I’m going to start referring to her as the Venn Queen. Eve Maler has done another Venn diagram, this time to show the relationship of whole areas of the “user-centric” sphere of activities. Going into Digital ID World next week, I’ll use this to help orient conversations around why there needs to be a simple, [...]

Joe Andrieu nails another super post (where DOES he find the time to write/draw all of these???), this time about what it means for a platform to really be open. My favorite part is that he doesn’t just do it in words — he does it in pictures, deliciously simple and understandable graphics that make it [...]

So much for the naïve thought that I’d have time at the Burton Catalyst conference last week to finally blog about two subjects near and dear to my heart that I knew would be covered at the conference. It backfired because they were too topical—all available time was consumed by related conversations. I did manage two [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I’ve never been part of a self-organizing community as large or as effective as the Internet Identity Workshop. If you care about the emerging user-centric identity layer for the Internet - or even if you only only care about the applications that are possible on top of that layer (which frankly are a whole lot [...]

Paul Trevithick just posted about a significant new step for the Higgins Project – the first contributions adding support for SAML 2.0. At first blush that may not seem surprising – SAML is the granddaddy of modern Internet identity protocols – but it speaks volumes precisely because Higgins established its early reputation as an alternative [...]

Denise Caruso published a wonderful article in Sunday’s New York Times on a subject very close to my heart: how to best go about protecting personal identity, profile, and preference data as new technologies like OpenID, Higgins, and XDI make it possible for individuals to aggregate and share this information much more easily. Call it [...]

Joe Andrieu, one of the leaders of the VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) community, has posted a good initial assessment of Microsoft’s first foray (post-Passport) of storing personal data for consumers via their Health Care Record initiative. It’s well worth reading his assessment of how this really legitimizes the market for “personal data stores”. Since that’s one [...]

Last week I mentioned the Social Web User’s Bill of Rights that was drafted for the Data Sharing Summit last Friday and Saturday. When it was first posted, it included the phrase, “ownership”, as in “user’s should own their personal data”. Mary Hodder, the entrepreneur behind Dabble.com, Paul Trevithick, and I were initially wary [...]