With the Internet Identity Workshop not far away, Alec Muffett writes of his distaste for parts of the current state of the Identity space. Hallelujah. I’ve been wanting to write this for a long time… now seems like as good a time as any to add my thoughts.

My takeaway of the moment is his advocating utilizing an entities(user/vendor) transaction history system as the authoritative trust and risk assessment mechanism. This isn’t new thinking, banks do this all the time. The problem however with the current identity space, is that to do this requires reliably storing *any* entities transaction history - which requires silo-free persistence, redundancy and management on all sides of the transaction in order to verify those claims. We don’t even have that silo-free persistence or redundancy yet - nor do we have the tools to manage our data that’s online and always available. Until we do, all this Identity talk has been bunk to me. Why I see it vital to be addressing this problem first.

He talks about relationships, links; they all require persistence or self-healing(think AI) in order to operate reliably as a system. Break one and any number of reliant services break unless caching is implied on the part of the relationship contract, or a human is there to fix every failure. It would be like losing your birth certificate, and having to go through the motions to restore your identity history to a verifiable 100 points before you could verify who you are in order to open a bank account, or create new relationships in the real world.

Now there are those I see aimed at fixing related networking architecture problems that partly solve persistence and redundancy: Van Jacobson’s Content-centric networking comes to mind, heavily laden with it’s key management system which has complexity drawbacks. Most of the other attempts out there however are all HTTP and REST-like based. One problem I see here is that we have network architecture not designed for todays identity, and one that criminals exploit at their own discretion with so many points of failure in the network that policing is near impossible. So how do you secure those routers and wireless networks your valuable personal private data traverses? You can’t. How can you be sure the chipset inside network devices hasn’t been tampered with by organised crime or opposing governments? You can’t. Or your personal network device? You can’t unless you can verify your device hasn’t been tampered with to the best of the manufacturers ability by checking an objects signature of operation with them /over time/. On the network side, only by signing and securing the data or hiding it completely can you get some peace of mind. Peace of mind with the knowledge that over time, that security will need to increase computational power as attacks do. There are already ISPs injecting information into web pages as they traverse networks, their proxies being easy targets for anyone wanting to be malicious. How do you make sure the data you ask for is the data you get? You can cryptographically sign it, or as many sites do now; open a ’secure’ pipe; HTTP SSL. A secure pipe over a network that could have hardware that’s been tampered with? That doesn’t seem very smart to me. What if you sign *all* the data? Then the points of failure become the crypto, end points, users, devices and the key management systems. What’s important however is knowing you get what you ask for, from who you ask for it from - efficiently such that such a system can scale. Problem is cryptographically signing and hash collisions mean you might not get what you asked for, instead a virus that goes undetected… which means we still need malicious software detection - virus scanners, etc - to monitor for malicious intent, checking packet signatures and detecting anomalies that slip through indicating the need to increase security. However, should malicious content breach a system, the best way to prevent that from causing untold damages, is by limiting what objects can do in a system - at all levels of the system.

Doing this presents still to solve issues on the end-points and user side in order to limit the social engineering of those wanting to be malicious. This has to be done by a means of focusing on user experience, education, and the interface by limiting damage and providing a support network for users should it occur. URI or email namespace, and HTTP resource handling as the interface are the real stumbling blocks here when it comes to adoption via user experience. You only need look at the Twitter namespace to see what’s possible otherwise, people often making requests for help to people they learn to trust as field experts over time - despite it’s inability to handle threaded verifiable transactions; something that could easily be added. Mobile and cross-platform devices really /are/ the future of transactions. What’s important about Twitter is that it’s /opt-in/. Capturing malicious claims openly in a persistent way can mean reputation based upon a persons history can become a reliable risk assessment tool. Don’t let the bad people in by default to access everything about you. Layers or capabilities are the key. There are also means that can make transactions between untrusted parties safer. Escrow and transaction risk assessment with repudiation should transactions go wrong being one - so long as the escrow is a trusted party of both parties…

With regard to those three equal parties Alec mentions participating in a transaction (user/vendor/IdP) - I agree that the third is not needed once relationships are in operation. I break the three down to one ‘component’ performing different functions as in a peer-to-peer or end-to-end network - which is one of the original IP protocol design goals[Bring on IPv6! (and a scalable replacement)]. However, most of the time it’s easier for people to conceptualize two(user/vendor or client/server), with the third managing relationships(the connector) - not storing anything - and instead delegating capabilities. I say this because in any classical network, there are three basic elements: Components, connectors and the data that traverses connectors between components. My problem with many existing Identity efforts, is the term Identity Provider or the ‘middle man’ aka single connector; as they just add a silo of failure. In my mind these must be replaced with what I call Relationship Managers. While the network itself is the ‘provider’; that being the hosts you choose - or preferably the network chooses for you by locality - to replicate and distribute your data redundantly between. All accomplished via Relationship Managers that I consider analogous to the VRM Control Panel I’ve seen Doc Searls advocate. Those Managers themselves able to delegate to other Managers such that authenticating an identity from multiple points of contact is possible. Important for redundancy and the ‘object capabilities’ security model: As multiple, yet strictly authorized devices for authentication via those Managers, is then possible on a per device/capabilities basis. Revoke one device(or Manager), still use another. A layered failure approach. A process no different than getting a new credit card(or bank). These Relationship Managers will need to be able to delegate auditing like a ‘Hawk’ monitoring a person’s transactions in order to detect anomalies. Something that could be done in-house by users or outsourced; Identity Brokers doing that management - just like we do now with virus scanners. This important persistent transactional data can then be used to tailor services to a persons user experience ala VRM. Everything can be packaged with the user in or out of control then, home-grown or outsourced; user-driven.

Whatever. Until decentralized data persistence, redundancy, namespace, and relationship management tools are here, it’s all bunk. There’s also another major part of the process yet solved; authentication. The current authentication arena makes me cringe. While I consider CardSpace one of the best of the bunch, it fails to follow the transaction history verification regime to learn and detect anomalies in operation, a process I consider important and could be layered on top over time. Key producing - dynamic, personal, biometric authentication learning systems that throw away the biometric data. In other words AI and unique object detection. Captcha’s are failing, it’s becoming increasingly more important to be able to detect that a human is really a human and differentiate them from other humans… something I believe can be done with multiple time varying history challenges, systems that learn like we do, if narrowly and task-centric at first. Recording passphrase fingerprints is an example of a step in the right direction. Still, like any other security measure it’s a moving balancing act, so I see CardSpace-like tools as a useful beginning in a layered object capabilities approach.

Still, with all these areas yet addressed and many neglected by what I see from the outside looking in on the Identity World: I still think we have a long way to go to when it comes to the ‘online’ world moving towards a service that lives up to it’s name before Alec’s hankering will subside for another that follows.

Niall Kennedy has a post[1] on browser history visited link sniffing. By injecting popular links using JavaScript and checking css :visited, he’s able to track where people have been and customize the user experience to suit. It has privacy implications, I can see this being used to build up user profiles without consent and target all sorts of things like phishing and advertising. Having an opt-in system in place to provide this kind of data for sites to use, on a per site basis, could be an interesting use of this data though. If users could be presented with an opt-in option on sites to use this and store this information, it could be useful and possibly bypass privacy concerns, without the need to install anything. Doing so, user profiles could be built up over time, through data-mining those popular links and content then targeted at those users. It does however require data mining potentially popular links in the first place, but should you find a history match, crawling that site for more links and then matching those to users browser history could create a nice usage pattern to mine useful context from.

Apparently this is an old issue, going back to at least 2001. I worry that in all that time XMLHttpRequests will (and are) being used without consent to brute force test a users browser history for visited links, done so while hiding the bandwidth used as a movie or flash is played, etc.

Might be time to start clearing your browsers history, or getting this Firefox plugin[2] if your worried.

[1] http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/02/browser-history-sniff.html
[2] http://www.safehistory.com/

The New York Times has an article titled Nobody Likes Smart Machines.

Dr. Norman, who the story follows, highlights the problem of predictability that comes as a result of delegation through automating tasks to smart machines that still occasionally require human intervention. They give the example of window blinds that change to suit the weather, the side-effects and resultant feeling of loss of control when your computer screen in the office randomly glares annoyingly back at you. It’s an interesting article that really only covers half the picture.

The conclusion the professor comes to is one many people in the design space probably would. That of making the user experience better by making it more predictable, either by removing functionality or improving control. This is where intelligent design really comes into the fore, but not just intelligent design needs to be considered. Intelligent systems that behave and self-adapt can really shine in this area. The big problem is how to do that effectively so as to account for not one person’s vision of how the world works, but that of many peoples. This is where personalization comes in and what I call object profiles, personalised profiles for objects just like that of the seat in an up-market car that adapts to an individual upon entry.

The key here is context. Maintaining the context of the environment surrounding the intelligent system in order to teach it personal traits and habits.

You can’t explain to your car’s navigation system why you dislike its short, efficient route because the scenery is ugly. Your refrigerator may soon know exactly what food it contains, what you’ve already eaten today and what your calorie limit is, but it won’t be capable of an intelligent dialogue about your need for that piece of cheesecake.

What this fails to account for is Machine Learning, narrow AI and that of the power of context in deriving best outcomes.

By context I mean monitoring everything you do and building a current and future picture of the world based upon past history.

Say you own one of those new fangled fridges that automatically orders the food to be home delivered if you run out of anything. What happens if you decide the next week that you want to go on holiday? How can the fridge know you won’t be needing it’s services until say the day you get home?

By keeping a record of whatever context you find yourself in. For example the online travel site your entering you holiday bookings into… simply give your intelligent appliances access to that knowledge - that’s how.

Big Brother 2020 style.

There has been a lot of focus lately on attention aggregation. Twitter/Facebook activity feeds are a good example of unstructured partial-attention aggregation, yet that only gets you so far. Real augmentation will come when the systems we interact with can change and adapt to our whim. And that my friends, is the power of context tracking in the digital age. Maintaining a dynamic real-time context profile our surrounding can then use - all based on a list of likely probabilities - probabilities then used to predict what augmentation intelligent systems can assist with next.

Information overload is already here. In a world of never ending pop-up boxes, call marketers, Facebook requests, mail you just throw in the bin and systems asking if you want to allow this or disallow that - systems that learn what we want will be needed to manage the never ending pile of relationship management with others and with our surroundings. When your in giving a presentation somewhere you really don’t want your phone ringing or IM window popping up.

Another advantage of these kinds of systems is the automated feedback loop AFL they make possible. This means device interfaces can be improved through historical collection of context, and actual usage patterns based upon factors that include demographics. New market devices may even emerge as a result of how people used these devices rather than how a designer thinks it should be used. Imagine devices that build an interface reputation for ease of use or productivity in different areas. How much easier would shopping for a new device online become? Increasingly we’re purchasing items without ever seeing or using them and more often than not we’re less satisfied with the outcome. An AFL can help minimize that problem.

What’s needed is the ability to delegate intelligently those monotonous tasks and the user experience that was once a burden becomes a boon.

Now you may think this is years away, but it’s happening now. Google augments personalised search based upon search history and your location aka your context. Individual data silos are already using these techniques to serve advertisements. I read recently that Marissa Mayer stated they use the keywords 411GOOG users enter for machine learning and better translation and search results. Games have long personalised themselves to users, even now to the point of detecting when the gamer is getting bored in order to maximize the user experience (and revenue).

It’s cross-silo and ubiquitous networking of dynamic devices that will bring the next wave of personalisation. I look forward to what my future digital self has in store for me there.

On that note, I’m thinking this needs a name… so building on the great work of VRM, I bring you ARM.

Automated Relationship Management. CRM was already taken and everyone can always use another ARM or a leg.

A quote by Sep Kamvar repeated by Greg Linden sparked some thoughts on personalization that I’ve managed to boil down to a simple old age adage:

It’s what people do, not what they say that matters when it comes to personalization.

This is why I believe contextual and personalized attention data is the most important personal information one can aggregate. I see this happening with services like Google’s Search History and Twitter/Facebook’s activity feeds at the very edges of this personalization movement.

It’s an area I believe the semantic web needs to work on in order to fill out the middle and become successfully adopted. Standardizing actions on the side of the developer and openly(with privacy in mind) recording these actions with dynamic ontologies. Associating the data with these actions. I say dynamic because meaning often changes over time and as Sep highlighted; checking every box and labeling someone as having a general interest doesn’t necessarily return useful results. It’s the history that matters (why dynamic ontologies) and personal information has to be personal to be effective.

Twine and other sites like it are interesting to me in capturing the data they do for a number reasons, however they all seem to be one shop shows, only capturing some attention from their own narrow usage patterns. This is where I see the real power to the people; aggregating attention cross-application and intelligently customizing usage for user experience. VRM is one area that comes to mind to manage all of this.

The way I see it, right now the only actions we have on users visiting sites are; entry, internal actions and exit. I think this is why only search history and location are returning results. I’m more likely to visit local business and services more if the ads are relevant to my location and search contexts. The closer something is, the more personal it often feels and closer to instant gratification you become.

Contexts include the who what where when how and why of a persons action. Who they are and their history of performing actions, what they’re looking for in relation to, where they are while seeking that. When they are seeking the what aka the time/day, how they’re attempting to obtain their goal and why being their motivation for doing so.

Who is the history - The records of a persons actions.
What is they seek - The goal aka resource aka search term
Where they are - Their location (IP address / wifi mesh / GPS location)
When they’re seeking - Is it after work? Middle of the day? Just after school?
How they’re seeking - What service or applications are they utilizing? Voice, Phone or Web?
Why they’re motivated - Is it research or are they in the mood to purchase something? History is telling.

If I’ve missed any, please leave a comment.

I believe this is why results always come back to context as Sep highlights with his statement that “recent searches are much more important.” It’s where they are and what people are doing right now.

Having said that, another area I see yet to be fully exploited is using time-varying attention information to predict what users may be motivated to do next or soon and return results(not necessarily all of them) that reflect that before the user even knows they want them. I call this the consumer cycle as most people are just patterns stuck in a cycle that evolves over time. I hear Microsoft Research are doing this with Visual Studio by tracking actions and customizing the interface. I know Werner Vogel’s of Amazon in a recent InfoQ video displayed a diagram Jeff Bezos drew that highlights their business growth cycle and the feedback loop. People are growth cycles too and if you can figure out those patterns then and you can pander to their every whim even before they know they have them. Targeted suggestion can really be a powerful form of persuasion. Friends do it to other friends all the time. This is why it’s important to also know a person’s friends and in what contexts they pay attention to them. A friend might buy a new phone and the person ask them about that purchase. Great time to personalize an experience and display the information from other sources(friends/known sites) the user can use.

What I find interesting is that all of this is related to a more fine-grain approach to handling users personal data in applications. The decision is then one of how dynamic to make an application such that collaboration and convenience are enhanced and not sacrificed in the overall user experience. One person might require a completely different experience to the next. So how best then to share those disparate world views? Links with history and session data that form historical views on data comes to mind. I’ve not seen much work on this regard but I haven’t really look that hard. Still, I believe this will be vital for the platforms of the future. Avi’s Seaside has been one of the few attempts I do know about, if you know any others I’d like to hear about them.

Now all of this dynamic data collection requires architecture to support it. I’m of the belief that a deterministic approach with history and session data stored for context recall may be the best approach to personalization across future contexts. Most of my research is focused in this area, so it better be.

With that, I’m off to revise my Combinatory Logic skills.

Pipe dreams description from Wikipedia:

A pipe dream is a fantastic hope that is generally regarded as being nearly impossible. The term derives from the mescaline pipe, which was popular in the early twentieth century. Such ideas usually need events to flow in just the right direction to be realized, as a plumbing pipe might. The probability of such a course, however, is extremely low. Misconceptions, obstacles unseen by the pipe dreamer, or simple ignorance of any issues involved are often disregarded. Also pipe dream is alluded to by the fantasies (a rather comical, yet popular, example of this is a banana hallucination which regularly gives the opium smoker bad advice) induced by smoking an opium pipe, but this term has been used more loosely since the 1800s.

Somehow seems fitting.

I really hope OpenID succeeds but I’ve begun to question OpenID foundations. Misconceptions, obstacles unseen by the pipe dreamers. Questioning the foundation on which it lies. IP, DNS, HTTP and the biggest technological hurdle of all; society.

Forgetting DNS as an OpenID, as who wants to have their identity reassigned or stolen? I’m left to ponder what else is out there. Yes there are inumbers, OpenXRI, inames (I can never remember if I should use a hyphen), but all that really does is give us permanent identifiers with a nicer naming convention and protocols for exchanging information. It doesn’t give me freedom to express who I am unless I have a credit card.

inames still cost money. Not everyone can therefore get a first-level iname. How many would be happy with =xri*name for the rest of their online identity? There’s also still one single registry monopoly and there’s nothing from stopping a spammer or phisher registering a name and using it to pilfer. By default everyone is let in. I still haven’t seen any reputation services built on this or any other system that seems to for that matter. Googles untrusted honeypot is the only that comes to mind. Federation really seems a long way off. Trusted computing another pipe dream. Yet it’s these I think we should be pushing centre stage.

I’d like to believe the internet is about collaboration. It therefore then make sense to me to make it easy to enable new and efficient relationships between resources at it’s core.

But first doesn’t it make sense to give EVERYONE a resource to enable these relationships?

This is why I think OpenID as it stands is a pipe dream. When I think about identifiers I keep coming back to those we use in the real world. The signatures our minds construct based upon dynamic attributes of people and objects we form dynamic relationships with over time. Where despite change that occurs, those signatures we build always manage to persist while the attributes change or are lost(I forget people’s names all the time!).

It therefore makes sense to me that I should be able to attribute any object online as I do in real life in such a way that I’ll remember it!

I fear that until we can do this persistently(with dynamically trusted peer replication), identity is all but a pipe dream.

Why can’t I be a name server for any resource I choose to annote with an attribute on top say an inumber and use reputation to manage these services and additional services I have the reputation to? Costs thousands and a checklist to get the rights to sell inames/numbers currently.

I feel like the current internet is all about making money and not making sense. ie. SPAM.

I’ve seen people commenting of their dislike of people using twitter as an instant messaging platform. Meh, let it go, people use technology to fill a need. In twitters case; instant gratification messaging(IGM) or as I like to pronounce it; i-gem. Because it’s all about the users. Me and my comment gems!

Feel the urge to scream but don’t want to wake the neighbours? Twitter it.
Just want to share some quick news but don’t think it warrants the effort of email spamming your friends? Twitter it.
Need to take note of an idea that just popped into your head? Twitter it.
Want to build a spam bot? Twitter with it.
Twitter, twitter, twitter it.

But that’s only part of the picture. You see producers and users are also consumers and Twitter can be useful for those who like to track other people and services live via instant messaging alerts or track through aggregation a users past history.

See a twitter you want to comment on? Twitter it using an @username.
See a twitter you find hilarious? Laugh at it. Then star it. (How long will it be before you can send new stars to all your friends?)
See an interesting twitter link? Click on it. Then star it. (One wonders how long tinyurl will stay tiny!)

Now we have a rudimentary bookmarking service and an instant messaging service with offline messaging capabilities. Just add tags and public and private syntax. What about emotions? Emphasis and emoticons…
But then how much is too much? After all; cross-platform plain-text communication is what Twitter does best. For that reason at most I can see them adding prefix and suffix syntax. Maybe prefix an exclamation to make a message private, etc.

But wait there’s more to Twitter than meets the eye! As the BBC example has shown, news producers can be pushed through alerts and marketed through Twitter. No reason other marketers won’t do the same, and monetise it. People are also using it to solicit requests for recommendations on products or for advice. So we can add rudimentary user-centric Vendor Relationship Management “personal requests” into the mix. No reason not to place ads next to those and monetise them on site in request and question channels…

I could see people starting to claim things about others on there too, similar to what Jyte is doing now, and it will only take time before there are proper groups you can join to assert your affiliation. Some people are already creating open accounts anyone can post to. Others are creating accounts to aggregate groups of friends together, creating custom nodes for like-minded individuals. Then there’s the band of often hilarious fakesters and fantasy writers pretending to be someone or something else.

But as with any communications service, they quickly draw the attention of fraudsters. I wonder how long it will be before the first widely publicised “incident” occurs from unsavoury types surveying peoples habits. Already there’s a rudimentary GeoTwitter tracking users locations. While I’d like to believe that the more open we are the more that benefits society, at the same time, not everyone is created equal and some will use that to their own benefit.

Which brings me to a conclusion.

Twitter just isn’t there for me yet. Not for the lack of anything mentioned above. But for the identity-less nature of the service. Decentralised, user-centric instant gratification messaging is still maturing but it’s not there yet. Twitter is a great start but I’d like to see something like OpenID Attribute Exchange and extensions made use of.

Let me store my messages, my history, on my own archival service in a way that lets me choose who can have access to it and for how long. With our Lifestreams carrying such personal information, it makes a lot of sense to me that I have the ability to control that and disperse my information through a controlled means of Identity Rights Agreements, with some of that information over secure lines. So much more can then be done with that structured data.

Saying that, I think a Twitter-like service could be the kick starter the SemWeb needs to really go mainstream if we can get a basic syntax people can use happening for structuring everyday tasks.

Afterthought: What Twitter really needs to go even more viral than it already is, is a “track me on twitter” widget users can add to their blog/site for visitors to click on and subscribe to immediately if they already have a Twitter account.

p.s. I thought about twittering just that afterthought… argh! it’s addictive.

This post by Jon on persistent metadata prompted some thoughts I've had a while now. Only after reading his post did I finally take the time to sit down and flesh out what's been floating in my head.

To answer Jon, I believe the truth lies in the 'file system'.

Here are my thoughts: 

What about a "universal file format metawrapper". Such that the wrapped files can only be opened by applications that support the format and treat metadata nicely. The format as having a header with metadata about the file type it contains for OS file typing, a unique identifier(to solve your photo tagging dump in a directory issues) and with other metadata that users add to the file. Applications not in the know wouldn't be able to read the files and corrupt the metadata because of the wrapper.

While it's not a solution for existing application file types, as that would likely have to be done at file system level with an API, I believe it would cater for future usage.

Operating systems of the future(and upgrades to existing ones) could natively support this metawrapper such that legacy applications could read and write the files. Redundancy could be achieved for legacy apps on native metawrapper OSs by storing the metadata in the existing file formats and in the metawrapper. The OS backing up known filetype metadata. Metawrapper plugins could exist to extend that. When there's a change the user could be alerted by the OS to take action. New formats that people create would use the metawrapper. The metawrapper having redundancy in the form of a metadata update history.

And maybe if we plugged this into web services, we could annote URIs with metadata using a standardised ReSTful metawrapper API and build a data web.

Also important for me is the ability to share additional metadata back with the source I get that data from. Podcasting metrics come to mind. Human computation tasks as well. I'd like to be able to download a photo, tag it in whatever program I choose and have that additional information sent to the origin host if I so choose to opt-in. All done through discoverable ReST webservices. A simple WADL, PEP(HTTP Extension Framework) or derivative of description language being pointed to in the metadata contained in the photo or say podcast.

Podcast metrics would be possible this way if a standard could be agreed upon. A player plays the audio, finds the metadata namespace saying it supports X standard and tracks what you listen to, stores that in it's database for later syncing or if it's always-connected, syncs to the host using the service discovery language and connects to a port(cometd/jabber). One could additionally have it sync to a personal server. Say your OpenID or I-names provider so that anywhere you go anyone could know what your currently listening to, have rated it, etc. And you could get the latest album art, current band news, other music like it, and anything else people can think up.

I thought it was about time I installed an OpenID wordpress plugin for my blog and give it a whirl. So I dumped it on my server and activated it and proceeded to login using myopenid.com account (it's easier to remember than my pip.verisignlabs.com one and I forget my livejournal password… So in doing so my blog redirects to myopenid.com and I login and fill in a persona. Hit share forever or whatever its called and wham.

Bugs. Something about not being about to insert into the database. nonces.
Tried the Options/OpenID and get nothing through the admin interface. Something to look at another day.

Enter Cardspace and the Firefox xmldap.org CardSpace identity selector. I install, restart Firefox and head to Microsofts own CardSpace sandbox only for the window to flash and not much else happen. Next I headed to Kim Cameron's Identity weblog and logged in successfully.

After I've installed IE7 I'll try the sandbox again.

From what I've seen, thus far I'm not impressed with any of these systems. A lot of work still to be done. For starters who wants to type http://<yourname>.myopenid.com/ into a login box over and over even without the schema? Gah! (Are you listening Jason?) Gimme an i-name any day(if only), and as for CardSpace, well I'm coming around to the simplicity and supposedly secure space it runs on, yet it in no way meets my expectations. More on that another day.

For now I'm happy that I had at least one success!

What using all these services has highlighted for me is just how User Experience is vital to my wanting to use(and build) these services.

On that note, go and sign up here, like I have and help out. There's been interesting discussions on the logo, which sucks at 16×16 and every other size.

My pre-requesites for an identity logo; must be clearly distinguishable in monochrome. Think Apple. Think Technorati.

Leisa writes:

So, today I did my first ever podcast and shipped it off to Anne for the Office 2.0 Podcast Jam.

I’ve shied away from podcasting for as long as I’ve known about it for a few reasons.

Before this blog I had a few short lived experiments with websites and blogging, but none of them really stuck. Partly, I think, because they were so inauthentic. Firstly, I didn’t know what I wanted to write about, but more importantly, I didn’t really want people to know who I was for security reasons. The idea of someone hunting me down somehow from my website was something that was a real fear for me at the time.

I'm seeing a trend towards being more open online, especially when it comes to professionals who work in the space. My only fear is that it opens people up to unsavory types. Recently someone I was writing to turned out to be one and that has made me think twice about what information I reveal to others online and to second guess those who aren't willing to be open and honest about themselves. Comments too on one of my blogs in the past has had me questioning being completely open. I think our tools are in dire need of identity, reputation and privacy evolution to facilitate proper personal expression.

Saying that, I think people are learning the value of openly marketing themselves and forming relationships with those like-minded and open individuals and companies, because often that can present new and interesting opportunities in areas of ones interest. I know for example, that when I read Leisa I'll get good UX commentry, links, etc. I actually went searching for others in the area and came up short for quality on the specific topic.
I'm finding I don't have the time to troll everywhere to keep updated on my interests and as a result experts in their fields are becoming more valuable to me. Something I've noticed about experts is that they mingle and mix in them, openly share and market themselves doing what they love - and do it often enough to build reputation.

It can be scary being open about yourself online though. I'm still not fully. Because of some of the content of what I write about I still like to keep certain aspects of myself semi-private. For a long time though I've wanted to register my name and start writing there. I've just been lazy… I think I'm going to do that soon and invest in myself…

Leisa talks about her podcasting experience too. Podcasting and more so Videocasting is something I keep meaning to give a real go too. Scares me. I'm not used to talking much. I always end up chickening out when I try, drawing a blank, having little to say. Still… doing things like it can be a good confidence booster I believe. And that makes it worthwhile in the end.

I look forward to hearing hers evolve.

The Office 2.0 Podcast Jam is alive and kicking

I have my own views on Office2.0. I can't see it taking off much until persistent storage is supported locally by all browsers and offline access and document synchronisation is done well. We'll see more Single Page Application's written entirely in Javascript utilising features like Firefox 2's persistent storage as it evolves to perform this task. Possibly in the form of bookmarklets that will allow applications to be run in browser while offline that store to persistent storage - synchronising online during reconnect. Mass usage will come down to when IE supports persistent storage other than this.

Synchronisation to people's favorite storage provider will become increasingly important too. As will APIs in the area that afford interoperability allowing Web Application developers to support one standard to allow many places of storage for users. Even multiple places(e.g. backup) for each piece of data. I can't help but think about Personal Identity Providers here.
I'm actually running RC2 of Firefox 2 at the moment and I have to say it's an improvement over beta 2. Seems quite slick and I finally learnt how to remove those silly close tab buttons. I still can't re-size my search box but in this version it's smaller and easier to manage for my preferred tool bar layout. I'm loving the spell check as I type though! Another Office2.0 feature goes mainstream. I can see this improving language skills exponentially. Unfortunately I chose to install the US version! Not British or Australian.

While I'm on Firefox. I'm still getting used to the scroll tabbing. I don't think I like that. I can't see all my tabs at a glance. Will figure out how to turn that one off as I tend to navigate by favicon when I have a lot of tabs open. Fading non-active tabs sucks as well… I wonder how long it is before I hack the theme.
Looking ahead, I see things really getting interesting when my browser begins to become my document manager. Tabbed browsing will become increasingly more important. One feature I'd like for tabs is the ability to open an existing tab in a new browser window instance. At the moment I have to open a new window and then drag the tab to it, refreshing the tab in the process. That sucks when I've downloaded a movie or screencast in it. Basically I want threaded tabs. A separate memory space so as to prevent one in-browser application crashing the lot as happens a lot now… Tab locking too. Preventing accidental closure. One reason why I HATE close buttons on all tabs!