Hey I am wondering what is going to happen that you can change your 'avatar' and add an description to your name? (And why there is no forum search?)

the blog search is also a forum search
there is no nick descripting
you get an avatar from philipp if you are regulary active here.

thanks.

> there is no nick descripting

Not? But you have one (or kinda), for instance your homepage is linked and there is some defusing text^^

Thats just for the first Google result for your username.

I think Philipp should get a minor upgrade for our " About " page.
Everyone who's interested would write a small paragraph about himself, and send it to Philipp.

After Philipp got the email, he will update the person's page.

What do you say guys?

(It's just a small suggestion i kept in mind)

Philipp is probably too busy

First,
I'm talking about only regular members here...

Second,
Hey, He's got Tony :P

(Just Kidding :))

Your idea sounds good, David, but as DPic says, maybe he's busy enough to do that...
I think it would be better if we can have a log-in and edit our information as much as we like.

i would support that.. also it would be nothing special..

how is it managed at the moment, no login nothing that provides you are the only one who is posting from this name?

I don't want to have to log-in to this forum, It's what's separates this forum from the others.

Silenco
No we can't prove who we are, this forum works on trust. And it works (as far as I can tell, Philipp/Tony will probably be along in a moment to prove me wrong :D)

David
Good idea but I bet Phillip will get p***ed off when we want to start wanting editing them all the time

<< @David
Good idea but I bet Phillip will get p***ed off when we want to start wanting editing them all the time >>

Yeah, you're right. Didn't think of that.. :/

Here's how I figured the About page for every user would work. You use your full name, e.g. "David Hetfield". Now the top Google search will find your homepage. And this homepage contains more information about you, even your photo, your sofware, your downloads etc., so that there's no need to replicate all that info on Blogoscoped. Of course, it doesn't really work if you don't have a homepage, or your homepage is not positioned at #1 for your name yet. Still, I can make some tweaks upon request so that your homepage will be shown on #1 for the nick's about page, but this only works for full names or very unique nicknames.

On that note, I think it may be cool if there would be a format similar to robots.txt that would be called say "me.txt". Then you register e.g. david.hetfield.name and in the me.txt in the root there would be stuff like:

username: david
username-alternative: david123_1
fullname: David Hetfield
interests: google, search, heavy metal
icon: /images/david.png
homepage: http: //example.com
friends: (urls to other "me.txt" files, space-separated, follow)
location: (maybe some geo-coordinates...)
email: nospamexample.com
etc.

You can provide as little or as much as you want in that file. It's not XML because XML is too complicated :)
If you don't have a server, well there is the option that your main social site of choice offers you to export this file as text on their server, and there can also be new sites to do only that (hmm, anyone wants to do a startup for this? :)).

Then when you register for the 13th social news site or for any other website, instead of providing all info all over again, you just provide a password plus the link to your me.txt. I'm lazy and don't want to enter all that info all the time. Plus, whenever you change something in the "me.txt", like you change the colors of your icon, after an hour or so that change will automatically be reflected in all the other site (Digg, Blogoscoped, Orkut...).

Read this:
http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/ (Thoughts on the Social Graph)

That document talks primarily about social network relationships – and it talks about a *centralized* solution. However, nobody may "trust" this centralized solution (even if it's a non-profit). Plus, it's more complicated the way it's set up. There already was a FOAF XML file (friend of a friend) that, to my knowledge, isn't hugely popular, though some people use it (I use it on this server, but it's outdated*). And not only reg. the non-friendly terminology:
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2007/09/21/howToAvoidSoundingLikeAnMo.html

* FOAF RDF file: http://blogoscoped.com/foaf.rdf

Philipp, this has taken off a little bit, but obviously hasn't caught on in a large way:
http://openid.net/

"For geeks, OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. OpenID takes advantage of already existing internet technology (URI, HTTP, SSL, Diffie-Hellman) and realizes that people are already creating identities for themselves whether it be at their blog, photo stream, profile page, etc. With OpenID you can easily transform one of these existing URIs into an account which can be used at sites which support OpenID logins."