Ideally we’d do a panel on what I call DLA (digital lifestyle aggregation.)

To me - this is Portal’s 2.0.

Of course Identity is at the core of this. Imagine a stack, with attribute exchange being on top of authentication, and a new layer of verbs - such as:

- auto-invite

- send message

- post content

- create or join group

- merge or aggregate data

being the third layer.

But DLAs also represent the whole widget thing - whether you call it Live.com and MS’s start page (NetVibes and Pageflakes) or you call it “Windows Live Spaces” (VOX, LiveJournal) or social networking (MySpace, Facebook), etc.

What all these systems have in common is that they are ‘profile’ pages for end-users. Thus - identity plays a large role.

So maybe the panel should be called ‘modern day profile pages’. In every mix, flavor and variant.

I’d have these folks on the panel:

- somebody from SixApart

- Tariq Krim for NetVibes

- somebody from the Live Spaces group

- a widget vendor

- and me riding shotgun over this herd

What does Microsoft have to do with it?

Well I like to imagine that the modern day Microsoft - especially after hearing of the new convergence, connect devices together strategy - understands that having open standards to connect and mesh apps and web services together - is crucial.

And it’s not just people, but also media, microcontent, IM - all sorts of stuff needs to get ‘meshed’ together.

Something like that…………..

Just so we’re clear what I’d like to talk about………………..