TechNayak(mirror)

Convergence refers to the coming together of markets, technologies or concepts to benefit out of each other. This coming together when complete diminishes the lines between these two entities and it becomes really difficult to relate to each of them independently. The wikipedia definition states :

Technological convergence refers to a trend where some technologies having distinct functionalities evolve to technologies that overlap, i.e. multiple products come together to form one product, with the advantages of each initial component.

I recently wrote an essay on digital convergence for a course im taking. The essay talks about how telephony and computing converged to become the phenomenon we know as the internet. The essay talks in detail the history of both these fields and highlights significant landmarks and events that laid the foundation to this ocnvergence. Its an interesting read for anybody wanting to learn about the history of the internet.

Click here to download my essay on Convergence

Im testing the XML-RPC interface to blog sites in order to buld a plugin to post blogs really fast. If this post is published on the blog then , it means Im one step away from finishing my plugin. Yaay!!

If you have developed a web application and want users to post to their blogs using your application, this is the way to do it. Its really simple. Here’s the library I tried. Its really simple and works well for Blogger, but in WordPress, the title of the post doesn’t appear. For wordpress, you can use the MetaWeblogAPI for XML_RPC. Just download the XML-RPC implementation in php from here and follow the instructions in this article. That should just about do it , dont you think ?

Oh and this thing took me less than 20 minutes to do

I have been a big fan of OpenId for a long time and also advice many people about the benefits of using it. What I really disliked was the fact that big names were missing from the OpenId directories. That changed as Yahoo is beta testing being an OpenId provider and the news is Great. First of all it almost triples the number of users who have OpenIds and also almost every internet user has a yahoo account (approx 30 million) , which makes the proposition a whole lot better.

I have been trying to make a web property OpenId enabled and its a cinch. Just download and install libraries for the multitde of programming languages and then just follow some basic configuration steps , map the OpenId users to your user management system and you are done. Here is a list of all the plugins available for OpenId enabling your site.

OpenId has really come of age and with Yahoo announcing support its become a neccesity for almost every web App. I would even go so far as to mandate websites , old and new , to enable OpenId on their sites and save the users from the painful signup and confirm cycle. The sheer number of OpenId holders should be motivation enough for properties to go the OpenId way.