In a post titled "The Number Problem in Electronic Identity", partially in response to my post on identity ontologies and Mark Wahl’s on his LDAP experience, Mark Wilcox ponders:

…problems that can be summed as one point:

* PEOPLE DON’T LIKE TO BE REFERRED TO AS A NUMBER

This is because in part, the only time you’re referred to as a number, is usually in bad circumstances. Either mundane-bad like waiting in line to be helped or seriously bad as in you’re incarcerated in a prison.

Of course – this is where Credit Cards and DNS as examples help out by providing Names to Numbers. I would even argue that for most of us we don’t really think of telephone numbers as numbers by themselves.

We see number – NNN-NNN-NNNN (ok, that’s US specific, but you get my point) & we refer to it as “the Wife” or a friend. Or “the Credit Agency” and know to avoid it.

Unfortunately I don’t know exactly what the solution *should* be though I have feeling it’s going to need some type of social acceptance pattern. Either like a telephone number or a MySpaces URL.

He’s raising a very important subject that I like to refer as the "on-line recognition problem": if I come across you on-line, or something that you did on-line (like a blog comment you left somewhere, or a contribution to a wiki, or a listing you have at eBay etc.), how do I recognize you, or that it was you who wrote this?

Today, by and large, that is hard if not impossible. The best we can do today is guess, because most applications still have their own idiosyncratic identity and account registration schemes whose records aren’t harmonized with others. Exercise: try to determine how many listings I currently have on eBay.

Of course, under many circumstances, you may not want me to recognize you, and that’s not the issue that I mean here. What I do mean is: if you do want me to recognize you (and if you want to prevent others from being able to impersonate you), how do we do this?

Mark floats some examples that we have already: by phone number, by social security number — and he’s of course right that nobody likes to be referred to as a number. Or as MySpace URL or LiveJournal URL or LID URL or OpenID URL or i-name or … Add to that a card metaphor as in Microsoft’s CardSpace (formerly known as InfoCard).

I don’t think as a community, we have an answer to this question at all. Should it look like an identifier, like a phone number, i-name or URL? Should it look like a card? An avatar? What should an innovative website print when it wants to say "me"?

Paul Trevithick and I had a good conversation on this last night, and I hope to be able to continue this in a larger group, and across protocols, with the identity community assembled at Harvard this week.

Update: Esther Dyson, on the first panel of the day, just called it "presentation of self". I like that phrase quite a bit; the question remains open and urgent.