I had the honor of being invited into the Dec. 31st, 2004 Gillmor Gang in their last podcast of 2004. I was being used as filler representing the humans and FOAF in the digital identity space.

Dick Hardt couldn’t make it - so I also represented the Sxip Networks approach in this conversation as well.

Some really important things came out of this conversation and it’s incumbant upon us to build on these opportunities. The most important thing I think that happened was when Dave Winer pointed out that the average software developer is not in a position to support one of these complex identity systems out there, like Liberty Alliance or the WS-* stack. Dave called it the 6th Law of Identity - KISS.

So BAM! It is just so obvious to me why Dick Hardt built Sxip they way that they did! It’s exactly what Dave asked for!

Sxip can easily be supported (with as little as some Javascript) and provides as thin of a layer as possible, while providing a DNS-like service for digital identity. You can dive into it deeper - building your own Sxip-compatible storage portals or just create a site that reads compatible Sxip profiles and meta-data.

But the only money that’s paid to Sxip is for maintaining a HomeSite or MemberSite - and it’s roughly the same price as maintaining a digital certificate or domain name registered - and end-users pay nothing.

Sxip does not store ANY of the end-user’s meta-data or even profile data about yourself.

Sxip simply stores (what they call) a GUPI - which is a value presenting you and which points to your designated “HomeSite” (read: DLA.) You can then move your data to any other HomeSite or what they call “Membersite”. This creates a SSO (single sign-on) environment for all sorts of new apps, servcies and interactive content.

Sxip also supports the notion of multiple persona (which is part of our PeopleAggregator design) and is everything we need for our ‘open standards’ efforts, like ourmedia.org.

So I nominated Dick Hardt to be the leader - as he’s both a nice guy, really smart and is spending his own money. So he really reminds me of me.

So I wanna thank Steve Gillmor and Doc for asking me to be on the show and I can now say “I’ve drank the podcast koolaid”. My lord.

I call it a podcast as that seems to be the term everyone likes to use. Clearly it’s just an audio blog post, that (if you feel like it) can be subscribed to via RSS and downloaded into their iTunes and listened to on their iPod.

But I’ll never buy an Apple product ever again - so I have a problem with calling audio blogging being subscribed to via RSS = podcasting. I also have a problem with the fact that there is no meta-data for these podcasts - but I’m willing to leave all that “behind me”. I’m stepping back and divesting.

Dave Winer asked for us all to “give something up”. So I’ll start calling audio blogging podcasting and you can help us all work together.

OK?

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 2nd, 2005 at 2:48 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.