I´m back from the Tokamak II in Oporto. It was a very interesting, productive and fun meeting. I find it very motivating to work in such a group of clever people on real innovation. By the way 14 developers from 8 countries.

OpenID:
From today on we support login via OpenID on the openDesktop.org network. So KDE-Look.org, KDE-Apps.org, openDesktop.org and the other sites are now officially OpenID consumers. You can associate one or more OpenIDs with your useraccount. Please go to the Settings page to configure your OpenIDs.

OpenID is great. The only problem with OpenID is that it is not suitable for authentification for REST based APIs like our API www.open-collaboration-services.org
I think I found a solution for this problem. I will release the API for OpenID based API access in a few days after a bit more testing. In the meantime you can use our API with the regular username/password authentication.

Knowledgebase:
Last week we launched a new knowledgebase/help feature. Every application on KDE-App.org and openDesktop.org has now its own small user generated FAQ. If you have a question or a problem with an application you can post your question together with a description and up to three screenshots. Other can help you with the problem via comments. And if you found the solutions you can add the answer to your question and mark the problem as solved. The owner of the application has full edit and delete right to the FAQ entries for his application.
So we hope to build a small user FAQ for every application.

This Knowledgebase/FAQ is also accessible via the REST API: www.open-collaboration-services.org So the idea is to integrate access to this knowledgebase directly into the desktop applications. See also my Akademy Keynote about the Social Desktop for more information.
http://www.open-collaboration-services.org/socialdesktop.pdf

If you want to help with the integration of the knowledgebase or any other of our features into the Social Desktop feature please contact me. I´m sure it will be fun to do really innovative stuff.

At the moment I´m working on new features for the marketplace/app store feature and the Social Desktop. Stay tuned. More interesting and innovative stuff is coming soon. 🙂

Advertising:
Another more serious thing. Our advertising income is decreasing since a few month. As you know all services on our websites are completely free including job board, API access and marketplace. We rely on advertising to pay the hosting of the three servers with over 6TB traffic per month. I think the reason for the decrease is the recession but also the fact that a lot of our visitors use ad blockers and never click on banners.

So if you want to support us please consider to click on banners if you find them interesting.

We are also looking for sponsors. So if you want to become a sponsor of one of the biggest networks for Desktop Linux drop me a line 🙂