The Progress Bar

Webcast is here.

I’m signing up for various wiki’s maps and the community hub pertaining to the Identity Mashup conference and I am running into problems with all the different authentication schemes and getting tired of creating repetitive accounts.

First I get an invite to join Attendr, first new account. A cousin to Frappr in terms of functionality. I Get in, do my thing, go tag crazy, list who I know and who I want to meet.

Then I try to log into Community Hub. I have to create another new account. So I do that. Grumble. The Community Hub wiki says I can log in with LID or OpenID, so I create an OpenID account, try to log in and get this cryptic message:

Error: return_to ‘http://wiki.idmashup.org/Main_Page?title=Main_Page&lid-nonce=2006-06-16T23%3A53%3A27.571Z’ not under trust_root ‘http://wiki.idmashup.com/’ You cannot log into this site with this OpenID URL.Try to access this page anonymously.

Grumble grumble. My new OpenID account works at other locations, what’s the deal? The wiki is not listed in the OpenID site directory, does that mean it’s not known by the system yet?

Why do I have to create a regular user/pass account for the Community Hub and another or OpenID account for the wiki? Grumble 3x.

Then when I try to Contact the help form, I fill it out and hit send and the same page reloads with my message in it, no confirmation or error message. Massive grumble.

Harping aside, I do like the hub, nicely done, it’s the myriad registration processes that drive me nuts.

I received an email about the Atttendr Identity Mashup conference wiki today. This is a good idea rolled out a few days too late. My friend Tom, who founded 8 Minute Dating, has a company called Networking Match that does something similar, albeit with a greater degree of pre/during/post-event networking. I enjoy the pre-conference attendee browsing, I just would have liked to do it earlier in the week.

There is one tag called on Attendr we-need-introduction-protocols which I found while clicking around the tagsphere. This is definitely something that requires a great deal more thought. I threw one up for fishing, because the identity-centric focus of the tags lost their importance, of course everyone is interested in identity. I will buy a beer for the person who comes up with the best tag in the cloud.

My Attendr page.

I’m looking forward to next week’s Identity Mashup at Harvard. There are not many events like this on the right coast, will be nice to connect with people who’s blogs I’ve been reading but have yet to meet.

If you want to meet up during or after the event, email me at relaxedguy at gmail dot com. I know some people are seeing Sox games and there are several dinners happening, it’s going to be a busy three days.
I added a Food For Thought session called The end of Spam: What are the marketing opportunities and implications of identity, reputation and attention systems and how will consumers benefit?

Post dinner beverages, people watching and conversation will set the tone of this GTG.
Tracks I’ll definitely be attending:

Monday

Wild and Walled Gardens: Trust, Reputation and Community Building

Disruptive Technologies and Business Models: Power Laws and Power Shifts: The End-User Revolution

Tuesday

Interoperability, Open Identity, and Identity Brokers.
(Need a doppleganger at the Mashup talk.)

Long Tail Markets, Social Commerce and Open Business Models

Towards and Open Identity Layer and Trusted Exchange: What Might it Look Like?

I’m glad to see enough differentiation between the tracks to avoid the gut-wrenching session overlap syndrome.

See you on Monday.

I am finding more often than not that more and more emails and blog posts begin paragraphs with the word “so.” I read and hear it often enough that it reminds me of how the word “like” became popular when I was a kid. Via BoingBoing, a billboard: “Don’t sound stupid, stop saying like”, from the Academy of Linguistic Awareness.

Last week Aldo Castaneda was here to do a podcast on Digital Identity. After getting to know each other a bit the tape recorder went on and we started the discussion with the layers of the identity stack – authentication framework, data providers, aggregators and consumers. The topic evolved into the marketing aspects of Digital Identity, something I rarely hear discussed at identity conferences and podcasts.

Aldo is coming into his own as a podcaster, he poses evocative questions and is an engaging conversationalist on and off the air. He likes to go off on tangents as much as I do in order to fill in the gaps while presenting a concept, which can be challenging but he pulls it off every time. Hopefully we will meet up again at the Identity Mashup next month. Aldo says the podcast will be ready next Wednesday.