits from a time-tested set of concepts to re-use in their own data. This re-use adds value (“the network effect”) to the collection. When people all over the Web re-use the same LOC concept for “Chinese drama,” or a concept from some other vocabulary linked to it, this creates many new routes to the discovery of information, and increases the chances that relevant items will be found.

See also:

• W3C Drops Audio and Video Codec Requirements From HTML 5
• W3C Wants Better Browser Security

Here’s an excellent video interview with tech publisher and conference mogul Tim O’Reilly, brought to us by our friends at FORA.tv.

In this 30-minute interview, O’Reilly talks about the evolution of sensor-based technology — how things like accelerometers and GPS inside devices, or speech-recognition and face-recognition capabilities within applications are going to revolutionize the next wave of web apps.

Gigapixel cameras will be able to see better than us, and the software inside them will recognize objects more quickly than our own brains.

“What’s the next web UI? It’s a pair of glasses,” he says.

There’s also a riff on how Twitter has brought the concept of “real time” to a whole new level of importance on the web, and a story about how his company almost purchased Yahoo back in the proverbial day.

That’s really just the tip of the iceberg. A fascinating half an hour.

See Also:

• Web 2.0 Expo: O’Reilly’s Keynote in a Nutshell
• Web 2.0 Expo: Microformats Destined to Fail Without Incentives

If you’ve ever wondered where the real keyboard nerds hang out on the internet, it’s at a web forum called Geekhack.org.

For those who lust after keyboards, mice and strange input devices like glowing, space-aged hockey pucks, the amount and depth of knowledge to be found within its virtual walls is unparalleled.

User iMav, one of the site’s admins, started a monster thread about how to change your keyboards’ boring old beige or white keys into any combination colors using RIT dye, the same, cheap drug store find you can use to dye your t-shirts (the results are seen above).

Some other discussions: advice on replacing the standard LEDs on a Unicomp keyboard, insanely detailed reviews of boutique Japanese hardware, some truly eye-catching DIY mods and a hack to bring your beloved IBM Model-M into the modern era by replacing its PS/2 interface with a USB port.

For the truly devoted, there’s even a forum for posting audio samples of your favorite keyboards in action. A great place to visit if you’d like to brag about the clacking of your Cherry switch.

Thanks to Paul for the tip!

7 Billion is a lot of money, and there is a lot needed in order to keep our industry competitive. If it were up to me, I know exactly where I’d put it.

1. Internet Ubiquity — I want to turn off my toaster from anywhere around the world. Is that too much to ask? Access to high-speed broadband, like municipal wi-fi and 3G networks, is simply too unreliable and expensive. Efforts towards expanding the reach of networks have been hot and cold. WiMax seems to be a questionable technology at best. There needs to be a solution to bring the internet to everyone, everywhere and it will take some substantial investments to get it going.
2. Bigger, Stronger, Faster — Plans by broadband providers in America to increase speeds are infantile compared to those in other countries. It’s striking that the place where the internet was invented pales in comparison to places like South Korea, where average download speeds are almost 50 mbps.
3. Online or Offline. It doesn’t matter — Connection is one reason, but keeping a copy of your data locally is another. Google Gears makes it easy to access the internet online or offline. For the most important services this is a great band-aid. Now it is up to the rest of the web to fill in the gaps.
4. The Mobile Web — Computers are expensive, but cell phones aren’t. If you put the power of the internet in these devices, it means empowering families that may not be able to afford broadband internet at home, but might be able to start that business or buy from the palm of their hand instead.
5. One account for everything, on your server, on your terms — OpenID and Google Friend Connect says your data is your property, but is it really? Facebook Connect is another way to consolidate your online information, but seems to be holding on to your data until they can figure out how they are going to make money off of it. Courageously, all of these companies seem to be working together to make OpenID work, well, openly.
6. Open-Source Everything — Open-source projects are usually free to the public, which means the projects themselves don’t make much money (if any) and usually operate underbudget or on a shoestring. However, these projects provide the infrastructure and interoperability it would take to stimulate businesses and save them from inventing the wheel innumerable times. In many ways, this isn’t any different than what the entire stimulus package was intended to do.
7. Give it to Webmonkey — Okay, maybe not just Webmonkey. Educating web developers with the skills they need to make them competitive is a tremendous stimulus. Making the internet easier to use and program will mean more professionals, more ideas, more businesses and a better internet. Besides, imagine the amount of tutorials we could entice writers to write with 7 billion dollars? If you’re looking to stimulate the economy in your own little way, contribute your own tutorial to Webmonkey.

Vote for your idea on how to use the stimulus package on internet related ideas or add your own ideas after the break

Show ideas that are: hot | new | top-rated or submit your own prediction

Want to add your own ideas as to how to spend the stimulus package? Add them below

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Pretty Loaded has some very creative loading screens. It’s mesmerizing, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll actually be able to view them all. Almost there… Just 15% complete.

[via kottke]

Henceforth, Webmonkey has updated from 2.0 beta to 2.1 beta. In this update, the site will be streamlined in order to bring a little more focus towards our primary goal: being the web developer’s resource.

Unfortunately, it comes at a loss for what was the Webmonkey team. Michael Calore, Scott Gilbertson and Adam DuVander have taken their brilliant software and business news coverage over to Wired’s Epicenter blog. Scott Loganbill (that’s me) is left to maintain Webmonkey part time and continue to make the wiki the web-dev-opedia it is and was always meant to be.

With three less monkey_bites writers, the blog will change its direction slightly to cover less web software news and more web development community coverage. Also, all contributions to the wiki will be considered for promotion on the front page even more seriously. Webmonkey is all about sharing ideas and knowledge. The wiki is dedicated to putting out some of the most accessible web tutorials and resources. We think everyone should know how to build their own corner of the web, and we’re excited to provide a place for a community that feels the same way. In fact, this week we start out with a contribution by cpeterpan on how to write object-oriented JavaScript code.

If you haven’t contributed to the Webmonkey wiki, now is the time. Beyond the good feeling you get by teaching people what the web can really do, you also get the warm feeling that your tutorials are actually being read. If it’s really good, you might just find a Webmonkey t-shirt in your mailbox. If you’ve already written some tutorials elsewhere, feel free to cross-post to and from your own blog or website. Webmonkey is all set to host your content under Creative Commons so long as it is useful, on topic and not spammy. For more information, check out the Webmonkey Writer’s Guide.

As with any change, particularly in times like these, it comes as both difficult and challenging but with a healthy dose of excitement that only comes when starting a new chapter. The spirit of Webmonkey lives on in your voices and contributions. So pitch in people. After all, the web won’t build itself.

We here at Webmonkey are curious to know a little bit more about you. Are you a programmer? Have you bought in to webapps hype or are you sticking with the desktop? Are you a Digg person or a Slashdot person? And who does your hair, anyway?

Step up and take our reader survey. We’ll ask you some simple questions — anonymously, of course — about who you are and what sorts of things you like to click on out there on the interwebs.

We promise you’ll receive good vibes of the totally non-hippie variety if you take part. So take a moment and complete our reader survey and make a monkey happy. Thanks!

Webmonkey: Studies have shown OpenID’s user experience is really complicated. How is OpenID going to get less complex?

Joseph Smarr: I think there’s sort of two parts. One is, for any given Open ID provider, how does that experience look of signing in. For example, now you can sign into Plaxo using your Google account. That’s a process that’s gotten better over time and is only going to get better.

So when Yahoo announced their OpenID back in January, basically because they really wanted to make sure they didn’t make any security or privacy mistakes, the process was fairly long and cumbersome. But you know, Yahoo has streamlined a lot of that. Google has taken it one step further by actually letting you share information.

Nowhere do you necessarily have to know what OpenID is and what happened. It’s just a standard experience of “Oh, I’m a Gmail user, Plaxo works with that,” Boom, it’s all there.

John McCrea: And worth noting, they didn’t take on the challenge of communicating to the user that there is a URL involved at all, they’re just using their Google account credential.

Smarr: So that’s one area of user experience improvement where we just kinda works for the user and makes sense. Other areas that have been talked about there, one of the things people have been excited about at the UX summit was rather than having a full page redirect, a lot of them are moving to having a lightweight pop-up, kinda how Facebook Connect does it.

Read the full interview.Another area that people are looking at is how do you get the web browser involved. So the web browser knows what sites you use and you can imagine configuring it with one or more identity providers and then when you go to a site, imagine if the browser just popped something up, it’s not phishable and it’s custom to you which says what account do you want to log in with. These are all things that I think can help solve that problem of picking the identity provider that you use.

McCrea: There was one key takeaway from the summit though, which was, where we want to get to is an experience that is materially similar to what we see in Facebook Connect today and to do that, we really need just a few people who are product design savvy and aware of what the technology can do, to sit down, mock it up, and get a general agreement and then go forward. That’s a working group that Joseph is part of, Chris Messina is part of it. So there are a few things that have to get nailed down, but the general direction is quite clear.

Webmonkey: When we talked about the major players of OpenID a couple months ago, we talked about Google, Yahoo, MySpace, but Microsoft never came up in discussion. How much of a surprise was Microsoft’s recent OpenID announcement?

McCrea: I would say not shocking, but it wasn’t one I knew was coming. Typically Plaxo is the launch partner of choice with Joseph Smarr typically debugging into the middle of the night, but when the Microsoft one came, it was a little bit out of left field.

Smarr: But some of those Microsoft people who are involved in that have been coming. Jorgen Thelin, who wrote the blog post for Microsoft’s announcement was at the UX summit. Mike Jones from CardSpace. Angus Logan has been part of this. Those guys have been definitely paying attention. I think as is probably standard for Microsoft, they tend not to discuss future releases much, but they’ve certainly been there and paying attention and asking good questions.

McCrea: Plus they’ve been very active in the portable contacts efforts. Microsoft going open stack is not a surprise, but the timing of the announcement…

Smarr: And natural enough to do it at PDC.

Webmonkey: Is Microsoft’s announcement the tipping point for OpenID?

Smarr: I think this week, the combination of Microsoft and Google, you’d have to argue is a tipping point indeed. And we know that MySpace is waiting in the wings. Also this week we had Yahoo going live with YOS on OpenSocial, you had LinkedIn launching their platform on OpenSocial, I mean it’s like, in a week you can’t even keep track of the number of major sites launching on open stack technology, yeah, clearly we’re at a tipping point here.

Webmonkey: That’s pretty exciting.

Smarr: Yeah, I think (last) week will be looked back on as the week that Open tipped. We’ll have to see, but it very well could be.

McCrea: Yeah, it’s funny but right at the beginning of the year there was the week (in January) when everybody joined the data portability movement but that was really a statement of intent. What you see now, and it’s not even November yet, this stuff is rolling out. You know Facebook Connect might be a couple steps ahead and they might have a couple of implementation out in the wild, but there are still just a couple of them and their real launch isn’t until the end of November. So this open stack too is going to make a lot of progress between now and the end of November.

Webmonkey: If every major internet destination, like Yahoo, AOL, Google and Microsoft are OpenID providers but none of them accept logins by other OpenID providers, what’s the point?

Smarr: Some people have raised the concern that there’s all these people being OpenID providers and fewer being relying parties, but actually I think it’s just fine — it’s a natural part of the evolution of adoption. You know, you’ve got this chicken and the egg problem with new technology, which is, will sites go to the trouble of accepting OpenID if most of the sites don’t have OpenID.

You can make the case that every mainstream internet user has an OpenID, and now that some of those providers are putting real data behind those OpenIDs so that it is not just about single sign-on, but it’s about getting the linkage to share the data between the sites. That’s exactly the critical mass that is necessary to see this really take off and I would expect to see a lot of parties be a relying party in the future. So I think it is healthy part of the evolution that you had to get that critical mass before people could really say being a relying party is kinda a no-brainer.

McCrea: I can’t speak to the explicit details of any of the big providers, but at this point they just dropped the first shoe, and I think that it’s pretty darn likely they will all become relying partners in the next 12 months.

McCrea: You know Plaxo became a relying party in August of last year and we did that not because we thought it would immediately improve user experience but we knew it was necessary for someone of some heft to go out there and become a highly visible proving ground through all of this. So our mission now is to show over the next 8 months, that these second-generation OpenID implementations actually do improve on-boarding in ways that affects our bottom-line very positively.

Webmonkey: Now adoption isn’t a problem, what are you going to focus on next?

Smarr: We’re really moving into phase two of open stack adoption across the web now. We’ve got phase one accomplished which is you can at least get in with pretty much any big provider. Phase two now is streamline the UX and start sharing user data. I expect that to happen at an accelerated pace now.

Webmonkey: Dave Winer (the web guru behind RSS) recently suggested in response to OpenID, that it is difficult to get participating partners of these big companies interested in open technology beyond a point where it would benefit their personal careers. That doesn’t seem to be the case here, when in 11 months all of these implementations are being rolled out at an unprecedented pace. Is Winer wrong?

Smarr: I think the point here is that a lot of these guys at these companies have seen this movie before and they already know how it ends. Cause we had the web take off with these open standards and rapid innovation. I think these companies are getting smarter and being less resistant in thinking that they can bend this stuff to their will. I think they’re also just realizing increasingly that you don’t have to do everything under the sun in order to benefit from it. In fact, if other people can build and evagelize and maintain all of this authentication code and all of this stuff, it just works for you.

Google and Yahoo and Facebook and Microsoft and everyone else, they have all built their own proprietary delegated authentication systems. They’re all kind of pain points for their developers, and they’re all kind of different, and they might not have great library support. It’s just a tax. It’s not like Amazon’s particular cryptographic signing mechanism is like their secret sauce. It’s just something some engineer just had to whip up so that people could use their technology.

That’s why they were all so happy to move over to OAuth, because it was like “Oh, OK. This is basically just as good as what we came up with but a whole bunch of other people are going to make sure that it stays good and has good support and good tutorials. It’ll be that much easier for people to get up and running with our stuff.”

I know Dave Winer has been around for a long time and he’s seen what industry tries to do with open standards and it hasn’t always been a pretty picture. Maybe I’m naive and optimistic but I do think that they are kinda catching on and that’s why things are getting a bit easier and a bit less convuluted this time around.

Webmonkey: Any last comments before we sign off?

Smarr: It’s pretty hard to underestimate the impact of this follow-on of big providers really shipping code and not just what they’re shipping today but what they are all professing their intention to really embrace the full open stack with OpenID and OAuth and portable contacts. OpenID 2.0 is less than a year old. OpenSocial is less than a year old. Portable contacts is less than six months old. OAuth less than a year old. To see this kind of mainstream adoption by these major consumer properties, it’s just pretty amazing to see how fast that’s been going, and it still feels like we ain’t seen nothing yet. We’re just getting started and just getting geared up. I just think this is just going to be such an exciting time and any remaining skepticism people have about whether this is real or whether its happening hopefully now has been pretty clearly answered.

McCrea: …and if it hasn’t been clear until now, it should now be obvious that the curve is accelerating. If you are out there sitting on your hands and thinking is this OpenID thing, is this open thing, something I should be doing with, you’re going to be getting further and further behind relative to your competitors if you don’t act soon. Now is the time to think “How do I become an OpenID relying partner? How do I take advantage of the biggest sea change of the web since the birth of the web.

Read our full feature on OpenID’s attempts to overcome its usability hurdles on Webmonkey.

Webmonkey: You participated in a recent UX summit at Yahoo with representatives of OpenID partners from Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, MySpace, Plaxo, AOL and others. What was discussed there?

Eric Sachs: Funny enough, that started off being a very small meeting between ourselves and Yahoo and AOL and MySpace because all of us had heard the same feedback from these mainstream websites. In fact, it came out of an OpenID content advisory council that OpenID board had in New York a few weeks earlier.

We had plan on sitting down and saying “OK we’ve heard this feedback, let’s figure out how to meet it,” but then this was done in the community and a lot of other people heard us and said, “Hey can we come and join?” So from Google’s perspective, we’re making this available as an option to relying parties sites, we still support more traditional mechanisms to get just the URL with say our Blogger Identification Provider (IdP) service, this new IdP we’re offering even offers another option where websites can just request an opaque URL identifier from us if they don’t need an email address from us.

We’re going to give these Relying Partners (RPs) a couple different options and we really want to enable them to experiment and find out what approaches work best. We don’t really feel that we as an identity provider can tell these RPs what approach works best. We really want to help them and work with the community to try and figure out which approaches work best for websites in different categories.

Webmonkey: One way Google’s implementation differs from the traditional OpenID model is an authorization dialog allowing Google to share e-mail information when they log in to other sites. Why is allowing relying partner sites access to user e-mail addresses so important?

Sachs: There are a couple reasons for that. The OpenID content advisory council in New York and the OpenID board pulled together a lot of the OpenID content providers, so this is like Forbes and BBC and a lot of other major magazines and online news sites and said “Hey, you all as web sites have told us that your needs to strongly authenticate users are not particularly high. You might have content that people might pan out and send to someone else. You want pretty decent confidence of the user’s identity to give them access to subscription content.”

So they asked if they would all come and meet with us as the OpenID community, and tell us why aren’t you adopting federated login. Why are the problems with it? and there were three primary areas of feedback they gave us at the meeting. The first was that the user interface that the identity providers had was too complex.

Read the full interview.

The second thing that those websites said was “Hey, we have a very large installed base of users who already log in to us with an e-mail address. We need to provide some user-friendly way to potentially transition them to this approach.”

Near the end, the person who was leading the OpenID meeting actually specifically polled the group and said, “OK, here is a list of attributes that potentially OpenID identifiers could give to you. What do you need?” And everyone there said, we absolutely need the e-mail address, it would be nice to know if the user is over 18, if the identity provider had that information, and other than that everything else is sort of a nice to have.

That was very strong feedback from the group, and to be honest, Google, Yahoo, the others in this base, we talked to the potential relying partners last year and we’ve heard the same thing as well. It wasn’t just within that group. So we’re going to give the option for our user’s experiments and see how it works for them and see what their users think of it.

Webmonkey: Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo and Google are all OpenID providers, but none of these primary internet destinations are relying partners. If everyone provides OpenID accounts, but none of them allow you to login with them, what’s the point?

Sachs: Circular, right? Let’s be honest here. Google is kinda half way in the middle of this as well. The one difference we have as compared to Yahoo is you can sign up with a Google account using any e-mail address  that you own. You can login with a Yahoo address, a Hotmail address a Morgan-Stanley address and use things like iGoogle, Google News, Google Checkout, etc…

We don’t, as of yet, allow you to log in to, say, Google Checkout, using federated login from another website and, in fact, one of the reasons for that is another piece of research we shared at the UX summit which is that large providers like ourselves and Yahoo have a lot of desktop applications and installed applications for mobile devices, and those applications are all hard-coded to ask for the user’s user name and password. If someone is trying to login to Google using federated login, I as Google don’t have their password so a user tries to launch Gmail on their blackberry and types in their password I don’t know what to do with it. So those applications just plain vanilla break.

One of the other things that working on is with a combination of the OpenID protocol and another standard protocol called OAuth, we’re trying to work a combination of the two to try and enable our rich clients applications to potentially work with federated logins. First we’re actually doing that with our enterprise customers, where we already support federated login, and if that works we hope for the longer term we can offer that to consumers.

Webmonkey: Both you and Yahoo contributed user experience research suggesting OpenID’s user experience is just too confusing. How are you addressing these issues?

Sachs: One of the biggest issues we’ve tried to figure out is: The average user, how do they learn the first time it is even possible to use federated login. Just last night after we got this stuff live, I showed the Buxfer website (a website using Google Account APIs) to my wife and I said “Why don’t you login with your google account?” Just as Yahoo’s research shows and our own research shows, she completely missed the Google button and tried to login the normal way.

The second hard problem is that some mainstream websites are looking at this and saying “You know what, federated login is good, but what would be really great is access to the user’s social graph,” so that they can enable their websites to be more socially relevant. So on a newspaper or magazine website, maybe they can tell the user, “Here are some other articles your friends liked on this site.”

That’s the kind of stuff that needs to be worked out, but this is why at the UX summit we said Yahoo, MySpace, Google, and others each of us has an incentive to work together to find a common approach here. Each of us has significant UI or UX resources who can do some testing. And we’re all now quite willing to share our test results with each other because this isn’t an area where the UI is going to be proprietary to any of us. As soon as someone finds a UI that works well, it’s going to work for all of us. We all have an incentive to get there as quickly as possible. Make a big pie to go after and then we can all compete to grab a piece of that pie.

Webmonkey: The Facebook Connect interface appears to be a step ahead in user experience. Why doesn’t OpenID utilize its interface solutions?

Sachs: It’s certainly simpler. One of the things we should realize is that we’re not the first in this space. Microsoft had Passport, was it ten years ago? Where they put a passport button on your website and you clicked on it and they tell you the user’s e-mail address, their identity, you can get their address book. So to be honest, they thought of a lot of this stuff a long time ago. That single button approach had the same usability problems then that it did now.

Facebook, I mean, let’s give them credit, they’ve done a great job thinking through the usability of the pop-up approach and in particular, and here is where we beat up on the lawyers a little bit, the approval pages on the identity providers tended to be written in very conservative legalese by the lawyers. This is one of the things Yahoo admitted in their UX research, that they just made it too complex. No users are going to read all of this stuff. So they certainly worked to simplify it in the new version that they’ve rolled out and they’ve made huge improvements.

Facebook has been even more aggressive about trying to simplify it even further. Now there’s a balance there  between what is enough informed user consent, what makes the lawyers happy and what’s a good user interface? Facebook has certainly made users happy and it’s a good user interface and it made their lawyers happy. I’m sure it gives the lawyers at some other companies the chills, but it might just be the right approach in this case.

Webmonkey: Why would there be resistance to sharing my e-mail? Is there a control issue?

Sachs: There certainly is. So one thing to note is the method we’re using to give the users their e-mail address when they’re on a relying partner’s website is still built on the OpenID technology. It did have a standard by which the user could consent to have their address given to the other website. So that’s always been OpenID. The problem is once you give your e-mail address to a website, what’s to stop them from mistakenly or maliciously giving it to some spammers. The other problem is what’s to keep some spammer or phisher from trying to impersonate that website, say your bank, and send you e-mail.

Now we get into some of the inherent problems of SMTP that to be honest are a bit orthagonal from anything related to federated login, but the identity and security community, boy do we wish we could avoid some of those problems of internet e-mail. I’m someone who has been in the e-mail hosting business since 1992, back when it was X400 and Lotus Notes digital signatures and back then when we looked at SMTP, we thought “no-one would ever use this” but, it was so much simpler and easier for users to use that user’s said “you know what, the value proposition here far outweighs the risk.” If I went to my wife today and asked her to stop using e-mail, I bet she’d shoot me. We don’t have a better alternative yet. The industry is going to keep on working toward it, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be solved as part of federated login. The problem is likely just related issues.

At the end of the day it’s great to find these ways to maybe replace e-mail addresses for communicating with other businesses, but I don’t know what you’re going to do to replace communication with your friends. My friends, if I’m giving them a business card it’s going to have my e-mail address on there, I don’t know what else to suggest would be on there.

One of the options that has been suggested is well, what if it points to your social network web page and the person has to do a friend connection with you before they can send you e-mail. You know, maybe. Sounds like a lot of work, but maybe.

Read our featured article about OpenID’s usability problems on Webmonkey.