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If you have a site or blog and you wanted to make it a community site, your options were limited. Building features like invite a friend, social networking and collaboration was not trivial and involves writing your own applications - this may or may not be supported by the hosting provider unless you were using something like Drupal.

The situation is set to change with Google announcing its Friend Connect service. Like all other Google products, this too is in Beta (and preview release) and has a long wait list. This service will let you implement social features on your website without having to worry about coding and you will be able to invite friends from other popular social networking sites.

Facebook and MySpace had also earlier announced similar initiatives.

And there is focus on social computing else where too. With it’s version 5.0, Liferay also announced enhanced collaboration and social computing features. These include portlets with improved functionality for Blogs, Wikis, Discussion Forums, a chat client, polls and other such features. All of these are based on the same underlying functionality for tagging, commenting, rating etc., which is very similar to Drupal. What this basically means is that irrespective of whether you are creating a blog post or a new article, you can use uniform features for categorization, rating and RSS.

Now it’s easier than ever to have your own Facebook :).

Last week, Language Line Services announced the results of its latest forum on medical interpreter certification. Switching things up from last year’s Boston location, the event took place on the opposite side of the country in Portland, Oregon, one of a growing number of states with formal programs for medical interpreter certification. As usual, when the market leader in the telephone interpreting space makes a move, the industry mumbles, rumbles, and grumbles. Key players and competitors reacted with a mixture of questions about what the over-the-phone interpretation (OPI) provider is doing about certification — and what it might do in the year to come.

A plethora of certification programs for medical interpreters already exists. With the Language Line program included, there are currently 7 certification programs, plus initiatives in 8 states (Indiana, Iowa, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Washington, and Texas). So why would anyone re-invent, or in this case, re-announce the wheel?

Reason number one: the United States currently lacks a nationally available medical interpreter certification. The Language Line press release also offers a few additional clues to things that may be lacking in the current market for programs, citing results of a survey of nearly 800 buyers and prospects. Among other things, the survey found that:

• Respondents favored multiple levels of certification
• Language proficiency levels should be high
• Remote testing via telephone or computer is favored

National availability? Check. Multiple levels of certification? Check. Language proficiency testing services? Check. Ability to test remotely? Check. Tests available in many languages? Czech.

Okay, while Language Line does not have Czech interpreter certification yet, it does offer 22 languages: Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Korean, Khmer, Arabic, German, French, Haitian Creole, Italian, Japanese, Vietnamese, Russian, Tagalog, Somali, Farsi, Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian and Hmong. It also sells language proficiency testing services.

Lessons learned from related interpreting disciplines teach us that an overabundance of supply for interpreter testing programs often leads to consolidation. Cases in point:

• In 1995, disparate state efforts around the country for court interpreter certification began to unite. Today, 40 states offer court interpreter certification through membership in a consortium run by the National Center for State Courts.

• In the 1970s, 18 certification programs were offered for sign language interpreters. The Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf scaled down from 20 separate certificates, offering just 7 today.

The elephant in the room is the National Coalition on Health Care Interpreter Certification, which boasts a coordinating committee comprised of several groups and professional associations with widespread support from health care organizations, non-profits, and other major stakeholders. The Coalition issued a call for membership application in March. Successful applicants were to receive notification during the week of 5 May, 2008. The announcement from Language Line was released on 6 May. Just a few days later, on 9 May, the Coalition issued its own press release, naming Language Line and competitor CyraCom as two of the newest additions to the 17-member coalition.

It remains to be seen whether Language Line will link its commitment to release a pilot test within a year’s time with its participation in the Coalition, or whether it will continue to press forward with both initiatives simultaneously but separately.

On the business side, fellow suppliers and buyers of telephone interpreting should pay close attention — there’s more to this story. The development indicates a focused business strategy for the telephone interpreting giant that has significant implications for the entire industry. We predict that this issue, and Language Line’s attention to it, won’t be disappearing anytime soon.

Read our “Certification Fixation in the Interpreting Field” Quick Take for a deeper analysis of this move by Language Line, a summary of reactions from competitors, and potential impact on the market at large.

Here’s my summer reading list. Tell me what I’m missing.

• The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It, by Jonathan Zittrain
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, by Clay Shirky
• Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World, by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu
• Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, by Chris Kelty
• Designing For the Social Web: Voices That Matter, by Joshua Porter

It’s a bit heavy, I know, but this is the kind of stuff I find interesting.

What are you reading this summer? What key new text have I left out?

Things younger than Republican Presidential candidate John McCain.

Jmaps: a handy library to display Google maps with all sorts of overlays and stuff with jQuery.

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Stewart Mader has written about keys to wiki adoption. To quote: Meetings are an especially good place to start. Plan agendas using a wiki, then record minutes & notes, and action items. Between meetings, you can update the status of items, and this sets the stage for deeper wiki uses, like project management.

[Thanks to Michael Angeles]

He’s doing well, although the recovery is going slower than he’d like.

Men well, ethanz.

[Tags: ethan_zuckerman ]

Last week IBM’s developerWorks ran an article about The Future of PHP about the upcoming PHP 5.3 and 6.0 releases. While the new features in PHP6 may be underwhelming in terms of sheer quantity, the release marks a major milestone for PHP: Unicode support. Since Unicode recently surpassed other character encodings on the web, having every PHP function support Unicode will greatly improve the ease at which content may be managed within an application. There are numerous other efficiencies and optimizations added as most of PHP’s built-in functions have been overhauled, which should increase performance for existing code, as well.

The biggest gain in PHP’s upcoming releases, however, is the addition of namespaces to the object model. Because class names must be unique, we’ve previously had to use naming conventions as workarounds to avoid naming collisions (which could be common when you include third-party class libraries), writing classes named such as:

class DuoConsulting_WebService_Xml_Parser

With namespaces, you can specify a namespace to keep class names shorter and saner:

namespace DuoConsulting::WebService::Xml;
class Parser
{
...
}

Then when you use these objects the code is more readable and less error prone. You can also use aliases to assign a shorter keyword to a long namespace:

use DuoConsulting::WebService::Xml as xml;
$parser = new xml::Parser();

You can read more about the PHP 5.3 implementation of namespaces in the CVS repository.

Nearly all of the features that have been removed in PHP6 were already deprecated in PHP5, which means you probably shouldn’t have been using them for the past three years anyway. Most PHP5-only code (such as the Zend Framework) should require no modifications, whereas some code ported from an older PHP4 codebase may need to be updated to run in PHP6. Since it was bad practice to use the vast majority of removed features even in PHP4 (such as <code>register_globals</code> which automatically created new variables based on GET and POST parameters such as those passed through a URL or web form) their removal should only reinforce better coding practices rather than break existing applications.

The near future looks bright for PHP, and since the biggest changes to the language are going to be coming in the next major point release, I suspect it may not be long before 5.3 is the de facto minimal version under which a number of applications will run.

The Berkman Center has announced the launch of the Publius Papers, a collection of short essays (op-ed length) about the various ways constitutional moments the Internet is going through, from formal declarations to norms and nuances. The essays are in conversation with one another, by a whole bunch of authors. The exact site will be announced tomorrow on the Berkman main page. And it’s with a great deal of trepidation that I say that the first essays is mine, on why the government that governs tacitly governs best, with responses by Esther Dyson and Kevin Werbach. Ulp.

[Tags: publius esther_dyson kevin_werbach ]

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Avi Rappoport has written about "search tools junk". To quote: Search logs contain a lot of weird things, and some of them can have a significant effect on search log analysis. Having looked at tens of thousand lines of search log entries, I offer this first attempt at defining some of the weirdest and least useful kinds of log entry, which I call "Search Log Junk". Here are the types of junk that I've seen most frequently.

Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet (and How to Stop It) is quickly rising to the top of my summer reading list (about which more to come in a later blog post). The distinctions he draws (based on his recent talks, see video here, here, and here) between sterile and generative platforms, and the concerns he raises about contingently generative or tethered platforms, seem to me right on target, and consistent with the issues Tim O’Reilly has been raising (along with, of course, many others) about how to translate the freedom behind free software and the openness behind open source into a world in which services and data live in the cloud.

One major place where the conflict between fully generative and contingently generative comes into play is on online video. YouTube’s terms of service should give any independent video maker pause - both in terms of the license rights they claim and in terms of the susceptibility to take down on the basis of broad criteria[1].

Two things make me hopeful, though, for the future of video on the open web: Miro and Kaltura.

In other words, YouTube may suspend your account at virtually any time and for virtually any reason. Remember, since you’re also not allowed (per the Terms of Use) to download videos from YouTube, if the copy stored at YouTube gets deleted in theory it vanishes entirely, making your web browser connected to YouTube one giant tethered appliance. (”You agree not to access . . . YouTube Content through any technology or means other than the video playback pages of the Website itself, the YouTube Embeddable Player, or other explicitly authorized means YouTube may designate”).

And don’t even get me started on DRM, which aims to replicate the experience of a tethered appliance with content on your own computer.

Last week Dean Jansen from the Participatory Culture Foundation came to visit the Berkman Thursday blog group to talk about Miro.

Miro, which I’ve blogged about many times in the past, is an open source, multi-platform, standards aware video player, as well as a collaboratively edited channel guide. If you spend any significant amount of time watching video on your computer, you should have it. (It’s especially great for longer-form video, high definition video, and disconnected mode - planes, trains, and automobiles).

(Yes, those are actually my subscriptions - click for full size image).

Two things I did not know about Miro that Dean showed us:

1. You can add additional web sites as “Guides” inside the Miro player. If they aren’t formatted as guides they won’t quite work the same way, but this makes it possible to have multiple guides from different sources, ensuring distribution of control of the media.
2. You can create an account on the Miro guide, which tracks your ratings of channels and then can suggest channels you might like, on the basis of those recommendations.

I’ve also been looking at (and talking to the team behind) Kaltura, which bills itself as:

The first open-source platform for video creation, management, interaction, and collaboration.

Kaltura not only enables you to embed video on your site (a la YouTube, Blip.TV, or several dozen others), but lets users collaboratively edit video, providing a complex and full featured editing environment all hosted in the user’s browser.

Kaltura has an interesting partnership with the Wikimedia foundation (see Yochai Benkler’s blog entry about it) and make a video extension for MediaWiki is available now from their downloads page; extensions for Drupal and WordPress are “coming soon.” These extensions let you integrate Kaltura’s SaaS offering inside your hosted application.

The “Community Edition Video Platform,” which will let people provide the full Kaltura functionality from behind a firewall or on their own server, is work in progress, but you can register on their site to be notified when it becomes available.

While it may sometimes seem that free software is not required for generative platforms - an argument Zittrain makes in his presentations above - free and open source solutions do help us to avoid the kind of contingent generativity Zittrain describes, since the worst case scenario is to take the software and run your own, or modify it in order to remove whatever restrictions (intentional or unintentional) the platform imposes. You just can’t do that with most hosted offerings.

[1] From the YouTube Terms of Use:

YouTube reserves the right to decide whether Content or a User Submission is appropriate and complies with these Terms of Service for violations other than copyright infringement, such as, but not limited to, pornography, obscene or defamatory material, or excessive length. YouTube may remove such User Submissions and/or terminate a User’s access for uploading such material in violation of these Terms of Service at any time, without prior notice and at its sole discretion.

Among the many reasons I’ve been posting so infrequently was wedding planning. My own. Last Saturday, Stacy and I conducted our ceremony at the Hillside Club in Berkeley.

Ryan posted a set of 16 beautiful photos from the event.

To be truly forthcoming, Stacy and I were already technically married, having done a San Francisco City Hall ceremony on February 15, the 6th anniversary of our commitment to one another.

(Photo by Maggie Mason)

Saturday’s ceremony was a blast. Stacy and I were both quite anxious, but we were also able to be very present during the event. My favorite photo of the event demonstrates this:

When you can double over laughing in your own wedding ceremony, things are going well.

Our guests protested over how much food we served them at dinner (a meal prepared by our favorite East Bay Chinese restaurant, China Village.) Yet when the 140 cupcakes appeared (more than one for each person), they were pretty much all eaten. Hmmmm.

We began the event with a slideshow. The slideshow had a surprise for some people, and that surprise is another reason why I’ve perhaps not been as on the ball when it comes to writing here.

Stacy and I are expecting a boy.

2008 is a liminal year. Stacy, we’re gonna have an adventure!

(I’ve turned comments off for this post.)