Phil Windley has it.
Tom Keays has it too. Even newbie blogger
Rob Hayes has it.
I have it too. Mine is =Judith.
JD Lasica talks about it, but I dont
think he has it yet.
So what is 'it'? According to
2idi, the first i-broker, i-names are "a way to authenticate your identity and
share personal data with the assurance that it will remain private and up-to-date." The 2idi website goes on to
explain that "your identity cannot be "harvested" by spammers or other marketers without your express
permission."
Want to know more about the background, technology, and concepts involved with 'i-names'? David Worthington, writing
for BetaNews—I-Names a Spam-Free E-Mail Alternative?—does a
pretty comprehensive job of describing the i-name concept. He also gives some background about the consortium of
organizations behind the delivery of i-names, and the various components of this "privacy-protected global Internet
address" called i-name.
I often talk about distributed social networking and owning my identity here on the Internet. I want to be able to
choose who to share 'it' with, and to use my own private key to unlock the doors of those services I choose to join
without having to build endless profiles on endless services.
One of the people I have been chatting with about this concept is Kaliya
Hamlin (aka =Kaliya), the Outreach Coordinator for Planetwork. Kaliya
is an ardent evangelist for Identity Commons in "...supporting their bootstrapping efforts to develop a trusted social
layer of the Internet using XRI/XDI open source, OASIS standards." UPDATE: Upon reading Kaliya's
weblog I find that Doc =Searls has it too.
Identity Commons also has a press release—The
Final Spam Killer—that talks about the potential of i-names to "...make it easy for both people and organizations
to control their own Internet identity and form long-term, trusted data-sharing relationships…"
Do you get 'it'? Will you get 'it'? Let me know when you do!
By the way, thanks everyone, for all of the kudos regarding my new role here at Weblogs, Inc. as the Editorial Director.
And, happy full moon eclipse… Yikes… (:=
1. I completely agree that securely federated, user-controlled digital identity is a most valuable goal for social software to pursue. However, one of the problems I have with the various current digital identity schemes such as this one is the cerebral "disembodiment" of their definition of digital identity as a set of "facts" about oneself. It seems to me that my digital identity extends way beyond my declarative definitions of myself: surely both the content (including meta-content such as del.icio.us tags etc.) I originate and my online interactions with others and their content exist within an organic spectrum of "me-ness"?
The other issue with a unified and global system is the centralised management of namespaces. First come, first serve, and at a price, of course, trivial for us Westerners, but perhaps not so affordable to people from the developing world. So woe-betide you if your name is John Smith or you are a working-class African. It just isn't "small pieces, loosely joined", however alluring the promise of one system fitting all...
Posted at 8:03PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Luke Razzell