I've just been catching up on what Eric Norlin has been up to recently – the truth is I lost track of his feed when he moved his thinking from his old place to here.
Note to community: We have work to do on making it less painful to change URLs when using RSS. Could there be a special tag we could put in the last posting at OLD-URL that tells peoples’ blog readers to change their configuration to NEW-URL? Can Dave Winer devise such a thing – or is there some capability defined and I just don't have software that takes advantage of it?
So anyway, I assumed Eric was on vacation… But no way! So I missed some good stuff.
For example, without Eric to point it out, I missed this bizarre proposal by Jonathan Schwartz for government regulation of DRM standards.
And then there was this piece on the simplifying identity assumption being made these days in Malaysia – elimination of all segregation of context, and use of one government-issued identity for every aspect of life. The card conveniently conveys all the ‘necessary basic information’ – like your religion and ethnic group – and will be used for everything from driving to health insurance to credit transactions and digital signature. Could it be more than accidental that this “identity simplification” has evolved in a country which, according to Amnesty International, is plagued with “a pattern of human rights abuses such as fatal shootings, torture and deaths in custody”?
Eric also picks up on Doc's really interesting new work on Splogs:
‘Doc has posted a great blog entry about the rise of Splogs (spam blogs) and what it means for “content.”
‘In essence, Doc sees a possible world in which sites like Google allow “passport like” sign on to paid content that is free of splogs and comment spam, thus relegating the “rest” of the web into something similar to what some Microsoft guys once called the “darknet.”
‘His question to us identity folk has been – “can the identity metasystem solve this?” The answer of course (theoretically) is yes.
‘What's fascinating about this is that identity is on both possibles of this equation:
‘1. in the proliferation of the Darknet, identity enables the walled gardens of paid content to develop, while the rest of the net languishes in identity-poverty like the poor living outside the castle wall.
‘2. in the brighter future, identity isn't a divisive “enabler” but an underlying infrastructure for the entire Net.
‘I'm betting that #2 brings about more innovation and economic opportunity, as it fosters a more open and efficient marketplace.
‘Clearly, we've got some work to do. And clearly there are some bumps in the road and dark days ahead.’
Hope everyone else updates to Eric's new rss feed.
[tags: Identity, Eric Norlin, Digital Identity World, Doc Searls, Splogs]