particlestorm.net

A great introductory article about the issues facing web community developers trying to balance user expression with the security of the other users around them.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/secureyourcode

I’m predicting that the “Web 2.0″ (or 3.0 some think) will soon hit critical mass, meaning interfacing with interactive web sites will become a daily part of life. Unfortunately, this atmosphere strikes me as the ‘cool lets do everything’ environment of personal computers just coming onto the Internet. Often when a new area of technology comes out people are quick to propel its strengths and forget about it’s weaknesses. Then 2 years later their once pristine machine is a smoldering pile of crap filled with more junk salesman trying to sell you pills and software and the ex-king of Nigeria just won’t go away.

The web can do an amazing amount of things but it is only now that the people are starting to see the security issues that might exist in sites already wildly out of control. The well publicized “Worm of MySpace” helped bring these dangers to people’s attentions. I predict that over the next year the ‘research / hacking’ community will focus much more on these ‘web 2.0′ sites and find major security issues. Depending on how big of a site and how sensitive the data, it may or may not become as large spread of a problem as spyware is.

Will all these hyper configurable community sites because the next bastion for spyware and viruses? Will MySpace get into a contest on wither it or the Russian Botnet Armies have more power to do damage?

I’d like to welcome to the world our latest contribution to the community of Bakersfield, The Southwest Voice. Like her older sister, The Northwest Voice, this new weekly newspaper will be written by the community, for the community, from the perspectives of your neighbors and friends.

Everyone is encourage to submit articles, photos, or even just questions to the newspaper’s online community, located at www.swvoice.com for The Southwest Voice and www.northwestvoice.com for The Northwest Voice. Once your content is approved it will be featured on the web site for all your neighbors to enjoy. Chances are it will get published in the weekly print version of the paper.

The Southwest Voice will be delivered for free to the neighborhoods of the Southwest part of town and also available at many local community areas. With Voice publications being distributed to 27,000 homes in the Southwest and 24,000 homes in the Northwest, our Bakersfield community has never had more opportunities to tell our community what going on in our schools, parks, and lives. Join the hundreds of your fellow citizens who have shared their voice and let your story be heard.

Gazing deeply into the future and into his own soul he searches for his destiny. Does he realize he is not the prettiest of our nephews? Or, is beauty something deeper than flesh to this small pup?

The Bakotopia team, The Bakersfield Californian and I were awarded a 2006 Digital Edge Award for Most Innovative Participation for our website, Bakotopia. The award, known as an “Edgie”, was awarded by the Newspaper Association of America’s New Media Federation.

Bakotopia is an online community for the ‘young adult’ crowd in Bakersfield. It’s a place for local bands to get together and announce events and their fans to converse. But it is more than bands, it is a place where the users can define a profile, sell and buy stuff, make new friends, listen to local music streams, and meet like-minded people in Bakersfield.

I spend my days at The Bakersfield Californian working on the software platform that powers Bakotopia and several other sites. The platform, known internally as “Bakomatic”, is written from scratch in PHP, runs on Linux, and uses MySQL as its database engine. We have many big plans for the platform in this coming year, including many additional sites and cutting-edge features. Stay tuned!

I’d like to personally thank the rest of my team and the leadership at The Bakersfield Californian for their great work, forward thinking, and enthusiastic support. Your willingness to embrace technological advances makes cutting-edge products like our platform possible. By looking at changing technology as a benefit instead of something for the newspaper industry to fear you insure the paper and all the company’s endeavors will continue to flourish.

Bakotopia, as well as our other sites, are really a team effort, of which I am only a small part of. Thank you to Publisher Ginger Moorhouse, CEO Richard Beene, The Bakersfield Californian executive staff, Mary Lou Fulton, Dan Pacheco, Mark Jackson, Mick Martinek, and the rest of the ‘Colorado Boys’, Matt Munoz, and the many others at The Bakersfield Californian who are making this project an astounding success.

I plan to write in more detail in the coming months about all the exciting work I am doing at the paper. Until then, check out our three existing ‘brands’ powered by the platform, make a profile, meet some friends, and have fun!

Bakotopia – http://www.bakotopia.com/
Más – http://www.masbakersfield.com/
The Northwest Voice – http://www.northwestvoice.com/