Andy Dale lead a great workshop on XDI for implementors yesterday. The newbies there really came away with a good understanding of XRI and XDI – how they work and how they might use them. Phil Windley came out from Utah and blogged the workshop so you can read about it if you like. We did video tape it and will get that out ASAP.
me
Identity Refill
Yesterday I was in Barns and Noble about to leave the when the cover of this week’s Economist leapt out at me. Canada’s Wintery Election + a 14 page special report. I leapt at the opportunity to read 14 well written articulate pages about my country of origin. I got an ‘identity refill.’ They got all the nuances of internal Canadian politics just right. The issue of “Canadian Identity” was covered well – (If you are still trying to understand what that might mean it is worth the read). They also included coverage of the national slogan – Peace, Order and Good Government – saying that the governmental state of affairs was somewhat rocky.
I also learned that the new governor general (the queen’s representative in Canada – our head of state) is Michaëlle Jean an immigrant woman from Hati. Yes a black woman is our head of state (before that it was Adrienne Clarkson an immigrant woman from Hong Kong). Part of our identity is to really ‘BE’ an immigrant nation.
Its official – we had our Birthday
Doc wrote this great post up about Identity reaching the STAGS – Subject That Actually Goes Somewhere about a year ago. There are great things coming up next week is an XRI/XDI workshop Dec 5th. pre Syndicate workshop on identity Dec 12th details coming soon.
VocabWatch – Derrieregulation
There is some intense stuff happening over in telecommunications regulation land that has significant implications for the interent. Susan Crawford has been blogging on this extensively. (She is now a member of ICANN’s board so).
Bruce Kushnick, of Tele-the-truth, (said with at Brooklyn, Italian accent),
has come up with some new Vocab to describe what is going on.
The Telecom Act giveth and the FCC taken away. The definition of ‘deregulation’ is — those with the most amount of money and influence win!
Deregulation was ‘open the network to competition’. Now ‘deregulate the wires’ means deregulate the incumbent from previous laws to open the network to competition.
I think it’s time for some new terms.
Terminator-egulate — To kill previous regulation
Fib-erize — To continue to promise fiber optics to the press
release.
Liaregulation or Sayanythingulation. — The uncommittment of
whatever you committed to
Derrieregulation — Sit on your ass, claiming you’re doing
everything in your power to compete.
Astroturegulation — Get 50 ethnic, hispanic, black, asian, Jewish,
Christian, Muslim, disabled, senior groups to claim you need new financial incentives and more deregulation.
Killeregulation — Death to VOIP, Munis, anything that moves.
Technorati Tags: Vocabwatch
VocabWatch – Bliki
I haven’t done this in a while but i am going to start “Vocab Watching” again. Highlighting the crazy new words that get made to describe stuff in this ever changing world.
Bliki from Riffs
Bliki is a combination of two popular internet interfaces: blogs and wikis.
A blog is your online journal. A wiki is an application that allows users to modify any portion of a document. A Bliki is a combination of these two things—the community, including you, decides on the content for any given item, whose reviews are the best, what things or topics are the most important to riff about, and how those riffs should be organized and annotated.
Technorati Tags: Vocabwatch, Web2.0
I just got Measure Map – Woohoo
A few months ago I put in my name to be an alpha tester of Measure Map. I got the invitation this morning and used my nerdiest skills to install it ( I had to use my FTP client to download the files, add in code and then upload them back on to my webhost).
I am really excited that I have a user interface to actually understand what is going on in my blog. It show how important UI is because right now I have a log on my web host but it un-readable.
User-Centric collection of atributes and reputation
We had a great lunch with Mary yesterday where we discussed this article and her comments about reputation portability. Ironically enough Mary’s comments excerpted and therefore were not complete. She articulated more deeply in our discussion how the the meaning of an eBay reputation has meaning within that community. When you extract it out of that community and look at it as someone who is not a member do the numbers have ‘meaning’ in the same way they do for those in the community.
Comment from Ivan the below article…
A small company called Opinity is trying to address this issue by aggregating many different sources of reputation data (ie. eBay rating, credit rating, etc.) to enable sites to interact w/individuals to get the reputation item they need for that trusted interaction to take place
This guy gets it! They are actually not just aggregating ‘reputation data’ and ratings but also membership in various website communities (you can say you have xhandle over on site Y when you are making comments on bulletin board Z but how do you prove it? Opintiy gives you tools to do this.
If identity is what others say about you (Dick has defined it this way in his identity 2.0 talk). If you are a member of an organization and they assert that about you. (how else do you show someone the membership cards in your wallet online?) Opinity gives people tools to support you authenticating your memberships in various organizations.
He continues
…I’m afraid that they may have a “chicken and the egg” problem in getting people using the service in order to get sites to support it and w/no sites supporting it users will be hard to come by.
This is where his understanding break down. Opinity is offering its services to communities/websites to use.
Opinity is much the same, although they offer partners the opportunity to tap into the data. These centralized data plays have no chance on today’s internet. Why even bother.
Here’s what we need – a referee and a scorekeeper. Open (I didn’t say free, mind you) APIs in and out, not just links to feedback scores. Figure out the rules (keep it flexible) and let other applications feed the database. Somebody please build this. Or eBay, open up your Feedback API.
I’m not alone in pleading for this. See what Rob Hof and others have to say as well.
Web 2.0 and Tufte to the rescue
So on this snark blog – Go Flock Yourself that my buddy Jon Garfunkel sent along has this interesting post asserting that Web 2.0 retards need to read more Tufte. in reference to this picture with notes on flickr. The good news is that is coming to San Jose and San Francisco this month Dec 5-8. About 8 months ago after NTEN I went to Boston just for the workshop because Marty recommended it. Well worth it – you get all of his books and a day long course – Presenting Data and Information.
More on the workshop
Phil Windley inquired to learn more about the XRI/XDI workshop on December 5th and this is what Andy Dale replied…
It is my intention that the afternoon provide potential implementers or implementation decision makers a very concrete idea of what they can do with i-names (XRI/XDI).
I want to let them know what they can do now and the schedule for the next pieces of the infrastructure being ready. I want them to know what people get ‘free’ with an i-name and what type of functionality they can start to provide people with i-names that no other technology will give them.
I want to paint a picture of the functional revolution that occurs when people aggregate their own data under their own control and how that lets any service provider give better service.
People should leave the workshop with an understanding that they can start to implement “Identity Centric Architecture” today and how that will benefit them and their members/customers.
Opinions on Opinity.
There has been a lot of opinions about opinity in the blogosphere in the last week.
From Mashable:
Quoting Bill Washburn @ Opinity –
The way we think about it at Opinity, individuals would also be completely welcome to put together multiple reputation profiles of themselves for different contexts, say one for ecommerce, one for professional purposes, one for political or dating or community forum purposes. An eBay rating could be shown in a profile or not as any particular person might deem wise for their purposes. The most important thing is that elements of a reputation profile can be made portable, aggregated, authenticated, and thereby be more useful and worthy of some degree of trust (depending on how broad, deep, and verified the profile is) everywhere on the ‘net.
That’s more like it! I reckon these guys could be on to something big, if only they can figure out how to make plenty of dough from all this – their idea sounds exactly the same as mine, but the problem I’ve had up to this point is justifying it from a business perspective. You can’t really charge users, so you’d have to charge site owners/developers for any applications that hooked into the system. So maybe you have a new auction site and you don’t want to build a whole new reputation system, along with the high switching costs for your users – pay us and we’ll do the hard work for you.
Despite what P-Air says, there’s really no chicken and egg problem if you aggregate and categorize existing feedback systems (you won’t start off with a zero score if you can import your current eBay score from the start). But here’s the question: how could someone make this work – and would it even be worth the effort?
What is a product like this going to buy me as a citizen of web? I can see their idea of a central repository of user reputation (something similar to Credit Reporting company). But all the big sites have their own repository and why would they want to share that. So, their basic approach would be to get the smaller websites to get to use this service. Now that is a big issue because why would most of these websites want to purchase a service they do not need. As soon as the customer pays via credit card, these people do not care about the reputation of the customer. So unless this system can help them
Lets take the model from customer point of view. Most people would like to get tangible benifits out of this before they would be ready to aggregate their identity information in one place. This could be in form of discount in online stores. In addition to that the reputation needs to be integrated with a identity engine that can build a central repository of their profile (which will include their blogs, comments on other websites for products, etc) across the web which can then be converted into his reputation (because without the “identity” you will not know who are the people talking about since there could be really large number of “John Doe” out there).
May be I am thinking too far into the future. At the moment, it could be more like something that gamers and others involved in online activities (like chat ) would use to aggregate and share their information out of box.
I had a look at the Opinity service. This service allows a user to create a reputation. This seems basically to mean that a user can create reviews for people. Interesting, I would like to see a more distributed MicroContent solution for this.
A more interesting feature to me is the certification of identities. A user can submit identities (username+password) at the service. And Opinity will try to login. If it succeeds it has certified that identity. Something similar can be done with email addresses. In this way u user can prove that his various identities on various services belong to the same service.
I see such a certification service as a part of a personal profile.
Business week’s Rob Hof wrote about Mary’s assertions about the ‘unportability of reputations’. We are having lunch next week to talk about it 🙂
Reputation Matters – for big and small
Two days ago I flew from Boston to JFK (my taxi was 30 min late and I was blessed to have the best host ever – Jon Garfunkel who drove me to the airport) to make a morning presentation on Corporate Social
I headed to a presentation facilitated by Joe Sabilia my friend from the Social Venture Network – on Communicating Your Companies Values: How Corporate Social Responsibility Impacts the Bottom Line.
On the plane I was scanning the Guide to CSR Communication.
According to a poll released by the Cherenson Group, almost 80 percent of adults say they would rather work for a company with an excellent reputation than for a company with a poor reputation, even if the company with the poor reputation offered a higher salary. (p. 13)
Tying this back to this morning’s experience. I really wish I could give the taxi cab company demerits for not picking me up.
after the business panel
I had a great day on Tuesday at the Corante Symposium***
We opened with this quote and I think it is basically true
Managers would rather live with a problem they can’t solve than with a solution the don’t fully undersand or control.
Eric Bonabeau
Comments on the panel:
From Educause
Kaliya talked about a new data web that links to persistent data. For me that elicited thoughts of Plaxo, microformats and XHTML. I may have misinterpreted her, but I believe she was projecting a growth in commodity skills and contract labor. 

Let’s talk about customers… companies in e-transactions get all the data on customers. This thread reminds me of the medical records data ownership controversy.
Liz posted about the “hollywood model” comment I made and how these was a wondering if this was actually a good thing.
___________
Lunch followed and Bud and I enjoyed a good conversation over that he blogged.
I shared with him the use case that I have been seeking to solve ‘since the beginning’ and is why I am so enthusiastic about identity.
The community that I am seeking to serve with my nonprofit
attends conferences but these are all put on by different but similar organizations. Why should these people who might show up at 4 different organizations over a year have to enter a different profile across all those activities.
This apparently has continued to resonate.
Also, I continue to be tremendously intrigued by Kaliya Hamlins’ ideas for creating identities. What I envision here is that people create a profile or publish a profile that they think fits with the conference. They then use this identity for this conference and others like it so that you can find new resources via people you met at the conference. Obviously, SPAM potential is high, but the idea is intriguing.
_____
Other interesting panels included Kevin and Mary on this question – How do we scale meaning? They opened with this quote from Bruce Sterling.
Ultimately no human brain, no planet full of human brains, can possibly catalog the dark, expanding ocean of data we spew. In a future of information auto-organized by folksonomy, we may not even have words for the kinds of sorting that will be going on; like mathematical proofs with 30,000 steps, they may be beyond comprehension. But they’ll enable searches that are vast and eerily powerful. We won’t be surfing with search engines any more. We’ll be trawling with engines of meaning.
Liz Lawly posted these great snippets for her talk on the question of is social software a mirror or a lens.
We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us. Winston Churchill
This is true of social software they shape us.
____
finally the cocktail party headline – Identity women were popular at the symposium. I was asked by him if I was into ‘identity’ as in identity politics. I was like … nope. Apparently others at the event where.
***(except there was no outgoing SMTP – so they were so kind to actually open the Harvard interent in the one room we were in but for future reference “open wifi” means open outgoing SMTP)
Technorati Tags: corantessa
identity workshop audience
I have been working hard to spread the word about the workshop Andy is leading on December 5th about i-names. One of the folks I passed it along to is Paul Hogan of Exponent Partners who do strategic and tactical consulting, and helps design solutions, selecting and implementing the right technology in the nonprofit sector. Here is his articulation of the market need and who should be at the workshop.
All of our clients want to have data from web-based applications (i.e. transaction processing, membership management) as well as basic forms (i.e. registration, surveys, etc.) integrate automatically with the back-end database, in our case Salesforce and potentially CiviCRM. I’d love to see you guys certify applications that are compliant with these standards and give them a stamp of approval so that we could use them for clients.
The way the agenda looks, your audience really ought to be the ‘product managers’ and execs of folks like Salesforce, CiviCRM, CivicSpace, Democracy In Action, Radical Designs, CrownePeak, everyone building add-on modules to Drupal & Mambo, the dozens of membership management software vendors, etc.
Invasion of the AIM BOTS
Today in Bryant Park I logged into Audium (my platform neutral IM Application) and these little AOL IM Bots had installed themselves on my machine. It was really really really annoying – they could have asked me nicely if I wanted some bots and what they did. Instead they just pushed them onto my machine. I was just watching the Reuters building 20 story high AIM advertisement go up and down. Saying how ‘new’ they were. Seems really old school to just install stuff on my machine without asking.
Markets are conversations guys!!! you ask before you install stuff. Maybe you should go talk to your new social software aware property before you do more stuff like this.
Meeting an 'identity man' (Aldo Castenda)
I met Aldo for the first time last night at the Planetwork event (he is in the back row next to me in the picture). Today we met up again and talked ‘identity’ over sushi and ice cream. We talked about how we got into this whole identity thing and talked about different emerging developments.
It is great to meet a good lawyer (as in good hearted – but I am sure also talented) who is interested in this identity space. God knows we will need him and more like him.
He had asked me before if I wanted to collaborate in some way on the pod-casts and now that we have met and talked the answer is – YES!
11 11 11 11 identity on remembrance day
I took this picture at Karin Miller’s house. It is the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. This was when world war one ended. Remembrance Day.
This day shaped my identity as a Canadian. We had a remembrance day service every year at school in which we did two things gracefully. Remembering what war is really like and horrible it is (and that we should not do it again ever if at all possible) and a deep honoring of those who did fight in World War One, Two and the Korean War. Veterans sell poppies (plastic ones) starting just before Halloween and the money goes towards veterans. It is the last holiday in Canada before Christmas (we have a micro version of US thanksgiving on the first Monday of October.)
We had the day off and it was not just a bank holiday but a ‘real holiday’ where shat down. My family often watched services on TV or went to them.
I am sad that I did not get to experience remembrance day now that I am in America – it is deep. The days that are different here are numerous and the way we honor them in Canada are part of my identity. It is interesting to watch how when the days happen and you sort of participate but not participate. They you don’t have your ‘own version’ and elements of your identity slip away.
Just something to think about in identity land.
Three Planetworks this week
We had a great week for Planetwork this week. We had an amazing event in DC with 35 really diverse folks (link to photo)on a Friday Night at Busboys and Poets. Our line up was fantastic with CITI seeking good folks to work for them, and several projects serving the third world. We had a sponsor – Gerry of Net Team contributed $200 to make our evening a success. Karin a lawyer and founder of Our New Evolution did a brilliant job of getting the word out and the next one will be in January.
Yesterday in Boston we had a dinner to explore starting a chapter. Most excitingly Neila and Peggy who were part of the original Planetwork first conference (2000) crew in San Francisco. Deborah Elizabeth Finn, Jon Garfunkel, Aldo Casdiena, and Beth Canter were there.
Wednesday Brian Hamlin (yes there is a relation he is my husband) is hosting Planetwork in the East Bay. There is a great line up.
Green Century Institute Discussion of the upcoming Digital Be-In 14: Earth Service – “the Green Be-In” – on Earth Day April 22, 2006 at SOMARTS in San Francisco.
EcoResearch MANAGING ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE, 6-8 September 2006 20th International Conference on Informatics for Environmental Protection (EnviroInfo-2006)
E-Waste Insights
Compumentor
Triple Pundit
SustainLane

Technorati Tags: Boston, Planetwork, EastBay
GreenFestivaling
I spent all day today and will spend all day tomorrow at the Green Festival Collaboration Hub. It has been great fun talking to folks about the work that Planetwork is doing – expanding to 10 cities.
We have a whole group of folks working on the Virtual Civil Society. If you are in the Bay Area it is worth the trip. I had a blast buying professional looking organic cloths.
Here are pictures from today.
Jim is speaking to a packed audience about Eprida (a really cool carbon sequestration technology basically it pulls CO2 out of the atmosphere, makes fuel and fertilizer) there is an article coming out shortly in Scientific America soon. Watch the flash movie to get it.
Leaving the festival there was an ExtraCycle street party – Extracycle is a cool addendum to mountain bikes that make them Sports Utility Bikes (SUB’s). They had one set up with a Blender on the back. And a whole bike embedded sound system pumping away. They are Dancing in the middle. Who needs a hummer?
Technorati Tags: Planetwork, Collaboration
Identity based DRM – will the 'get it'?
I am not a fan of the MPAA, RIAA or any other big industry conglomeration trying to hold on to their existing business model of selling creative works (before you view/listen to them).
I have like many many folks participated in this system. I have bought first albums then cassettes and then CD’s (and now people buy songs online too – but I have yet to). When I make a purchase of these artists works I have bought the right to listen to them freely. People who had albums upgraded to cassette tapes (maybe) but likely for sure upgraded to CD’s. If they did this they bought the work ‘twice.’ In the digital realm it gets even stranger where if you buy a piece of music on apple i-tunes you only get to copy it three times.. from one computer to the next to the next. Then it ‘runs out’ of copies. mmmm…but didn’t buy the right to listen to it when you first bought it no mater which medium you as the owner of that music choose to listen to it in.
So far the whole frame around DRM has been device based. This means every time there is a new form that plays media – (record player, cassette deck, CD Player, MP3 on desktop, ipods and zen players….and there will be more in the future.
If DRM is to exist and not completely alienate those who are the end users of music it should be identity based. I – ME – I buy a copy of a song and I get to listen to it forever on what ever the ‘medium’ of the day is.
I would like to propose a better system that still means folks get money. Music and other digital work is completely FREE.
It is all on the web and we call all access it all. I as a listener to music only have so much time that I spend listening to music. I allocate some amount that I will contribute to the music payment pool in a month $50 – $500. Then the attention ‘given’ to each song is recorded. The money I allocate amongst all the artist/podcaster etc. is distributed between them (perhaps with me giving particularly enjoyable ones a bit more) based on my attention data stream. The artist I listen to actually get money! If I like them and listen to them over years and years they will get more money then they would if they sold me a song once. This of course needs a functioning micro-payments system it may be worth the music industries business to actually do this.
Technorati Tags: identity, attentiontrust
Identity Commons – too point oh?
I had a good chat with Owen Davis yesterday and we talked about what is going on with Identity Commons . The site has gone quiet while it re-organizes. This will include some existing board members resigning and adding some new ones. A new executive director will be selected too. This is great news.
Opinity is having a market conversation
I just redid my blog side bar and added a link to Opinity. I have been networking on their behalf for several months now. I am happy to share that they have also been engaging in market conversation. With the Online Traders Web Alliance about how their service – to aggregate reputation across services can be of benefit to them. They learned a lot and are incorporating the feedback they received.