As I continue to work with Identity Commons, a colleague just pointed me to SharedId which is

... an authentication service that allows web users to share their personal information in a controlled manner with their favorite websites. SharedID is built on the open standards RSS, RDF and FOAF. [sharedid.com]

While this sounds promising, unfortunately SharedId is exactly the wrong thing.

As you can tell, I'm not much of a blogger - no entries for five months! But when I saw the How to Save the World roadmap I had to say something about it. The 27 steps outlined are so simple and straightforward - it's a shame that we fancy ourselves "civilized" yet the chances of these steps being followed by any organization or government of significant size are minimal.

I just saw Howard Dean speak, and though I've liked him - and have planned to vote for him - for some time now, I'm finally jazzed enough to start telling people about him. He spoke on the economy, foreign policy and education, and then answered questions.

Finally signed on to Henri Poole's excellent Affero service - check it out (and if you're glad I sent you, let me know). Lots going on, and there's always so much more to do.

Just came back from a great three-day Identity Commons workshop in Sebastopol. Lots of great people, and five main projects were defined as essential to getting things rolling:

1. Marketing/Outreach
2. Open Source Technology
3. Fund raising/Revenue
4. Greenhouse/Project Interface
5. Legal/Org./Constitution

I'm heading up the technology project - gotta set the single sign-on distributed authentication / XRI-lite / profile access management all set up in three months.

In a recent blog posting, Joi Ito wrote:

You don't care if my real name is Joi Ito or where I live exactly. As a blog reader, you probably care if it is the same blogger that has posted all of the other blog entries on this blog.

Precisely - for reputation to accrue and be trustable, all you need to know is that it is the same identity/actor as the last time.

Haven't blogged in a while - I'm just getting used to this - and I feel I need to practice... It strikes me that the Democrats seem to be so incapable of mounting an offensive against a president that clearly fabricated evidence to pull this country into a costly (in many ways) war, while the Republicans never seem to be at a loss to take a simple issue (like a President's mistress) and blow it up into an impeachable offense. Another sad thing to watch is the trouble the Dems have in raising money.

In talking to colleagues about how one can market their data successfully and still remain in complete control of it, I see that there are areas that could use some clarification, or at least some use cases.

Just found this thread over at BurningBird. It appears Baldur Bjarnason is also pushing for signed weblogs - very cool!

Given the sorts of "reputation" mechanisms (Technorati, etc.) that are springing up in the blogging community, it seems that it would be valuable to have the capability for blogs to be signed by a non-spoofable entity (person or pseudonym). Does this capability already exist? Does RSS have tags for (e.g.) a PGP signature guaranteeing content and authorship?