Lawrence Chan and Jeff Pennal recently spoke at the Vancouver Tech Fest on Designing Interoperable Web Services. This year's event was the first ever, and given the great turnout I'm sure it will continue in the future.

Here are Lawrence and Jeff's slides:

View more presentations from dgibbons.

Thanks to Medhat for inviting us out as well as the rest of the TechFest team for putting on a great event.

On August 6th, AOL Research released the raw search logs of over 650,000 AOL users from a three month period. The data was released ostensibly for research purposes, but the privacy breach in releasing the data has been the main story. While the data was "anonymized" by replacing usernames with numeric ids, it is still possible to determine the identity of a user by reviewing the terms they searched, as the New York Times demonstrated.

AOL quickly pulled the data, but not before many users had downloaded it and made it available in both the original format as well as an easy to use web interface. It's more than a little bit strange to be viewing other people's search results—some are humourous, some are sad, and not surprisingly, some are quite disturbing.

Needless to say, the fallout has been significant. AOL apologized, two of the researches were fired and the CTO of AOL stepped down last week.

In the aftermath of this release, more people are realizing the risks involved in the massive amounts of data they reveal about themselves when they perform seemingly anonymous activities such as searching and browsing the Internet. Google logs your searches and your browsing history, as well as your email, your instant messaging and your photos. Google's even made rumblings that their long term goal is to store all your data. Combine this with government requests for access to search information and it's not hard to understand the concerns of privacy advocates when they speak of the risks involved in collecting this massive amount of information in one spot.

John Battelle, in his book titled "The Search" coins the term "Database of Intentions" to describe these risks:

"The Database of Intentions is simply this: the aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result... Taken together this information represents a real-time history of post-Web culture—a massive clickstream database of desires, needs, wants, and preferences that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked and exploited for all sorts of ends."

So what can be done, as users, to reduce our footprints in this massive database?

There are a number of tools that can be used, including the GoogleAnon bookmarklet to anonymize your Google cookie, as well TrackMeNot, a Firefox extension that periodically issues random queries with fake data in the background.

Ultimately it's important to remember that the information we enter into search boxes is not anonymous, and not only is it being logged, it is also being transmitted unencrypted across the Internet.

A couple of us attended the sold out Canada on Rails last week, the first ever Ruby on Rails conference. It was a good conference, and I was surprised to see how far people had come for a relatively small event.

The conference was two days long, and most of the core Ruby on Rails luminaries were there, including script.aculo.us and RJS author Thomas Fuchs, MeasureMap co-architect Michael Buffington, and of course David Heinemeier Hansson, the author of Ruby on Rails himself. BCIT was a bit tight for a conference of this size—the keynote was overcrowded and the ventilation was having trouble keeping up with that many Ruby hackers in one spot.

For the uninitiated, Ruby on Rails (RoR) is an Open Source web application framework, originally developed by 37Signals for their Basecamp product. It uses the Ruby dynamic scripting language, and has solid support for the AJAX techniques that are popular with the so-called "Web 2.0" sites.

RoR follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture. In this aspect, it is similar to many other web development frameworks such as Struts, but it has a strong emphasis on handling infrastructure components auto-magically, allowing developers to focus on the core business logic, rather than the plumbing required to support the application.

While nearly every web development framework has this as its goal, Ruby on Rails actually does a good job of turning it into reality. The combination of a dynamic, object-oriented scripting language (Ruby) and a flexible object-relational database layer (ActiveRecord) allows developers to quickly put together web applications. While there's no such thing as a silver bullet, that hasn't stopped a lot of people from making impressive productivity claims.

We've done a couple of in-house projects using Ruby on Rails and are currently working on a client project, and I like what I see. We're not going to become an all Ruby shop overnight, but this is a useful tool for projects that fall into RoR's sweet spot.

Regardless of the platform you develop with, Ruby on Rails is definitely worth watching closely. It's clear that RoR's mantra of Don't Repeat Yourself and Convention over Configuration has won a lot of converts, and given the way that new techniques are quickly adopted you can expect to see similar approaches in future versions of web technology platforms.

Welcome to if/then, the OpenRoad weblog. This will be a place for us to discuss topics on software, information architecture, design and anything bright and shiny that happens to capture our attention. Watch this space!