Whoever thought we’d be using blogs for vacation notices? But until we have real Internet-wide presence service, it seems much more sane than problem-prone email bounce-backs. So count on me to be completely offline (and I mean completely) until August 4th. I’ll blog more on why when I return (in complete bliss).

The new announced Information Card Foundation has nine community board members, and I’m pleased to report they all have a keen sense of humor. Case in point: Pam Dingle’s bio on the Board of Directors page: Pamela Dingle Pamela Dingle is an Enterprise Identity Consultant at Nulli Secundus Inc . She is also the founder of [...]

Ryan Janssen has posted another interview in his series on digital identity, and I daresay that if you’ve ever met Doc Searls, you can just feel his energy and passion about VRM coming through in this writeup. Highly recommended reading. Doc has been right about many things, and ultimately I think VRM is going to [...]

Nowadays I find myself orienting my entire year around IIW (the Internet Identity Workshop). DO NOT miss it if you want to seriously intersect with the user-centric identity community. This year it will include a follow-on Data Sharing Summit on May 15, illustrating how the focus is slowly moving to the most important capability enabled [...]

Ryan Janssen pinged me via my contact page last week to ask if I had time to share the story of how I came to be working on XRI, XDI, OpenID, i-cards, Higgins, and Identity Commons. He reached me this afternoon and we talked for almost two hours. Boy, did it bring back memories. I’m [...]

Although I saw snippets when it first came out, I sat down tonight to watch An Inconvenient Truth end-to-end with my wife and two boys tonight, and I was blown away by how powerful a message it still delivers. In fact Al Gore has done an update that brings it current within about a year. It’s [...]

Not only that a lot of people have been complaining about my funky ports, but by Internet provider also decided to start blocking the 8080 port. That's somewhat of a problem, since without this port my blog will not work. Sigh! I therefore decided to bite the bullet and start using a professional ASP.NET hoster. So please update your links and feed readers to my new blog address: HTML: http://blog.beuchelt.org/ Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/WebServicesContraptions Thank you for your understanding.

Identity Woman (Kaliya Hamlin) posts about why current “friend formats” like FOAF and XFN don’t satisfy the need for privacy and personal control of data that she – and many other women – want before they are comfortable sharing personal information online. She mentions that XRI and XDI provide this capability. Chris Messina comments that: As it [...]

Paul Madsen has done a nicely illustrated post on the taxonomy of i-cards supported by the Higgins project. He makes a great point about how SAML cards (”s-cards”) could fit in, both in terms of third-party cards and self-issued cards. As I posted previously, I’m excited about seeing SAML integrated into the Higgins framework. My only [...]

I just noticed that Paul Madsen made a post about my recommendation that folks check out Joe Andrieu’s comments on the MS HealthVault announcement. Paul got my attention by titling his post, “Drummond, it’s Hailstorm“. Just to clarify: I wasn’t recommending HealthVault. I was recommending Joe’s blog post about it, and most notably the large open [...]