Advogato was an

online community An online community, also called an internet community or web community, is a community whose members interact with each other primarily via the Internet. Members of the community usually share common interests. For many, online communities may fe ...

and

social networking site A social networking service or SNS (sometimes called a social networking site) is an online platform which people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people who share similar personal or career content, interests, act ...

dedicated to

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

development and created by

Raph Levien Raphael Linus Levien (also known as Raph Levien; born April 6, 1970) is a software developer, a member of the free software developer community, through his creation of the Advogato virtual community and his work with the free software branch of ...

. In 2007, Steve Rainwater took over maintenance and new development from Raph. In 2016, Rainwater's running instance was shut down and backed up to archive.org.

History

Advogato described itself as "the free software developer's advocate." Advogato was an early pioneer of

blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...

s, formerly known as "online diaries", and one of the earliest social networking websites. Advogato combined the most recent entries from each user's diary together into a single continuous feed called the ''recentlog'', directly inspiring the creation of the Planet aggregator somewhat later. Several high-profile members of the

and

open source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open ...

movements were users of the site, including Richard M. Stallman,

Eric Raymond The given name Eric, Erich, Erikk, Erik, Erick, or Eirik is derived from the Old Norse name ''Eiríkr'' (or ''Eríkr'' in Old East Norse due to monophthongization). The first element, ''ei-'' may be derived from the older Proto-Norse ''* ain ...

, Alan Cox,

Bruce Perens Bruce Perens (born around 1958) is an American computer programmer and advocate in the free software movement. He created The Open Source Definition and published the first formal announcement and manifesto of open source. He co-founded the Open ...

, and

Jamie Zawinski Jamie Zawinski (born November 3, 1968), commonly known as jwz, is an American computer programmer, blogger and impresario. He is best known for his role in the creation of Netscape Navigator, Netscape Mail, Lucid Emacs, Mozilla.org, and XScree ...

. Because Advogato was the first website to use a robust, attack-resistant

trust metric In psychology and sociology, a trust metric is a measurement or metric of the degree to which one social actor (an individual or a group) trusts another social actor. Trust metrics may be abstracted in a manner that can be implemented on compu ...

and to release the underlying code for that trust mechanism under a free software license, it has been the basis of numerous research papers on trust metrics and social networking (see the list below for specific examples). Advogato's early adoption of an

XML-RPC XML-RPC is a remote procedure call (RPC) protocol which uses XML to encode its calls and HTTP as a transport mechanism.Simon St. Laurent, Joe Johnston, Edd Dumbill. (June 2001) ''Programming Web Services with XML-RPC.'' O'Reilly. First Edition. ...

interface led to its use as an example of how such interfaces could be used by web programmers. Advogato saw use as a testbed for social networking and semantic web technologies.

Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a profess ...

, who was an Advogato user himself, included Advogato in a short list of sites notable for their early adoption of the

FOAF FOAF (an acronym of friend of a friend) is a machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects. Anyone can use FOAF to describe themselves. FOAF allows groups of people to describe soc ...

as a method of exporting user RDF URIs.

Trust metric

The motivating idea for Advogato was to try out in practice Levien's ideas about attack-resistant

s, having users certify each other in a kind of

peer review Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work (peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review ...

process and use this information to avoid the abuses that plague open community sites. Levien observed that his notion of attack-resistant trust metric was fundamentally very similar to the

PageRank PageRank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results. It is named after both the term "web page" and co-founder Larry Page. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages. According ...

algorithm used by

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

to rate article interest. In the case of Advogato, the trust metric was designed to include all individuals who could reasonably be considered members of the Free Software and Open Source communities while excluding others. The implementation of this trust metric was through an Apache module called ''mod virgule''. ''mod_virgule'' is free software, licensed under the

GPL The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...

and written in C. Despite the trust metric, posting privileges to the front page of Advogato were gained by controversial individuals, leading some to claim Advogato's trust metric solution was faulty. Misunderstanding of the purpose of Advogato's trust metric was common, which often led to the assumption that it should exclude specific individuals on the basis that they were known cranks.Advogato: Advogato Has Failed
/ref>

References

Advogato and mod_virgule references

*Raph Levien (2004)
Attack Resistant Trust Metrics
Early draft of abandoned PhD manuscript. *Raph Levien (2007). Lessons From Advogat
(video)(abstract)
Google Tech Talks, June 25, 2007. *Jesse Ruderman (2004)
A comparison of two trust metrics
*Mary Tyler (2004)
Behind four Linux community sites
Linux.com feature.
Social Forces and Constraint in the Attainment of Community Status
*Steve Rainwater (maintainer of mod_virgule 2007 - 2016).

External links

* {{Official website, http://www.advogato.org/ * Rusty Foster, 2004.
User Sponsorship and Managed Growth
.

article. * modified codebase with backend PostgreSQL, currently seeking maintainer/new owner by Steven Rainwater

Free software websites Reputation management Defunct social networking services Blog hosting services Internet properties established in 1999 Internet properties disestablished in 2017

History

Trust metric

See also

References

Advogato and mod_virgule references

External links