Online Identity Management

Since the early 1990s, I’ve been fascinated by the concept of online identity management: what it means to have an identity online, what stays consistent with the offline world, what becomes more fluid, and what becomes more fixed.

It’s a very vibrant space right now, with commercial vendors, open source projects, trends, and standards all vying for attention. I’m thinking here of a couple of overlapping categories:
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One way openness, or learning to spit as well as suck

TechCrunch wrote last week about changes Facebook made to the news feed:

Facebook is planning on allowing users to add activities from third party social networking site directly into their Facebook news feed, we’ve confirmed.

The problem is that their only talking about allowing users to *add* activities into the news feed, not to take their facebook news feed and take it elsewhere. As TechCrunch put it:
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State of Drupal

(First part of this week I am attending DrupalCon 2008)

[Update 3/4/08: Audio from the State of Drupal as well as Jay Batson and Dries' "Presenting Acquia" talk are available on Shai's podcast]

[Updated again 3/6/08: Video from the State of Drupal at Internet Archive]

Not surprisingly, Dries’ state of Drupal presentation was well received by the crowd of assembled Drupalers.

The state of our union is strong, Dries began, citing the success of Drupal 6 in attracting even broader communities of interest. But as we prepare for the broader audiences that success brings, there are things we need to pay more attention to.

The focus of Drupal 7, as Dries recommended to the community, should be on interoperability and usability. This means improving internal and external APIs, enhancing data portability, and redesigning the home of Drupal, drupal.org, to better accomodate the next wave of users joining the community.

(Great to see a project lead of a major open source community paying so much attention to usability!)
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Graphing Social Patterns

Ongoing at the same time as DrupalCon (which I’m at) is Graphing Social Patterns (which I’m not at).

However, based on the twitterstream (hashtag #gsp), sounds like lots of interesting presentations there:

• Charlene Li on the Future of Social Networks (CNet coverage)
• Charlene Li on the Future of Social Networks (the Slides on Slideshare)
• Beth Kanter’s notes (and her own slides on “Giving Good Poke: Using Social Apps and Media for Social Good)
• Chris Messina on Diso (slides)
• Slideshare tag gspwest2008 and tag gsp seem the best places to look for presentations to be uploaded
• Jeremiah Owyang’s notes on David Glazer’s presentation Open Social

I know I’m also missing lots of others blogging the conference - links in the comments appreciated.

Tantek Çelik on Open Media Web

The second episode in the OpenMediaWeb series is Tantek Çelik:

I wonder if the trajectory he describes whereby proprietary data formats are ultimately superceded by open ones will also hold true for all this FLV video being created - as I recall the file format/spec is already well understood, and I know I’ve seen FLV players which were non-Adobe created.