I first requested one about a year ago and recently re-requested it.

We’ve got an Optaros group, and I know we could set up a page for people to become fans of Optaros, but what I really want is for us to be a network.

Can anyone who has successfully created a network share any tips on what they did?

Shindig first, direct from the OpenSocial API Blog “Let’s get this Shindig Started“:

Shindig is a new project in the Apache Software Foundation’s incubator (as per the formal proposal) that aims to provide an open source reference implementation of the entire OpenSocial stack — Shindig’s goal is to allow new sites to start hosting social apps in well under an hour’s worth of work.

This am was the initial commit to the Shindig svn repository. In other words, there’s already code, in the best open source fashion:

This commit represents initial versions of the first two components, the Gadget Container JavaScript and the Gadget Server — the latter written in Java. The Gadget Container JavaScript provides code to generate IFRAMES pointing to gmodules.com, offers some basic gadgets functionality (e.g. dynamic height), a layout manager, the edit dialog box, a cookie-based user preferences store, and an option to point IFRAMES at your Gadget Server instance instead of gmodules.com. The initial Gadget Server provides extensible scaffolding for processing gadgets: retrieving XML, parsing it, and processing it into a form that allows rendering of the gadget to a user or retrieval of its metadata.

I won’t likely have time today (or tomorrow for that matter) to dive into this, but it is great to have some actually code in advance of the holiday week.

The second project I’m excited about this morning is DiSo, which is Chris Messina, Will Norris, Steve Ivy and others working on a social networking platform “with its skin inside out,” starting with WordPress as a platform. It’s a chance to take the concept of using XFN, hCard, OpenID, OAuth, FOAF, and related microformats and open standards to create a truly distributed social network.

(See also GigaOm’s coverage from Tuesday which I just found through the news feed in my WordPress dashboard – The Next Social Network: WordPress)

Glad to see both of these projects kicking off in the transparency of the open source world – gives me good hope that we’ll actually make some significant progress on the social network portability front.

Advertising is the bread and butter of the web, yet most of my friends claim that they never click on ads, typically using a peacock tone that signals their pride in being ad-averse. The geekier amongst them go out of their way to run Mozilla scripts to scrape ads away, bemoaning the presence of consumer culture. Yet, companies increasingly rely on ad revenue to turn a profit and, while clicking on ads ?may? be declining, it certainly hasn’t gone away. This raises a critical question: Who are the people that click on ads?

She points out that many of the answers at this point are heavily anecdotal – the kind of assumed “middle America” we often project when we need to explain some mass behavior in which we don’t participate. What she finds, in what little research is available, is perhaps surprising:

I cannot find any research on who clicks on social network site ads (does anyone know of any???), but based on what I’ve seen qualitatively, my hypothesis would be that heavy ad clickers are:

* More representative of lower income households than the average user.
* Less educated than the average user (or from less-educated environments in the case of minors).
* More likely to live outside of the major metro regions.
* More likely to be using SNSs to meet new people than the average user (who is more likely to be using SNSs to maintain connections).

In other words, much to my chagrin, I suspect that heavy ad clickers in social network sites and other social media are more likely to trend lower in both economic and social capital than the average user. Unfortunately, I don’t have the data to test these hypotheses at all.

It’s a fascinating question given how much of the energy of the current set of web applications is fueled by ad dollars. What are all those ad buyers paying for, and how effective is that market?

Are ad buyers paying for click-through tracking the demographics of the audience they get this way, as compared to the audiences they reach through print media?

Is the reality that the relatively disenfranchised online (to sum up the four bullets danah points to above) are less discriminating with their attention, and give their attention away more cheaply?

Does this mean that the clicks of the great unwashed online (pardon the image) pay for the web using experience of the urban elite adblock using digerati?

If advertising is like taxes – an annoying fee we try to avoid at all costs, while acknowledging reluctantly that someone has to pay it in order for us to get what we want (see what’s love got to do with it?) – are online ads essentially a regressive tax, costing the most to those who can least afford it?